Mount Arthur is an ideal destination to practice the art of feeling – connecting the wildness outside to the wildness inside.
To travel slowly is to make the mind less dominant and to allow the heart to emerge to see the world anew. Mount Arthur allows one to get fresh air in your bloodstream and inspiration into your eyes without crowds, as it is rarely visited by anyone except a handful of locals who loyally tramp here to appreciate its beauty, wide views and diverse landscape.
The landscape, like Tasmania itself, is both intimate and dramatic, made up of large and small things, and it is always rewarding, winter or summer, cold or sunny. Today it is wintry, with fog, clouds, wind and leaks of sunlight falling from the grey sky. There are no other hikers. We walk slowly here to absorb the land and weather.
There is no need to rush while hiking Mount Arthur: there is no Dove Lake to sprint up to snap pictures of, no Wineglass Bay lookout for Facebook photos, no gift shops to buy memories. Here is a backyard mountain to amble up, to take in the bush and let the thoughts and worries of life fall away like junk mail. Here is a place to let the landscape enter your soul and free your boxed-up spirit.
Mount Arthur is one of three amigos of northern Tasmania – with Mount Barrow and Ben Lomond. The three mountains frame the skyline to the east of Launceston and help define the city. The hills and peaks remind locals that they live in a mountainous state, that the natural environment dwarfs their heritage town, and this gives Launceston a sense of place and, when we look for it, peace.
We should rejoice that Tasmania is still so well defined by hills and rivers and mountains. This is our personality, a bit untamed and unkempt, far from manicured.
For newcomers who are trying to learn the name of the three peaks, locals have a saying: Little Arthur wheeled his Barrow up Ben. This is a good way to remember the mountains’ names and this saying creates both a rustic and wild feeling – child, wheel your barrow up into the mountains and see what you can find. There is a sense of mission and mystery in this little statement.
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Begin the Mount Arthur hike from the end of a narrow road that winds up from the pastoral farmlands of Lilydale, just a stone’s throw from Launceston. Turn off your notifications and begin walking up the steep track through the spindly dogwoods, stringy barks and water ferns. Walk steadily and without words and before you even realise it you are enveloped in a rainforest area of tall blackwoods, swaying tree ferns and stately beech trees. Pause and look at the world around you – look at the smaller world of fungi and an understorey carpeted with mosses and leaves. Suddenly you feel very small in this grand setting.
How quickly on a walk this one becomes a hobbit, tacking through a wild and mysterious wood. Look up and feel dwarfed by the trees; look down and feel astounded by the lush greenery. Feel the chilly forest air sink into your bones on this winter day. Close your eyes, listen. Hear what you can’t see. Don’t identify things in your brain, hear one thing, then the other – a bird, a breeze in the branches, a far-off flow of water, a tree creaking – the natural silence. Don’t analyse. Feel the mountain’s pulse. Feel shadows bobbing and rocks dreaming. What a perfect excuse to slow down, empty your barrow of cares and load up with magic things.
Open your eyes. A boulder is glowing with a verdant cover of moss and liverworts – small flowerless green plants. Look there: two tall trees growing up next to each other with two completely different kinds of mosses and lichens side by side on each tree. Why?
Did you know that it is normal in a rainforest to find 100 to 200 species of mosses and lichens and other small cryptogams (a plant that reproduces by spores) in less than half a kilometre of hiking? Some people spend their whole lives studying these amazing organisms – essentials parts of the whole because they create and build up the soil nutrients in a forest. Without world of small plants and fungi, the big things would not grow. Marvel at what you know and do not know. I know I know less than I should, but the wonder of it all eclipses my ignorance and does not bother me. I can research taxonomy later on. For now, I just walk and take it all in, in childlike wonder.
You could walk through this section in a few minutes or take hours. It’s up to you. Slow travel has no time restrictions. Five minutes of mindfulness here can seem like hours, and then last for years in your memory.
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The track grows steeper and you might need extra breaths of the delicious fresh air to keep you going – you heart is beating faster now as you climb up, and it feels good.
Hike further and you come to a scree of rocks, big blocks of dolerite cascading down the mountain like a frozen waterfall of rocks, probably created during the Jurassic, at least 50 million years ago. Humans are brief shadows passing over these rocks – our time so short on Earth, their time so very long.
They say you can hear the rocks speaking here as they freeze or thaw through the winter. Today they are just silent.
Scramble up, across and along the rocks and boulders, but don’t slip on the ice that lingers in the shadows of the scree. I have slipped here before. The bump can hurt.
You reach a saddle at about 1,000 metres where you turn left to begin climbing toward the higher areas of the mountain proper. A sea eagle glides over, practising its own art of slow travel and mindfulness, riding an updraft, just drifting on a cold day far away from anywhere.
Views appear as you climb out of the beech trees. Look across to the west and see the distant red bricks of Launceston, the winding waters of the Tamar River and the blue-green escarpment of the Great Western Tiers. Look to the north across the bucolic farmlands that stretch to Bass Strait, which today shines like a long silver and charcoal oil painting, clotted in clouds and fog that come and go with the brush of the wind. Up ahead of you is fog, tearing on the shrubs and rocky outcrops. Put your gloves and beanie back on – it’s chilly now and you are at the mercy of mountain weather and geography.
And just as I tell myself to walk carefully, I slip on some frosty rock, bang my knee and fall in the mud. Oh well, no mud, no lotus flower. To gain wisdom we sometimes have to fall and get dirty. Walk on gently, assertively passive.
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As you climb up and around a tumble of rocks, you enter the alpine world of the mountaintop, a long ridge that leads to the summit, less than an hour away.
Feel the wind whip across your face and see the fog shoot over the plateau’s boggy moorlands and tarns. Soon you will climb around a corner and you will walk into an old fire lookout. Across the ridge one can see various radio and repeater antennas that have sprouted over the years like spores, and I wonder about all the communication ricocheting through them, from the mundane to the profound. I wonder what the mountain thinks of such information being circulated across it, what nutrients it gleans from the white noise of civilisation.
As you walk across the misty ridge, you appreciate the highland world of alpine ponds, grasses and scrub. Red and orange scoparia flowers, thick green cushion plants and silver matts of pineapple grass adorn your walk. The wind whips across the exposed area and you are glad you brought your down jacket. Look south across the tarns and tors and there are the brothers, Barrow and Lomond, inspiring your heart and soul with their understated magnificence.
Mount Arthur was known by the first Europeans in the 1800s as Row Tor because of the odd rock outcrops one sees at the top. Before that the mountain by the local parlevar people by the name of rubala mangana. Aboriginal people have lived in north-eastern Tasmania for more than 2,000 generations and have a deep connection to the land. Did the ancients hike up here, like me, with whimsy for the views and solace, or did they stick to the rivers and coastal areas for life and lifestyle? The original people identified certain trees and rock formations in Tasmania as sacred trees or rock guardians. Some places were visited for ceremonies and have important stories that were associated with them that have been passed from one generation to another. What stories have we lost about this mountain’s tors?
At the 1,200-metre summit, there is a very odd tor, a beehive-shaped rock obelisk at least three metres high that was built more than 120 years ago as a survey triangulation marker. It looks strangely placed, like a vertical monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I circle around it like an awed Neanderthal and then full, of mountaintop-bagging energy, I climb to the top of the cairn. The views were meant for photographs. But as I sit on top and quickly cool, my adrenaline fades, and as I look down I suddenly sense that it will not be easy to get off the cairn.
It isn’t. I tell myself that I don’t need to scale that tall thing ever again. I had forgotten, in the excitement, about travelling slowly. These things take a lifetime to learn.
Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. That was 30 years ago. He was state coordinator for Landcare Tasmania for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian.
