Articles > Epiphanies in Tasmania

Four litres of cask wine saved my life. Cardboard vino has for too long been unjustly maligned for as an elixir it is surprisingly wonderful and, with liberal doses, superbly numbing.

An epic tract of Tasmania’s southwest is a World Heritage wilderness that gambols over 600,000 rollicking hectares. The Southwest National Park is the largest park in Australia’s only island state. The gargantuan Bathurst Harbour, a drowned river valley, is a prized part of it and a troupe of us had come to Tassie’s southwest to sea kayak about secretive coves and unreconstructed islands.

The Southwest National Park is about 10 times the size of Singapore but there are no roads. Indeed, the nearest conurbation is a six-day walk from where we camp. Excitingly, the vast button grass plains hereabouts mightn’t know a mobile phone from a green man in a space suit. There is no mobile reception and even satellite connections can be hard to come by.

This Luddite’s nirvana is surrounded by broad mountains whose brief, surely, is to keep sybarites at bay. The largest, imposing, granite-jawed Mount Rugby (771 metres) sits in judgement of every one of my supremely novice paddle strokes.

My inexperience, however, had nothing to do with my threatening predicament and cheap wine epiphany. The southwest of Tasmania has an annual rainfall of around three metres. Most of it might have fallen on our expedition if nature hadn’t conveniently packaged it as snow and hail.

There are eight of us in four kayaks. Two of the eight are guides, Toby Storey and Tim Devereux. Toby’s girlfriend, Emma, is along to lend a hand. On the first morning after land-based how-to’s we begin the paddle up the Melaleuca Creek to our base camp. Within minutes we disturb a wallaby and her young nibbling on marsupial grass – the locals’ term for the type of grass growing on the thin river banks.

By the time we reach our camp Rob, my kayak partner, and I have settled into a comfortable stroke, relieved at the ease with which it has come. Buoying us almost as much is finding our camp already set. Our tents are pegged and there are stretcher beds, each with a thin mattress. Boardwalks connect the tents to a dining and kitchen area. We unpack the kayaks stuffed with dry bags, food boxes and, well, wine, and move into the seasonal camp of Roaring Forties’ Ocean Kayaking.

On the afternoon of the first day we make for one of the alluring Celery Top Islands. Bathurst Harbour is sprinkled with five sister islands that take their name from the celery top pine whose leaves have an uncanny resemblance to stalks of celery. The Aborigines who arrived in Tassie around 35,000 years ago regularly burned the bush hereabouts. Among other purposes, fire was used to clean up camp sites and to create walking tracks - the first Europeans followed these fire trails to access Tasmania’s interior. The Aborigines never touched the Celery Tops. These deserted islands, not much larger than suburban house blocks, are lush bonsais of Gondwana: about them is evidence of relict flora 80 million years old.

We paddle up to a beach, a thin strip of quartzite stones. A wedge of black swans cruise about the lee of the island. A sea eagle swoops in a delicious but fleeting cameo. Dark water, stained from the tannin in the buttongrass, laps at our feet before we pad to one of the tallest specimens of the pines.

A squall rips in, the accompanying rain comes at us sideways. Our cove offers a surprising amount of protection from the maelstrom. Later, during a beserker of an afternoon, Toby and Tim prove rather prescient and guide us into coves where often we find shelter from storms and wind gusts barely a puff from cyclonic.

Much like popping to the corner shop for the paper, sheltering from the weather becomes something of a regular occurrence. And it helps master fast action paddling where ‘running’ for cover makes us feel suitably adventurous.

Tucked into the kayak and dressed in thermals and appropriate wet weather gear the cold isn’t particularly offensive. I am far more aware of how humbling are our surrounds. Rock-garnished mountains tower above us. The wind screams loud as a riot yet there is nothing about us but superbly wild nature and a good deal of water whipped into frenzy.

The southwest winds screaming in over the Southern Ocean are known as the Roaring Forties. That night our base camp becomes the whipping boy for storms that may have originated in the great white of Antarctica, the next land mass south of Tassie. The communal dining area has a fine roof but no walls. Even after changing into warm, dry clothes, and a delightfully spicy calamari main course, the night is colder than unrequited love.

Tasmania was created some 12,000 years ago when great ice caps melted and the seas rose to cut off Tasmania from mainland Australia. Tasmanian Aborigines had been living in the region for over 23,000 years before their isolation from the mainland communities.

Most sensible folk will tell you the Aborigines also lit their great fires to help in the hunt for game. On the second night in the southwest I’m prepared to bet the house, the missus and kids on the fact that it was to keep warm. Somewhere to the end of dessert I become convinced that lighting a conflagration much like the ones lit by the Aborigines will be my greatest accomplishment.

There is a glitch to the plan besides coming up short on dry wood. Fire is not permitted in this World Heritage wild. Perhaps everybody has contributed to the wine cachet in the interests of conservation. Whatever their rationale, quaffing wine numbs the cold superbly.

Day two, breakfast is piles of warm stewed fruits, pancakes and real coffee (plunger style). The sky, however, is Hitchcock dark. Some of us ponder creeping back to our tents, sleeping off both the stuffing of breakfast and the impending rain. “Cold is good,” says endlessly perky Toby, 25, a general rallying his troops. “The fact that it can seem shitty means no-one else will be around.”

During the summer this harbour, the only one between Hobart and the west coast town of Strahan, is a pleasurable bolthole for yachties and larger tourist vessels. Now it seems our troupe are the only ones casting footprint on this considerable part of the planet.

Suitably rallied we follow Toby’s course toward Port Davey and the Southern Ocean. A screaming sou’wester rips into our backs, hurries us along and we find ourselves surfing whipped up white caps. It makes the first-timers feel something like the experts we will never be. It’s wonderful.

We take lunch on an intimate beach by Farrell Point around 10 kilometres from camp. Some of us sit near a rowboat. To complete the Port Davey Track hikers have to launch the boat then row across a thin strip of water running between two land points known as The Narrows. “We’ve towed some people over before,” offers Toby.

During lunch the sun makes a teasing appearance. The warmth is welcome but it is somewhat more comforting to know the sun hasn’t completely checked out of the solar system.

After lunch we set off in search of a waterfall somewhere near the base of Mt Rugby. We can see parts of the watercourse sluicing through the granite rocks. There is no path. We push through the lightest of the brush. Still it’s jungle thick. Someone suggests marking our trail but it’s not necessary. We don’t penetrate far and within minutes the thick, lush growth forces us to turn back. Back in the kayaks the sound of the falling water teases us.

On the return paddle we tackle the wind and the waves head on. Some of the waves crash unthreateningly over the impressively stable kayaks. It’s hard going. Other novices, Rob Freshwater and wife, Julie, set the return pace. Water and spray splashes about. This paddle’s a grand task. Almost incongruously the water is invigorating. “Heading into the gale-force wind makes the paddling challenging. In fact it requires considerable effort just to stop from being blown backwards,” jokes Rob later. “But it was a feeling of achievement when we had crossed to the lee-ward side of the bay.”

That evening after another ripping meal the wine flows long enough for the hail to cease and some of us decide to break our shelter and make for the beach. Out from the trees the brightness of the night sky surprises us. Despite the cold we soak up both the wine and the star-filled sky. And as Rob notes, “with sufficient quantities of wine we also resolved many of the mysteries of the world.” In the absence of hot showers the cold and wine worked a treat on the expedition’s camaraderie.

Clayton’s Corner is named for the crayfisherman who lived in a superbly simple house across the bay from our camp. We paddle to the home on the final morning. The fisherman and his wife have passed to other worlds and though volunteers are restoring the vacant house it is open to visitors. We peek about. Some of us take delight in the sign in the bath – Please leave stick in the bath, for quolls to escape! Others note the visitors’ book where a recent entry notes the inclemency of the weather: “Just what you’d expect.”

Mount Beattie rides over the house. A sliver of a track winds its way from the house through forest and buttongrass landscaped with granite. It’s about an hour’s steady climb to the top of Mt Beattie. The views are far more panoramic than I had expected. A great sweep of the southwest, all the way to Port Davey and the Southern Ocean. For all that we can see man has made little impression on this wild.

We stand and admire our temporary domain. Then we hear a noise. It’s a small plane. We watch it buzz to a landing strip shorn from the surrounding plain. The quartzite strip is as white as the snow on some of the larger, distant mountains.

The plane lands at Melaleuca. The place isn’t big enough to be classed as a two-horse town. There are no shops and the few buildings are barely visible, even from the landing strip. Melaleuca’s total population is two.

While intrepid bushwalkers hike for days along some of the wildest coast in Australia to visit hereabouts we had arrived in a ten-seat plane from Hobart (the kayaks were already on location), somewhat unnervingly skimming over the top of some mountains, weaving our way through others.

Melaleuca and indeed a good part of the southwest was once the preserve of bush legend Deny King. Tougher than re-cooked steak and possessed of uncommon strength King hived a living from mining tin - bagging it and taking it to Hobart on his sail boat, mind! - and is one of the few to have lived in these parts. King’s definitive hideaway, nestled by a creek, is surrounded by a pocket-size rainforest and belongs within the pages of The Secret Garden. Deny and wife, Margaret, had two daughters and it is hard not to envy the magic they must have revelled in. Sir Edmund Hillary was just one of their visitors.

King died in 1991 but his legacy lives on. A passionate naturalist, King has a bird hide near his house named after him. From here keen watchers keep an eye out for one of the world’s rarest birds, the orange-bellied parrot which breeds hereabouts. The surrounding button grass plains provide some of the parrots’ favourite comestibles and surely must be one of the avian worlds largest all-you-can-eat joints. No more than 200 of the birds remain and while the parrots head to the mainland each autumn, this fox-free environment has kept them from going the way of the dodo.

King’s mining lease lives on too, having been taken over by the Wilsons. This husband and wife team are the only folk to trouble the southwest censor. In the ten years the self-sufficient couple have lived here they have asked a pilot for just one favour. To bring a masonry drill bit from Hobart! They still sail the tin out.

We had arrived at Melaleuca a day earlier than scheduled – our departure from Hobart was hastily brought forward to counter the inclement weather – and our first night was spent in one of the huts King built for walkers redoubtable enough to tackle the southwest.

We are soon to return to Melaleuca, due to fly out on the plane we have watched land. Nobody offers excitement at the prospect. Atop Mt Beattie a hangover subtly lingers but on the bald and exposed summit I surprise myself by feeling altogether fortunate.

The experience of Tasmania’s southwest wouldn’t be the same if the weather God took it upon himself to be convivial. Indeed, inclemency proves a wonderful conduit for adventure - rather than dramatic and life threatening. Still, as far as epiphanies go, I thought the one about finding redeeming qualities of wine in a box might be hard to beat. But this southwest wilderness is even far more extraordinary.

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