Lake Kara Chronicles: Nomads & Nature

The road past Preston Falls ran through thick forest before dipping into Upper Natone Forest Reserve, a stretch of bush so dark and overgrown that the temperature dropped the moment we entered it. The trees closed over the track and the understorey pressed in from both sides, mossy and tangled, the kind of place that feels watched even when it plainly is not. We drove through it slowly, glad of the sunlight when it returned.

Just before Lake Kara appeared through the trees, a figure waved us down from the roadside. Mick, the nomad we had met at Bannons Park a few days earlier, was camped nearby and had spotted the bus. He knew the area, had been circling this part of Tasmania for a while, and offered the kind of local tips that only come from someone who has stayed long enough to stop being a visitor. We talked for twenty minutes, thanked him, and pressed on to the lake.

Lake Kara is man-made, a dam set into farmland with a ring of bush around its shore, and when we arrived three caravans were spaced along the water. Grey nomads, all of them, with the unhurried look of people who had been doing this for years. Within a day they had moved on, one by one, and the lake was ours. The quiet that settled after the last of them left was not the absence of noise but the presence of something larger, a stillness that the water held and the surrounding hills amplified. We parked close to the shore and let the days open up.

On the third morning Anth was standing near the reeds when the water moved in a way that was not wind. He called to Sal, quietly, urgently, and she came to the bank in time to see it: a platypus, surfacing and diving in the shallows, its dark shape unmistakable even at a distance. Sal had never seen one in the wild. She stood at the water's edge and watched it move through three or four dives without breathing a word, and when it finally disappeared beneath the surface for good she turned to Anth with an expression that did not need language. Some things do not require commentary. They require witnesses.

Ros and Mike appeared midway through the stay, a retired couple from Wynyard, warm and generous in the way that Tasmanians had already begun to seem. They offered their driveway in town as a place to park and shower whenever we needed it, a kindness delivered casually, as though opening your home to strangers were simply what one did. Natalie arrived later, a solo traveller with her own quiet way of occupying a camp, and the evenings shifted from two chairs by the fire to four, the conversation expanding to fit.

The mornings were cold now. Properly cold, breath visible, frost possible, the fire needed rather than wanted. One month on the road. We counted it without ceremony, just a mention over coffee while the lake lay flat and silver in the early light. A month since the driveway at Aroona, since Sophie and Mack standing in the sun. It felt longer than that, in the way that new lives do.Read more