Hello Wild Wild West

West from Smithton the country changed quickly. The settled farmland of the north coast gave way to dairy paddocks and then to dirt roads, and within an hour we were in a part of Tasmania that felt noticeably emptier than anything we had driven through so far. Robbins Island appeared off the coast as we passed, a low shape across the sand flats with a history of cattle being herded across at low tide, though the tide was wrong for it and we saw the island from a distance only, shimmering behind a strip of wet sand.

The road ran through the kind of quiet that comes from land being used for one thing and one thing only. Dairy country, green and flat, with fences and gates and very few people. We followed the dirt south-west toward Marrawah, feeling the coast before we could see it.

We saw it first at Preminghana. The west coast of Tasmania arrived without preamble: dark water, rough swell, wind that pushed at the bus the moment we opened the doors. Surfers were out, which seemed improbable given the temperature, but they moved through the waves with the confidence of people who had made peace with cold water a long time ago. Watching them from the shore, warm and dry and slightly in awe, felt like an introduction to a part of the island that operated on different terms from the sheltered north.

Green Point was meant to be the night's camp. It sat at the start of the Tarkine Drive, wild and exposed, with ocean views that would have been worth the wind. But the campground was full. Every site taken, not a gap to be found, the one time on the trip so far that free camping had failed us. We stood in the car park for a moment, recalculated, and drove back into Marrawah.

The Marrawah Inn solved the problem in the most uncomplicated way possible. Salt and pepper calamari, loaded fries, cold drinks, and a room with a flushing toilet. After days of drop dunnies and bush camps, the toilet alone was worth the price of admission. We ate slowly, the kind of slow that comes from sitting in a chair that someone else owns at a table that someone else will wipe down, and the small luxury of a pub meal on a wild coast felt disproportionately good. The Tarkine started tomorrow. Tonight, the west coast had introduced itself, and we had accepted the introduction on its own terms: rough water, full camps, cold surfers, and calamari in a town that barely qualified as one.Read more