Across Tasmania: Hobart's Beckoning

The reason for leaving the west coast was practical. An opportunity had come up for Anth to screen for a clinical trial in Adelaide, which meant flying out of Hobart, which meant crossing the island. The trials funded the travelling life and, more immediately, the planned trip to visit Torrin in Japan. Leaving the Tarkine unfinished felt wrong even as we packed up at Nelson Bay and pointed the bus south.

The coast gave us a last run of itself on the way out. Couta Rocks sat among a cluster of weathered shacks, the sea smashing against the shore in onshore wind and rain, the spray reaching the road. Sal stood at the edge of it and watched the waves come in with the expression she wore when a place had reached her before she had time to think about it. Further south, Lake Rebecca lay behind the dunes, a freshwater lake that had sustained Aboriginal communities for thousands of years, the land around it still carrying the quiet weight of long habitation. Camp Elsewhere, named with the kind of humour that suits a place at the end of a dirt track, tempted us to stay, but the flight had a date and the date did not move.

We turned east and the roaring forties, which had been pushing against us for days, became a tailwind. The fuel gauge barely moved. The farmland dropped away and the Tarkine took over: temperate rainforest, one of the largest tracts of it left on earth, pressing up against the road on both sides. At Kanunnah Bridge we stopped to help a carload of tourists who had run themselves low on fuel and lost their phone signal, the kind of small roadside moment that feels like nothing at the time and stays with you because of what it says about where you are. Sumac Lookout offered a view of the Arthur River below, though the cloud and rain gave us only glimpses, the valley appearing and disappearing as the weather moved through.

The Julius River walk was the best of the Tarkine stops. The track ran through rainforest so dense and old it felt less like a walk and more like an interruption, the moss thick on every surface, the ferns enormous, the air damp and still. Lake Chisholm, a flooded limestone sinkhole, held the sky on its surface like a mirror set into the forest floor. The Dempster Plains opened up beyond the trees into vast, flat button grass country, wind-scoured and empty, and the Tarkine Sinkhole sat dark and still in its clearing, reflecting nothing but cloud. Each stop deserved longer than we gave it. We both knew it, said so, and kept driving, because the flight would not wait and the Tarkine was not going anywhere.

Terry was at the Berry Patch, camped between Ulverstone and Devonport, and we pulled in beside him just before dark. We had met him on our very first night in Tasmania, at Preservation Bay, his caravan parked nearby with the two cockatiels he carried everywhere. A month later and the friendship had held, the way road friendships do when they are going to last: no arrangement, just a message and a campsite and the assumption that turning up was enough. He met us with the ease of someone who had been expecting us even though no firm plan had been made, and the evening unfolded around cooking and conversation. We made pizza and banana pancakes as a thank-you, though Terry seemed to consider our company payment enough.

The next morning Sal woke to the sound of Terry murmuring to his cockatiels in the half-dark, the two birds answering in short, bright calls that cut through the quiet like small alarms set to the wrong time. We shared coffee, Terry helped with a couple of jobs on the bus, and the morning passed in the unhurried way that mornings pass between people who are not pretending to be busy. Saying goodbye to him was harder than we expected, not because the friendship was old but because it was becoming real, built not on shared history but on shared pace, the understanding that two people moving slowly through the same country at the same speed will keep finding each other.

We drove south toward the highlands with the north coast behind us and Hobart still half a day ahead. The Tarkine sat unfinished in the rear-view mirror, a place we had tasted rather than known, and the promise to return was not a polite ending but a genuine one. Some places ask for more time than you have, and the honest answer is to come back.Read more