Fiery Skies over Penstock

WikiCamps found it for us. We had been tracing the route south to Hobart on the tablet, looking for a halfway stop that would break the drive without adding hours to it, and Penstock Lagoon appeared in the highlands above Deloraine, roughly centred between the north coast and the city. Neither of us had heard of it. We marked it and drove.

The country changed as we climbed. The coast fell away behind us and Deloraine passed quickly, a small town at the foot of the Great Western Tiers that we would come to know better on later visits. Above it the road rose into the highlands proper, the farmland thinning into scrub and then into open, wind-scoured plateau. Snow markers lined the road, tall metal poles designed to stay visible when the ground disappears under winter cover, and Sal watched them pass with the particular brightness of someone already imagining what this place would look like in four months' time. She said nothing about it yet, but the idea of the bus in snow had taken hold, and it would not let go.

The Great Lake appeared on our left, enormous and flat, its surface catching the light in a way that made it hard to tell where the water ended and the sky began. Smoke sat across the highlands, not thick but present, a haze from bushfires burning somewhere to the west. We checked the government website at a pull-off, scrolling through the alerts with the engine idling, and found a green tick beside Penstock. The fires were not close. We drove on, the smoke filtering the afternoon light into something warmer and stranger than ordinary sun.

Penstock Lagoon is man-made, built for trout, and the fishermen who use it had not yet arrived or had already left, because we were alone. Completely alone, the only vehicle at the campground, the lagoon still and flat in front of us and the highlands rolling away in every direction. We parked at a site near the water and stepped out into air that was cooler than anything we had breathed since the Bunya Mountains in the first week. One night, that was the plan. A stopover on the way to Hobart, nothing more.

The sunset that evening came through the smoke. Anth sent the drone up and it climbed into a sky that was not orange or red but something between the two, the smoke bending the light into colours that did not belong to a normal afternoon. Below, the lagoon held the reflection without moving. Sal cooked inside while the footage recorded itself, and the meal we ate that evening was the quietest of the trip so far, not because anything was wrong but because the place did not seem to want noise.

We checked the fire website again before sleep, a silent habit that would stay with us through fire season, and found the same green tick. The night was cold and still.

The sunrise matched the sunset. Smoke again, but softer now, turning the early light a deep, improbable pink that lasted only minutes before the sun climbed above it and returned the sky to normal. We photographed it knowing the photographs would not carry what the moment had, and Sal made pancakes while Anth packed the drone away, and by mid-morning we were driving south toward Hobart with Penstock already sitting in a different category from the other camps. We had stayed one night. We would come back. Neither of us said so yet, but the lagoon had done something quiet and precise, and the road ahead already felt like a temporary departure from a place we had not finished with.Read more