Return to the Lagoon

We had promised ourselves we would return to Penstock Lagoon, and a week later we drove back up into the highlands to do it. The drive south from Forcett took us through the Steppes, a stretch of highland country where someone local had arranged rocks into a display on a hillside, painted and carved with enough care to suggest it mattered to them. Further along, the remains of an old homestead stood open to the weather, its walls leaning and its rooms exposed. We walked through it briefly, the silence inside heavier than the silence outside, and the life that had been lived there felt both near and entirely gone. It was not a place that asked you to stay. We drove on toward Penstock with the highlands opening up around us.

This time we took our time choosing a site. We drove the loop slowly, inspecting each campsite as though we were buying a house, and settled on a spot beside the lagoon where the water was close enough to hear and the trees gave shelter without blocking the sky entirely. Black swans drifted on the surface in pairs, their necks dipping and rising with a rhythm that made them look less like birds feeding and more like a form of patience in motion. We set up and stayed.

On the second day Anth discovered the grey water sensor was missing from the underside of the bus. The Victron display was showing a fault, and a quick look underneath confirmed the sensor had been knocked clean off, almost certainly by a rock on the way out of the previous site days earlier. It was a fifty-minute walk back to the old campsite. Anth went on foot, retracing the road, and came back with the sensor in his hand and the particular satisfaction of a problem solved by stubbornness rather than parts.

The campsite was beautiful but the solar was poor. Cloud cover and tree shade kept the panels below what the batteries needed, and within a few days we made the shift without much discussion: the induction cooktop and air fryer went off, the camp stove came out, and the campfire became the kitchen. It was a step backward in convenience and a step forward in something harder to name. Cooking on the fire slowed everything down. The meals took longer, tasted of smoke, and required tending in a way that the induction hob never had. Evenings stretched out around the flames, the Milky Way visible above the clearing once the fire burned low, and the trade felt more than fair.

A firewood run led us to a second site, sunnier and better angled for the panels, and we moved the bus just ahead of a severe weather warning. The wind came that night, hard enough to shake the trees above us, and the temperature dropped sharply. We layered up inside the bus and listened to the gusts batter the canopy overhead, the new site's windbreak holding where the old one would not have. Tasmania's weather continued to arrive without negotiation, and we continued to adjust.

Eight nights. The longest single camp since the trip began. By the end the water tanks were low and the food stores were thin, and neither of those facts felt like failures. They felt like proof that a place had held us longer than we had planned for, which was exactly what Penstock had done the first time, only now it had done it at eight times the scale.

On the way out we stopped at Waddamana Power Station, Tasmania's first hydro-electric plant, decommissioned and preserved. The Pelton wheel turbines still stood in the hall, enormous and still, their surfaces darkened with age. They had powered the state for decades, and standing beside them in the quiet of the old building, the scale of what had been achieved in this remote highland country was difficult to dismiss. We walked through slowly, read the panels, and left with the turbines still turning in our heads, the kind of engineering that belongs to a time when building something meant building it to last.Read more