Giant Walks & Towering Gums

We refilled the water tanks at St Helens and turned northwest, the Bay of Fires already behind us and Grammy a day away. She was arriving in Launceston tomorrow, and the drive north gave us one last day of travelling as two before the convoy became three.

The Blue Tiers rose to the west of the road, and a side track led us to Halls Falls on the way through, a short diversion to a cascade dropping over mossy rock in the kind of shaded gully that Tasmania keeps tucked behind its main roads. We stopped, looked, and moved on. The falls were pretty but the day had something larger waiting.

The Blue Tier Giant Walk announced itself through the road first. The bitumen narrowed to a single lane, then to dirt, then to something closer to a goat track that climbed through forest dense enough to scrape both sides of the bus. The Coaster managed it with the slow, deliberate progress that had become its signature on rough ground, and the trailhead appeared at the end of the track with the particular quietness of a place that does not get many visitors. The walk from there was short. The trees at the end of it were not. White gums, nearly sixty metres tall, rising from the forest floor with the same pale, straight authority as the White Knights at Evercreech but in smaller numbers, isolated in a grove that felt private and slightly reverential. We walked among them with our heads tilted back and the canopy absurdly high above, and the comparison to Evercreech came naturally: both stands of trees that had survived simply by being difficult to reach.

Back on the main road we stopped at the Pub in the Paddock, which is exactly what it sounds like: a pub, in a paddock, surrounded by farmland and rolling hills. Inside it had the warmth of a place that knows its purpose, and we sat with coffee and a plate of fries and watched other travellers come and go with the easy drift that country pubs encourage. It was a short stop. It did not need to be longer.

Legerwood came next, and the mood changed. The memorial carvings stand beside the road: tree trunks carved into the likenesses of local men who served and died in the First World War, each one named, each face worked into the timber with a care that makes them difficult to look at quickly and impossible to drive past. We stood among them for a while, reading the names, and the quiet of the roadside felt different from the quiet of the forest. This was not solitude. This was remembrance, held in wood, kept by a town small enough to know every name on the list.

Scottsdale's free RV park was the night's stop, busy and functional, the kind of camp that serves a purpose without pretending to be more than it is. We parked among a row of other vans and turned in early. Launceston was a short drive in the morning, and Grammy would be there, and the trip was about to change shape.Read more