Rainy Days and Tessellated Ways

We headed south from Triabunna after a slow start, Sal's pancakes served to all four for the first time on the trip, the batch scaled up and the kitchen briefly crowded. The original plan had been Cockle Creek, Australia's southernmost drivable point, a couple of days further down the peninsula. Dunalley was the night's halfway stop, the bus and Grammy's Hiace parked in paddocks beside the Dunalley Inn with the Easter crowds gone and the space to themselves.

The Tessellated Pavement was close by and we walked out to it in the early afternoon. The rock platform extends along the shoreline in a pattern of rectangular blocks so regular they look engineered, the formations known as pans and loaves, carved over millions of years by salt crystallisation and tidal erosion. The sea washed across the surface in thin sheets, filling the pans and draining again, and the geometry of it was strange enough to hold all four of us quiet for longer than a rock shelf usually would. Grammy crouched to touch the edges of the blocks, running her fingers along the grooves the way she had at the Spiky Bridge, as though the history in a surface is something you understand better through your hands.

From there we drove to Eaglehawk Neck, the narrow strip of land that once served as Port Arthur's natural barrier. Thirty metres wide at its thinnest point, the neck had been lined with guard dogs during the convict era, chained in rows across the sand to prevent escape. A statue of one of the dogs stands there now, teeth bared, and the scale of the thing against the narrowness of the land makes the history feel close and specific. The Officers Quarters Museum filled in the rest, the kind of small local exhibition that earns its keep through detail rather than spectacle.

The rain arrived mid-afternoon and stayed. We retreated to the Dunalley pub for hot drinks, the four of us drying out around a table with the windows streaked and the day outside turning grey and heavy. The rain changed the plan. Cockle Creek would mean two more days of driving south in wet weather on roads that would not improve, and the appeal of the peninsula dimmed with every gust against the pub window. Over a second round of drinks the route shifted: west instead of south, toward Strahan and the wild coast, where Grammy had her eye on a Gordon River cruise. The change was made without argument, the way decisions were starting to be made on this trip, by weather and mood and the shared understanding that the plan was always a suggestion, never a contract.Read more