Grammy's Second Gift

We left Derwent Bridge in fog, the lakebed and its dead trees disappearing behind us before we had cleared the campground. The road west ran through highland country that opened and closed around the bus, mountains appearing through gaps in the cloud and vanishing again, Frenchman's Cap visible for a few minutes as a dark shape on the southern horizon before the road bent away from it.

Bradshaw Bridge took us across the narrows near Lake Burbury, the water dark and still beneath the steel, and the descent into Queenstown was a descent into a different Tasmania. The old mining town sits in a valley stripped bare by a century of smelter fumes, the hills around it treeless and rust-coloured, and the strangeness of the landscape is difficult to look away from. We stopped for coffee and moved on, the west coast now close enough to feel in the air.

Fraser Flats was the campsite, set back from the road in a pine forest a few kilometres outside Strahan. The sun came through the trees in shafts and the ground was soft with needles, and we parked the bus and the Hiace side by side in a clearing that felt sheltered and private. Three nights here, anchored around the cruise.

The day before the cruise Sal drove into Strahan with Grammy and Fran for errands and exploring while Anth stayed behind to work on the bus. Maintenance had its own rhythm by now: checks, small repairs, the ongoing business of keeping a converted vehicle running as a home. That evening the four of them gathered at the campfire, and something moved at the edge of the firelight, a shape too quick to identify, gone before the torch could find it. The forest after dark was not empty, and the reminder was welcome.

The cruise was Grammy's gift, the second of the three-week leg, and it began at Strahan harbour on a morning clear enough to see across Macquarie Harbour to the ranges beyond. The boat passed through Hell's Gate, the narrow opening where the harbour meets the ocean, the swell lifting the vessel for a few minutes before the shelter of the harbour returned. Sarah Island sat inside the harbour, small and exposed, and the guide told its convict history with a directness that made the place feel less like heritage and more like evidence. Men had been sent there to cut Huon pine in conditions designed to break them, and the island had done its job efficiently. We walked the ruins and listened, and the silence between the guide's sentences carried its own weight.

The Gordon River was the heart of the trip. The boat turned south from Sarah Island and entered the river, and the forest closed in from both sides. Huon pines and myrtle beech, some of them over a thousand years old, grew to the waterline, their reflections doubling the forest on the still, tannin-dark surface. The captain cut the engine and the boat drifted. Nobody spoke. Forty-odd passengers, none of them related, none of them coordinated, all of them arriving at the same silence independently. The river held it. The trees held it. The moment lasted longer than it should have been able to, and when the engine restarted and the boat moved on, the sound felt like an interruption that the forest tolerated rather than welcomed.

Heritage Landing was a short boardwalk into the rainforest at the river's edge, the guide walking them through the ecology of the ancient forest with the same plain competence he had brought to Sarah Island. The trees here had been growing before European settlement, before Aboriginal contact with this particular valley, before most of the things that people measure time by. Walking among them felt less like tourism and more like visiting something that was allowing the visit.

Back in Strahan that evening Grammy's generosity produced one more surprise: tickets to "The Ship That Never Was," a outdoor play telling the story of convicts who built a ship on Sarah Island and sailed it to freedom. It was performed on the waterfront with audience participation and a lightness that sat oddly and perfectly against the weight of what we had seen on the island that morning. The actors pulled Grammy into a scene and she played her part without hesitation, which surprised nobody who knew her.

We drove back to Fraser Flats in the dark with the forest pressing close to the road and the day sitting heavy and full behind us. The Gordon River had done something that the Fossil Cliffs and the dolphins and the wombats on Maria Island had not quite managed: it had made us all quiet in the same way at the same time, and the quiet had meant the same thing to each of us. Grammy's gift had delivered something that could not be bought twice.Read more