The Nut, Both Ways Up

From the Yolla Tavern we drove the north coast road back toward Stanley, the same road we had driven in the first fortnight, now shared with Grammy and Fran. The familiarity of it felt different in convoy. Places we had discovered alone were becoming places we were showing to someone else, and the showing changed them, the way a favourite book changes when you watch someone else read it for the first time.

The Nut at Stanley was the first stop. We had climbed it on foot a few weeks earlier and did so again, taking the Zig Zag Track up while Grammy rode the chairlift to the summit. She was waiting at the top when we arrived, composed and dry, looking at us the way someone looks at people who have chosen the hard way for no practical reason. The four of us walked the summit circuit together, the views out over Bass Strait and the farmland behind the town as wide and sharp as they had been the first time. Fran took photographs. Grammy pointed out things in the distance that may or may not have been what she said they were. Highfield Estate, on the hill above Stanley, was a brief stop on the way down, a colonial homestead from the earliest days of European settlement in the north-west, its rooms bare and cold and its history close to the surface.

Tall Timbers at Smithton was nearly empty when we pulled in. Off-season had cleared the place out, and after Anth's thirteen-cache marathon here weeks earlier the campsite felt almost private. One other traveller, the bus and the Hiace, and the wide Tasmanian sky going dark above them. Two nights. The first was quiet.

The second day was not. We drove west to show Grammy and Fran the Arthur River and the Edge of the World, and the coast obliged with weather that suited the name. Wind and rain, hard enough to lean into, the lookout platform exposed to everything the Southern Ocean had been building across thousands of kilometres of open water. Marrawah Inn offered shelter and hot drinks on the way back, the same pub that had taken us in when the campground at Green Point was full. This time we were there by choice, and the warmth of it after the wind felt earned rather than lucky.

Couta Rocks was a brief stop, the coast as rough as the first visit. The Tarkine loop we skipped entirely. The roads were too demanding for Grammy's Hiace and the walks too long for a comfortable day with all four, and we made the call without drama. In its place we drove to Trowutta Arch, a geological oddity where two limestone sinkholes have collapsed into each other and left a natural archway standing between them. The walk in was short and flat enough for everyone, and the arch itself was strange and impressive in the understated way that Tasmanian things often are: no sign, no fanfare, just a massive stone bridge in the middle of the bush with ferns growing from its spine.

Grammy stood underneath it and looked up, and the expression on her face was the same one she had worn at The Wall, at the Fossil Cliffs, at the first wombat on Maria Island: not surprise exactly, but the particular satisfaction of someone who has travelled a long way to see things and is finding, at seventy-four, that the things are worth the distance.

We drove back to Smithton as the light went. Two days of showing Grammy the north-west, and the showing had done what showing always does: it had made us see it again.Read more