Connections on the Western Tiers

From Lake Barrington we drove south toward the Western Tiers, the road dropping to the Forth River before climbing again through forest that thickened with every hundred metres of altitude. The Tiers rose ahead of us, a long escarpment that forms the northern wall of the Central Plateau, and as we gained height the country around us began to look like the highlands we had come to know at Penstock and Derwent Bridge: cooler, wilder, less interested in visitors.

The Mersey Forest campsite had come from WikiCamps, the app that was quietly becoming as important to the trip as the fuel gauge. The first entrance defeated us. The turn off the road was too sharp for the Coaster's length, and we reversed out and found a secondary track that wound around to the same campground from the back. The misdirection turned out to be a gift. It delivered us to a site beside the Mersey River that was empty, screened by trees, and clearly the one the locals kept for themselves. The bus fitted where a caravan would not have, and Grammy's Hiace slotted in alongside, and within twenty minutes the camp felt settled and claimed.

The Western Tiers carried something for us beyond the campsite. Two years earlier, before the bus, before any of this, we had walked the Walls of Jerusalem, a multi-day hike into the plateau behind the escarpment. That walk had been the trip where the idea took hold: the idea that this could be a life, not a holiday, and that Tasmania would be the place to begin it. Driving the same country now, in the bus we had built to make good on that idea, the memory did not need to be spoken aloud. It sat in the landscape, part of the reason this particular forest felt like more than a campsite.

Anth gathered firewood and split it in the clearing while Grammy and Fran settled into the Hiace for the afternoon. A geocache at the Mersey bridge drew him on a short walk, and he came back with a find and enough photographs to prove it. The camp was quiet, the river audible, the kind of afternoon where nothing happens and nothing needs to.

A small car appeared just before dark, quick and purposeful, circling through the entrance we had bypassed and parking directly behind our camp with the confidence of people who know a good site when they see one and are not going to be deterred by its being occupied. Three people climbed out. Arli and Luke were a couple who worked in outdoor education and travelled between contracts, their life a rotation of employment and road time that they had calibrated over years. Tali, their friend, was about to leave for New Zealand on his own trip. They asked if we minded. We did not mind. The fire was already going.

The evening that followed was the last campfire with Grammy and Fran, though we did not know it cleanly at the time. The circle had expanded from four to seven, and the conversation moved between the two groups with the ease that campfires produce when the wood is good and nobody is watching the clock. Arli and Luke talked about balancing work with the life on the road. Tali talked about New Zealand with the nervous excitement of someone standing at the edge of something. Grammy listened more than she spoke, which was unusual for her, and Sal noticed, and filed it away without comment.

The fire burned late. The river ran beneath the talk. Grammy and Fran would leave the next day, and the three weeks that had begun at Launceston with a chairlift ride and a wasp attack were drawing to a close. The farewell would come in the morning, and the trip would contract from a convoy back to a single bus, and something that had been there for three weeks would be gone. But tonight the fire was large and the circle was full, and the morning could wait.Read more