Whispers of Tasmania's Wild Heart

Justin was gone before we had the bus packed. He had a ferry to catch at Devonport and the length of the state to cross to reach it, so he went early, and by the time we pulled out of Ted's Beach the Amarok was well up the road and out of sight.

We took it slowly. There was no reason to hurry and some reason not to. He rang partway through the morning and we talked for a while on the phone with the road going past, the sort of call where both people know it is the last one for a long time and neither says so. Then that was that. He drove to Devonport and got on a boat and left the island, and we had known him nine days.

That is the arithmetic of this life and we were still adjusting to it. You meet somebody at a camp, you eat with them, you spend a week around a fire, and then a ferry timetable ends it. Nothing wrong happens. It is just the shape of the thing.

The drive out gave us what the drive in had not. Coming through in the dark a week earlier we had seen almost nothing, and in the fog on the Gordon Dam day we had seen less. Now it was clear. The canal between Pedder and Gordon sat flat and unnatural in the landscape, water moved from one lake to another because somebody decided which way it should go. The Sentinels stood up off to the side, quartzite, sharp-edged, the same white rock that used to be the beach at the bottom of the lake we had just camped beside. Then the Needles, which had been a rumour in cloud on the way in and were now entirely visible, a row of blades against a clear sky. We stopped and looked at them properly, which we had not been able to do a week before.

Mount Field again by the afternoon, the same powered site, the same twenty dollars. There is a particular ease in returning to a place you already understand. You know where to park and which way the door should face and how long the walk to the toilets is.

Sal had work to catch up on and got into it with the bus plugged in and charging. Anth walked the Three Falls Track for a second time, alone, chasing geocaches he had not had time for when the four of us went through at dusk. He came back in the dark with all of them found and in the specific good mood that comes from completing something nobody else cares about.

The bus was quiet that night. Six days at Lake Pedder had been four people and a fire and constant talk, and now it was two people and a heater and the sound of the panels doing nothing in the dark. Not bad quiet. Just noticeably different from the week before.

Tomorrow was Hobart, then Andy again, then south to Cockle Creek and the bottom of the country. There is not much past Cockle Creek. After that the next thing is Antarctica.Read more