Longley Nights and Southern Dreams

Hobart for supplies, which by then took about as long as it needed to and no longer. Six months in, a resupply had stopped being a task and become a sequence: same order, same shops, same list mostly held in the head. You get efficient at the things you do fortnightly.

Andy had spent the Pedder week around Hobart on his own and was ready to come south with us, so the afternoon question was where to put two vehicles for the night on the road toward Cockle Creek. That question gets answered on a phone. Both of us sitting in the front of the bus with WikiCamps open, filtering, reading other people's comments about mud and noise and whether the publican minds, which is how nearly every night of this life gets decided.

The Longley Hotel came up. Camping out the back, no fee, on the understanding that you eat in the pub. We sent the location to Andy and drove the forty minutes south.

That arrangement is a good one and worth saying why. A pub with a paddock gets people through the door on a Wednesday in June, which in a small town south of Hobart is not nothing. Travellers get somewhere flat and safe and lit, with a toilet and a meal. Nobody is doing anybody a favour and everybody comes out ahead. We had been on the road long enough to have opinions about this sort of thing.

The three of us ate in the pub, which was warm and busy enough to have a bit of noise in it. Andy had a week of his own to report and we had ours: the naked swim, the dam in fog, Justin gone to the ferry. Country pub cooking, generous rather than refined, exactly right after a day of shops and driving.

Then out to the paddock and the bus, and the cold came down hard the way it had every night that month.

We were away early. Two vehicles again, the bus in front, Andy behind, heading south down the Huon and then further, on the road that runs out of Tasmania.

Cockle Creek is not the southernmost point of Australia, whatever gets said about it. There is land below it and a cape further south again, reachable only on foot over several days. What Cockle Creek is, precisely, is the end of the driving. The bitumen stops, then the gravel stops, and after that the country carries on without any road in it at all for a very long way.

That was where we were going. It seemed like a reasonable place to point a bus.Read more