Wonders at the Southern Edge

The bitumen ran out a long way short of Cockle Creek and what followed was mud, gravel and corrugation, heading south into country that empties as you go. We had aimed at this once already, months earlier, with Grammy and Fran, and had not made it. Weather, timing, the ordinary reasons. It had been sitting on the list since.

Mountains on the right with their tops in cloud. On the left, water appearing and disappearing through the trees as the road turned, small bays, and past them the Southern Ocean doing whatever it was doing that day.

Then the track stopped, and that was Cockle Creek. There is nowhere further south you can take a vehicle in this country.

We found a site and set up with a forecast of high wind and rain sitting over the next few days, which at that latitude in late June is less a warning than a description. The spot was poor for solar and we took it anyway.

What the place does not tell you, standing in it, is how busy it used to be. In 1792 and again the following year a French expedition under d'Entrecasteaux anchored in Recherche Bay, and the naturalists aboard went ashore and did the first proper scientific work done on this continent by anybody, and planted a garden to see what would grow. Later there was bay whaling here, and timber, and coal, and for a stretch of the nineteenth century this dead-end at the bottom of the map had a working population, ships in the bay and a reason to exist. All of that is gone. The quiet we drove into is the most recent thing about Cockle Creek, not the oldest.

The first walk was out to Fishers Point, which involves a beach and a negotiation with the tide. We timed our runs between sets, went hard across the exposed sand and got up onto the rocks before the water came back, which is enjoyable in the way that low-stakes urgency always is.

At the point the geography changes character completely. Recherche Bay behind you is protected water, flat and reasonable. Past the point there is nothing between you and Antarctica, and the swell that has been building across the whole of the Southern Ocean arrives on that rock having been slowed by nothing at all. It is loud and it does not stop.

We turned around at the far end and got the view back, which was the better one: the southern ranges standing up behind us with snow still on the tops, cloud moving across them and breaking, and the afternoon sun coming through the gaps in pieces. Turbulent water at our feet and still white mountains behind. We stood there a while.

The tide had not cooperated on the return. Anth went in bare-legged in a pair of crocs and carried Sal across on his back through water that was well past sensible, both of them making a considerable amount of noise about it, and neither entirely dry at the end.

A day or so later we found a better site and moved: unobstructed views across the bay, decent sun for the panels, and a long-drop to ourselves, which after weeks of sharing facilities counts as luxury. We slept with the water audible from the bed for the rest of the stay.

The pademelons came in at dusk every evening, cautious at the edge of the light, working the grass and keeping one eye on us. Black currawongs went over during the day making the noise they make, which is unlike anything on the mainland. And along the beach we found devil tracks in the sand, unmistakeable once you know them, laid down overnight by an animal we never saw.

The big walk was sixteen kilometres return, out to South Cape Bay. Not the southernmost point of Tasmania, whatever gets claimed for it; that is South East Cape, and reaching it takes days on the South Coast Track. What South Cape Bay is, is where the South Coast Track begins and where the walking public generally stops.

We went out through button grass and then wet forest, boardwalk in the worst of it, mud everywhere else. Halfway along we fell in with a young hiker doing his own version of the island, and walked together for a stretch, exchanging the information travellers exchange. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos worked the canopy above us the whole way, calling to each other, which is a sound that carries a very long distance through wet forest and always seems to be coming from somewhere behind you.

Then the trees ended and the cliff top opened out.

Dark sand a long way below, sandstone and rock breaking the line of the shore, and beyond it the Southern Ocean going out flat and grey and uninterrupted. Nothing between that beach and the ice. We sat down and did not say much for a while. Six months earlier we had left the Sunshine Coast heading south, and this was as far south as the continent goes for anybody without a boat.

We stayed several more days and then packed up and drove back out the way we had come, north for the first time in weeks.

Behind us the bay went back to what it does when nobody is there, which is what it has been doing since the whalers left, and the French, and everybody else who ever thought there was something at the bottom of the road worth staying for.Read more