Fire & Frost: Birthday in the Highlands

Michael and Amanda had the bus for a month and would not take anything for it, so we said goodbye at Forcett and drove north with a stop to make first.

The Dweller was waiting at a FedEx depot. It is a hot tent stove, a proper one, firebox and flue and a glass door, designed to sit inside a canvas tent and heat it without filling it with smoke. We did not own a hot tent. We had ordered it anyway, on the reasoning that we could set it up outside and get the heat and the flame without any of the smoke that a normal campfire puts into your clothes, your hair and everything you own. Whether that reasoning would hold up was untested. It sat in its box in the back all the way to the highlands.

Sal had asked for snow for her birthday.

That was the whole brief. Not a restaurant or a present, just to be somewhere with snow on it, and the Central Highlands in early September is the only place in this state where that is even a reasonable request. The forecast was not promising. We went anyway, up through Chauncy Vale where Andy had got himself lost back in June, and then up onto the Lake Highway, where the country changes character completely: sub-alpine moorland, low scrub, no shelter, water standing everywhere after weeks of rain. Then ten kilometres of dirt in to Penstock Lagoon and the boat ramp where we had camped the first time round.

Thin tree cover there, which is exactly what you want going into a week of unsettled weather. The panels got what they could while the sun was out.

The birthday came without snow.

She got coffee in bed, which is what there was to give, and it turned out to be enough. Then lunch at the Great Lake Hotel with Michael and Amanda, which had been arranged as a goodbye and turned out to be a bigger one than expected: they are leaving Tasmania. Not for a holiday. They are going to New Zealand, giving up the property and the Hipcamp and the whole arrangement, and doing something else entirely.

They said our life had something to do with it.

That is now three. Grammy went home from three weeks in the convoy and bought herself a van at seventy-four. Andy came down from Adelaide to try this on and left having decided it fitted. Now Michael and Amanda are selling up for New Zealand. We are not recruiting anybody. We turn up, we park, we talk to people about what we do, and every so often somebody goes away and rearranges their life. It is unsettling as much as it is flattering, because none of them are seeing the flat days.

Back at the lagoon, the week settled into itself.

Penstock is a fly fishing water and the fishermen were out from first light, standing thigh-deep in it, casting and recasting on a surface that on the still mornings was a perfect mirror of the sky. They stayed until dark. We watched them the way you watch anybody doing a slow thing well.

We drove the tracks around the lagoon looking at other camps, threw the frisbee Andy had left us, and each evening got the Dweller going.

It works. It works remarkably well. You feed it small wood through the door and it draws hard up the flue, and the glass glows, and the heat comes off the body of it in a way an open fire does not manage unless you are practically in it. And nothing smokes. You can stand next to it for three hours and go to bed without smelling like a bushfire, which after months of open fires is not a small thing. Gathering wood for it became the evening job, the pair of us out in the scrub with armfuls of whatever would burn.

Snow never came. It stayed cold and grey and threatened all week and delivered nothing, which Sal took better than the weather deserved.

Then Anth got a call from the mainland that needed him on a plane, and the week ended sooner than planned. We packed up and drove out past Arthur Lake and down through Poatina, off the plateau and back toward Launceston and another town day.Read more