A Snowy Sojourn in Tasmania's Highlands

Back up the Lake Highway and in the ten kilometres of dirt to Penstock, third time, and this time we parked close to the water.

The app said snow. It had said snow before and delivered nothing, so we were treating it as a possibility rather than a plan, but the temperature was going the right way and the sky had the particular flat heavy look it gets when something is coming. We went to bed with the Dweller banked and both of us wondering.

Anth woke first and knew before he opened the curtain. There is a specific quality to the silence when snow has fallen: sound gets absorbed, the ordinary background of wind and bird noise disappears, and the light coming through the curtain is wrong, brighter than it should be at that hour and coming from the wrong direction because it is coming up off the ground.

Several inches of it. Everything.

The bus was under it, roof and bonnet and windscreen. The scrub had gone shapeless. The track in had disappeared entirely, just a smooth white channel between the trees where a road had been the night before. The lagoon was black against all of it, the only dark thing in the landscape, with the snow running right down to the waterline.

We did not make coffee. We got into every layer we owned and went out into it, and the first thing either of us did was stand still and listen to how quiet it was.

Sal had asked for this for her birthday, eight days earlier, and the weather had comprehensively failed to provide. Now here it was, unrequested and a week late, deeper than she had asked for.

We had seen Tasmanian snow before, two years ago, walking the Walls of Jerusalem and coming in after a fall had already happened. This was not that. This was waking up inside it, with the bus buried and the whole plateau converted overnight, and being the only two people who had made a mark on any of it.

Then, twenty minutes into a walk, two other people.

Cody and Sian had been going round Australia for a year and had come to Tasmania for a week for precisely this: they had watched the forecast from the mainland and flown at it. They had got it. The four of us stood in the snow being incredulous at each other, and then we invited them back to the bus.

We set the Dweller up outside and fed it, and it earned every cent it cost. Snow around it, sleet coming through in bursts, and a stove throwing real heat out into open air with four people standing round it. That is what the thing is for, even without the tent.

We were all Queenslanders about it. Cody and Sian too. None of us grew up anywhere that does this, and the whole time we were talking, we were also catching flakes and watching them go on our hands and behaving in a way that would embarrass anyone from a cold country. Grown adults, delighted, standing in a paddock.

Eventually the cold won and we went in and finally had the coffee, five hours late, in a bus that smelled of woodsmoke with the windows fogged.

The snow kept coming for the better part of a week.

Not the same fall, but new ones, most mornings a fresh layer over whatever had partly melted the day before. The place rearranged itself daily. A stand of trees you had walked past twice would be unrecognisable. The lagoon edge froze and unfroze. The light came off the snow at a low angle all day, because the sun barely gets up at that latitude in September, and everything was lit from underneath.

The panels did nothing, obviously. You cannot generate power through four inches of snow, so the first job each morning was clearing them, and even then the return was poor under that sky. The batteries went down all week and we let them, because we were not leaving.

Cody and Sian went after a couple of days with the usual promises about crossing paths, which on this island is a reasonable expectation rather than a politeness.

What finally moved us was water. The tanks emptied at their own pace regardless of how good the camp is, and eventually there was no more of it, and no amount of scenery solves that. So we cleared the panels one last time, got the bus out through the churned track, and drove down off the plateau toward town.

She got her snow. Nine days after the birthday, and about three hundred times more of it than she asked for.Read more