Waddamana: Where Four Make a Crowd

We left Penstock with the last of the snow still lying in the shaded patches and took the long way out, on roads we had not driven, because there was no reason to hurry and the direct route was one we knew.

That took us past Waddamana, which we had been to before for the power station. It is the first hydro station Tasmania ever built, opened in 1916, and it is a museum now: the original machine hall preserved with the generators still standing in it, the whole scheme that electrified this state beginning in a shed in the middle of nowhere.

But the station was not what stopped us this time. The village was.

Waddamana has four residents. Four. And when we came through, three of them were standing around a van-café having their morning coffee, which meant that seventy-five per cent of the population was in attendance and the remaining twenty-five per cent was presumably at home.

We pulled in, because how could you not.

The van belongs to Llry and Toni, who are also two of the four. So the café is run by half the town and that morning it was serving a quarter of it. They were pleased to see two more people, and we stayed considerably longer than a coffee stop warrants. They talked about what it is like out there: a place with a museum, a road, and almost nobody, up on a plateau that gets properly cold and properly cut off. There is a whole life in a settlement that size and it does not resemble anybody else's.

We left with pastries they would not charge us for and a promise to come back through.

Then the dirt road east, with Anth stopping for geocaches along the way and Sal in the passenger seat with her laptop out.

The Masters had started. There is reading to do now, and things due, and they are due on dates that have nothing to do with where we are parked or what the weather is doing. She works in the front seat while the country goes past, and when we stop she keeps working, and a life that has been entirely responsive for nine months has a fixed obligation running through the middle of it.

Neither of us has said much about how that is going to work. It is early.

We came out on the Lake Highway, turned east on a road neither of us had been on, and got to Dago Point on Lake Sorell in the afternoon.

Two nights there, and it was warmer, which after Penstock felt like a considerable indulgence. Not warm. Just not minus one. The lake sat flat below the camp and nobody else came in the whole time, and after the snow week and the four-person town meeting, two days of nothing at all was about right.

Then the water ran out again, which is how most of our stays end, and we drove down off the plateau to Launceston, where Sal had the hairdresser booked.Okumaya devam et