Silver Waters, Wild Hearts

We filled the water tanks at Ouse and then went up into the lake country, which is where the middle of Tasmania stops being farmland and becomes something stranger: a whole hydro system of connected lagoons and impoundments spread across the plateau, with short roads running between them. In Queensland you commit to a direction for a day. Here you can look at three lakes before lunch and still not have decided where to sleep.

What we look for now is specific and slightly unromantic. Open sky first, for the Starlink and the panels, which rules out anything under canopy. Then a view. Then nobody else. That order, in that sequence, every time. The internet stopped being optional the day the Masters started, and a beautiful site with a hill in the way is no longer a site we can use.

Tungatinah Lagoon looked good and we did not take it. We were being fussy.

At one of the stops we got talking to a bloke in a serious expedition vehicle, retired, who had been a science lecturer. Anth studied science, and the dates lined up well enough that the pair of them spent a while working out whether he might once have stood at the front of a room Anth was sitting in. Neither of them could settle it. He knew these lakes well and told us where to go.

Which is how we ended up between Lake Binney and Brady's Lake, on a flat piece of ground right at the waterline with lupins flowering along the edge of it.

Eight days there.

The fisherman was already a fixture. An older local who came out most days, set up, cast, and worked at it with the patience of somebody who has been doing this in the same water for a very long time. The cormorants were the problem. They were on the lake constantly, and whatever they were not eating they were scattering, and he would come and go with not much to show for it and a fairly detailed opinion about the birds.

Between the two lakes there is a kayak slalom course, gates strung over fast water where the hydro scheme lets it through. It is a serious piece of infrastructure sitting in the middle of nowhere. In eight days we saw exactly one person use it, running the gates alone in white water with nobody watching but us.

We trained most days, which out here has had to be reinvented more thoroughly than almost anything else. Both of us came out of a gym background where you load a bar and then add weight to it, and there is no bar, no rack, and no room for either. So it is bands, bodyweight and running, which after years of heavy lifting feels like taking up a different sport entirely. It works. It just took a while to stop resenting it.

The weather did everything in those eight days. Twenty degrees and glaring one afternoon, single figures and rain that night, wind coming down the lake hard enough to put chop on it. Some mornings the sun came up over the water and lit the whole lake orange. Others it stayed grey until ten.

Sal's second trimester marks started arriving, more distinctions, and there was a genuine dispute in the bus about which of us was more pleased about them. Anth maintains he won that argument.

Then a piece of admin surfaced. The bus needed its heavy vehicle inspection, which meant going back to Glenorchy. In a house you would call that a nuisance. Out here it is simply where the next few days go, and the difference between those two reactions is most of what ten months has done to us.

The last morning gave us three things at once. Mist sitting low on the water. A rainbow standing over the far shore. And a platypus, twenty metres from the bus, working the shallows in that unhurried way they have, diving and surfacing and diving again, entirely unbothered by the two people standing on the bank watching it.

It stayed a long while. We did not move until it did.Read more