Sacred Spaces and Patient Hearts

Back to Honeysuckle Banks at Evandale, five minutes from the airport, which is the only reason anybody camps there and the only reason we ever do. Trains at night, aircraft overhead, headlights sweeping the windows. Sal has now had three separate goes at sleeping through it and has not managed one yet.

We were there because Anth might be flying to Melbourne and might not. The screening was arranged, then it was contingent, then it depended on something at the other end, and so we sat five minutes from the airport waiting for somebody else's decision.

Waiting is not interesting. You fill it.

So we went to Cataract Gorge, which we had been to in March with Grammy and Fran. The gorge is right at the edge of Launceston, dolerite walls dropping straight into the South Esk, and the strange thing about it is how quickly the city stops. Ten minutes from a supermarket you are in a proper river gorge.

Last time we did the standard route. This time we took the Duck Creek Trail, which runs along the upper part and is quieter, and Anth had a cache to find up there: another of the old ones, placed early, still being logged after all this time. That is three of them now that we have found in this state, and there is something in the fact that geocaching's founding generation came to Tasmania and hid things in it and the things are still there.

The old Duck Creek Power Station sits along that trail. Small hydro, early, long since decommissioned, the building still standing with the water still running past it. Tasmania is full of these. The whole state was wired up by people putting concrete in river valleys, and half of it has been superseded and left where it stands.

We came back through the main gorge rather than the way we came, which took longer and was the right call.

The next day Sal bought cushions.

There is a genuine question in a bus about how much stuff is too much, and the answer is not obvious, because seven metres punishes every unnecessary object and also has to be somewhere you actually want to be. Sal's position is that you cannot have too many cushions. This position is not universally held in the vehicle. But she is right that the difference between a functional interior and one you are happy to sit in all winter is mostly soft furnishings, and it costs almost nothing.

Anth spent the same day on the roof. Small pieces of ply, cut to fill the gaps at the ends of the solar panels and around the two MaxxFans, so that the whole roof becomes one covered surface instead of panels with holes between them. It is not much of a job to describe. What it does is give the roof a continuous shaded layer with an air gap under it, which in a metal vehicle in a Tasmanian summer is the difference between an interior you can sit in at two in the afternoon and one you cannot. It had been on the list for weeks and got done because there was nothing else to do.

Then the decision came, or the shape of one, and Melbourne was still hanging. Rather than sit at Evandale any longer we decided to go to Narawntapu, which is up on the north coast an hour away, on the reasoning that if a flight materialised we could drive back and if it did not we would at least have spent the days somewhere better than a camp under a flight path.

That is most of what the waiting taught us. Not much. Mainly that you should do the waiting somewhere with a view.Read more