Echoes of Belonging

The plan for the days after Christmas was Lake St Clair, the deep lake at the southern end of the Overland Track, and the only thing against it was how little either of us wanted to leave Little Pine Lagoon. It was a shallow, open water up on the Central Plateau, known to fly fishers across the country for its trout, and over Christmas it had been ours, with nothing to organise and nobody to be anywhere for. It had been one of the best Christmases either of us could remember. We packed up slowly on Boxing Day morning, the low sun laying long shadows across the water, neither of us in any hurry to be finished.

The road down off the plateau ran through Bronte Park, a small village in the Central Highlands that grew up as a hydro construction camp and sits close to the island's centre. A local out walking a dog stopped to chat, the way people do in small places, and mentioned in passing that the busy season was nearly here, the summer people about to arrive. It was an ordinary remark, and it stayed with us far longer than it should have.

We had been in Tasmania for eleven months. We had seen its summer and its autumn, its frosts, snow at Penstock and a highland spring, and now we were about to watch summer come round again. We had places we went back to, Penstock and Swimcart and the foreshore at Gordon, and people scattered around the island who would be glad to see the bus pull in. We knew which towns had a laundromat and which had good coffee, and how cold a highland night could get in autumn. We were not residents. Somewhere along the way, though, we had stopped being visitors, and the bus had stopped being the way we saw Tasmania and become where we lived in it. The local had no way of knowing any of that. It was only that, hearing about the season on its way, we found ourselves thinking of it as ours.

Anth had a geocache to find nearby, and it led us to a wooden stave pipe, timber staves bound with steel bands, still carrying water after seventy years. Much of what stood around Bronte Park had been built for the hydro, by people who came for the work and moved on when it was done, and the pipe had outlasted most of them. There was something steadying in that: a thing built for one job that had simply gone on doing it, season after season, while people came and went around it.

In the autumn we had come through Derwent Bridge with Grammy and Fran for the Huon pine carvings at The Wall, on a night that dropped to a degree above freezing. This time we went on the few kilometres to Cynthia Bay, at the lake's southern end. Lake St Clair is the deepest freshwater lake in the country, gouged out by glaciers, and the Derwent rises from it to run all the way down to Hobart. The palawa name is usually given as leeawuleena, sleeping water, and under that day's flat grey cloud it was easy to see why.

Cynthia Bay is also where the Overland Track ends, about sixty-five kilometres and six days on foot from Cradle Mountain. We stood near its finish and let ourselves picture walking it one day with the kids, all of us coming down out of the mountains together onto this shore. Right then that meant Torrin and Sophie in Japan for the ski season and Mack in Queensland, the family spread across two countries. It was a dream that needed all of us in one place at the same time, and we were content to carry it for as long as that took.

Frankland Beaches came first, and we folded our running programme into the walk, still working our way toward a first five kilometres, running where the boardwalk allowed and walking the sand between. The lake stretched away north under high cloud, grey and enormous, the mountains of the park standing up along its sides. Our feet went from timber to sand to timber again, our breath came hard, the air smelled of eucalypt and cold water, and for a while that deep, sleeping lake was simply where we went for our run, as though we lived at the end of its road.

Our camp sat just outside the national park, and on the first night we shared it with one other camper. The next day we walked the Watersmeet circuit, out through the forest to where the Cuvier and Hugel rivers join before reaching the lake, the cloud thickening as we went and rain always on the point of starting. It hardly mattered. Highland weather had been doing this to us all year, and we had long since learned to walk under it rather than wait it out.

As we had expected, the quiet did not last. The camp sat beside the Lyell Highway, the main road from Hobart to the west coast, and over the next two days it filled and emptied around us, vans and cars arriving late and gone early, everyone on their way to Queenstown or back from it. We were the ones staying put. There was a small, unexpected pleasure in being the fixed point while everyone else moved through, and it sat comfortably beside what had been on our minds since Bronte Park.

Then Sal's calf began to complain. We slowed down without any fuss, gave the running a rest, and let the last day by the lake go at the pace her leg set. It cost us nothing we minded. A year of this life had taught us that a plan was only ever a starting point, and that there was nearly always somewhere good to be while we waited.

When we finally turned west for Queenstown, it was onto the same road we had taken with Grammy and Fran on the way to the Gordon River. Then it had been the way to somewhere new. Now, with the lake behind us and Sal resting her leg, it was a road we already knew.Read more