Sacred Waters & Ancient Paths

Lake King William was our first stop west of Derwent Bridge, because we wanted to find the place where we had camped with Grammy and Fran in the autumn. The lake is a hydro storage on the upper Derwent, and its level rises and falls with the dam and the seasons. That autumn the drought had taken it so low that the bus stood out on the dry lake bed, on dusty ground well out from the water, with Grammy and Fran's hired Hiace beside us. Now the drought had broken. We found the spot, or near enough, and it was under water. The lake lapped quietly over the ground where we had parked, and the place we had come looking for was gone beneath it. We were surprised by how glad that made us. It felt like going back to see someone who had been unwell and finding them well again.

Further west on the Lyell Highway the forest closed in and the rain came and went. The Franklin River Nature Trail led us through dripping rainforest that smelled of wet moss and earth, along the banks of the Surprise and the Franklin, both running high and fast, the water dark as strong tea with tannin. We walked it quietly, the rivers loud enough to make talking an effort. This was the river more than a thousand people were arrested to protect in the early eighties, when it was going to be dammed for power like so many others on this island, and here it was running past us full and free. Earlier that day we had stood beside a lake made by a dam. It felt right, a little later, to walk beside the river that had refused one.

A few minutes on was the start of the Frenchmans Cap track, several days in and out to a white quartzite peak, with a long reputation for mud. Standing at the trailhead we added it to the list begun at Lake St Clair, the long walks we hoped to do one day with the kids, and the list was starting to look like a reason in itself to bring everyone together. For now we went only as far as the swing bridge over the Franklin. We crossed one at a time, light rain falling, the bridge moving underfoot, and each of us stopped halfway to stand above the water a while. Neither of us said much about it afterwards. Out there on the wire, with the river loud underneath, we had both been thinking about how much this life had changed us, and how far we now were from the lives we had left behind on the Sunshine Coast.

As we stepped off the bridge, a man came out along the track: an outdoor educator, the fifth we had met in Tasmania, who had been hitchhiking his way around the island. He told us about it there by the river, rain dripping off all three of us, and then went his way and we went ours. Donaghys Hill Lookout came next, a shorter climb of about two kilometres up through the forest, and from the top the Franklin's valley opened out below us in every direction, ridge after ridge of forest with the river cut deep somewhere among them. It was a fair consolation for the long walks we had decided to leave for another time, and a view that made leaving them easier.

Twenty minutes further on, the Nelson River track ran short and level beside swift, swollen water through moss-covered rainforest, and the rain that had been coming and going all day settled in properly. The falls, when we reached them, were in full flow. They came down wide and white, and the spray lifted off them and drifted across the viewing platform until it and the rain were the same thing on our faces, cold and fine and constant. We stayed longer than we needed to, taking photographs we already knew would hold none of the noise.

Lake Burbury, which we had crossed under clear skies with Grammy and Fran, was lost in cloud this time, the water grey and the far shore gone. Past it the road began to climb and the forest gave out. Gormanston had once been a busy mining town and was now a few houses and a lot of empty ground, and above it the hills were bare. At the Iron Blow the lookout hung out over the old open cut, the pit where mining here had first begun, and the water lying in the bottom of it was a startling, unnatural blue, beautiful in the way a warning sign can be.

The hills around Queenstown had been stripped for the copper smelters from the 1890s on. The forests were cut to fire them, sulphur fumes killed what grew back, and once nothing held the soil, the west coast rain, some of the heaviest in the country, washed it away down to the rock. What remained was bare ground in pinks, ochres and greys, so strange in the cloudy light that it was hard to look away, and hard to enjoy once we knew how it had come about. Earlier that day we had walked beside a river that people had fought for and kept. These hills had gone the other way, long before anyone thought to fight.

Back on the Lyell Highway we finally stopped at Horsetail Falls, which had caught our eye on the way through last time. The boardwalk followed the hillside with the falls in view the whole way, about fifty metres of water coming down in a long white drop, loud with the rain. A newly finished section of track took us right to the top, and Queenstown lay below us in its valley. A man who lived there part of the year stopped to talk, plainly proud of his town, and after the hills we had just come through, it was good to hear someone speak about Queenstown with that much affection.

That night we stayed in town by the Gravel, Queenstown's famous football ground, where Australian rules is played on gravel instead of grass. The people parked beside us were from the Sunshine Coast, our old home, and were doing the lap of Australia. It had been such a full day that we let our usual evening entertainment go. There was enough already to sit with: a lake that had come back, a river that had been saved, hills that had not, and two waterfalls running high with rain.

Morning came in overcast and practical: overdue laundry, fuel, and then, as a rare treat, coffee in a café in town. Queenstown was a small place now, a fraction of the town it had been when the mines were at their height, and buying a coffee there felt like a modest way of backing it. Then we turned east for Lake Burbury, and as the road climbed out the bare hills fell away behind us and the green came back up on either side.Read more