River Songs & Railway Dreams

Lake Burbury, the hydro lake in the hills east of Queenstown, was where we meant to camp, and the drive out ran through rain and low cloud. Mountains showed themselves for a moment and were gone again, a ridge here, a dark shoulder there, then nothing but white. We stopped at the lookouts anyway and stood in the drizzle looking at cloud. Sal's break from study was starting to run down, and every clear day before it ended mattered. This one was not looking like it would be.

The lake was young as Tasmanian lakes go, made when the King River was dammed for power and the water rose over the valley floor, and the campsite sat right at its edge. We had it to ourselves. After a year of looking for places like it, that still gave us a small jolt of pleasure, the same quiet relief every time we turned the engine off and heard nothing but rain on the roof. We set up with the lake hidden in drizzle and mist and went to bed trusting it would clear, as other Tasmanian lakes had taught us it often did.

It did. In the morning the cloud lifted off the water as if a lid had been raised, and there were mountains in every direction, close and steep and dark with forest, each of them standing again upside down in a lake so still it held them whole. Every lookout we had stopped at in the rain had been facing this. We stood out in the cool air with our coffee and said very little. It was the view we had driven out for, handed over a day late and all at once.

The summer days that far south were long, so there was no hurry. We let the morning go slowly before setting out for East Pillinger, a ghost town on the shore of Macquarie Harbour, the same wide water we had crossed with Grammy and Fran on the Gordon River cruise. Around the turn of the last century Pillinger had been the port for a copper railway pushed through this forest to the mines, and for a few busy years it had been a real town, with a pier and brick kilns and people who had come to stay. Then the copper companies merged, the railway lost its purpose, and the town emptied almost as fast as it had filled.

The way to the trailhead ran along the old railway formation itself, a line cut through the hillside for small trains and never meant for anything as wide as us. Getting the bus there was half the day's work. The forest pressed in humid and close on both sides, and Anth took it in stages: out to trim back the branches, in to inch forward, out again to look. Every overhanging limb was a scrape waiting to happen on the only home we had, and he treated each one that way, in no hurry at all. Nobody who built that cutting had pictured a seven-metre Coaster in it, and we earned every metre.

The walk followed the Bird River the whole way, fast and amber with tannin and loud enough to fill any silence. The air was thick and damp and smelled of wet fern and rotting wood. The rails were long gone, but the line was not. Embankments still held their shape, old sleepers surfaced through the moss underfoot, and here and there telegraph wire still hung among the trees. Under the noise of the river it was easy to imagine the trains, small and slow, working their way up from the harbour with the town's supplies. It was World Heritage forest now, and it was taking the railway back slowly, on its own terms.

At East Pillinger we ate lunch at the end of the old pier, Macquarie Harbour lapping below us. Boilers sat rusting where the town had been, beside the brickwork of its kilns, and an old railway carriage, once the line's deluxe one, was sinking a little further into the bush. There was nobody else there. We ate slowly, in no hurry to leave, and it was strange to think of people standing on these same boards once, watching the harbour for a ship.

The walk back was the same track in a different light, the sun lower now and slanting through the canopy from the other side. We walked a lot of it without talking, both of us thinking about the people who had lived out here at the edge of the harbour, how hard they must have worked, and how little of what they built had lasted. A railway, a port, a town, all of it meant to be permanent and gone inside a generation. Our own home moved on every few days and left nothing behind but tyre marks. Walking back along their line, it was hard not to feel we had chosen the lighter way to live.

By the time the bus came back into view the afternoon was getting on, and we decided not to spend another night at Lake Burbury after all. Sal's break would not last, and there were walks further north we had not done yet.

Below Queenstown we stopped at the Confluence, where the Queen River joins the King. The Queen came in orange, stained by more than a century of the mine above it. The King ran dark beside it, and it came out of the dam at Lake Burbury: the same water we had woken beside that morning, still clear of the town. The two colours held apart for a stretch before they gave in and mixed, and went on together toward the harbour we had eaten lunch beside. We sat and watched for a while.

Our last stop was the Queenstown cemetery, for its water tap. We filled the tanks among the old headstones, the light still long, and then turned the bus north.Read more