A Guide to Bushwalking in Tasmania: Twenty-Five Short Walks
It was in the night that I set off for my longest journey.
Forty days spent hunting around the corners of painted sandstone, peering under leaves, falling down wombat burrows and climbing up to the shaky tips of swamp gums. I ate nothing but the berries and roots and fungi poking from the blinding snow, vomiting them up as soon as they touched the base of my stomach, and at times I was on a track that was a stream that was a track and the water was gushing over my feet, and then I was walking on icy tarns that were hardened campsites and lakes that were buttongrass plains. There were strange equations that were revealing and losing themselves in my head like those I had tried to study as a student in my silent home…
And I plunged and churned through the wet snow and my footprints held their form through many nights of heavy flurries, and I was conscious in every step of the true ground beneath it. I was completely aware of its shape and colours hibernating below the depths of that puffy white mattress, and I was able to comprehend its beauty as though the seasons stood alongside each other, all at the one time. On the short, dark days the wind ripped the air from the west and flung it in my face and it covered the mountains with an ocean of clouds and the currents swirled in sleet that smelt of frozen polar wastes; on clear days the fog could only be persuaded to leave with great effort, it dithered in and out and slunk into the valleys and hung around like a beautiful, shy teenager, and it played with the light in circles and waves as it reflected off the crystal lakes and the layers of frost coating every leaf and finger of grass…
I went gambolling from the west over the mountains Achilles and Thetis, jumping from boulder to boulder and poking out my chest at Pelion West, leaping on the shoulders of all that mythology and grasping at the talons of masked owls and wedge-tailed eagles to lift me up over crevices that returned my mocking grin.
And then night and day were all the same to me. I arrived early for a dawn service on the tip of Mt Ossa, where I sucked the small tarn dry just as the sun lifted above the fog in the seas below, and there was a voice intoning in the light winds, coaxing and repeating. I cannot remember the terms that it offered me or even the firm, rolling timbre of its inflections, just a stop-start album flaring in my mind of images and associations, limbs of iron and a horizon stare and my name carved into camps and caverns, emblazoned on unnamed wonders and outliving the geology. Of the devils fearing my ferocity as though I was a new cancer spreading through the forests, of endemic pardalotes and ravens fleeing like refugees, migrating to the north, the native hens reaching the sand lining Bass Strait and plunging in regardless. Of black-and-white photographs that showed me staring through the image like carved quartz, the mines I had dug and the peaks I had felled, the skins of white and yellow gums piled across my shoulder and hung from wired icicles strung behind my back.
And beside those visions, while I captive listened to that persuasive voice as the sun shot the mist orange and red with splattering blood, I remember that a certainty and confidence arose and overcame me, an assurance that began behind my ears and in my temples and spread through my arteries and nerves, even as it pressed up from the ground through the soles of my feet: that I would fulfil all of my hopes and aspirations in power, that I would find what I had been longing for; that I would be strong and the forests would explore me, map me and survey me and wonder at my beauty and my wilderness of spirit.
I don’t recall my answer. I wish that I could remember how I responded there, alone on that highest of the Earth’s peaks, weighing and measuring my options. And yet the fact that the offer had come to me and me alone proved that I was so many worlds above the walkers with whom I’d previously travelled—and it was no wonder that even in the short days when the sun resigns, giving up in the face of the unrelenting cold, when the clouds pad that sun and straightjacket it and carry it away to gloomier rooms, and when the snow unifies the scenery in a white consensus, weighing down branches and whole saplings into arches under which I strode jubilant, the white powder abasing itself, the fresh blizzards hurrying to bow low and offer tribute—it was no wonder that there were masses of devout pilgrims following after me and the legends I was imprinting and emblazoning.
‘Mr. Smithies,’ I said to that fine bushwalker, sitting in my great, immeasurable hall of regal stone, and ‘Mr. Emmett and Mr. Thwaites, you have been good to honour me, and I must offer you my sincere apologies but I cannot admit you to my presence today, for I have just had the Luckmans and Miss Masterman in and I am due to scope the whole island this afternoon to search for the finest granite’—the cold and icy granite that would slip and slide from my grip like a hyperventilating fish; but I would rip it apart and mash it with my hands and my teeth—‘but if you follow quickly then perhaps in the weeks filing past you will hear my booming voice drowning out the thunder, perilling the falcon flights and scouring the sky.’
And so off I would speed, transfigured in reflected light, and in the days that followed I dotted the clouds as I crossed the high points from spike to spine as though whirling and circling around confused and lumbering dragons, ready to plunge charmed daggers into their backs and their throats. I was waving and pointing out new and undiscovered heights to the peakbaggers, to Harris and Geeves, to Dawson and Lillico, showing them the hidden way and lifting up their feet to touch the tips; and perhaps I diverted rivers and blocked them up with butterflies, perhaps I mined great piles of flowers from the alpine veins of richea and exported them on the winds to overcome foreign shores with their transient wonder, and perhaps I scythed away at the buttongrass with my hands and baked its ground seed-heads to a stiff damper, jamming snowberries and churning up the milk of bettongs and offering this feast of rustic scones around a stately log table.
‘Deny King,’ I said, ‘Ernie Bond and Bert Nichols, I am pleased you have come to pay your respects, for I wanted to explain that your tithes from the reserves—the tin and the berries and the furs—these are no longer required. I will be making up a new contract with you and reversing our services. For I will now be the source of all your produce. I will lift up Melaleuca and tip the tin from its pockets, and I will snap shards of granite to scoop up the mud from the Vale of Rasselas and run new and improved sheep at Gordonvale, sheep that are covered in the wool of my beard.’
And those bushmen nodded with deference and awe, unwilling to meet my flashing eyes. And then I was off again, leaving them behind in dusty clouds, and in many refuges and high places there were bushwalkers trying to catch up with me and shake my hand, asking me to autograph their guides and share their bacon and their flour and their squat tins of thick beans, but few found any trace of me at all, for I could cross the island in hours and in minutes, and though they might look in the place that I was rumoured to be in the morning, by noon I would have found a new rippled range and be sucking up the water and the yabbies from their holes.
And then on the fortieth day of my ascension in the high country I saw a figure in the distance; he was perched alone and pondering on the columns of the Cradle, and I thought, well, there is an aligned soul, there is a man worthy to receive me, and I jumped from Hansons Peak to the Little Horn, and leapt again, and there we came together right on the metal survey marker, face to face, a meeting point establishing us as clear equals.
‘Mr Weindorfer,’ I said, ‘it has been a long time.’
But he shook his head. He slowly shook his head.
And I wondered at that man who had built up his forest home, his Waldheim, on the edge of Dove Lake, that kindred spirit who had understood the landscape so magnificently.
‘Mr Weindorfer,’ I repeated. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
But he said no words to me at all; looking old and sad, he turned around and hopped down the boulders towards the cirque, and this one dismissal led me suddenly to cast my memory back across all encounters of the previous weeks, the faces of the bushmen and the walkers; what had their eyes and mouths been telling me? I could not remember a single word that they had said. What I had taken for respect and worship; well, could it rather have been a kind of restraint, courteous but malicious? For the first time in that gritty July I doubted myself, and the misgivings came on strong with the lost sun, and on that fortieth night I drifted across the plateau and there stood the photographers Truchanas and Dombrovskis among the rushing streams, but neither of them was willing to take my image; they waited there silently till I passed beyond them.
