Matthew Power: Blue Magazine

AUSTRALIA: Trekking in Tasmania

text: Matthew Power

photograph: Matthew Power

I hear the clatter of a cooking pot in the front seat of my van. My sleep-addled brain tries to identify the source of the disturbance without opening my eyes. Then a series of snuffles and throaty growls three feet from my head wake me up like a shot of espresso. I fumble for my flashlight, open the curtains between the front seat and the back, and cast a light on a somewhat unabashed Tasmanian devil, who reluctantly pulls his head out of a bag of trail mix to give me a closer look. With indifference, he returns to his meal.

“Hey!” I shout. “Hey!”

He (or she) stares at me again with deep black eyes, not visibly irritated that I have interrupted a free meal. I jump out of the van, open the front door and start yelling at the intruder to leave my food alone. There must be some nice carrion out on the highway just waiting for a devil, a small viscious carnivore, to gnaw on it. The devil stands on its back legs, regarding me quizzically, but I don’t really want it to leave. I’m fascinated by this snuffling, snorting creature. It hisses, and not wanting to make it feel cornered, I take a few steps back, leaving it a wide exit strategy. Being nocturnal, the devil doesn’t seem to like the spotlight I have trained on it, so it ambles down to the ground and heads for cover. A few moments later I hear a racket in the bush, a louder hiss, followed by a high-pitched squeal, cut short by a horrible grunting. Was it the devil happening so soon upon a replacement meal? Or was it some random spotted quoll, a small marsupial predator, killing a hapless young wallaby? The darkness of the Tasmanian bush offers few clues, and I head back to the van for a few more hours of sleep.

Tomorrow I start the Overland Track, a week’s hike from Cradle Mountain in the north to Lake St Clair 48 miles to the south. The track cuts through an ancient landscape of mountains, temperate rainforests, buttongrass plains and highland tarns, right through the heart of one of the world’s largest conservation areas, the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. I’ve come to hike the length of the trail, and with any luck, see the elusive thylacine, a marsupial thought by scientists to have vanished 65 years ago.

“You’ve got two chances of seeing a thylacine, mate,” said a bushy-bearded trucker next to me in a pub in Deloraine, Tasmania. “Bugger all and none.”

But that’s exactly what I’ve come 10,000 miles, half a world away, to do. The thylacine, known locally as the Tasmanian tiger or wolf, was the highest predator in the food chain of this island state 150 miles south of mainland Australia.

Tasmania’s wilderness is untracked and reports of its history are dark. Spotted by Abel Tasman in 1642, Tasmania was one of the earliest settled parts of Australia. Its remoteness and isolation made it an ideal penal colony for the British, who sent nearly 74,000 prisoners there during the 19th century. The island was already home to a distinct aboriginal population, separated by rising sea levels from mainland Australian aboriginals for 12,000 years.

At one time Tasmanian Aborigines were the most southerly peoples in the world, hunter-gatherers living in one of the most remote wildernesses on earth. Over the course of a few decades, they were systematically slaughtered by white settlers; hunted for sport and rounded up in reserves where they died of disease and malnutrition. In 1830, the settlers formed the notorious “Black Line,” a human chain of all the able-bodied men in the territory, to drive the last aboriginals out of the settlement and corner them in the Tasman Peninsula. They captured only two, shot and killed two more, but the ball of destruction was rolling.

By 1876, the last full-blooded Tasmanian had died. A small group that escaped the slaughter lived on, mixing with the sealers of Flinders and Cape Barren Islands in the Bass Strait and preserving remnants of their culture to this day. But their language, religion and most traditions have been nearly wiped-out, preserved only in word lists and published accounts of early contacts. And the thylacine, the wolf which lived with the natives for millennia, barely lasted a century after the white people arrived. They simply hunted it out of existence.

It is a mind-bogglingly difficult story to get your head around when confronting the wild beauty of Tasmania’s southwest, a prehistoric landscape of giant ferns and bizarre rock formations. But I sensed that any epiphany would be even less likely in the sleepy, forgetful English rose-garden villages of the east coast. Fortunately, if there’s one thing you have on a weeklong walk, it’s time to think. Tasmania’s history washes over me like a tide.

Already tired from the previous night’s encounter with the devil, I set out in the morning along the Overland. My pack is heavy with food for the weeklong trek: trail mix, tahini, falafel mix, oatmeal, soup, all sorts of reconstitutable delights. I wish I could travel as light as the Tasmanian aboriginals had, building tools and shelter where they went and leaving them behind for the archaeologists when they moved camp. Even their clothing was light. They wore kangaroo-skin loincloths or nothing at all, and coated their bodies with a mixture of ocher, charcoal and kangaroo grease to stay warm in the severe climate.

As I breakfast on some Vitawheats (a delicious Aussie cracker), a huge black bird hops onto the picnic table and grabs one right out of my hand. It then retreats to a fence and glares at me with yellow eyes.

“That’s a currawong,” an Australian hiker sitting nearby explains. “He’ll steal food right out of your mouth if you don’t look out.”

The walk begins gently enough, a slow rise up through a gum forest to a plateau, skirting a crater lake. The track is extraordinarily well-kept, with graded gravel and boardwalk over sections of wetland. The air is clear and smells of eucalyptus leaves and mud. It is March, late in the summer, so I’ve avoided the large groups that walked the track earlier in the season. The trade-off is Tasmania’s unpredictable weather, what the locals call “four seasons in a day.” It rains here 275 days a year. Hopefully I’ll catch a few of the lucky 90 that remain.

The plant life varies widely, from myrtle, sassafras, fern trees, leatherwood and celerytop pine in the rainforest, to dry eucalyptus and open buttongrass moorlands. After a steep rise I get my first view of Cradle Mountain, a massive saddle-shaped peak. The Overland Trail was laid along valleys and plains, and crosses through several mountain passes in its way south. Side tracks offer day hikes to the highest peaks in Tasmania. I leave my pack at the base of Cradle Mountain and scramble up the reddish, boulder-strewn flanks of the mountain, reaching the summit, a cluster of massive broken pinnacles of dolerite topping off above 5,000 feet. From there, the view is clear far to the south toward Mount Ossa, the island’s highest peak, and the Du Cane range which obscures the track’s southern terminus, 48 miles south.

The World Heritage Area was established in the 1980s after a fierce battle between conservationists and hydroelectric and logging interests. Roughly the size of Connecticut, crossed by a single highway and almost totally unpopulated, it is one of the world’s last great temperate rainforests. It contains some of the tallest and oldest trees in the world (the 300-foot swamp gum and the 2000-year-old huon pine), and takes up a fifth of the 26,000-square-mile island. Its terrible weather (11 feet of rain a year), swamps and numerous mountain ranges have left it among Australia’s most pristine wildernesses. The park contains a dazzling array of wildlife, including echidna, wallaby, quoll, pademelon, platypus and Tasmanian devil, whom I’ve already met.

Mountains and highlands stretch to the horizon in every direction. Except for the dirt road leading to the trailhead several miles back, there is no visible mark of humankind. This was a land crossed for millennia by the Aborigines, and the fact that so little is known about their language and culture makes it all the more haunting: all that remains are the notes taken down by early explorers, a few anthropological descriptions, the throwaway tools the Aborigines left scattered across the island as they traveled from food source to food source, a few petroglyphs in ocher here and a single handprint on the wall of a cave there.

With miles to go and the sun dropping, I make my way off Cradle Mountain, bouldering down to pick up my pack and head to the hut for the first night’s sleep. I fall into a rhythm, my body on autopilot, only vaguely aware of being tired or hungry. My eyes and thoughts drift over the landscape that unfolds before me. The sun is shimmering against the monolith of Barn Bluff, a dead ringer for Devil’s Tower, as I come through a scented forest of gums to Waterfall Valley. There are about a dozen others camping at the well-equipped hut, which has a gas heater and wooden bunks. Some stay outside in tents, but I’ve set out on this trek with only a bivy sack and take shelter where I can. After a meal of avocado, tahini and honey on Vitawheats, I go outside and walk around in the darkness, camera in hand, hoping to spot a thylacine—or at least sense one lurking in the heavy darkness.

I’ve been captivated by the idea of the thylacine ever since I first read about the animal years before: a meter-long marsupial with a rear-facing pouch, tiger stripes and a set of jaws that open wider than those of any other mammal (although experts believe that widely reported claims of a 120-degree gape are exaggerated). The thylacine was demonized by early settlers as a sheep killer (which scientists now agree it likely wasn’t), and government bounties drove it to the brink of extinction by the early twentieth century. Around 1910, the number of bounties paid out by the regional government dropped sharply, and people began to realize that the thylacine, now exceedingly rare, was less valuable dead than alive. Every zoo in the world wanted one, but the population had fallen below a sustainable level. The thylacine was sad and restless in cages, and all captive-breeding attempts met with failure. The last known thylacine, named Ben, died in 1936 in the Hobart Zoo. The next year the government declared them a protected species, even though in all likelihood, they were already extinct. Now, an Australian scientist wants to clone the thylacine from tissue samples from an 1866 fetus found in a museum’s archives.

Still, for the last 65 years, purported encounters have been common, with hundreds of thylacine sightings claimed and more than a few from credible sources. Even today, the faithful insist that the thylacine is out there, perhaps hidden away in the vast southwestern wilderness area that is transected by the Overland. Discovering one now, in the 21st century would be like finding a new planet.

Under the brilliant southern stars and the scent of eucalyptus, the inescapable logic of extinction creeps into my mind, and I think of the thousands who have walked this track, and the total lack of hard scientific evidence of thylacine’s existence since 1936. It makes the night sounds seem lonely, with the thylacine’s cry (described as a deep throaty bark not unlike a heavy cough) now only an echo in the memory of the few people still living who saw one in the Hobart Zoo. I stand out in the darkness for a long, long time.

Inside the hut I sleep like a brick. The bleary-eyed few who sleep outside in tents will later relate the horrors of nocturnal marauders: a horde of devils tearing through the walls of their tent for food.

The next day is even longer than the one before, 17 miles and eight hours over the vast moorlands of the park’s central plateau, through patches of gum forests and buttongrass, a decidedly Dr Seuss-like plant that covers the flats like tufts of strawberry-blonde hair. Mount Ossa and the Pelions stand out on the far horizon. Walking alone, I imagine myself part of that lost tribe of Tasmanians, moving with wooden spear in hand across the landscape that they once crossed on foot, constructing temporary shelters from bark and telling stories around the fire about Noiheener, the benevolent god of the day, and Wrageowrapper, the malicious spirit that ruled the night.

And so I continue on, days of walking through a miraculous landscape, my pack getting lighter as food is turned to muscle. The weather is unseasonably good except for a day of cold rain on the exposed moors that left me wondering how the aboriginals had managed this climate wearing only ocher and kangaroo grease. Many experts believe that they didn’t even know how to make fire, but rather carried it with them (perhaps collected from forest fires) when they moved from place to place, not an easy task in such an extreme land. There are mudpits up to my knees, and leeches on the undersides of leaves. I sit in camp one evening with a saltshaker, patiently assassinating a half dozen of them on my legs. Another hiker comes up to me and says, “What’s that behind your ear, mate?” I reach up and my hand returns covered with blood. The swollen leech on my earlobe has exploded.

In my imagination, the Overland Track is a solitary journey, but in reality there are many other people walking the route at the same time. The trekkers are largely eccentrics. Among them are a dreadlocked Israeli girl walking the track barefoot, carrying her sleeping bag in her arms and outpacing everyone on the trail; an Australian with only a loaf of white bread, a topo map and a compass who is going off the trail and up a river valley six miles through a trackless region called “The Never-Never”; a 55-year-old man from Canada with a prosthetic leg who has come to add the Overland to a list of treks in North and South America, New Zealand and Europe. For each of us, the walk becomes a private connection to the landscape, something that we understand by meeting eyes and nodding when we pass each other on the trail. People gather in the huts at night to swap stories of their aches and pains and the birds they have seen walking through the rainforests. I am compelled to the camps’ edges, out into the night, to listen to the nocturnal activity of the marsupial world.

Days are haunted by the gnarled beech trees hanging with moss and the cackle of green rosellas, looking like parakeets with two-foot wingspans. Mountains appear as markers on the horizon and I walk all day toward their crumbling spires through the forests that cling to their sides. I am overwhelmed by Tasmania’s rough beauty, and still I can’t come to terms with the land and what it has lost. There is no sign of the thylacine, but I still hold out hope that somewhere in this vastness they are hiding.

I remember the words of the trucker in Deloraine: “This island’s covered with roads and the marsupials are out all night, always getting run down. You’ll find wallabies, devils, quolls, every animal on this island dead in the road. But not once in 70 years has someone hit a thylacine. That says something to me, mate.” But still, this is a huge roadless region on the map.

The question I face is this: If this remotest of places, with so little imprint of civilization, can’t be called wilderness, what truly can? See how the place has changed in two centuries. Its native people? Gone. Its greatest predator? Gone. What is preserved is wild as long as people fight to make it so. Without protection, many of these places would be logged or drowned under hydroelectric schemes.

I follow river valleys exploring 60-foot waterfalls overhung with moss and huge trees, accessible only by a three-day walk. After five days, a side trail up Pine Valley leads me into a rainforest surrounded by mountains, with fern trees twenty feet high shaking dew on me as I walk by. Apropos of the mystical quality of the landscape, the mountains are named from Greek myth: Olympus, Eros, the Minotaur.

After a night camped by a brook, I wake to find the forest cloaked in mist. I expect to see a brontosaurus any moment. An hour’s climb straight up through dense rainforest of myrtle and fern trees, brings me onto a plateau. It is covered in snow gums, gnarled and stunted eucalypts whose layers of peeling bark make gorgeous abstract patterns of green, red, and yellow, bright under a layer of rain. Below the plateau is the Labyrinth, a Jurassic landscape of highland tarns and ghost gums. Above, shrouded in mist, is a mountain called the Acropolis. Thousand-foot cliffs vanish into the white fog. I feel as though I’ve stepped through the looking glass, alone, to walk through a perfectly arranged Chinese silk painting. Scrambling over the boulder field at the cliff base, I make my way to the top, above tree line to a world of mist and lichen-covered dolerite, the hard survivor of an age of glaciers, guided by cairns into the fog. And then, stumbling half lost along the mountaintop, I come to the edge of a cliff.

Marching out into the fog on the ridgeline of the mountain, perfect pillars of stone, each 100-feet-high, stand sentinel in a row. They are balanced impossibly, the drop is terrifying and the mists are like torn silk around the pillars and I now understand what gave the mountain its name.

I step out onto the column nearest the cliff’s edge. Was this spot sacred to the Tasmanian aboriginals? Did they scramble up the boulders to commune with their gods in their now vanished language? The mountaintop is a cathedral of the elements, ancient beyond reckoning, the hardest part of the mountain that has survived the Antarctic glaciers’ advance and retreat.

Maybe, I think, that is what wildness is, whatever survives the brutality that is visited upon it. Some of the aboriginal descendants, sensing some echo of wilderness in themselves, had stood down the bulldozers that sought to dam the Franklin, Tasmania’s last wild river, 20 years earlier, and fought for this whole region to be preserved. A hundred years before their people had been nearly wiped off the surface of the earth by that same force of “progress” and “civilization.”

Did the Tasmanians sing here, painted in ocher? Nobody knows, or ever will know. The voices have been silenced. The wind moaning through the towers of rock seems to be the origin of that lost language, and it is possessed of a dignity that could not be defiled.

It’s cold and wet up there but I stay a long time, surrounded by a universe of swirling mists and towers of stone. Maybe it’s lost, maybe there is no thylacine lurking in the forests below, but whatever wildness remains here, I offer myself to it.

This article was originally published in Volume 4, Issue 5.