SOME ISLANDS
Cockatoo Island, 2009
They stand to attention some three metres high, faceless heads turned to the sky, like those Easter Island gods. Massive cast-iron bearings, orangey rust blackening with age, they dominate the western lawns of Cockatoo Island. Some people have a way of turning useless scrap iron into works of art simply by imaginative placing. There are children climbing and sliding down these strange shapes but they are gone by the time I focus my camera. The largest island in Sydney Harbour, it was used for a prison, a grain store, for ship-building, and now tourism and biennale art exhibitions. An early prisoner was the bushranger captain Thunderbolt, but not for long. His wife swam across with tools big enough to free him and they swam back to the mainland unnoticed. They were tough in those days, as were those less fortunate convicts who had to excavate 42,000 cubic metres of rock. Later, several destroyers and a light cruiser were built there. In 2008 our Wednesday painting group, led by John Fitzpatrick, spent a day sketching and, a year later, Kate and I joined a two day art class here, first setting up our gear in the turbine hall, four storeys high. I have never seen such huge machine tools, the lathe for turning propeller shafts must have been ten metres long. Elsewhere, as industrious as the surroundings once were, the other artists toiled under massive travelling cranes, comparing notes at lunch time.
FIJI – MARCH 2007
forty years ago last week we had stopped here at Fiji towards the end of our 36 hour migration from England. Back on board the 707 everyone had opened their duty-free purchases and all round the plane there were explosions of annoyance, while the stewards muttered “they never learn”. Our family then was two tired parents, John and Madeleine crashed out on some spare seats, and Rebecca still “some consequence left hanging in the stars” (Romeo and Juliet). But Kate was wide awake saying “This is the part I love” as the acceleration hits us in the back and the plane shuddered and banged along the runway until, at the rim of the sea, it has no option but to claw its way up into the sky.
Today, Kathy has dropped Joan, Ann and me at the airport (and will collect us, sleepy and grateful, on Monday). After 40 years I am now looking down at the same astonishing sight of thousands of little white puffs far below, each marking its exact footprint in indigo on the dazzling Pacific surface. The forecast for Suva for the last six days has been rain but it starts to clear as we land at sunset and join a minibus for the drive round the Coral Coast to our Bure at Hideaway resort. Behind our palm trees lies a blue and tranquil ocean, but on day two the pumice and big waves from some underwater volcanic contortion will hit. So we take a reef walk, stumbling along waist-high on broken coral until we get to the nurseries. Souvenir hunters and run-offs from last month’s heavy rain have depleted some of the coral and put much of it under stress. So we pay five dollars each for a sprig of coral moved from the devastation zone to the nursery where we plant it in the safety of a little anchor of white cement. Later, at high tide, we snorkel at Black Rock. It seems to me that flat fish in the ocean swim horizontally while flat fish in the lagoons are designed to swim vertically. The various kinds of butterfly fish and angelfish wobble towards you in a friendly fashion, but the cloud of tiny blue fish are suspicious, contracting into a spherical coral home as you approach, then expanding out radially as you pass, like some microcosm of our oscillating universe.
Day two and we haven’t even been shopping yet, unusual when travelling with Hogan sisters. So our taxi to Sigatoku makes an unexpected stop at Barabi Handicrafts (the driver must get a commission) and another at an Ecotourism centre. But eventually he drops us at Sigatoku markets. I suggest 20 minutes but he say an hour and a half and he is right. The Fijian stalls seem to sell fruit and veg, the Indian ones bangles and necklaces. Joan and Ann have now lodged me with a glass of orange juice in a comfortable chair in the department store which apparently requires detailed exploration. With heavy surf pounding the reef the lagoon is now closed, except to four intrepid surfers who paddle out over the horizon. So, for days two and three we have now adapted to lazing in and around the pool between massive breakfasts and dinners, eating paw-paws from Sigatoku markets for lunch. Ann and Joan join a botanical walk and buy some oil which can cure dislocations and strokes. Meanwhile I ask the surfies about the razor-sharp coral out there at the reef break. When you come off fall as flat as you can, they say.
New resorts are sprouting up, but tourism has not yet spoiled the naivety of perhaps the friendliest people in the world. Day four, and Joe, towering over us in the bow of our long boat, is the most massively superb human being I have ever seen, jet black with huge muscles and sinews rippling under sweat and sea water. We wade ashore on Robinson Crusoe island for a day of war dances (I can still feel the giant hand on my throat), fire dances, sword dances, snorkeling, a turtle hunt and crab races. In between is the Lovo lunch, fish, chicken and vegetables steamed in a large hole in the sand on hot rocks and covered with palm leaves, old sugar bags and sand. Popular for weddings, those with invitations come and those without invitations come. The local men now walk across the hot rocks and, if you still didn’t believe, the water then poured on the rocks turns to steam. It is my turn to do a botanical walk and I learn about forked sticks to break a man’s neck and then to eat him with, and a tree whose leaves can cure a dislocated shoulder (but then I didn’t believe in fire walking until an hour ago). Joan relaxes under a coconut palm.
Day five. There will be a wakeup call at 4 am, and we have set two alarms, but we still wake through the night, just in case. The bus has already trawled along the coast dredging up similarly dazed groups of tourist flotsam bound for Nandi airport. Since 1967 they have extended the runway back towards town, but it still ends, spectacularly, at the beach.
HAWAII 1987
Joan and Rebecca had already returned to Sydney from London, but I had a round the world ticket which included three nights in Waikiki. The ten hour leg to Los Angeles started and ended in warm climates but, on account of the curvature of the earth, my flight gave me clear views of Scotland, passed north of Iceland and over snow and ice in Greenland. But Honolulu was warm and I was on a surfboard at Waikiki beach by nine a.m. Since the board was old, heavy, full of holes, with a broken fin and no leg-rope, I swapped for a bigger one that had once been a windsurfer. In fact this was ideal for Waikiki’s one-foot high summer surf that travels steadily for half a kilometre. You can get an idea of the length of these rides from my beach photo looking out to sea, and the travel advert looking back to Waikiki beach. Though small and easy to catch the waves break far out and seem to go on forever.
I joined a tour bus next day which took us past Diamond Head, the remains of a mountain that blew sky-high when sea water mixed with molten lava all those years ago. The island is quite beautiful, greens of a vividness I’d not seen before on steep mountainsides groined by glaciers. I was astonished to find the surf at Sunset Beach and Waimea Bay completely flat. This was summer and the gigantic waves of the surf movies depend on the winter storms that roll down from Alaska. Being a somewhat timid surfer I was secretly glad, and enjoyed a swim in deep crystal-clear water instead. Enchanted by this beautiful island, I hired a car next day so I could repeat the circuit, left the hire car at the airport and the next day disappeared at the international date line.
1995 GREAT KEPPEL ISLAND
For Jane Leonard’s 21st in Rockhampton we took off out to sea, crossing back over the coast 100 miles north at Newcastle, and followed the spine of the Great Dividing Range. From the window seat, I revisited so many of our summer holidays: from Anna Bay (our first campsite), Fingal Bay, Port Stephens, Seal Rocks, South West Rocks, Yarrahappini, Byron Bay and, from Dorothy Greenwood’s farm, Cabarita Beach and a fold in the hills which must have contained Clothiers Creek. All in brilliant sunshine, but as we approached the “Sunshine State” (Queensland) the sun vanished and we entered heavy cloud! At Brisbane we changed planes for a “Shorts 360”. “They seem to get smaller” said Joan as we entered a contraption, apparently built from meccano and powered by two Pratt & Whitney rubber bands which clawed us up into a corridor between high and low cloud layers. At the caravan park at Rockhampton we met the three Earls who had driven up in two days. Next morning we joined Mary, Jane, Alison and Chris for a barbecue breakfast on top of Mount Archer (500 metres). Jane’s 21st went well, assisted by a six-verse song, composed by Joan, Ann and Kathy, and sung, with help from me and John Earls, to the tune of “Old Smokey”. Brought tears to the eyes of the “oldies”, though Thomas claims it wasn’t the words that made people cry!
The Tropic of Capricorn. The coach driver looked doubtfully at our huge pile of baggage, but she was towing a large trailer. We crossed the Fitzroy River, with a catchment area the size of England, and headed, through coastal plains studded with the tortured cores of prehistoric volcanos, past Yeppoon to Roslyn Bay and the ferry to Great Keppel Island. John Earls was waiting for us having unloaded many more boxes of food and drink from his car, and the 10 of us embarked. The twin hulled ferry rammed the beach so we could disembark without getting our clothes too wet, and then jeeps and Landrovers carried our baggage mountain along the beach to two cabins behind the sand dunes. The green shallows are of a pure, translucent colour reminding me of the Aquatic Club in Barbados. The cabins are surrounded by hibiscus, poinsettia, poinsettiana, croton (variegated) and palm trees under which we have put out two dining tables, but we have to watch the possums, so tame they drop down onto the tables and help themselves from your plate. Other wild life not so delightful, such as the 2 metre long sting ray which wafts through the shallows every evening, but exactly at 5:30, so we swim before and after. Here we are outside the cabin getting ready.
The Aunties go boom netting. A cold, cloudy day, so a 5 hour bush walk through wooded hills and back along the beaches. Then 12 hours of rain, drumming on the tin roof of the communal kitchen as we cook and eat, but then next day perfect fine weather. The “Reefseeker”, a huge, modern four-storey catamaran brings day-trippers from the mainland and we join them for a cruise along the island to a reef suitable for snorkelling. On the way Joan, Ann and Kathy try “boom netting”, hanging on to a rope net dragged behind the ship. (Later I am made to destroy the photos I took of the swirling catch of aunties). Next day Joan and I went on a smaller cat to a neighbouring island reef and I chased shoals of brightly coloured fish in and out of coral with one of the new disposable underwater cameras. On the beach there is parachute jumping from a tiny aeroplane at $200 a jump, windsurfing (I had a go), and I nearly persuaded Joan and Ann to try parasailing (parachute towed by a speedboat). In the evenings a file of lurching camels takes seasick looking tourists for rides along the beach. Each camel carries a bag under its tail, but they don’t seem to be quite large enough. Leaving Sydney, a Turkish taxidriver, fascinated by the Chinese in his suburb (never saw one before), took Ann, Joan and me to the airport; on returning, a Chinese from Irian Jaya, very knowledgeable about politics, but never met a Turk, drove our taxi. Half of Australia’s population is now from non English speaking parents. The Asians I meet more and more in the surf can swear at you like any Anglo-Saxon if you drop in on their wave. And the Asian and Arabic students at Macquarie seem culturally (keen on football) indistinguishable from their white fellow students. So far we are lucky in the most successful multicultural experiment in the world.
LORD HOWE 2000
Earlier this year David and Joan reviewed the junk accumulated over 25 years by six persons in the series of crumbling inter-connecting warehouses known to the post office as 33 Morton Street, Wollstonecraft, NSW 2065. Since doing anything about the junk, for example with bulldozers, seemed far too difficult, we have decided to stay and do something about the crumbling warehouses. And so a series of plumbers, electricians, slaters and builders are being extremely impolite as each example of David’s ingenious earlier handiwork is uncovered and rectified.
Anticipating the behaviour of the dollar, our travels this year have been Australian. Joan, Nana, Ann and Kathy went to Norfolk Island in January. They found the contrast of duty-free shopping for luxury goods in galvanised iron sheds, with the horrific history of man’s inhumanity to man during the convict period in a place described as paradise very strange. However they were able to trace an early relative who was livestock administrator and who fell foul of his long winded boss because of his Catholic wife’s failure to attend evening service!
We went “camping “ in a cabin with Rebecca and Shivaji in February to our own little paradise on the South Coast of NSW. In June Joan launched a surprised David into his 70th birthday party, a wonderful week at Lord Howe Island. In July Joan travelled all of 300 metres up the hill to the spares and service department of the Mater hospital. The new titanium hip joint is doing well. Perhaps the most exciting thing about a most exciting Olympics was the sheer enthusiasm of the 20,000, half of them children, performing at the opening and closing ceremonies, and the cheerful helpfulness of the 50,000 volunteers who seemed to be everywhere where they were needed.
Family news. My diaries for 2000 show Rebecca working again at Cressy Road pre-school and planning to take a year off to finish her degree. We both joined an acapella choir in January. It clashed with Anthropology 380 in second semester so I dropped out while Rebecca continued as the soloist. Madeleine is finishing her Open University degree which she has managed to combine with raising her young family and running her printing business. John has been busy with his regional choir, which contributed to the Olympics opening ceremony and he will be conducting again in the “Sing 2001” Federation centenary celebrations. Kate is a full time undergraduate again and loving the challenge of English, drama, education, and media studies. Joan combines a lot of unpaid social work with two choirs, secretaryship of the Henry George Foundation, and steady recovery from the THR (total hip replacement). David, still under the delusion that he is solving the world’s problems, has wandered from economics through politics, sociology and history into anthropology, which may raise some questions in the Economics Department about the uses of computer they gave him.
Lord Howe Island. Since in 2001 we all repeated most of what Joan and I did at Lord Howe in 2000, I will be brief. On the approach the tiny plane nearly ruptured its tummy over the razor-sharp volcanic remnant called Ball’s Pyramid, but soon we were bumping along the grass runway to the tiny airport hut. When my suggestion of a tricycle for Joan, and subsequent experiments with a tandem, threatened to precipitate marital problems we opted for ancient but autonomous bicycles for transport round Lord Howe Island. With enormous hotel pack lunches in our handlebar baskets we set off each day to watch the feeding of the island’s friendly petrels, swooping down from Mount Lidgbird, and feeding the hungry kingfish thrashing the shallows off Ned’s beach. We joined the Coral Princess for a glass bottom boat cruise in the lagoon. How friendly or hungry the island’s sharks were was a matter of considerable interest to those who stayed aboard and watched with ever-increasing interest while a Galapagos shark circled four of us trying to withdraw, turtle-like, into our wetsuits. To warm up we climbed Transit Hill from where the transit of Venus was observed in 1882. June was cool, summer would be expensive, so a dream slowly crystallised into a plan for the whole family to come in the next May holidays.
LORD HOWE 2001
With our four children, three spouses, and eight grandchildren we monopolised a small plane and descended, literally, on Lord Howe Island in May. Nana, John, Kathy, and Ann saw us off from the airport, and two barefoot girls met us on the airstrip at the other end and drove us to Pine Trees. The lodge served us breakfast and dinner at a 17-place table and packed lunches for each day’s excursion. The bike hire shop did good business, even supplying a tricycle for Raji with pannier basket for little Akula.
The island is an odd shape. The middle bit is a fairly flat saddle, supporting guest houses, a couple of shops and the runway which has replaced the need for large flying boats to terrify marine life in the lagoon. At the South end of the saddle two mountains erupt vertically, like in those early movies of Bali Hai in South Pacific, to 875 metres. At the North end steep forests rise to a sheer cliff inhabited by masked Boobies and red-tailed Tropic Birds which perform courtship dances flying in backward somersaults.
We spent most of the week, so it seemed, snorkelling off Ned’s Beach. On the last night our choir of 17 gave a concert for which John had arranged the music. Then a farewell pyramid at the airstrip.
NEW ZEALAND – 2005
Le donne sono mobile. And so Kathy has just driven Ann, Joan and David to catch the plane from Sydney to Christ Church while Mary is winging her way there from Brisbane. We meet up within 10 minutes of each other, wake up the hotel porter and crash around 2 a.m. Now Wednesday, we hire a car and explore Arakoa and watch Maori teenagers diving off a jetty into water at 10 C. Oh well, their ancestors paddled canoes halfway across the Pacific so they must be tough.
The quick are the dead say the signs as we drive across the Canterbury Plains, but it is the Southern Alps that really slow us down. Someone once said Darwin in the wet was like living inside a damp sock. Here the West Coast gets 7,500 mm of rain a year so today we get rain. But, unlike Darwin, 110 kph winds and a freezing level at 2000 metres are forecast. Rain drives us south, past Dismal Creek and Ship Cove where, 100 years ago, storms drove the hulk of ship wrecked in Victoria right across the Tasman. Late afternoon and it is clear enough to walk up to the Fox glacier, looking like a gigantic ribbon of dirty toothpaste, clamped and squeezed out between massive mountainsides.
The geriatric lugers. Queenstown in glorious sunshine is stunningly beautiful. An almost vertical gondola takes us up to the luges where the locals are astonished by three geriatrics hurtling downhill, Joan and Ann leaning hard into the bends leaving David far behind. Then, instead of bungy-jumping, sky-diving, jetboat racing or white-water rafting, we opt for a trip on the lake. All 330 tons of the steam ferry Earnshaw were railed up and assembled at the lake in 1912, the year before the Titanic sank. But there are no icebergs in the lake, only water so pure that nothing rusts. Tim will be interested in our tour of the ship. One muscular stoker feeds coal fired boilers driving two triple expansion stem engines. Unlike that on the Arabian Prince, the funnel is tall and majestic and the siren very dignified.
At the Whale-Way station. Now Sunday and, as the road climbs up to Mount Cook, the clouds climb down. The same thing happens next day at Mount Hutt, but we warm up in 40 C pools at Hanmer Springs and then begin to see the snow capped mountains that drop into the sea at Kaikoura. Next day we go to the Whale-Way Station. Somewhere out there are whales: Sperm, Humpback, Fin, Blue, Beaked, Brydes, Sei, Southern Right, Orcas, Pilot and Minke. But somewhere out there rising winds have cancelled all boat trips and grounded helicopters and seaplanes. Oh well, one day perhaps.
The green-lipped mussel. We didn’t realise that our motel at Picton backed onto a truck route on one side and freight rail line on the other. But from a sleepless night we go to a perfect day and, at the sleepy little port at Havelock, we join a green lip mussel cruise down Queen Charlotte Sound. The Maoris tell us that the Sound was clawed into its present shape by a giant octopus, dragged backwards in a titanic battle with a sea god. After a dish of mussels steamed in white wine and followed by three glasses of wine this all becomes quite believable as we watch from the stern a sea god amongst little spirals of foam dancing off plumes of spray, with the slanting afternoon sun catching the steep forests that tower above that huge octopus over there.
To the North Island. Now Thursday and, as the giant ferry slams into the wind and waves of Cook Straight, we can understand why it took the Maoris 500 years to pluck up the courage to paddle across to the South island.
“Australia? that’s Moses country – all wilderness and desert” says the taxi driver. In Auckland now and we pick up the car registered GRNMAS and drive to Brian’s and grandma Patty’s place, easily the most spectacular farmhouse we have ever stayed in. But we don’t hang around and next morning we head north to the Bay of Islands (144 of them), get lost and find another bay of islands (around 12, islands that is, not time). Our landlord is a member of parliament, looks like a Maori chief and probably is. Our apartment is almost on the beach and looks across to the final resting place of the Rainbow Warrior, a sacred place in New Zealand.
Muraroa. Montaigne once said that the memoir should reflect the struggle to understand the journey. Our journey now is the Pacific and, at New Zealand’s beautiful top end, we have found a strange post festooned with signs. One says “Rainbow Warrior 5.6 km”. Another says “Muraroa 3675 kms”. A third sign, pointing accusingly North-West, says Paris 18,330 kms”. Let us, like Montaigne, try and understand these journeys.
Long after other nations had stopped testing atom bombs, the French continued. Since they had sovereign rights over Muraroa, international law allowed them to pollute the Pacific. But the movements we now call environmental or conservationist had already started to define sovereignty in a completely new way – the sovereign right of all peoples to enjoy our natural heritage. Greenpeace was its name and Rainbow Warrior was its flagship.
Rainbow warrior probably broke international law by hassling the French and the French certainly broke international law by sinking the Rainbow Warrior. As I remember it the two spies were jailed for two years in New Zealand. When they got back to France they received medals and were promoted for services to France. We walked to the cliff and looked down on the last resting place of the Rainbow Warrior and then out to the vast and beautiful Pacific horizon.
So, how can we make sense of all this? The leading authority on international law is no help at all. Of sovereignty he said” “It is doubtful whether any single word has ever caused so much intellectual confusion and international lawlessness.” Maybe it is time we all redefined sovereignty in terms of humanity rather than in terms of international politics.
Now Sunday and Snow Cloud, a 36-foot yacht, takes David, Joan, Ann and an American couple (Mary now back in Australia) out to the Cavalli islands. Skipper Chris Sales is an enthusiastic sailor (Antarctica, Cape Horn, etc) but a bad time manager, and we return to port two hours late. He once investigated a pod of Orcas on the way back and got his passengers back at midnight. Tim, the thin American youth who looks about 14, operates a world-wide technical support group, but from Auckland, and for a software company in Sweden. And Dea is studying aroma therapy. “Oh brave new world that has such people in it”.
But some old things are older than you think. The Boers invented the commandos while the British invented concentration camps for captured Boer commandos. The Maoris, facing British artillery in the Maori wars, invented trench warfare, building deep bunkers, and escape trenches just in case.
“Persons who throw litter into the Devil’s Cauldron may be asked to retrieve it” from mud boiling at 140 C. Actually, you can give the museum at Rotorua and the thermal pools at Hells Gate a miss. Far better at Tai-O-Wapu where molten lava is only 1.5 kms below, and it looks and feels like it.
Now Thursday and the rain clouds come down to meet us as we drive up into the Tongariro National Park with its three volcanos. Suddenly an incongruous six-storey chateau looms out of the mist and, as we drink some coffee there, the skies clear miraculously. Racing up to the ski lifts, at last we get the view of the snow-covered mountains they told us New Zealand had. You can probably give Waitomo’s glow worm caves a miss, though the ceiling did look like the Milky Way on a bright night, and we wouldn’t otherwise have got to Kawhia and seen the last of the long, fast, 100-year-old whale boats practicing for the regatta.
Saturday and we have two days to do Auckland. Jan Douglas shows us round the neat, white houses of Devonport (all wooden, it’s the earthquakes, you see) and we then do the superb maritime museum. The wine tasting on Sunday is good at the Villa Maria winery which, hard to believe, occupies a large sunken volcanic crater in the middle of an Auckland suburb.
Monday and a team of 7-foot basketball players is towering above us at check-in. Somehow they all jack-knife into economy class seats and then, at twenty thousand feet, the captain announces “We have a change of plan due to a slight hitch”. I reach for my life jacket in case we have to ditch in the Tasman sea, but it turns out they couldn’t get “How to love your dog” working so we watch “Willie Wonker” instead..
TASMANIA – 2003
The Lonely Planet Guide to Tasmania, like all Lonely Planet guides, has sections called “Climate”. “Getting Around”, and “Flora and Fauna”, followed by itineraries around the regions, and these seem like good enough clothes pegs on which to hang some notes on our trip.
THE CLIMATE. Some 35,000 years ago Aborigines were able to migrate across a land bridge into Western Tasmania. To keep out the cold, and there was an ice age some 12,000 years ago, they rubbed ochre, charcoal and fat into their skin. To keep out the rain, and the West coast still gets 150 inches a year, they lived in caves and bark huts. Some 200 years ago the first white settlers in Hobart survived the cold and wet in tents and wattle and daub huts while others struggled to explore the starkly beautiful ranges of mountains. But today we are pampered tourists not settlers or explorers so, as we slide effortlessly in air-conditioned comfort across the same mountain ranges, we survive by turning up the heater and speeding up the wipers.
GETTING AROUND. In October 1822 two sailing ships transported the first batch of convicts to Sarah Island, through the narrow heads that convicts later called “The Gates of Hell”. Their cells were too short to lie down in and too low to stand up in. Their food was bread, potatoes and, when it was not rotten on arrival, salted meat. Their job was to build ships. Those who escaped were, with few exceptions, subsequently recorded as “dead in the woods” or “killed by aboriginals”. We check in for two nights at Strahan and watch a play about Sarah Island in a makeshift theatre down by the docks. There are only two actors, and the rest of the cast is being Shanghai’d from the front row of the audience. Therefore we tip-toe past and head for the back row. Some convicts were to be shipped out to the maximum-security jail at Port Arthur. But ten of them apparently have other ideas. So they hijack the boat, pass through the Gates of Hell and into the Great Southern Ocean, turn left and catch the Roaring Forties all the way across the Pacific to Chile, and freedom. They were lucky. The Roaring Forties are not always kind. Last year a buoy belonging to the Department of Meteorology signalled the approach of a wave 23 metres high just before it got munched and disappeared from the seawaves and airwaves for ever. Next day we are transported by high-speed catamaran out through the Gates of Hell and into the windswept ocean. But today we are tourists not convicts so to survive we turn back and re-enter the lounge for a beer and buffet lunch before a guided tour of Sarah Island. Our guides around the island turn out to be the two actors from last night.
FLORA AND FAUNA. Well over 1000 years ago some of the Huon pines we see started life and some, which we didn’t see, are now 2000 years old and reach up over 90 metres into the sky. Below the canopy of these Huon, King Billy and stringy-bark giants is a dense understorey of smaller trees and shrubs engaged in a silent upwards competitive struggle towards the light. Above the forests, on the windswept crags we stub our toes on, stunted shrubs hang into their own toe-holds for dear life. Flying in the wind above all this, the Peregrine Falcon has evolved a sky-dive of 350 kms per hour in pursuit of its prey. And flying beyond all this, Mutton birds each year take off and fly the 30,000 kms round trip in order to mate, in Alaska and Mongolia. And so everywhere we look we see an endless struggle to survive. But we humans have an ambivalent attitude to all this. For example, convicts at Sarah Island completely stripped the island of trees. Miners at Queenstown ripped open the mountainsides in search of gold, copper and silver. However, today the board-walks up mountains and round lakes, and the cabins we sleep in, are all mounted on poles to minimise damage to the ecology. And at Seahorse-World these strange creatures are now farmed for markets that otherwise would drive them to extinction in the wild. We are slowly learning how to manage, not to destroy, other species.
ITINERARY. Life must be smaller and slower down here. As we touch down and taxi in it seems that there are no 747s, only a few little Cessnas parked at Hobart’s International Airport. On the drive to Lake Clair we overtake one car and, next day on the way to Strahan, one car overtakes us. To the left of us as we drive there is only one road into a wilderness covering one quarter of the whole of Tasmania. At Queenstown we walk round a corner and nearly bump into John Howard who has brought a large money bag with him from Canberra. The locals are grateful, the Lions have put on a free sausage sizzle and, as it happens, we hadn’t any other plans for lunch. Probably the most photographed icon of Tasmania is Cradle Mountain, so we do the walk round beautiful Dove Lake nestling at the foot of the mountain. The guidebook says the weather can change from warm sunshine to driving snow in 20 minutes, but we are lucky. Outside the lodge a large wombat and a baby are shuffling round in the general direction of the kitchen. Inside the lodge are log fires and a welcome hot meal.
Moving up to top left (North West for navigators) of the diagram on page 5 of the Lonely Planet, we are now doing a double load of washing in the photogenic Captains Cabin, 1835, immediately below The Nut at Stanley. The Nut is a flat-topped volcanic remnant. For some reason they tried to blow a hole in the side of it but the dynamite didn’t work, giving rise locally to the phrase “a hard nut to crack”. The little weatherboard town is delightfully laid-back. The hairdresser opens on Thursdays, but only by appointment, and there are signs at the side of the town hall one to “Gents” and one to “Public”. We visit a stately home, Highfield House, and learn that the staff once included a “flagellator” to keep the convicts in order. Two nights at Launceston gives us time for the Tamar valley wineries, a lavender farm and a strawberry farm, and the seahorses and seadragons of “Seahorse World”. Male and female dance together for five days, twining prehensile tails in an elegant courtship of synchronised swimming, but it is the males that give birth, 400 at a time. Today they all crowd to the front of their tanks to inspect us humans, jigging up and down in flotillas of tiny question marks (the seahorses that is, not the humans).
Stopping at a coffee shop in St Helens we sit next to a tattooed shaven-headed hulk of a man resembling a pirate. Turns out to be an out of work abalone diver from WA who has just sold his Harley-Davidson to pay the rent. He is impressed that I once owned a 350 Norton with an “International” tank, and we enthuse over ancient machines like the one-litre swing-suspension Vincent-HRD. There are many highlights in the trip but the best is probably the three nights on the Freycinet Peninsula. We all climb to the saddle between the Hazards and Mary and I continue down to the perfectly-curved and spectacular Wineglass bay. From there the Isthmus track to Hazards Beach is littered with oyster shells, the remnants of a gigantic aboriginal midden and I reflect that, on the floor of our hire car, there are now four much more recent little middens of pistaccio nut shells and bread and cake crumbs. Next day, and a heavy swell is confining our cruise to Oyster Bay. So the launch punches and slams its way down the peninsula to Shouten Island and a sheltered bay for our coffee break. If the names on the bays and headlands reflect early Dutch, French and English political ambitions, then “Slaughterhouse Bay” reflects the later whaling industry. The “Right” whale does everything right, it floats on the surface when harpooned, and yields a great deal of oil. The Hazards in fact are named after Capt. Richard Hazard, an African-American sealer and whaler.
The curious traveller meets curious names as well as curious statistics and, on our way back to Hobart the hire car climbs effortlessly over a hill called “Break-me-Neck” on one side and “Bust-me-Gall” on the other. At a Richmond coffee shop there are notices like “Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law” and recommending us to “Panic with panache”. The coffee, however, is forgettable. The maritime museum is not as good as the ones in WA, but Joan discovers a good section on whaling in Freycinet and I discuss the model of a Liberty ship with the attendant. A major contributor to winning WW2, some 2700 of these were built in by Harry J Kaiser in the Bethlehem Yard at Boston. The first ships ever to be welded together, some of these 7000-tonners were built in an astonishing three days. In January 1945, having failed to catch a 10-knot convoy out of New York, we were sent up to Boston for repairs and our little 1800-tonner was tied up alongside a Liberty ship. A poor advertisement for Kaiser’s quality of welding, this one had broken its back and was also here for repair. The Liberty ship captains were called “90-day-wonders” being trained up from office clerk to captain in that time. Later we met a poor advertisement for this training in the Bristol Channel when a Liberty ship, leading a convoy of smaller ships on our port side, broke the rule of the sea and cut clean through our own convoy.
Mary returns to Rockhampton tomorrow so, for a farewell dinner we select “Squid Roe” for its name as well as its seafood reputation. Later, Squid Roe earns a reputation for service – they phone Ann back in Sydney to say they found her address book left there. Sunrise is a sharp orange sliver above an indigo line of forests as we approach the airport. Later it has turned misty as Ann, Joan and I walk the Tahune Forest Air Walk, 30 metres above the forest floor and some 30 metres below the canopy. In the understorey, the densely packed verticals of sassafras, myrtle, pines and leatherwood are sometimes strapped horizontally by shrubs, appropriately called “Horizontals”. Now on the way to Bruny Island and an old court house has been conveniently converted into a coffee house, called the “Petty Sessions”. The menu is divided into breakfast, “doing porridge”, coffee “morning adjournment”, and lunch which concludes with “just desserts”. The two Bruny islands are connected by a thin neck of sand in the middle of which is “Highest Hummock Lookout” with a memorial, “Truganini”, of cruelty to aborigines, and a “hide” from which fairy penguins can be watched crossing the beach at dusk.
Now Monday 14th April, our last day and from our lounge window the top of Mount Wellington seems free of cloud. On arrival at the summit (1270 m) the reason for this turns out to be a howling, icy wind capable of blowing away a lot more than just clouds. Thawed out by the car heater on the descent, Joan goes to the art gallery while Ann and I now brave “Antarctic Adventure”. For the bob-sledge simulator we climb into a space shuttle thing on hydraulic legs, face a screen with ice walls hurtling past and, desperately grasping at handrails to control the abdominal centrifugal forces, try to forget what we ate for breakfast. We learn that Antarctica’s land mass is twice the size of Australia and that Emperor penguins can dive to depth of 265 metres. In the afternoon we drive around the Derwent valley. Like the Derwent, the conversation meanders, as I have observed it is prone to do, from the compensation of orthotics for different leg lengths, to Joan picking strawberries all those years ago. As we gaze up at steep hills Ann reflects that different leg lengths would be pretty handy picking strawberries on those slopes. We can’t find the farm at Upper Plenty, but we do find the famous cricket ground at Bellerive. A walk round Battery Point leads inevitably to Salamanca and the shopping expedition that Joan and Ann had promised me and that I was so looking forward to, then round to the docks for a last meal at Fish Frenzy.
Next morning we left the land of Van Diemen for that of New South Wales. Qantas flight QF1710 took off at 6:05 a.m. and somehow we made it. Our Sydney taxi driver comes from Chandigar in the Punjab. I tell him proudly that we once passed through there on the Himalaya Queen. He tells me proudly that Chandigar was laid out by Walter Burley-Griffin. Maybe it is a small world rather than a lonely planet.