Along the road out of Marrawah there are 77 pademelon wallabies, 42 Bennett’s
wallabies, 35 Tasmanian devils, eight wombats, six spotted quolls and six
brush-tailed possums all flat on the tarmac in various stages of
decomposition. Native crows sit corpulently on fence posts like the queue at
a butcher’s. Tasmanian roads are the best way to get up close to the
island’s secretive and weird wildlife. There aren’t many cars here but
they’re driven with lethal abandon. The wildlife ranges from the singular to
the frankly bizarre: an antipodean collection of concept creatures with
spare pockets, scales, beaks, spikes, flippers, pogo-legs and a genetic
inability to recognise a pick-up coming the other way.
We are driving out to the tip of the northwest coast, and on the way we’ve
picked up a possum. We pull off the road and tie it to the back of the truck
like a bunch of good ol’ Mississippi boys on a Saturday night. It lies
spread-eagled in the dirt. I stare at it, as something’s odd, something I
can’t quite work out. “So you’ve noticed,” says our guide. “Possums have
their tackle on upside down.”
And damn me if he isn’t right. The little critter’s got his very neat
matt-black meat and two veg sewn on back to front. Now, whatever induced
evolution to think that having your testicles upfront was a comfortable
idea? We drag the possum behind the truck through the wiry button grass,
laying a scent trail up to a hut on the shore, and there we peg him down.
The far northwest coast of Tasmania is a wild place. They tell you it’s a bit
like the west of Scotland. It isn’t, really. This is in another league. This
has a black belt in ruggedness. A coastline with a sinewy, keening abandon.
There is precious little land in the world further south than this. Between
here and Patagonia, a day away round the globe, the Roaring Forties skim the
heaving, heavy sea. The ripping, flailing winds that helter-skelter round
the Southern Ocean come to spank this coast with a relentless gusto.
The rocky shore is tortured into a macabre and dramatic beauty. The waves
stand up on their hind legs and lunge at the land, to be flayed into
bone-white shreds by the black rocks. In the late afternoon, the sky is
glowing pale gold, dark mauve clouds are filigreed pink, thousand of mutton
birds (sheerwaters) fly low over the silver water, and we hurry back in the
teeth of the wind to our hut. Cabins, lean-tos and bothies squat all over
the wild places of Tasmania, home-made out of bits and pieces, recycled
offcuts, old front doors and driftwood. They have a serial charm. Men here
like being out in the dark: they’re happiest whittling and fiddling,
grilling something they’ve picked up at the side of the road.
This hut is one room with a little bunk room tacked on the back. It has a
fireplace and tables and chairs that were chucked out of a post-war kitchen.
We sit round the table and eat abalone stew with bread and butter and wait,
the room lit only by orange firelight, the wind fretting the window pane and
rattling the latches and hinges. The chimney coos and mutters as we watch
the darkness outside, the dead possum strapped out in a pool of moonlight.
Tasmania was discovered for the old north world by the second greatest
dead-reckoning navigator who ever sailed, the Dutchman Abel Tasman. He
guessed there must be a great land to the south. He found Tasmania and
called it Staten Land because he thought it was attached to Argentina, and
sailed on to discover New Zealand and then back up round Australia without
apparently noticing it. He gave us the first map of Tassie.
Ever since, “map of Tassie” has been the universal Australian euphemism for a
lady’s front-bottom area. Its outline resembles a charmingly old-fashioned
hirsute pudendum. “Going down to Tassie” will get you a laugh in any bar on
the mainland. Tasmanians are the eternal fall guys of Australian humour. The
jokes usually involve incest, stupidity or bestiality.
Outside, there is a skin-puckering scream. We press our faces to the window
like characters from a nursery story, watching for the beast. Just beyond
the pool of light in the sticky dark, a creature with a head the size of a
pit bull terrier’s and the body of a delicate black piglet sidles up to the
possum. A Tasmanian devil. An old male with his face scarred by fighting,
alert and belligerent with blazer-button eyes, a black cork nose and a burst
of fine whiskers. He grabs the possum and tugs hard.
The gape of his maw is huge, a powerful jaw with murderous teeth. Devils are
unique to this island, one of the small band of carnivorous marsupials. They
have their pockets on upside down. The females give birth to 20 or 30 tiny
young that crawl like blind, bald maggots into their pouches. They only have
two pairs of nipples. The four toughest get a grip, and for the rest, life’s
short race as one of the world’s weirdest animals is already run.
Devils are being ravaged by cancer. A unique Tasmanian-devilish cancer, of
course, that grows root-like tumours on their faces. Nobody knows why and
nobody has a cure. The devil has few relatives to mourn him. He behaves like
a hyena but genetically is closer to a bandicoot. The cancer seems to be
contagious. Forget bird flu – we really don’t want infectious face cancer to
jump species.
We stare at this strangely engaging little grave-robber caught in the
reflective firelight, with the roaring sea behind him. He looks up and
sniffs the gusting air, listening for his carcinogenic competitors. He has
only two natural enemies: a reckless Toyota and every other little devil he
ever meets. The Tasmanian state government has been trying to copyright the
devil to get back some of the money from Taz, the Warner Bros cartoon
character. They resent the cash it makes and the libel. They tell you that
the charm of Tasmania is that it has the look and pace of a time gone by.
They’ll probably mention 1950s England, a country of villages with corrugated
iron instead of thatch. Actually, it’s not like that at all. Charm is too
small and dainty a word for what Tasmania has. It doesn’t allow for a place
left out at the edge of the world, or for the strange quality of the
silence, as if it’s breathing slowly, waiting. It’s nothing you can put your
finger on. A flicker in the corner of your eye. A secret not so much hidden
as unspoken. Bits of
it do look very like bits of England, north Wales or the Lake District. But
more, it looks like a landscape that had been invented to look like England.
You drive down country roads and for a moment they’re perfect, but where a
tree should be a beech or an oak, it’s a gum or a leadwood. The sheep in the
meadows are the wrong sort of sheep: big woolly merino. I get out and stand
beside a field, thinking how strange it is to travel all this way and arrive
at a hyperreal Hampshire during rationing, and then I notice the field is
growing poppies. Opium poppies. Half the world’s pharmaceutical morphine
comes from Tasmania, and it’s grown here because they have such a
close-knit, well-ordered, law-abiding, scary society. They don’t like
outsiders knowing they’re farming class-A drugs. So it’s sort of half
Hampshire, half Helmand province.
Tasmania is a land that has been constructed out of memory and homesickness.
Just a glance at the map and the names sing like a sad echo. Sheffield,
Beaconsfield, Devonport, Ben Lomond, Perth, Swansea, Runnymede, the River
Esk, Weymouth, Bridport, Ben Nevis, Melton Mowbray. Fading postcard names of
places that the people who pinned them here on the very edge of the
habitable world would never see again. They settled and grew apples and made
English cheese, wore ties, ate Sunday roasts, made Christmas pudding in the
middle of summer.
Subsequently called Van Diemen’s Land, it was a penal colony, vicious and
hopeless, a skip for the rubbish and broken bastards from back home.
Finally, they petitioned to change the name to Tasmania, like an island on
its own witness-protection programme wanting a new start. Society here was
truncated, bitter, guilty, mocked and self-reliant, and ultimately stoically
admirable. I sit out in the pearly dawn one day watching the mist curl over
a pond in a blind valley where a hamlet of cottages hold each other at arm’s
length. It was a familiar rural ensemble that summoned old-world literature
and lyric couplets. Then, out of the rushes, cutting a smooth V through the
still water where there should have been Ratty or Jemima Puddle-Duck, is a
duck-billed platypus. Overhead, a family of yellow-tailed black cockatoos
raucously stand in for the lark ascending.
There are places that look like old England and there are places that look
like nowhere else on Earth. Tasmania has a rainforest that has an elemental,
speechless beauty. Rainforests around the rest of the world are smelly,
soggy, dank and deeply disappointing. Tasmania’s cool, temperate forest is a
great buttressed and hammer-beamed cathedral to the green gods, to Gaia and
Puck.
Everywhere you look, it has composed itself into artful vistas or Titania’s
boudoir. The canopy is made of huge, slow-growing eucalyptus, blue, red,
grey, yellow, white. Some of the tallest trees in the world are here, the
celery-top pines, pencil pines, leatherwoods, myrtle beech, sassafras,
pepperbush, wattles and tree ferns, and on the ground a velvet carpet of
bright lichen and moss.
The variety of green stuff beggars the English woodland. This is some of the
oldest living landscape in existence. I want to believe this is as close to
the primeval forest as we can ever get. If that isn’t genetically true, it
is spiritually and emotionally. If you travelled here for nothing else, you
should see this forest: it’s the stillness that’s so gorgeous and unnerving.
A huge, silent library of greenness. Things do live here, lots of things,
but none of them say anything.
In a dappled meadow there’s a shuffle of leaf fall and gingerly we pick up an
echidna, one of the strangest concept creatures God ever put into limited
production. It’s curled up into a ball like a hedgehog. It is both spiny and
hairy. It has a snout like an anteater and large mechanical digging hands
that appear to have been put on back to front. It has only one relative, the
platypus, making them a nuclear family of suckling egg-layers. The Cradle
Mountain rainforest is an impressive place to walk.
There’s a great hike over the spine of Tasmania, where the weather is like
Wales but without the Gaelic moments of dry, sunny optimism. It was up here
that I discovered the odd truth about wombat dung. No creature has grown so
snugly into its name as the wombat, and they have this remarkable poo. It’s
square. Wombats lay organic dice – they have special bones in their
backsides for squeezing and shaping and slicing. The reason for the cubic
turd is that wombats like to mark their territory neatly, and they lay their
personal Lego as high as possible on logs and rocks so that it doesn’t get
lost in the grass, and they’ve made it square so that it won’t roll off.
Nanny nature thinks of absolutely everything.
Forty per cent of Tasmania’s ancient rainforest is now national park, and the
rest is going to be protected, but not for seven years. Forestry is the
biggest single industry. An old-fashioned muscly, mannish, moustached,
hard-hat and plaid-shirt job. Tasmanians have worked in logging for
generations. They’re proud of their trees, proud of the little English farms
they’ve carved out of them. The Huon pine is a rare endangered tree, its
wood so hard and oily and straight, it never rots in water and was used to
make masts and yachts and most of the window frames on the island.
The King Billy pine, named after William Lanney, Tasmania’s last full-blood
Aborigine, has a grain that’s so beautiful it’s used for panelling and
floorboards. The coming moratorium on cutting old-growth forests has spurred
a frantic impetus in the loggers. You can’t hire a truck or lorry anywhere
in the state: they’re all being used for lumber. The sound of chain saws
trills over the forest: the ancient trees and their undergrowth are being
clear-felled so they can plant a mongrel weed, shining gum, which grows like
bamboo; most of it is sent to Japan. The forest is being rubbed out by
special pleading, arm-twisting and back-scratching corruption. The rest of
Australia looks on with an environmental horror, but Tasmania is used to
that: it’s always been a place apart.
If what you know is the northern-hemisphere sky or, more likely, the reflected
city lights, then the southern night sky always comes as a surprise. The
Southern Cross pointing a compass; the Milky Way closer, brighter. It is a
younger sky that doesn’t come with classical poetic baggage. I sat next to a
hardwood fire on the edge of an open pasture, bright eyes pricking the
shadows. Every so often a stuttering log would illuminate a dancing quoll.
Quolls are another strange and specific Tasmanian creature.
A carnivorous marsupial that comes in two flavours: striped and spotted. These
are the small striped ones like stoaty cats. I’ve seen a spotted one stuck
to the road. Craig, the man who made the fire and cooked strange indigenous
Outward Bound food, is telling us tall stories about the thylacine, the
Tasmanian tiger, the largest of the carnivore marsupials. The last one died
in captivity in the 1930s, and there is an old grainy film of it in Hobart
zoo, madly pacing its little cage. A strange, rangy animal. Craig stares
into the fire and says quietly that he’s seen one, twice. It’s out there,
wary and rare in the silent forest.
Tasmania’s east coast couldn’t be more different from the west. Protected from
the weather, it’s tropical hot, with sand dunes running down to empty,
pristine beaches out of which punch humpbacked granite boulders like
half-buried Henry Moores, turned a beautiful rusty pink by indigenous
lichen. On the shoreline pied oystercatchers dodge sand plovers, Arctic
terns, Atlantic gulls and pelicans. Over the scrubby marsh grass where the
pademelons graze, wedge-tailed eagles quarter the land.
The rolling sea is full of fish and whales. It’s as perfect a beach as you
will find anywhere in the world. This is the Bay of Fires, given its name
after the camp fires of the Aborigines who were driven into this corner of
the island. Tasmanians don’t boast about it: they’re modestly reticent when
it comes to what they did with their Aborigines. But the English in Tasmania
quietly and without international fuss managed one of the very few wholly
successful systematic genocides, perhaps the only one, in the world.
They bribed, cajoled and bullied the Aborigines to leave their island for a
better life on Flinders Island, a barren outcrop of rock off the coast. The
natives were killed by pestilence, starvation, the weather, neglect and
despair. Six Aboriginal women survived on this rock in the sea like a
grotesque inversion of the sirens. They were used as prostitutes by passing
whalers. Tasmania has had a hard childhood, an abused infancy. It’s built on
bones and tears, rage and homesickness – and considering all that, or
perhaps because of it, it’s grown to be a singular and remarkable place.
On the Legerwood Road, in a little logging and railway community in the
northeast, they had a ceremony in 1918 to commemorate the local men who died
in the great war. They planted trees for them along the dusty road. Douglas
firs for Alan Andrews and George Peddle. Deodars for William Hyde, John
McDougall and John Riseley. A sequoia for Robert Jenkins, and at each end of
the line a Weymouth pine for the Anzacs and Gallipoli.
By 2000 the trees were old and unsafe and had to be cut down: the community
asked Eddie Ross, a chain-saw artist, to turn the stumps into portraits.
Here’s John Riseley blowing a trumpet: he died burning rubbish on top of an
unexploded bomb. George Peddie was a sawmill manager and bushman: he died at
Passchendaele. Here he is in his bush coat, with a cross-saw and axe. John
McDougall was 19 when he died in France. He’d been a railway porter. He
waves his flag for a train that’s always expected. Robert Jenkins was from
Cornwall. He was engaged to Miss Trippy Forsyth. He sits in a trench,
looking up at her patiently waiting on another branch. They all stand with a
coarse and primitive dignity on a quiet road opposite a post office where
you can get ice cream.
They’re not just an awkwardly moving remembrance of a sacrifice made on behalf
of a nation that used this distant, forgettable outpost as a criminal
dustbin, but a memorial and metaphor for all Tasmanians. These hard, naive
people, shy and silent and capable, growing out of the stumps of their
trees.
Need to know
A A Gill went to Tasmania with Austravel. The 10-day Tasmanian Wilderness
package costs from £1,905, based on two people sharing. For more
information, tel: 0870 166 2070; www.austravel.com
