LINES OF VISION

I nestle into this house owned by Parks at Cockle Creek, it is late afternoon. Sitting on the arm of the chair near the window, my eyes follow the shoreline along the south-eastern corner of Rocky Bay to the sculpture of the Southern Right Whale Calf. From here it looks like a kangaroo in mid-hop. Close to shore a small boat with a mast is turning around in the wind. In the foreground a sign on the grassy verge indicates: Private Residence 839. It refers to the old, low-slung cottage next to it, but this dwelling is not in my line of vision nor in my imagination. Instead I see sign, boat and water.


At the far end of the beach on the other side of the bridge, near the entrance to Cockle Creek, another sign nailed to a jetty instructs Private Do Not Use. You can walk onto the rocks that the structure is attached to, but not the jetty itself, left most of the time unused and weathered by the wind and the salt water. This do not use exclusivity stands absurdly exposed in such vast, wild space. Meanwhile the other piece of private property continues its graceful turns back and forth on the water. Campers arrive in the dimming light. At my back a south-westerly gale is on its way.

*

This is the island of wind chorus. Inside I watch dark trees dance to the wind's night tune. I am glad for the warm fire and my pot of soup on the stove. This is a place of testing strength and weakness - can't have a chorus of trees without a wind at your back pushing you along, the wild romance out there full of rain and temper-tantrum squall, full of itself, raging around, owning the place. This is one kind of night, perhaps like the one described by Labillardiere and his crew, but unlike them I'm not huddled on the bank of the South Cape Rivulet in the soaking rain.


This is a listening kind of night. A gale stirs up its own dread, reminds you - doesn't it? - of one's ultimate, solitary task. I'd rather be alone here than alone in a city full of people. There's news that another friend is dying. A gale tells you that you're not always in charge. This Cockle Creek place once held me in its grip. I can hold it better in my imagination than out there where the wind conducts the proceedings, where the gale stirs up all that is mostly kept in place.


Living the night. Take your cue from the sound of the wind. Tree shadows lurch. I research memory here near Recherche Bay on the edge of candle-lit history. I forget to speak, remember who I am, who you are, beyond all the details that keep us too often on the move. Living the night.

*

Researching memory: I remember the large trees along Planters beach. So many are now dead. And an old green cottage by the pines instead of the two modern houses now hooked up to satellite dishes. Memory collides with reality, yet our lives are reduced to memory, shaped by it, memory becomes us, fiction flatters fact.


Walking along that stretch sectioned into five beaches, you are now asked to respect the hooded plovers, to leave the shells and seaweed on the sand. Collecting cockles is no longer allowed - it's public property not for the taking. Then from the last beach you enter a woven tunnel of ti-tree on the way to Fisher's Point, its fairy-story path soft and spongy underfoot, leading irresistibly onwards to the whitest of light at the end. Ferns and mosses decorate its edge with splashes of green, while the curved lines of cutting grass bunch in to the side. On a hot day you would linger in the cool here.


I remember we camped at Bolton's Green and strolled along these shores at Rocky Bay, the breeze caressing our salty skins. Our equipment was basic but a summer's day and the perfect white sand made it easy. My trusting, youthful glee at all this beauty made me carefree. I had a hazy, intense attraction to the natural landscape. I still do. Like Labilladiere I am filled with admiration. Perhaps my Celtic ancestry feeds this response to the natural world. But as I was soon to discover, beauty can be terrifying. My first walk to South-East Cape in the mid 1980s turned me in on myself and steered my imagination to the brink of control.

*

By morning the wind has died down and I imagine those campers coming out of a wet, howling night. As the light changes a group of surfers go off with their boards to ride the big southern waves. Fury has taken her rage elsewhere. A spot of sun through the trees pretties the day. Come out it urges. I emerge to recherche past impressions, at the centre of which is a memory of power.


I don't remember going to Fisher's Point before or being aware of it. On the way there I pass two people walking so effortlessly, they seem to be floating across the sand. Our greeting is genuine, three human beings adrift in this openness. I am moved by his unassuming smile, his young face, his long dreadlocks gnarled like the trees behind us. She is more tentative, as we women often are, her mouth smiles, her eyes assess the moment. Tears well up to the rims of my eyes and I view the world through a watery lens, hear the sound of lapping at my feet: the greeting is genuine.


The rocks on the way to Fisher's Point are crawling with fat skinks. My feet disturb their sun-baking and they dart for cover. Another surfer passes me in a hurry to reach the waves around the corner. Focused on the sea, he doesn't want to know I am there. Our eyes do not meet. In the distance his companions bob about in the swell like pieces of kelp. I think of my brother, a surfer in a hurry to get through life, his death no risk, a calculation beyond limits.


At Fisher's Point stand the ruins of an old hotel built by Captain Fisher in the nineteenth century. You can sense the dimensions of this building, the tawny brick-work suggesting an eye for pattern and colour, now offset by the greens and browns of the encroaching grasses and bush. Nature reclaims its own, we are not here forever. Remnants of an old garden feature a cluster of fuchsia and a line of fern that perhaps bordered a pathway. This hotel would have tasted salt, its fires would have warmed and fed the hardened whalers drunk and cursing on the inside, full of masculine noise and brash certainty now lost to silence. The sea and wind have turned the building into a kind of Escher-like structure where notions of space and boundary tease our perceptions.

*

The bridge at the mouth of Cockle Creek separates the National Park from the area where campers bring their dogs, their radios, their trailers, their fishing boats. When the Park was up for listing as a World Heritage site, the bridge felt like a line you crossed. Some of the traditional campers who'd long been coming to the Recherche Bay State Recreation Area, saw the conservationists' campaign as selfish. I've never gone boating at Rocky Bay. How many of them have walked to the south coast? A man and a woman stand at the edge of the bridge near their boat, looking down at the fast moving current. We greet each other with friendly hellos - one thing is clear, we all feel happy to be here. Further along the sandy road, I pass a group of men enjoying a beer and arrive at the remains of the old cemetery, now an official historic site.


Cockle Creek Population 3, the sign says. For a brief period it was a community of whalers, timber workers, cattle farmers and coal miners. Before then, for thousands and thousands of years it was home to a people of unknown number.


The European graves tell us “new world” stories typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stories of women who bore many children and suffered high infant mortality rates, stories of hard labour in a demanding environment. The remaining graves remember the Motts; William and Ann Adams - Ann and a son disappeared while looking for cattle; Thomas and Alice Field; Rosetta Tedman and Domingo Jose Evorall; Bridget and William Strong; Jock Hardy.


Back over the bridge is the story of the Heather family: tough, capable women who ran a timber mill with their father and managed the logs by hand. They built a tram-line in nine months with axes, cross-saws, horses and steam. You had to be careful, you had to be alert, they said. A huge, rusted wheel at Bolton's Green reminds us of the mill that closed in 1947. By the late 1930s all the mines had closed. People drifted away. All that European purpose vanished. The cleared land grown back now.


Whales once used Rocky Bay as a carving place during their annual migration from Antarctica. The interpretation panels tell us that the hunting was indiscriminate. The calves were killed first. And in less than 100 years the great beasts had gone and the industry collapsed. I imagine the rank smell filling the air back then, and the velocity of enterprise or greed that resulted in the whales becoming an endangered species.

*

The important thing about wildness is knowing it's there. At times this seems enough. Knowing it up close is also important, though not always comfortable; often it's intrusive. On my first walk to South East Cape I was alone and in the bright February light, nature exposed my sense of solitude to its core: a wild, intimate aloneness beneath an intense blue sky, the sun's shadows sharp and unrelenting. That walk threw me into myself and out of control.

I have been on this same walk with others a few times since. Parks and Wildlife call it a great short walk and it is. Yet I became so afraid that first time. Was it simply the snakes? I think not, although they played havoc with my mind. I can be rational about snakes when I only see one every now and then. But there was more to it than this feeling of deep discomfort: that day out there I did not linger.

Now all these years later, it's a still April morning and I venture into a cathedral of trees resonant with birdsong. Honey-eaters and pale brown finches scatter on my approach. This is a morning sitting softly between overcast and sunny. I pause before descending into Blowhole Valley, a wide carpet-like tapestry of brown, pink and grey grasses with a scattering of heath-like shrubs and trees. Old fence posts nearly smothered by vegetation, slant in a line across ways. I try to imagine a tram going through here or someone trying to raise cattle in this country. Easy to imagine losing them. Today a neat wooden walking track stretches ahead of you, a kind of 'yellow brick road' you can skip along, enticing, easy to follow.

On a calm autumn morning like this, the valley gives you a benign welcome. You can hear the ocean roar beyond the hills at the other end. You the silent walker with the light changing ever so slightly from second to second. Second by second the shadows move, second by second you feel a kind of love. Second by second is as close as you'll get in this life, to time standing still. And yet, just the other night, you know this place was blowing.

*

What was I afraid of that February day I went on my first walk through this valley? I'd already experienced the “wilderness” and felt drawn to it. I had expectations of being filled with the radiance that a sparkling, hot Tasmanian day can bring. Determined to go, I rushed towards this possibility, then very soon found myself trapped by fear in too-bright light. By the time I reached the ocean I could barely look at it, its roar seemed menacing. I crouched behind bushes feeling like I'd never get back to the gentle waters at Rocky Bay. I certainly don't remember sitting on the expansive black cliff at the eastern end of the beach with its full-of-wonder view. Maybe I'd had too much sun. Maybe my mind was on fire.

The short walk that day seemed endless and all consuming, as if the sea would swallow me up, or I would disappear like the long ago Ann. Perhaps she was whispering sweet dread into my ears, although I didn't know about her then. I stayed huddled at the coast only for as long as it took to eat my sandwich, then faced the task of getting back. It felt like a six kilometre test of will and bravery. This sounds so ridiculous now and yet it was dramatic. My head felt like it would burst as wave after wave of anxiety came over me. Being threatened by wildness was a great shock to me because I'd prided myself on feeling one with it. But that day mother nature was the hard task-mistress.

Without the ease of cleared wooden walkways, the old path was narrow, muddy and on that day literally oozing - four big tiger snakes in the space of ten minutes made it seem like they were there every inch of the way from then on. Every stick, every tree-root, every passage lined with tall cutting grass was, in my mind, a snake place. The idea of snakes took over and so they were everywhere. I don't remember actually seeing any more big snakes after that, but I expected to every minute of the way which was worse.

The tiny bit of my rational mind that was still working that afternoon tried to say: the beauty, the beauty, what about the beauty? Well it was there, in all its cruel magnificence, it seemed.

When I reached the other end of the valley again, just before heading back up to the eucalypt forest, I glanced down at my feet and saw that I'd almost trodden on a whip-snake. It spun a sudden circle or two as if to have the last laugh, before slithering just as quickly out of sight. The final unnerving. Alice was certainly in Wonderland but it was merciless that afternoon. Or was the little green whip-snake Oz the Great and Terrible? I was by then jellied with fear as I charged off through the trees lest I stop and become immobilised. The track narrowed through more cutting grass, I slipped, the grasses cut my hands. I forged on, beside myself.

*

This time the full roar of the Great Southern Ocean greets me like a gentle sleep-breathing giant and from up top the water is a heaving mass of black, laced with gushing white. People on the beach are minuscule. Sea-bird sounds are minuscule. I feel gloriously minuscule.

Down below, lying on the sand the roar comes inside you, you become the roar. It vibrates over the ground, across your back, it closes in on you. You are sound, the roar is you. You want to be lost in the roar. Words lose their shape, thinking loses its shape, sleep loses its shape. The giant breathes and you know its froth could toss you aside forever, in less than a moment it could be all over.

The sun soothes. A woman, who looks like a tiny patch of sparkling red from here, stands on one of the many chocolate brown boulders strewn across the western end of the beach. As the heavy waves bang up against these rocks, spray erupts high into the air above her.

After some time, the sea-mist rolls in, ethereal, beckoning. When I leave, I leave haltingly as if I am leaving a lover. I turn back again and again.

Then out of left field a man walks by, all too neatly dressed in new gear, like a scene from a Merchant-Ivory film. He's a pale foreign hunter in the antipodes, carrying a tripod like a gun, striding towards the wooden stairway at the end of the beach. It will lead him to heaven and maybe a bit of hell on the South Coast track. He's off to capture those moments savoured later when he will look at his photos and remember. But he's the one who'll be captured. I imagine the exertion and the exhilaration.

*

Away from the water, back through the ti-tree groves all you hear is bird twitter and leaf tinkle. A carpet of composted foliage welcomes you underfoot, as you wander past stands of native laurel, tree-ferns, trickle-creek sounds, rock pools swirling with foam patterns beneath the bracken laden banks, a quiet, wild mess in the dappled light. After that the sandy path continues, criss-crossing with snake-sticks, meandering further from the coast than you might expect, a lasting reminder of the beach.


I come upon a group of feeding black cockatoos, one drops a bush cone in front of me as they object piercingly to my presence, screeching on and on for ages - okay, I say, I'm going.


Memory being at least half-fiction, what you see, what you hear the next time is never the same. I'd always remembered dark mountain ridges looming over the valley, but there are none. The spectacular chain known as The Cockscomb, Mount Leillateah and Moonlight Ridge are not actually visible from the valley, I realise. To see them, you have to get to the other side of the eucalypts near the beginning of the track. When I arrived back at our camp spot all those years ago, I dived into the glassy water at Rocky Bay and washed away my fears. As I picture it, there were fairy penguins playing in the water. Fact or fiction? Since those days I've known whole “remembered” hillsides not to be there when I've gone back to find them, lost in the weave of story, invisible yet wholly present.

*

The vibrant pink of the robin, the dark purple of the climbing blueberry, the sea-weed patterns on the sand, kelp glistening in a bubbling sea, feasting cockatoos - some of us feel nurtured by these encounters. Some people come for the big adventure, park their cars in the long-term parking area, wrap their legs with gaiters ready for the mud, their packs loaded for all kinds of weather, all kinds of life and possibly near-death experiences. Still others might come here and think there was nothing much to do. They would welcome a visitors' centre, somewhere inside to go to, eighty comfortable cabins to stay in, a bar and restaurant. Some people who pull up here, don't even get out of their cars. For a while along the road through Bolton's Green, surveyors' pegs stood ready marking a plan.


This is the land of the Lylue-quonny bands of the South West tribe. Their places: Needwonee known now as Cox's Bight; Ninene renamed Port Davey; Lowreene - Low Rocky Point. There have long been people here. Yet one of the myths of my generation is the myth of “wilderness” as in uninhabited, untouched, pristine. I can no longer see the Tasmanian landscape in these terms, though I used to, with an awe and reverence that was, nevertheless, ahistorical and Eurocentric. Perhaps “wilderness” as in “pristine” is meaningful in a relative sense - relative say, to what you would find in Europe. I've never gone far enough into so-called “deep wilderness” to really know if it exists. The “wilderness” photography of the past fifty years helps us appreciate the breathtaking, uncultivated landscape that does exist here and why it's worth preserving. But the notion of “untouched” country seems to me to be a non-indigenous fantasy. Many “discoverers” of so-called “wilderness” have done so in the company of indigenous people or after the fact, people whose pivotal role in the landscape is unknown, ignored or relegated to the margins of an overblown explorer narrative.


Even though history re-tells us that this place was full of human life and culture well before Europeans got here, the contemporary craving for “pristine wilderness” experience is on the increase. And this desire is placing the environment under a new kind of stress, thereby changing it again.


Outside the door of the cottage I am confronted by two enormous clouds of smoke billowing upwards from behind the hills at the northern end of the bay. As the smoke rises up, its dense centres red-brown like spent blood, merge into mushroom-stalk brown and flower into a white-grey curling mass. There is a kind of grandeur to it all. But these are Forestry's regeneration burns and every autumn people argue fiercely about them. The smoke drifts east, then out to sea, forming a murky umbrella over the southern tip of Bruny Island. I fix my gaze west on the silhouette of mountain ridges beneath a sky of blended reds, browns, purples, greys and yellows - a painter's delight.
If the indigenous custodians of this land had been left to continue their traditions, we would have another story of fire. We are learning that they patterned the landscape with fire, transforming it in sustainable cycles in accordance with Indigenous Law. As Bill Gammage reminds us: When you go into the bush, or into what Europeans call wilderness, the memory, monuments and memorials of the Tasmanians will be all around you.

*

The currawongs are having a party in the rain. On a grey day all colour is intensified. Cloud grey, quiet grey, lazy lapping water grey, slow grey, lines of light grey across liquid flat. A man stands in the rain beside his mobile home, like a tortoise out of his shell. Three plovers on the beach give me wide berth, circle over the water to land behind me. A speck of a boat in the middle of the bay carries the secrets of two paddlers across the water's surface as they share a joke, one scoffs a knowing laugh. Grey does not hurry. Even a sudden windy whip of dark grey moving low across the bay and dumping rain, means you crouch down by the acacia bushes, watch the performance, watch the paddlers work their sticks back towards the shore, only to slow down again once the cranky cloud has moved on. I am the calm fabric of grey.


I feel like I am being absorbed into this landscape. I want to be like a rock with a lusty shine, all sea salty, ageing grain by grain. Now a cacophony of parrots is celebrating the day. Do we really need an hotel here? At least the developers have, of late, agreed to build their tourist facility outside the National Park zone.


The afternoon light settles on a small circular island of rocks not far from the shore, a necklace of gulls crowd around its edge for a snooze. A perfect moment, still and full of life. Itself.

References
1. Edward Duyker, Citizen Labillardiere, MUP, 2003.
2. “Landscapes Transformed” by Bill Gammage page 165 in Memory,
Monuments and Museums, Marilyn Lake (ed), MUP, 2006.

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