Australia: Tasmania – UNESCO, Tasmanian Wilderness

☀️ The Morning Forecast Nobody Believed

We woke to one of those sunrises that makes you briefly philosophical about life, the universe, and whether you remembered to pack enough socks. From the window of the motel room, the mountains sat in the middle distance, their peaks catching the first pale light in shades that any landscape painter would have charged a great deal of money to reproduce. The sky above was conducting itself magnificently. It was, by any measure, a promising start.

The forecast, on the other hand, had been quietly catastrophic the night before — cloud, rain, more cloud, possibly some additional rain for good measure — and we had gone to bed in the way that sensible people do when ignoring bad news seems like the most reasonable available option. We had looked at the weather app, made a small noise of displeasure, put the phone face down, and gone to sleep. Sometimes denial is a perfectly functional coping strategy.

We held onto hope. Weather forecasters, after all, have achieved a level of consistent inaccuracy that would result in immediate dismissal in any other profession. A surgeon who was wrong as often as a weather forecaster would not be practising for long. An engineer whose bridges fell down with the same frequency that predicted sunshine fails to arrive would be having a very difficult conversation with a professional regulator. The weather forecaster simply goes back on television the following morning and tries again. I find this both irritating and, in its way, rather admirable.

The day ahead involved sixty-five kilometres of Tasmanian road, which sounds entirely manageable until you remember that Tasmanian roads treat the straight line as a theoretical concept rather than something to be implemented in the real world. The island’s interior is a place of steep ridges, dense buttongrass moorland, and valleys that have spent several million years making themselves as difficult to cross as possible. The engineers who built the roads here did what engineers always do in these circumstances: they went around things, over things, and occasionally through things, producing a succession of curves, switchbacks, and gradients that are undeniably scenic and absolutely murder on journey time. An hour passes. Another hour passes. The kilometre count advances with the urgency of a particularly cautious snail on a cold morning.

There was also, critically, no coffee in the room.

This requires a brief pause, because it is important. The absence of morning coffee is not a minor inconvenience in the way that, say, a slightly scratchy towel or a noisy air conditioning unit is a minor inconvenience. It is a physiological crisis that presents itself, deceptively, as a minor domestic problem. Somewhere during the first hour of driving, with the road unwinding through forest and the brain operating on reserves last topped up the previous afternoon, the situation had become properly urgent. Conversation had contracted to the essential. Eyes were fixed forward. The world outside the windscreen was technically beautiful and we were technically appreciating it.

And then — in the manner of a mirage conjured by collective desperation — a café appeared beside the road. A real one, with lights on and actual ground coffee aroma drifting out before we had even cut the engine. We did not rush. That would have been undignified. But we were certainly purposeful.

🏔️ Cradle Mountain National Park — A World Heritage Wilderness in the Rain

Restored to something approaching full human function, we pressed on towards Cradle Mountain National Park, which sits in Tasmania’s central highlands and is, by any fair assessment, one of the more extraordinary places on the planet.

The park forms the northern end of the Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair National Park, a vast wilderness corridor stretching some 170 kilometres south to the shores of Lake St Clair — Australia’s deepest freshwater lake, plunging to around 167 metres at its deepest point. The whole area was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, part of the broader Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area that now covers roughly twenty percent of the island. Twenty percent. That is a staggering proportion, and one that speaks, depending on your point of view, either to extraordinary environmental foresight or to the considerable difficulty of building anything useful on terrain this uncooperative. Probably both.

The landscape is ancient in ways that are genuinely difficult to hold in the mind. The dolerite peaks — Cradle Mountain itself reaches 1,545 metres — were shaped by glacial activity during the last ice age, when large glaciers ground their way across the highlands, carving out the bowl-shaped hollows called cirques and the small glacial lakes called tarns that now define the skyline. The result, on a clear day, is a terrain of jagged ridges and cold, still lakes that looks exactly like the illustration in a geography textbook under the heading “dramatic highland scenery.” On a less clear day — and we were about to experience a less clear day — it looks like Scotland, but wetter.

The vegetation below the treeline is a curious and distinctive mixture. Ancient pencil pines grow here — some of them genuinely hundreds of years old, growing with all the urgency of a retired civil servant who has decided there is no longer any particular hurry. Alpine ash and the extraordinary horizontal scrub, a plant that has adapted to the ferocious rainfall and persistent wind by simply declining to grow upward and going sideways instead, which is perhaps the most sensible response to the Tasmanian highlands that any organism has managed. Tasmania’s flora has been largely isolated from mainland Australia since rising sea levels cut the island off around ten thousand years ago, which has produced a botanical ecosystem that is quietly, stubbornly, persistently different from anything on the mainland.

The human history of the area is equally layered. The Aboriginal Tasmanians knew this country intimately for at least 35,000 years — probably considerably longer — using the highlands seasonally, leaving behind evidence of their presence in rock art, stone tools, and the accumulated knowledge of tens of thousands of years of careful observation. European settlers arrived in the early nineteenth century and set about doing what European settlers tended to do, which was to hunt everything that moved and cut down everything that stood still. The thylacine — the Tasmanian tiger, a large carnivorous marsupial that had inhabited the island for thousands of years — was hunted to extinction by a combination of government bounties and enthusiastic private initiative. The last known individual died in Hobart Zoo in 1936. This is the sort of fact that sits quietly at the back of your mind while you are walking through the park, looking at the dense forest and thinking, in a mildly melancholy way, that there used to be considerably more things in here.

The park’s modern identity as a protected conservation area owes much to one man: Gustav Weindorfer, an Austrian-born botanist and naturalist who arrived at Cradle Mountain in the first decade of the twentieth century, took one look at the place, and fell completely in love with it. He built a chalet on the plateau — Waldheim, which is German for “forest home” — and spent the remainder of his life guiding visitors into the wilderness, writing about it, and campaigning with evangelical persistence for its protection. He is said to have declared, with the particular conviction of a man who has made up his mind about something, that “this must be a national park for the people for all time.” It eventually was, though it took the bureaucracy the better part of another sixty years to catch up with his vision, which is broadly in line with what you would expect from any bureaucracy asked to do something sensible.

By the time we arrived at the park, the weather had made its position entirely clear. The philosophical sunrise of the morning had been comprehensively overruled. Rain was coming down with the steady, committed quality of precipitation that has blocked out the entire day in its calendar and is not going anywhere. We sat in the car park for a moment and looked at the grey curtain beyond the windscreen with the mild, practised resignation of people who have, on reflection, done this sort of thing before.

The visitor centre was warm, which was the main thing. It was also sensibly stocked with waterproof maps and a small café, and staffed by people who had clearly seen the expression on our faces many times before and were sympathetic about it.

From the visitor centre, shuttle buses ferry visitors the few kilometres along a restricted road to Dove Lake, which sits in its glacial cirque beneath the great dolerite bulk of Cradle Mountain itself. Private vehicles are not permitted through this section of the park, on the perfectly reasonable grounds of minimising environmental impact. This is an entirely sensible policy, and one appreciates it considerably more in retrospect than in the specific moment of standing in the rain waiting for a bus, which is a sentence that applies to quite a lot of environmental policies.

🥾 The Dove Lake Circuit — Six Kilometres of Principled Misery

Dove Lake is the centrepiece of the park’s most celebrated walk: the Dove Lake Circuit, a six-kilometre loop around the lake’s perimeter that, under appropriate conditions, is one of the more beautiful short walks in Australia. The path is well maintained — a mixture of compacted gravel, raised boardwalk sections across the wetter ground, and rocky trail where the terrain makes other options unavailable. The full circuit takes between two and three hours at a comfortable pace and is rated as accessible, meaning it does not require ropes, specialised equipment, or a level of physical fitness that would exclude people who might reasonably describe themselves as “pretty fit, all things considered.”

We set out in conditions that could be described as bracing, if you were being charitable, and as appalling, if you were being accurate.

The wind was coming off the mountain in gusts that carried what felt like a genuine personal grudge. The rain had abandoned any pretence of falling vertically and was now arriving from approximately the horizontal, finding with impressive precision the exact gap between collar and hat brim that waterproof clothing designers, despite their best efforts, always seem to leave. The lake itself was invisible for much of the early section of the walk, hidden behind cloud that had descended to somewhere around waist height. Cradle Mountain — which on fine days presents one of the most photographed natural silhouettes in Australia, its double-humped peaks and angular ridgeline reflected in the still water of the lake below — was entirely absent from proceedings, having apparently decided that this was not its kind of afternoon either.

And yet.

There is something oddly compelling about walking in proper weather, provided proper weather is not a euphemism for anything genuinely dangerous. The boardwalks through the buttongrass plains had a particular quality in the low cloud — the landscape reduced to immediate, intimate detail rather than grand panorama. The texture of the dolerite boulders alongside the path. The astonishing, vivid, almost luminous green of the moss on the rocks, which only achieves that intensity when it is wet and which was, today, thoroughly wet. And the pandani — the giant grass tree, Richea pandanifolia, endemic to the Tasmanian highlands — which stands three or four metres tall with its crown of long, arching leaves and looks, with complete sincerity, like something designed by a science fiction production department for a film set on a planet that has not yet been named. It is one of those plants that makes you question whether normal is a concept with any real content.

When the rain eased, which it did two or three times, briefly and without committing to it, the lake revealed itself in sections — the water grey and pewtered, the far shore dark with forest, the surface troubled by the wind into small, purposeful waves. On one of these clearances, the cloud lifted enough to show the lower ramparts of Cradle Mountain itself — not the summit, not the famous silhouette, but enough of the great dolerite face to understand immediately why people come here in very large numbers and stand in rain like this to see it.

The walk traces the full perimeter of the lake, crossing a small beach of white quartzite sand at the far end — deserted, in the circumstances, with the particular dignity of a beautiful place that has decided not to perform for anyone today — and climbing through rocky terrain on the western shore before descending back to the boatshed at the outlet. The boatshed is a small, sturdy stone structure with a corrugated iron roof, precisely the kind of old functional building that photographers love without quite being able to explain why, and it sits at the end of a long jetty that extends out over the water. We stood beside it for a moment in the rain, took stock of our situation, and agreed we were both wet, had thoroughly walked the circuit, and were ready for somewhere dry.

We took the shuttle back, changed into dry layers in the car park with the mechanical efficiency of people who have made this particular mistake before and learned from it, and pointed the car southwest.

🏭 Queenstown, Tasmania — The Town That Copper Built and Smelting Destroyed

The road between Cradle Mountain and Queenstown descends from the highlands through the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park — more World Heritage country, more extraordinary wilderness — before reaching the Linda Valley and beginning a drop that is, without any exaggeration, theatrical.

The Lyell Highway winds down from the plateau in a series of switchbacks that, on a clearer day than the one we had managed, offer views of the hills around Queenstown that look like absolutely nothing else in Australia. The slopes here are bare. Not naturally bare — stripped bare by more than a century of copper smelting. The sulphur dioxide emissions from the smelter killed the original vegetation across the surrounding hills. The resulting acid rain leached the minerals from the exposed soil. The consequent run-off stained the bare rock in shades that have no equivalent in nature at this latitude: deep ochres, purples, burnt oranges, dusky reds, colours that shift and change with the light and the weather in a way that would be spectacular if you could ignore what caused them, and remains spectacular even when you cannot. It is a man-made environmental catastrophe that has become, paradoxically, a distinctive and genuinely arresting landscape. You feel conflicted about finding it beautiful, which is probably the appropriate response.

Queenstown sits at the bottom of this extraordinary descent, in a narrow valley at the junction of the King and Queen rivers. It was established in the 1880s following the discovery of copper ore in the surrounding hills, and for most of the following century it existed for one purpose: extracting and processing that ore. The Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company ran the operation and, in the process, ran the town. It employed the majority of the population, determined the pace of daily life, and had the straightforward authority that comes from being the only significant employer within a very long drive in any direction. At its peak, in the early twentieth century, Queenstown was a substantial industrial town with a population of several thousand, its own newspaper, its own hospital, its own football team — the kind of place that copper money could sustain and that everybody assumed would go on indefinitely.

It did not go on indefinitely. It rarely does. Ore grades fell. Commodity prices fluctuated unpredictably, as commodity prices have an unfortunate tendency to do. Technology changed the economics of what had previously been viable. The workforce contracted across decades. The mine closed in 1994, and with it went the economic rationale that had kept the town going. The population, which had been around five thousand at its height, fell to a small fraction of that. Queenstown was left looking at its extraordinary and ruined landscape and working out what to do next.

Reinvention, in these circumstances, is never quick and is rarely neat. Queenstown is still in the process of working it out. There are galleries and cafés now. An arts project connected to MONA — the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, one of the most genuinely interesting museums in the world — has brought attention and visitors. The Empire Hotel, a grand Federation-era building on the main street, still operates and has been progressively restored to something approaching its former self. The remarkable West Coast Wilderness Railway — a narrow-gauge line that once connected Queenstown to the coastal port of Strahan, negotiating the precipitous terrain through a series of rack-and-pinion sections that represent a genuine feat of Victorian engineering — was partially restored as a tourist attraction.

The bare coloured hills remain. They are visible from almost everywhere in the town, a constant and entirely unignorable reminder of the century of industrial activity that shaped and ultimately damaged this place. They are beginning, slowly and tentatively, to revegetate, now that the source of the sulphur dioxide emissions has been removed. But slowly in this context means decades, possibly generations. The hills will not recover in our lifetime. That, too, feels like appropriate information to carry through a town like this.

We stayed the night at a place called Hiker’s Rest, which delivered exactly what its name promised and nothing more, and was entirely sufficient for the purpose. It occupied the honest, practical territory between budget accommodation and hostel, furnished with cheerful functionality and absolutely no pretensions to being somewhere you might photograph for social media. The beds were comfortable. The bathroom was clean. There was a laundry. The sound of a tumble dryer processing a full load of wet walking gear is, in its particular way, one of the more satisfying sounds that travel produces. By morning, everything would be dry. That was enough.