Here is another excerpt from my Tasmanian travelogue. This chapter tells the story of my journey to the southern-most tip of road in Australia: Cockle Creek in the far south of the Huon Region.

The modern world does not hold many more physical frontiers. Star Trek once famously decreed that space was the “final frontier”, though this is not quite true for the average human being who may have a few other barriers to pass through before space travel becomes a remotely conceivable “next step”. For most of us, even in this increasingly mobile age, our lives still operate mostly within certain fixed parameters, and a journey outside of these parameters constitutes the passing of a frontier. And, for the majority of eastern seaboard Australians, some of those frontiers are found at the country’s extreme north and southern ends, or at its red centre. The sense that these are frontiers is no doubt helped by the fact that, at least at our northern and southern tips, our road systems, normally reliable, break down before we can drive to the physical tip, as if to say, “Go no further. Here be dragons,” or “Here be barbarians hoards.”

I drove to the northern tip, or close enough to it, with my family as a child, so that has less appeal for me. Besides, it seems less extreme than the southern-most point: we all know that the world continues further north of us, and the seas to the north of us are barriers I have since crossed many times. The centre also draws me in; I had planned to head there with a friend these holidays, but our plans fell through. Perhaps the feeling of thwarted adventure this has given me is what has planted in my mind the new desire that has got me up today before daybreak: to drive as far south as Australian roads will take me. Certainly, the southern “frontier” is surely the most fascinating one Australia holds. Very few people go there, and even fewer have ever gone further south, save for the odd trip to New Zealand or Patagonia; yet even they do not lie due south of us. Once you pass Australia’s southern-most tip, there is nothing but water and then that true southern frontier, where only scientists and the ridiculously wealthy can go – Antarctica. I cannot go there, at least not now; and so, instead I will go as close as Australian roads will allow me to go. They call it Cockle Creek.

~

I set off around 8am, with toast and two cups of coffee in me and some relatively straightforward directions in my head. It sounds like a difficult trip to mess up; once you get into the Huon Valley there are not terribly many directions you can go. Still, the isolated nature of my destination adds to the tension in me as I set off – mostly excited tension, true, but tempered by a sense that, if something did go wrong, I might be a very long way from anywhere or anyone when it happened.

But I have a few helpful tip-offs as I leave which hopefully minimise the risk: I should fill up with petrol in Huonville, though there may also be petrol in Southport; I should also buy good in either Huonville or Southport (precisely which town my friend recommends for food, I cannot quite remember…), in case I find myself south with nowhere to eat and a long time before I am back in “civilisation” – which, apparently, ends in Tasmania when you reach the last town with a Banjo’s. This is, presumably, a very different thing to the last town with a banjo in it, as that would surely mean that, not only had you left civilisation a long time ago but you were now thoroughly in Deliverance territory, at which point you should get the hell out of there before it’s too late.

My friends and I joke about what else I might find when I get to the southern frontier: a man rocking back and forth on his verandah, toothless, sucking on straw with his bare gums while mumbling, “You’re not from around these parts, are ya, stranger”? There’s a high chance, actually, that when I get there, there will be more or less nothing to see save the road ending. If it gets to that, at least I have my hiking boots in my car; I can go for a wander and make the most of the wilderness.

I suppose the true test of a frontier is how little you can imagine what you will actually find when you get there, all jokes and stereotypes aside. Each town I pass through feels like it may be the last. If civilisation ends with the last Banjo’s, then it ends at Huonville, a reasonably busy little town where I stop for petrol. The lady at the service station makes light conversation as I pay (what is her accent? I cannot identify it. French, perhaps? Or Dutch?). She expresses the hope that the weather will hold for the weekend. I ask if she thinks it will; she shrugs. I pay for my fuel and keep winding south.

Before long, I am one of the only drivers on the road as it stretches and turns through foresty hills and drops from time to time into pockets of wood-smoke where towns sit snugly in the belly of a hill; other times, the road opens onto circular bends of water with towns stretched out on its arm. And gradually the towns grow smaller and smaller. In Dover I stop for a few photographs. A girl walks her pony in a field. The streets boast shops which do not seem to be open. As I return to my car and head towards Southport, I wonder if it was in fact Huonville where I was supposed to stop for food.

At the turn-off to Southport I see one car going the other way, driven by a man with a beard the size of a Louisiana swamp. There are no cars going with me. In a matter of minutes I am in Southport, or what purports to be it. There are signs for an information centre but I see none. In fact, there is no centre at all; the town consists only of a handful of houses sitting unobtrusively in dollops on the flat at the bottom of a hill, the road stretching out into the curves of hill and water. No shops to be seen, and before long I reach a ramp where cars are parked for boating but no people can be seen, just a dead-end, a large dirt turning circle which I use to head back towards the start of the town. On my right, where the road enters Southport, I see what proves to be the “information centre”: a public toilet with a map and some information about the far south on its outside wall. I park my car and take some photographs of rippling sand and gently undulating water with boats sitting softly upon the surface. I then take advantage of what may be the last toilet of this leg of the trip, though the inside of the toilet is black and I reflect on leaving that a tree in the bush would have been far, far nicer.

The map on the wall shows me where I have gone wrong in my navigation: the road ends at Southport but only because the water stops you from going further south; it seems the town sits upon the curve of a bay or an inlet. If I want to get to Cockle Creek, I will need to back-track. The road where I saw the swamp-bearded man was where I should have gone right with him not left; there a dirt road will take me to Cockle Creek.

Foodless and hungry, around an hour from anywhere I can eat, I decide to make my way to Cockle Creek before I will be too hungry to do anything.

Here is another excerpt from my Tasmanian travelogue, this one recounting my trip down to the infamous Port Arthur convict prison.

There is light drizzle as I approach the Port Arthur Historical Site and, in the dimmer light in the forest which I am driving through, I turn on my headlights. When I arrive, however, the sun is out, or looks like it might be out in a few moments, so I leave my raincoat in the car and head into the site.

The first part of the package I buy for the day – the “Bronze Pass”, it’s called – is an introductory tour with a guide in a black spray jacket and polarfleece beret that makes him look like an ageing bohemian camper. I have a momentary thought as the tour begins that perhaps I left my headlights on, and, with no way of checking for the next forty-five minutes, it plays on my mind as our guide gives us a survey of developments in the British prison system and Port Arthur’s origins in the prison reforms started by Jeremy Bentham and his “panopticon”. Some of what we are told I already know and so my mind wanders from time to time, dredging up memories from a second-year Literature course entitled “Australia and the Colonial Imaginary”, in which our study of Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, available at all tourist shops and bookstores around Tasmania, took us on a journey through the Enlightenment-era origins of the now clichéd “nature vs. nurture” debate.

Port Arthur, it seems, inhabited a strange place in the development of thinking on the subject. The emphasis in modern prison systems on rehabilitation seems to stem from a belief that humans are not innately criminal or otherwise but are victims of environment and circumstance. Prison, the logic then goes, should not punish the individual, rather give him or her a chance to reform. Port Arthur did both. It taught trades and served as a kind of last change for the most hardened or “incurable” of criminal cases; and yet they were also punished, often brutally – the whip of choice here at this “secondary punishment” prison was the so-called “full cat-o’-nine-tails”, that is, a whip of nine strands each containing eighty-one knots digging into the back. Convicts who were whipped publically for “absconding” or the like needed, as a point of pride and honour, to show no pain while being whipped, all wanting to prove a “pebble” – a small, hard, unbreakable rock in the shoes of the prison powers – rather than “sandstone” which crumbles under pressure.

And so punishment failed, in most cases, to reform its already hardened recipients. Were they, I wonder, better helped by the church services they were required to attend, the old bells of which we hear, in recorded form, punctuating the tour guide’s commentary? Did the solitary confinement inflicted on them to enforce quiet contemplation of their sins help any more? Neither of these questions can be answered on today’s tour, and so, in between shifts of location and new facts about the site’s history, along with momentary attempts to remember whether or not I did turn off my headlights, I am left pondering the merits of a prison system which, in its swings between the punitive justice of Victor Hugo’s Javert and a permissive version of Bentham, has never really mastered the tension between justice and grace which the God of the Bible seems to hold together as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Of course, my philosophical musings are regularly cut short by the feeling that I should in fact be paying attention to what the tour guide is telling us; and then I continually find my mind returning to my headlights and scanning ahead to a potential future whereby I am stranded here until the RACT can come to give me a jump-start. How long, I wonder, would it take them to make it out to Port Arthur? Will they come out to me, a Victorian and therefore not a member? The sun goes down in my mind and I am still here, unable to drive home. How long is it before the ghosts come out? Which would arrive first, the RACT or the ghosts? Meanwhile the tour goes, rain coming and going with it while we are told stories of escaped convicts dying from dehydration or cold, being killed by the Eaglehawk Neck “dogline” – a long “line” of vicious hounds spread out in a manner designed to stand in the way of a popular escape route – or choosing to return, tail between iron-bound legs, to avoid such a fate; and these stories set me thinking, as I trudge on with my tour-group through rapidly softening soil, that perhaps my fears of being stuck here with a flat battery are not the worst things that could happen, or have happened, to people who come here.

Fortunately, it all proves academic. When the tour finishes and I am able to duck to my car, I find that I had remembered to turn off my headlights after all. Now armed with a raincoat and gloves, I am free to enjoy the site in dryness and without worries of a flat battery.

The place opens up for me, seeming less and less like the prison that it had potentially become for me, and I find myself looking at it with more open eyes. What perhaps nothing can quite prepare you for here is the sheer beauty of the place, especially in Winter. Regular rain, much of which falls while I am here, has softened the features to a delicate lushness reminiscent of the kind of English village which much of this place was set up to recreate, and the ruins, set amidst verdant hills, make the place look like the closest thing Australia has to a Stonehenge or a Bath. A prison with no need of walls, the place feels now far from a prison, just as, when it gets too wet and I decide to take refuge inside with a hot drink and this journal, the café where the 1996 massacre occurred now feels the safest and most comfortable place to be. I wonder: did any of the convicts, as they worked felling trees or building houses, ever look out on this place and see the beauty in it which is all too apparent today? Did they ever listen to the church-bells and hear chimes of freedom not of judgment? I cannot tell. But the extremes in the weather which I have witnessed today – now sunny, now cloudy and wintry in the sudden rain-fall – give me some sense of what, apart from the sheer isolation of the place, may have been its greatest source of punishment to the convicts and pioneers who lived here. “Damn Demon’s Land”, the prison-guards ironically called it. Too beautiful, surely, to be called that – but I have a car and a warm home to return to, and can leave now before it becomes dark and takes on the illusion at least of being haunted. There has been much pain here, some of it in my lifetime, which I cannot even begin to imagine as I sit innocently here.

The following is an excerpt from the second chapter in my Tasmanian travelogue. I hope you enjoy it.

The morning begins in fits and starts, much like the way the traffic exits the boats: sudden chugs of motion with elongated periods of stasis.

Sleep, for one thing, is fitful at best. The beds are comfortable enough but the pillows are so thin and insubstantial as to make their existence almost pointless. By about 4:15, the time at which my incoherent room-mate decides to get up and start his day (what does he say to our other room-mate, who he meets coming out of the toilet just as he is getting up? Is it, “It’s 4:15, not too early”, or have I misheard him altogether, my ears gathering what my brain can only compute as nonsense?), I finally work out the best way of folding up my pillow to maximise support and comfort and then manage to sleep for almost two hours with little interruption.

Just before 6am I wake up from a dream in which my other travelling companion and I agree that sleeping until now is still better than getting up at 4:15; my mind is already prepared for the swift process of getting ready to disembark at 6:30. I wash my face, clean my teeth and pack my bags while my remaining room-mate maximises the time he can sleep. The intercom system sporadically reports fun facts to us as a thinly veiled reminder that we should be up and about; Wendy in the Tourism Centre is available until 6:30; We will be disembarking at 6:30; Speak to Wendy now if you want tips on your time in Tasmania; Please wait until your garage deck is called. By the time I get to the general gathering area around reception and the Lavender Café, most people are packed and either buying coffee to help ease the earliness of the hour or are just waiting, bags at the ready, prepared to board cars when the intercom finally tells us we can. I make a brief visit to Wendy at the Tourism Centre. She seems a little confused by my wish to drive down along the east coast; do I realise, she asks, that there are no freeways in Tasmania? Do I realise that I cannot drive on the coast all the way? It is only afterwards that I wish I had played dumb and acted as if I had personally wanted to drive my car on the beach all the way to Hobart. Instead, I take what local knowledge she can give me, not wanting, in my flippancy, to become another Burke or Wills, and, armed with a map that cost me $5.50, I am now, more or less, prepared for the drive.

And soon enough we are off – though that cannot really be said without qualification: there is a long wait in cars before we can go anywhere and when we do “go” it is with moments of sudden movement punctuated by long waits, occasionally being motioned in a particular direction by someone with a fluorescent stick to light the way to the appropriate lane. At the final point – quarantine to stop us from bringing anything unsafe into the state – a man checks my boot to ensure I am not smuggling fruit, firearms or live animals, and I am, at last, on my way.

The land as I drive off into it is bathed in morning mist and the ground thick with frost, but all of this adds to the beauty of the place. As I head south-east on the Bass Highway the mist slowly clears and my windows with it; the sun rises until it stars almost directly into my eyes but the frost remains. Cows nibble at it from time to time in an attempt to get at the grass beneath. The road winds now southward, now east, and the green hills wind and unfold before me.

I make a chilly stop in Deloraine, a minor detour from the highway, in the hope that I might find somewhere to eat breakfast. I do not, but I find a park where I can take a chilly walk and photograph a lake and the trees and frost around it. There have already been many places along the way that I wish I could have captured as I drove – a band of crimson where the sun rises; a layer of mist rising from a lake; a ribbon of purple across a canopy of trees – but there has not been a convenient place to stop and so words will have to do to record them. In Deloraine, however, I am able to capture some of the beauty in a handful of photographs before, frozen, I return to my car and drive on.

I make it to Launceston by about 8:30. Approaching the town from above (it sits as a neat, circular package of houses and buildings within its own valley), I feel myself lowering into the fog which sits above it, giving the town, for that brief moment, an almost magical quality which is, admittedly, ruined later when I learn that what I have taken for mist is actually natural pollution from the wood-fires, kept through the vagaries of meteorology and pressure systems as a protective layer over the city. Much of the town seems still asleep as I drive into it and the sun, peering halfway up the horizon atop buildings and street signs, makes it glow in a sleepy manner while I try to navigate through the morning haze and glare.

Soon enough I find a park and, covered in just enough layers to keep me warm, set off in search of food. Not much is open yet but I follow the stream of early risers with takeaway coffees in hand to find a spot for breakfast and a much-needed wake-me-up. Eventually I find my way to Banjo’s, which appears to be a chain of bakery cafés boasting Tasmanian produce and which is, most importantly, open. My egg and bacon pita is warm and fills me and I have the chance to collect my thoughts and prepare for the drive ahead of me so I do not complain. A family at a nearby table, evidently also not from Tasmania, share fun facts which they seem to have gleaned since arriving; did you know Tasmania is the twenty-sixth biggest island? What is the largest? Is it Australia or Iceland? Is Australia an island? From the café windows I watch shops turn on their lights as women with beanies and prams stroll the streets.  A man at a table outside, his back to me, blows clouds of smoke into the morning air – maybe from his breath, maybe the steam of his coffee, maybe from a cigarette; all look the same from this angle and all are equally possible on a morning this cold. Then, finished with my breakfast, I head next door to Gloria Jeans for what I presume will be a reliable cup of coffee; at least I know what the standard will be, I reason. I seem to be the only person there that morning who is not a regular customer; the girl at the counter actually needs to take my order, instead of being able to deduce it from past experience. She calls everyone else by name, whether they wear biking lycra, casual clothes or the uniforms of their trade; all are known and all have their regular orders. I, the stranger, take my coffee and head on my way, stopping briefly at a music store to buy some tunes for the drive. I nearly spill my coffee over the counter; as it is, I only spill it on my hand. Coffee nestled dangerously into my lap, I navigate the one-way streets of Launceston and rejoin the highway heading for the east coast.

The following is the beginnings of a new project I am working on – a kind of travel journal I am keeping during my winter holiday in Tasmania, which I will write as I go then edit and collate when I am finished. Here is a preview of the first entry:

2nd July: The Voyage

Little birds fly south for the winter. I learnt that many years ago in a book of Sesame Street jokes and riddles. The joke ran:

Question: Why does Little Bird fly south for the winter?

Answer: Because it’s too far to walk.

That fact and its related joke have both stayed in my mind for the decades since I first read the book, even though I have since learnt that a) it clearly applies to more types of birds than just little ones and b) it almost certainly does not apply to birds in the southern hemisphere. Why b)? Because what the joke failed to teach my six or seven-year-old self is that, if birds fly south for the winter, it is in order to escape the winter cold, not – as they would be doing if they flew south in Australia – delving further into it.

And yet here I am defying all the southern hemisphere’s common sense, leaving wintry Melbourne for even more wintry Tasmania. The mind boggles – or should boggle. I, of course, know why I have chosen to do this, even if at times the decision baffles even me. There are several good reasons for what I have chosen to do: I have friends to visit; my flatmate is away for a month and I don’t want to spend my school holidays at home by myself; and last, and perhaps most importantly, if I am going to experience a cold and depressing winter I may as well do it properly.

Besides, there is something exciting, adventurous even, about approaching a Tasmanian winter, in that way we can have of feeling the thrill in doing something that we know to be foolish, challenging, perhaps even downright stupid, yet are choosing to do so, just for the heck of it.

To add a little to the sense of adventure, I am taking the boat. If the boat is in fact, as a friend described it, a large, “floating casino”, it only slightly reduces the sense of adventure, primarily because, putting aside whatever excitement the boat itself may or may not hold, it is also a means to an end: taking the boat means taking my car, and taking my car means that, when the boat arrives in Devonport tomorrow morning at 6:30, I will set off from the north of the island to the south, just me and the road.

Having my car will also mean the freedom to go exploring from my base at Carlton Beach, half an hour from Hobart. While driving around Tasmania in my 1992 Toyota Corolla will not exactly be Roald Amundsen or Abel Tasman material, it will still be the first time I have ventured around the island since I came here with my parents and brother at age ten, and this makes it something of an adventure for me at the very least. The island is small and I have a week to move around in it and see as much as I can. I have all manner of hopes and plans – going as far south as road will take me, for instance, or setting off into the bush of the southwest. What I will actually do and see remains to be determined. But I am entering the experience with a sense of excited anticipation that is not yet dampened by the realities of the Spirit of Tasmania.

There are, however, several realities which the intrepid adventurer will have to face between arriving at the pier and embarking the boat which is primarily a giant garage doubling as a reasonably tacky floating resort. The process of boarding the boat in your car is a lengthy one and a slow one, drawing into its slow upwards chug a range of emotions spanning the thrill of watching the Port Melbourne waves lap around you and then staring upwards at the giant gangway which is your plank onto the boat, through to the letdown of entering the boat’s seventh floor which boasts two restaurants, a café, a shop, a tourism centre and a gambling venue entitled the “Star Club”. It also has a cinema which, at 8pm, will screen “The Muppets Movie” for free. This may or may not be a bonus.

The restaurants do a natural enough job of sending passengers off into their different classes. There is the à la carte restaurant with waiter service to which, I presume, only the more sophisticated passengers will go (I don’t know for sure; I already pre-determined it was not for me), and then there is the “Captain’s Table”, a fairly inappropriately named all-you-can-eat bistro of sorts where you can pay $30 for a “large” plate of food, a dessert and a soft drink. The queue moves a little faster than the gangway onto the boat but only slightly, and standing in it is a curious experience of sharing a dining room and kitchen with a mass of complete strangers from all walks of life, all the while trying to avoid scrutinising their movements (why doesn’t the woman in front of me collect her tray and cutlery at the start?; why does the woman behind me give her  nearly teenage children small plates when it costs the same for children to have small or large?), all the while finding it fascinating to observe something which normally only the super-market checkout brings you even close to observing. And then there is the feeling of being scrutinised yourself, of wanting to take full advantage of what extortionate prices can allow you to have while not appearing to be overloading the plate or taking the best parts of the roast lamb.

And then you eat, the boat starting to move during your first few mouthfuls, giving you the curious sensation while you eat of having the floor moving backwards with you. You probably will not spend too long over your meal – there are people all around you looking for tables and the ambience is hardly something you will want to soak up. So perhaps you will move on to the Lavender Café, where you can buy tea, coffee or alcoholic drinks and sit where you can hear the pokies in the background and the man with the whisky whose iPad is not working perfectly enough for him to be able to savour the fairly miraculous fact that he can be using the internet from the middle of Bass Strait and thus punctuates his failed attempts at whatever he is trying to do with four-letter-word-peppered accusations at the unsuspecting touch screen. These are your travelling companions.

To look at it all objectively, the seats are comfortable, the room is warm, and you are on your way to Tasmania with your car kept somewhere safely beneath the deck. This should really be enough. If the whole experience gives you the impression that the “spirit of Tasmania” smells of cigarettes and whisky and has a soundtrack composed by a pokies machine replete with bleeps and Nintendo-like gurgles, then remember this: tomorrow you will set off onto the Tasman Highway in your own car, and the glorious east of Australia’s magnificent and tranquil southern isle will await. And if the sound of the pokies is a bit too grating and the TV keeps you from focusing on the copy of Nicholas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania that you have taken with you, then it might be worth putting the book away and taking a walk on the deck in the bracing night air and start to feel just that little bit closer to the spirit of Tasmania as it might have seemed to Abel Tasman.