He says: ‘I wanted to believe – though the pig had planted doubts. There is nothing in life I wanted to be more wrong about than the thylacine.’
One summer night Brown was driving home when, a mile from his house in Launceston, at the end of Vermont Street, he saw – five yards away – a large animal trotting: a kangaroo tail, buff-coloured and with four large stripes across its backside. ‘And guess what? It was a greyhound. A mutant greyhound. But it brought home to me that a thylacine was even less likely to find than a mutant greyhound.’
Brown never has found the tiger, but on a two-week rafting trip down the Franklin River he discovered his vocation. He saw platypus, marvellous gorges, astonishing side caverns, rapids thundering, Huon pine – some of them thousands of years old – the occasional eagle floating overhead, ‘and nobody’.
And then as he came round the bend into the majestic Gordon, there they were: jackhammers, helicopters, barges. In 1972, Tasmania’s Hydro-Electric Commission had submerged Lake Pedder and its halo of pinkish sand. Now the Commission was preparing covertly to flood the Franklin, one of the last wild rivers in the world but regarded by the Liberal Premier Robin Gray as ‘a ditch, leech-ridden, unattractive to the majority of people’. Early convicts like Robert Greenhill and Alexander Pearce had a similar perception of the rainforest, and it had reduced them to cannibals: to Brown, the Franklin was an invigorating paradise, and he felt that he had been placed on earth to protect it from the fate suffered by the thylacine.
Brown translated his love affair with the Franklin into a campaign of public awareness that gathered up behind him the passions of other people wedded to the place. For the novelist James McQueen, the Franklin was not just a river. ‘For me it is the epitome of all the lost forests, all the submerged lakes, all the tamed rivers, all the extinguished species. It is threatened by the same mindless beast that has eaten our past, is eating our present, and threatens to eat our future: that civil beast of mean ambitions and broken promises and hedged bets and tawdry profits.’ Brown’s success in saving the river led to many people hearing of Tasmania and made tangible the word ‘wilderness’. Today, 39% of the island (1.74 million hectares) is a World Heritage Area, and Brown is a federal senator for the Greens, a party that in Tasmania in the 2002 general election polled 18% – the largest Green vote, according to Brown, recorded in any general election anywhere in the world.
In his office, which overlooks the Derwent River, Brown describes Tasmania as ‘this special little crucible’. But his crucible is not as protected as he would like. He shows me a photograph of himself standing at the base of a huge charred eucalyptus, dubbed El Grande by the press. He tells the tree’s story. At 439 cubic metres, this 300-year-old Eucalypt regnans in the Styx Forest, 50 miles west of Hobart, was the largest tree in Australia. And yet not long ago Forestry Tasmania accidentally burned it in a regeneration programme.
Brown takes the scorched eucalyptus as the symbol of a culture that risks devouring itself. Thirty years on, he has shifted his ire from Hydro-Electric to Forestry Tasmania, whose logging of old growth forests he sees as the sure destruction of Tasmania’s habitat, just as Nick Mooney sees the fox.
Everyone in Tasmania has tales of being caught behind a logging truck. On my way to speak to Brown, I have passed 23 trucks – each loaded with between a dozen and 20 trees, and one or two emblazoned with ‘Doze a Greenie’ stickers.
‘This year,’ says Brown, ‘150,000 trucks will take 30 tons of logs every morning, every noon and every night to the woodchip mills for paper which will be used by Japan and Korea and end up in the rubbish dumps of the northern hemisphere.’
For Brown, old-growth logging is Tasmania’s modern ‘stain’. In a vote taken in 2001, 67% of the island’s population supported his call to stop it. They included the novelist Richard Flanagan: ‘Without an end to clear-felling, our old-growth forests will share the fate of the Tasmanian tiger: a lost object of awe, one more symbol of our feckless ignorance and stupidity.’ Brown says: ‘We’re destroying the biggest carbon bank in the southern hemisphere with these grand trees, and with them the best hedge against global warming. If, in a rich and democratic society like Tasmania, we can’t turn the log-trucks back and get this place to be a centre of natural beauty for a world that is being rapidly depleted, who can? How can we ask Brazil, Cameroon, Korea? If we can do it here, then we can then bring optimism to people working under much more difficult circumstances.’
It has taken 30 years, but Brown senses that he is winning his argument that Tasmania’s worldwide fame and fortune is its wilderness. In 1982, while leading a blockade to prevent the flooding of the Franklin, he was arrested south of Strahan, not far from Sarah Island, and spent three weeks in a cell. ‘Today, I wear a smile when I think of Strahan,’ he tells me, saying goodbye outside his office. ‘One hundred and forty thousand people a year coming to see that wilderness, those rivers.’
III
Oyster Bay
‘Old man, I’ve one particular spot in mind not far from here: a coral reef and white sand, real white sand that you could build castles with, and behind are green slopes as smooth as real turf and God-made natural hazards – a perfect spot for a golf-course …’
Graham Greene, The Comedians
ONE MORNING AFTER A STORM I TOOK MAX ONTO NINE MILE BEACH to pick up shells.
A Pacific gull watched us, neck tucked into chest, and a steady line of breakers threw up brogues of bull-kelp polished to a military shine.
The south-easterly had rolled Jimmy’s ancient cowrie onto the shore in front of our house. Already in the three years that we had lived here the sea had washed up a whale, a six-foot sun fish and a giant squid. Plus various skeletons that we could not put a definition to. The French explorer Nicolas Baudin was conscious that his countrymen back home ‘will have difficulty in believing that the sea can contain living animals with a form as strange and extraordinary as those we have met’. At Lisdillon further along the bay, Sarah Mitchell found a strange sea-creature which she sent to the Hobart museum. The sea-mouse – the first to be discovered – was named after her: Sarahi mitchelli. No wind had ever exposed the decapitated body of one of Michael Howe’s banditti, George (Bumpy) Jones, who on August 3, 1817 was shot in the head (reward: 80 guineas) and buried in the sand where he fell after the sergeant followed his footprints to their end.
Max points at a solitary black swan in the bay. I wish it would turn around and stop heading into the wind. ‘When you see a swan in the water like that,’ a friend who lives on Kelvedon beach told me, ‘it probably means that someone has shot the female. They’re monogamous. They get fretful after seeing their mate die. He’ll just exhaust himself now and you’ll find him on the beach tomorrow.’
My son and I had once found a dying black swan. It must have been heading for Moulting Lagoon, but was beyond fear or care when we picked it up out of the water. We laid it on the wet sand. Its orange eye looked at us unblinking and then at the crows on a gum tree that had assembled to peck it out once we were gone. The story of the black swan was the most beautiful of the legends that Tapte, chief of the lagoon people, passed on to Timler before his death in 1820. He told of how Mitaweena the whale became stranded in the shallows behind our house and how, as his heavy body crushed down, he blew spurts of black mud into the air from his blowhole. ‘In his last struggles the muddy jets flew higher and higher until reaching the rarer atmosphere, they turned into great black birds wheeling and trumpeting above the body of their dying creator. They were as black as the mud from Mitaweena’s grave and their eyes and beaks were blood red from the bursting lungs of the great whale. Their wings were tipped by the clouds as they soared high above his last resting place in a sad salute of farewell. And this was the coming of Pickerdas the black swan.’
Off this selfsame beach in 1942 in March a Japanese submarine launched its own strange bird.
‘This area was not too beautiful,’ complained Admiral Tatsuo Takudo. ‘There were high clif
fs of orange-coloured rock and no trees.’ Two hours before dawn on March 1, his gigantic submarine surfaced in Oyster Bay on a voyage to reconnoitre the ports of Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. Under a bomber’s moon, his crew assembled a collapsible float-plane while the 2,900 ton submarine drifted, engines turning, alert for any sign of life from Swansea. The pilot who strapped himself into the cockpit was Warrant Flying Officer Nobua Fujita, who claimed to be the first man to drop bombs from a plane on the United States. Fujita took off south and when he reached Hobart he pushed back the canopy to get a clear view of the Derwent. He noted the glow of a furnace, the barn-like shape of Mount Wellington, a white concrete road and five cargo ships at anchor. Then with the slipstream tugging at his helmet, he flew back to Oyster Bay, landing as the sun rose. A ship had been detected on the horizon and his plane was speedily dismantled, but the wind had started to come up, and the tips of one of the wings smashed against a derrick, snapping the plywood ribs.
If one believed the Mercury, an aircraft even stranger than Fujita’s passed above our house on a clear afternoon in March 2003. I got in touch with the witness who reported it, Bruce Sullivan, and he confirmed that he had been fishing with his girlfriend on Coswell beach, south of Swansea, when a flash startled him. ‘What we saw was nothing more than a silver ball-shaped object keeping the same height and speed 500 metres above the sea.’ This ‘thing’ crossed the bay, travelling south to north, and then evaporated into the air over Nine Mile Beach. ‘It was travelling fast in a straight line, no sound or lights, clear as the nose on your face.’ Then, Bruce said, it reappeared quite close to where our house was, ‘moved right and left, up and down, and disappeared’. A few locals had made jibes, but ‘the UFO people’ took it seriously. ‘They came with a form to fill out and it was printed in the newspaper.’
‘Could it have been a raft of mutton-birds?’ I asked.
My friend Michael who lived on Kelvedon beach liked to watch the young mutton-birds gather in a dense elliptical flock before they flew to the Bering Straits. ‘They look like a swarm of fish,’ he told me, ‘except just above the water.’ I suggested to Bruce that the sight of so many chicks trying out their wings might have had the shape of a flying saucer, but Bruce had worked on crayfish boats around King and Flinders. ‘It wasn’t a raft of mutton-birds, no way.’
On calm days Nine Mile Beach is one of the cleanest beaches in the world: no dead birds, no cans, no plastic bags, no tar, no people. Just the three peaks known as the Hazards leading into Mount Freycinet and the sea stretching for 1,200 miles to Antarctica.
In 1642, Tasman marked down the ten-mile spit of land as three islands. It was in trying to prove him wrong 160 years later that Nicolas Baudin lost the race to map the south coast of Australia. On March 6, 1802, he lowered a small boat containing Charles-Pierre Boullanger, his shortsighted hydrographer (he could only take his bearings ‘with his nose on the ground’, Baudin complained). That night a briny northerly carried Boullanger away and Baudin spent a crucial two months scouring for him although an English brig had picked him up three days later. The delay very probably cost the French Tasmania. Instead, it was Captain Ebor Bunker on the Albion, on his way to set up the first European settlement in the Derwent, who sailed into Oyster Bay in early September 1803. He was so excited by the number of sperm whales in the water that he interrupted his important mission to capture three. His expertise with the harpoon gave rise to the whaler’s cry: ‘Lay me on, Captain Bunker! I’m hell on a long dart!’
Bunker, sadly, left no description of Oyster Bay, but this is how the view from the beach struck one of Baudin’s crew: ‘two chains of lofty mountains of parallel direction embracing the whole shore and giving it the appearance of a beautiful valley invaded by waves’. Jorgen Jorgenson, pausing to take in the prospect from what is now the Lake Leake highway, gave his less than level-headed opinion that after travelling the world as he had, and after seeing its many splendid sights, this was a view ‘impossible for the most luxuriant imagination to conceive more lovely within the whole circle of the creation’. F.J. Cockburn remarked in June 1855: ‘The scene was indescribably beautiful … A glorious broad yellow beach runs round the top of the bay to the Schoutens and from this beach the view is magnificent. On your right you see the long line of the mainland for many miles, fringed with trees, houses and fields, behind which the hills rise; looking down the bay you see the cliffs and peaks of Maria Island rising darkly from the sea, and to the left of Maria Island you can look straight away to the wide ocean, with nothing to intercept the sight but a solitary white and distant rock, called by the French voyagers the Isle of Seals … I could not have had five pleasanter days anywhere.’
And we were now in our third year on the beach.
On the Beach. I must have remembered Nevil Shute’s novel when, in 1999, at the end of our trek in the Central Highlands I saw a house for sale on a shelf of coastal dunes. It was a single-storey building made from Canadian cedar and glass, and through the glass I could see a rock.
I was 42. But nothing in Europe or South America or Africa had prepared me for the vision of the Freycinet Peninsula on that March morning, or the dense colour of its granite: smoky and compact like a watercolour pigment. I knew that I was gazing at the most beautiful place I had seen on earth, a conviction that all subsequent experience has served to deepen.
We knocked at the door. Helen, a middle-aged woman in a lavender sarong, told us she had built the house with her husband, a retired radio executive who was now ill and needed to be nearer to a hospital. She was an artist and photographer – the house was hung with her vast red moodscapes – and as she led us on an impromptu tour of the room, she chattered about ‘destiny’ and ‘serendipitous unions’.
Inside the house, the glass seemed to intensify the sunlight. Strangely suspended by the light, I followed Helen into ‘the solarium’ and ‘the veranda café’ and then through clumps of boobyalla to the deserted beach and a small clearing in the spinifex where, she said, she liked to sunbathe naked. There was a fenced-off garden below the house, planted with apple and peach trees, and a tin shed where I pictured myself at a desk. Less than an hour later, we were bidding her an emotional farewell.
We had no family connections, no friends, no reason to linger, but I could not stop thinking of the view from the window out to the peninsula. By the time we arrived at our bed and breakfast that evening on the road to Hobart, we were seriously considering the possibility of the house – and Tasmania – becoming a destination as well as an escape.
There was a message at the convict-built bed and breakfast from Helen. She just wanted to say that she saw herself in us and how rare it was to feel such a connection to strangers and that there were no accidents in life. Oh, and incidentally, did we like the house?
We went home to England and began immediately to plot our return. I contacted Helen and proposed that we take a six-month lease. Whether impressed by our karmic connection or by a want of other offers, she agreed. At the end of six months we would make a decision to buy or not.
In the last fortnight of our lease, my father flew to Tasmania with the express purpose of persuading us not to sink our savings into a beach house at the end of the world. On the morning after his arrival, I came upon him standing barefoot on the strand. His eyes were nailed to the horizon and I could have sworn that there were tears in them.
‘I. Have. Never. Been. Anywhere. More. Beautiful.’
We telephoned Helen. We would buy the house.
For drama nothing touched the little thumbnail of porcelain which Max found on Nine Mile Beach that morning. We were walking along, a pair of hooded plovers tripping ahead of us and Max tracking their tiny convict arrowheads in the sand – when he spotted something. Not a shell, but a fragment of blue and white china worn to soapy smoothness.
He turned it over, uncertain what to do with it.
The willow-pattern had spilled from a shipwreck – but which one? In our local History Room at Swansea, I di
scovered that Kemp’s son-in-law Lieutenant Wharton Thomas Young had drowned here in July 1837. Already married two years to Kemp’s daughter Amy (described in his obituary as ‘a most amiable and accomplished lady’), Young was rowing across the bay when he ‘foolishly interfered with the cockswain’. The boat filled with water – and righted herself. Young, an excellent swimmer, was clambering into her when ‘a second sea washed him out again and he was not seen afterwards’. Days later his body rolled onto the beach. ‘The melancholy bereavement is much felt by Mr Kemp and his family and more particularly by the young widow who has been thus suddenly deprived of a husband by whom she was most fondly regarded.’
Wharton was not Kemp’s only son-in-law to drown. In 1854, Samuel Barrow, a magistrate married to his daughter Margaret Louisa, and known as The Christ Killer by convicts on Norfolk Island, was stepping ashore in Port Phillip Bay when an ex-convict recognised him – and pushed Barrow into the rough sea. Published in 1850, Medical Hints for Emigrants commented: ‘Accidents of this kind are very common in all the colonies.’
In November of the same year, the Resolution, a 49-ton smack, 45 feet long, sank off Waterloo Point. Everyone told me that the fragment of willow-pattern most likely had seeped from her cargo.
In Tasmania Page 35