Distance: 31km
Elevation: +350m
Time: 9:30
Total Distance: 377km
Music: Goanna – Let the Franklin Flow
Is there any reason why Tasmania should not be more beautiful on the day we leave it, than on the day we came?… If we can revise our attitudes towards the land under our feet; if we can accept a role of steward and depart from the role of the conqueror, if we can accept that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole, then Tasmania can be a shining beacon in a dull, uniform and largely artificial world.
Olegas Truchanas
A beautiful clear morning. I cross the bridge and start walking. Tiger road is beautiful, fern lined with a strip of grassy moss between the tyre ruts.
I feel like this part of the traverse could have just been a montage. The protagonist spends the first half of the movie overcoming challenges and growing as a person, then Eye of the Tiger plays as we see them crossing mile after mile of road and mountain, before depositing them just in time for the really interesting bits to start.
I’m still worried about my knee, but less so. If the walking was like this the whole way, there’d be no problem. I’m confident I can complete the walk through the Port Davey and South Coast tracks. I’m going to have to be smart and careful about deciding whether to do Anne and/or the Western Arthurs. I’ll have to reassess when I get closer. It’s improving every day, but walking on it is drawing out the recovery time. A day or a half day of rest would be a good idea. When I get to the next crossing of the Florentine, about 12km into the day’s walking, I’ll stop for a decent rest and consider.
It’s incredibly peaceful walking down Tiger road. At one point a large bird with a wingspan of maybe a metre flies down the road in front of me. Lands, flies again. Lands, flies again.
I’ve wandered into an active logging area, but it’s Saturday. I think I’ll be fine.
Beyond the logging section, the forest returns, but the quaint mossy road has turned to hard pack gravel.
In my food drop at the top of Scotts Peak road is a vanilla coke. And salami. And cheese. And sun dried tomatoes. I can taste these things.
I sit and eat my lunch of nut butter bars, salami sticks and crumbled cookies by the Florentine. It’s a beautiful river. Lyrebirds sing in the near distance.
It’s only another 17km to the Adamsfield track. The knee is doing well. I decide to press on. I can find somewhere to camp before then if I need to.
Just before I reach Florentine road, an Italian man in a Ford Everest comes barreling down the road and skids to a halt. He wants to know where the road goes. I show him the picture of the collapsed bridge. He has no maps. I show him on mine how to take the Florentine road to Wayatinah where he can get further directions. I wonder to myself whether he’ll make it.
And then I’m back on Florentine road myself. It’s a bit disappointing that I didn’t see any tigers on Tiger road, but I guess they’re hiding. The radio scan function in my head flips through snippets of songs I only know half the lyrics to. We’ll be back in the high life again, mumble mumble something…
Well no one told you life was gonna be that way. Your life’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA…
Early in the walk I had the chorus to Goanna’s Let the Franklin Flow in my head on a loop for four days.
Just. the. chorus.
From music to poetry. I try to remember the entirety of The Raven by Poe, but struggle to order the stanzas correctly. The silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain. I try The Conqueror Worm: Bedight in veils and drowned in tears. You don’t see the word bedight used often enough these days. The ring verse in the black speech of Mordor: Ash nazg durbutuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuluk, agh burzum-ishi krimbatul! …and in the darkness bind them. (This from memory).
My feet are a metronome. My feet keep the meter.
The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began…
A lady in a Subaru full of kids slows down and says something out the window that I can’t hear, before driving off again. People are strange.
A couple of women in a different Subaru pull over to ask if I want a lift. They’re all smiles. I think I detect a hint of kiwi accent, though it could just be the friendliness.
The poetry from earlier has me in a mood. I spend a few km putting one together:
Whose woods these are, I think I know;
Plantation gum trees, row on row.
They will not see me passing by
To watch their doomed trees blithely grow.The thousand rings of summers gone;
The chipper and the chainsaw’s song;
The soil turned clay beneath my feet —
…and miles to go before I sleep.
Mount Field West
Last night I marked a series of spots on the map where minor creeks cross the road; potential campsites or just somewhere to fill up. They’ve all been dry, but as I leave the last one, there’s a clear trickle in the clay gutter alongside the road. I’m not ready to drink it, but it makes me feel better about finding water to camp by on the Adamsfield track. And I still have water in my bottle.
An armada of trail bike riders, and two locals hauling firewood later, and I’m off the Florentine road and on a little side road called Cooks.
The Adamsfield track has no sign to mark it, just timber bollards. Once wide enough for a cart (though I believe only used by people on foot and pack animals), it’s overgrown and reduced to a footpad, which is itself not especially clear (though easy enough to follow). It starts off through sparse eucalypt and button grass.
At Churchill creek I stop and collect four litres of water. Now I can camp anywhere I like. A few hundred meters more and I’m at the site of Churchill’s Hut. I don’t know what condition it was in before, but it looks like a fire has been through here maybe five or ten years ago, and if the hut was standing then, it no longer is. The same fire has done no favours to the track, which in places is clear enough, but in others had me swimming in bracken and climbing over many fallen trees. I guess we’ll see what the rest of it is like. I decide to camp at the ruin.
I eat the last of Maria’s cookies while waiting for dinner to cook. The Hunger has begun.
The detour is effectively complete. Though I’m sad to have missed all that I had planned to see between the King William Range and here, I got to see another face of this amazing island, and even in the ruins and scars of logging, there is beauty to be found. I’m glad to leave the roads behind (though I still have about 30km of Scotts Peak road to walk).
My knee has tolerated another long day of walking, and is again better than it was yesterday. I’ve noticed since complaints from the stabiliser muscles in both knees. How they’ll fare on this uneven track and in the potential climbs to come remains to be seen.
Elias Churchill trapped the last known thylacine near his hut on the Adamsfield track and transported it to Hobart Zoo in May of 1936. It died there that September, two months after being granted protected status.
