Tasmania was settled by convicts. In 1824 there were 12,556
Europeans in Tasmania of whom 6,261 were convicts. Living on the island was to
be punishment enough, but convicts who re-offended were sent out to the Tasman
Peninsula, a jut of land south and east of Hobart, which is the state capital
and the island’s largest city. At Port Arthur, the penitentiary still stands,
though with no roof, and tourists wander the beautiful British styled gardens,
or at night tour the sight to feel the ghosts that haunt these hills. To be
imprisoned in such a beautiful place would be a particular agony.
I was not sent to Tasmania as a convict. I was on holiday.
There were lots of reasons I chose Tasmania, some of which I knew and some I
had yet to discover. The main reason was that my childhood friend, Sonia, had
written inviting me to join her family for the holidays in a house they had
rented outside of Port Arthur. It did not take me long to say yes. In the
months that led up to my departure, it occurred to me that I was embarking on a
long trip to visit someone I did not really know. That is, the most time Sonia
and I had spent together was between the ages of five and ten when we roamed
the hills and valleys of Central Pennsylvania under the care and enthusiasm of
her mother.In 1971 her family
moved to Australia. Since then we had seen each other twice, the last time in
1983. A lot had happened in the intervening years. On her side she had married
and had two children, Nina, 14 and Frankie, 12. On my side—well, too much to
tell on my side.
When I walked through the door of the house in Hobart, Sonia
rushed toward me for a hug. She looked just like I remember her mother: an open
face, a quick smile, short dark hair with a bit of a wave. Like her mother, she
is physically strong, and with that her intellectual confidence has a wonderful
grounding. As we hugged hello I knew right away that my young self had been
right: there was and still is something enchanted about being in Sonia’s
presence.
I followed
Sonia and Nina out from Hobart in my rental car. The idea of following them was
that I just had to focus on their car, not on the counter-intuitive fact of driving
on the left. This makes it sound simple, and to an extent it was, but every
time I needed to turn I flipped on the windshield wipers and whenever I had to
shift, I reached down with my right, not left, hand.Plus, I had a poor sense of where the left edge of the car
was, so I kept slipping off the roads that had no shoulder. And—there was no
gawking at the landscape as I drove. So they turned into a pull out to give me
my first view of the Peninsula.
The water of the Tasman Sea morphs from a deep blue to
turquoise near the scallop white beaches. I saw from the start that to write
about this land clearly—and the land itself is clear, the air swept clean by
winds from the Antarctic—was going to take some doing and that everyone was
going to have to forgive me both some clichés and a lot of excess. It was a
stunning view.
I could have dawdled there but they were eager to get home
to the wide roofed house looking out onto the sea, and in the distance Tasman
Island. This stretch of coast was near where Abel Tasman landed while sailing
for the Dutch East India Company in 1642. (The name, Tasmania was not put in
place until 1856; for a long time it was Van Diemen’s Land).
That first evening set the tone for the trip: lobster on the
grill, and as we settled in to eat, Nina called, “Susie, the pademelons are
here.” And they were, hopping out of the bush onto the wide-open lawn, a bit
shy but not frightened as I circled, trying to photograph their quirky beauty.
A pademelon (pronounced paddy-melon) is the smallest in the
Kangaroo-Wallaby chain of hopping marsupials. It has a long fine nose that
comes to a definite tip, dark like a child paints the nose of an animal. The
eyes are black drops, no white anywhere, set against its dusky brown fur. I
admit, those eyes that look like buttons sewn on do not make it look bright. It
often sits on its haunches, little front paws curled over, which brings it to
about three feet high. It hopped slowly, then stooped to nibble grass.
The next morning I woke to a vibrant sunrise over Tasman
Island, and to the calls of the strangest sounding birds I had ever heard.
Everything in Australia is larger including their raven-like black birds known
as currawongs. They make even more noise than your average crow—there’s a
grating noise that seems to come from the back of their throats. Their calls
sound like a complaint. In short, it was impossible to sleep much past dawn for
the ruckus. That sent me out with binoculars to find the brush bronzewing, its
om-om-om from the bush comforting and then the superb fairy wrens, their blue
collars astonishing. (And, who could not love a bird with such a name? Superb
indeed.)
The next call from Nina came late in the morning. “Look, a
snake,” she hollered from the upstairs. Across the green lawn, the same lawn
that had been dotted with pademelons the night before, was a long black thing,
perhaps six feet long and as thick as my wrist. I rushed out with my camera.
“Don’t get too close,” Sonia called leaning from the upstairs window, “some
snakes will chase you if they feel threatened.” Great. There are three snakes
in Tasmania: the Tiger (that big black snake), the white-lipped whip snake, and
the copperhead. All are poisonous. I saw all three while there, and perhaps a
dozen of the Tiger. I am a fan of snakes, try hard to love them. This doesn’t
mean that every sighting—some unnervingly close to the trails I walked—wasn’t
accompanied by a rush of adrenalin.
And so my introduction to Tasmania began. Puzzling
creatures, colorful birds, dozens of eucalyptus trees, green, blue. Over a
third of the island, which is the size of Ireland, is protected, parks or
wilderness land. This leaves a lot for creatures to thrive, though the
Tasmanian tiger is extinct and the Tasmanian devil, which has developed a
facial cancer, is endangered.
The physical joy of Tasmania is that water is never far
away, but mountains are also close by. We undertook lots of glorious hikes. At Fortescue
Bay we trekked out to Canoe Bay and on to Bivouac Bay, listening to the rich
call of a Golden Whistler, then of a Grey Shrike-thrush. Fairy penguins, those
pint-sized birds, nest in burrows trailside and we spied their sleepy heads as
they sat on their eggs. We hiked the top of the cliffs at Eaglehawk Neck,
looking down steep dolerite cliffs to gin-clear water or into blow holes that spewed
foam as the waves crashed in. After our hike we ate delicious calamari with
chips and wandered Doo-town where all of the homes sport Doo-names (Doo-Mee,
Doo-Write, Doo Drop Inn). One afternoon I took a solo hike out to the long
plateau that is Cape Raoul to look down onto organ pipe cliffs and crashing
ocean. (I missed the trail that would have led me to view seals on the rocks
below.)
All of this was glorious. The sun shone without hesitation
and the temperatures remained exquisitely in the 70s. All of the rain I had
been promised came in small fits in the night. In between these long hikes were
hours of reading (I can recommend Nicholas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania, which
gives a sense of the ruckus, often horrendous past of this lush place), card
games, and good meals. I got to watch Sonia in action as the efficient
marvelous cook, the loving mother pulling together a picnic, swinging another
load of laundry, cuddling her daughters. And I got to learn of her intense work
as an immigration lawyer in Brisbane. For both of us with no phone, and no
internet connection work felt—work was—very blissfully far away.
Nestled in there was one, perfect day. It started with a
boat tour with Tasman Island Cruises (an "eco" tour). The guides were both charming and funny,
and the day crisp and calm so we were able to nudge into caves and to edge in
close to the cliffs, to see the Totem Pole where climbers were heading up a
route, and the Pillar, a thousand feet of rock.We circled Tasman Island admiring the now obsolete lighthouse,
the enormous Australian Fur Seals galumphing on the rocks and swimming
acrobatically in the water. Then they took us out to that geographic point
where the Tasman Sea ends and the Antarctic Ocean begins. Thousands of miles
off rested the continent of Antarctica. A shy albatross sailed by in the
distance, pointing us south.
Dolphins bounded by the boat, Black faced cormorants sunned
on a rock, a mass of shearwater or mutton-birds skimmed the water and air. I
returned as if baptized by the air, the sun, the water, the creatures.
Back “home,” Sonia had a hike planned for all of us. Now,
I’m not going to name the location of this hike because it was so perfect, so
isolated. That was the pleasure: to hike through low-lying scrub on a high sandy
plateau, with views of the ocean all around. From time to time we passed over
emerald green moss, or trod on dolerite flecked with orange lichen. After about
two and a half hours of walking, we dipped down onto a pure white, purely empty
beach. (Sonia says that if you come and find her, and are nice to her, she will
take you to this beach.) It was ours for the few hours we lingered to play and
discover, rock hopping to find our own private blowhole.
Paralleling my pleasure in the excess of natural beauty was
my enchantment with Nina and Frankie. They came alive in this world, and their
excitement became my own. I saw through their eyes as we rock hopped and they
pulled up starfish calling, “Look, Susie, look, it’s beautiful.” There were
colorful shells and anemones and grotesquely large gelatinous jellyfish in
shades of orange or pink, and creatures we could not name that looked like
large shelled slugs. They ran up enormous sand dunes and raced back down,
plunging into the water as if they might swim to Antarctica.That seemed possible. Anything seemed
possible. We all body surfed in the cold water until a wave folded me in two.
When I stood on shore and squinted, I could see past the Tasman Sea to the
Antarctic Ocean, and there to the end of the world. When I turned to watch Nina
and Frankie run down the sand dunes I could squint past the present and into
the past.
Watching Nina and Frankie reminded me of E.B. White’s rich
essay, Once More to the Lake, where watching his son in the water of the lake
of his youth he loses the line between self and son. Watching Nina and Frankie
was seeing my sister and me at the Indiana Dunes, or Sonia and me hiking up
Shingleton Gap, brushing past rhododendron in bloom, and finding stones that
shimmered like hope.
*
On the flight to Tasmania I met a woman in the airport. “You
live in Tasmania?” I asked. She nodded with a smile. I figured I would not meet
many people who lived there, but rather tourists galore (I did, but I met only
two Americans the whole trip). “Was raised in England. Had five brothers who
spoiled me. My husband took over right where they left off. Been mollycoddled
my whole life,” she explained, still grinning. I wanted to ask more questions,
but she turned to her magazine. This was the end of her story, sweet and
simple: from one happy set up to the next, and Tasmania was perfect.
We all boarded the plane—a much more relaxed affair than
traveling in the States, I have to add. Sitting next to me was a woman with a
similarly direct story. “I got married and moved to England. Then things went
bad. Well, they went bad when my son was born. I came home to Australia, met my
husband and we moved to Tasmania.” She didn’t even need to finish the story.
Happy ending for all. Music swells, everyone smiles, green and lush and birds
flapping in the breeze.
These people hadn’t just reduced their lives to a good short
story, they were haikus.
I have a good life.
I live in Tasmania.
Please do envy me.
And I did envy them, the good life, but also that they could
tell their stories with such conciseness. Whenever I launch into a story I have
to give the pre-story, which leads to a few small anecdotes, which leads to
more pre-story until I get to the story story, which always has too many
details. Perhaps like this blog post.
There’s no simple story here. There are superb fairy wrens
and shy albatross, convict’s ghosts lurking in the cliffs, picnics and card
games. There is the past swimming into the present, and the present energized
by the past. Here is what I want to say: Old friends, those you make when you
are a child, have a purity to them that friendships later in life can not
duplicate. As a kid the desire for a friend is strong and uncalculated. Sonia
was that friend. She is the friend who knows the bones of my past, as I know
hers. There’s no other way to say it: this is friendship that is like family.
It has endured 27 years of absence and yet was still there with the strength of
acceptance and affection I only expect from family. We had lots of details
about our lives to catch up on, which we did in a meandering way, on rides to
the trails, while hiking, late at night when everyone was asleep. But catching
up is not really about the details, it’s about recapturing the immediacy of
life that we had shared, of running down the sand dunes and plunging into the cold
sea, headed for Antarctica.