Review…
Tasmania’s mountain history: documented at last
WE DRIVE the winding road, first though the tall trees of the temperate rainforest then onto the open alpine plateau. How different it is to the farmland below. This is a landscape of low shrubs with the occasional copse of native mountain pine punctuated here and there by the bare dolerite bones of low ridges. Wild. Windswept. Unwelcoming. Intriguing.
We park the car and get out into a slipstream of cold wind. Fiona cinches the hood of her jacket, tightening it against the chill as I hoist my daypack onto my back and set out on the short walk to Pine Lake.
The lake is a remnant of the glacial age here on Tasmania’s Central Plateau. This day it is a wind-rippled body of water below a dolerite ridge. What lies beyond that ridge? That was the thought running through my mind as I stood there making photographs in the cold summer wind.
That which lies beyond
Tasmanians, some Tasmanians anyway, have known what lies beyond for the past 120 and more years. They have known because they brought their sheep up here to graze summer grasses, alternating summer grazing with winter pasture in the lowlands in a local version of transhumance.
Others came into the territory exploring for minerals or to trap possums with their thick winter fur so ladies in distant cities could benefit from its warmth as once did the animal the fur was taken from. Those early venturers into the highlands travelled by foot and horse well beyond that low ridge I looked at from the shore of Pine Lake.
Attracted by the ice
When the road from Deloraine to Great Lake was constructed in 1916, the lake became a popular ice skating venue. ‘Popular’ brings up images of crowds, however crowds there were none of, just small groups. Then came Ray McCluster, a dentist in the northern Tasmanian town of Launceston. He brought something new to the lake, something that was popular in his native America. Ice sailing.
Take three heavy planks. Join them together. Add a mast and sail. Install a tiller to steer the thing. Put it on the ice-covered lake on a windy day. Then zip off at speed across the frozen surface, hoping there are no patches of thin ice.
Ice sailing never caught on in Tasmania. That was probably because of unreliable ice conditions and the remoteness of Tasmania’s highland lakes. So says the historian of Tasmania’s high country, Simon Cubit.
The authoritative history
Ray McCluster’s story appears in Simon’s last book on the history of the high country, Mountain Stories — Echoes from the Tasmanian high country, Volume 2. Published in 2017, it follows Volume 1 of the previous year. Both volumes are the authoritative history of this elevated landscape and the people who travelled and worked in it. Both volumes are packed with enthralling tales of our mountain-culture heritage. Tales, like the story of how Crater Lake and Dove Lake got their boats.
The lakes are known to those who walk the Cradle Mountain country and both are the product of a past glacial age that melted away between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. Both still have the boat sheds made of local, indigenous pencil pine that sheltered those rowboats. That at Dove Lake is now a popular photographic subject.
Simon Cubit reveals how the wooden, clinker-built dinghies were built by JW Brown in the Tasmanian north coast town of Ulverstone. They were completed in 1938, put on a trailer and towed to the end of the road at Cradle Mountain. Here, they were stored over winter before being moved to their respective lakes. The boat sheds still stand on the shorelines of the lakes. The boats? Gone.
Another high country
When Australians hear the term ‘high country’ they imagine the Snowy Mountains and Victoria’s alpine high plains and peaks. Those places are embedded in Australian history and popular culture, home to quasi-mythological figures like the man from Snowy River.
There is another high country. It is across Bass Strait from those of popular imagination and it figures less in Australian mythology. It deserves to be better known because it has its own cast of loners, explorers and visionaries. This is Tasmania’s high country, the windswept and winter-snow-covered Central Plateau between Great Lake and the Mersey River headwaters, between the town of Bothwell and the Walls of Jerusalum, the cluster of peaks and ridges once the home of summer graziers and trappers and now the haunt of bushwalkers visiting the state’s World Heritage country.
I got to know the Walls when I lived in Tasmania and spent much time in the mountains. I recall, one fine and warm summer day, my companion and I ascending the ridge known as the West Wall. There we sat in the contemplative silence of the mountains as, arrayed to the far horizon in front of us, lay the lake-studded Central Plateau.
This was the first time I had set eyes on its undulating expanse of dolerite ridges and lakes small and large. What was that long body of water on the horizon? Great Lake, I wondered? And were there trails through that territory? Could I walk from here to Great Lake? I felt the urge to get out there and explore, to trek that undulating, rocky plateau all the way to Great Lake. I never did. I still want to.
Now, thanks to Simon Cubit’s two volumes, I have an insight into that wild country and its history of European peoples’ landuse. Little remains of the history of Tasmanian Aborigines who must have come up here over the millennia before that. I now know that I can walk into Dixon’s Kingdom, the hut of native pencil pine constructed by one of the summer graziers and temporary home to bushwalkers, and keep going because there are trails out there, trails onto the wild and rocky Central Plateau.
Places high and wild
I have a strong interest in the vernacular architecture-without-architects of mountain huts and beach shacks, so it was pleasing to find photographs and stories of the buildings and those who built them in Simon’s two volumes and in his earlier book, Mountain Men. I have overnighted in a few of the mountain huts he discusses — Dixons Kingdom, Old Pelion Hut, Old Waterfall Valley Hut, Narcissus Hut — as well a some that do not appear in his books. When I return to those huts my experience will be all the richer thanks to Simon’s work.
Within its 285 pages are short narratives that describe people who must have been far-more resolute, resilient and tougher than the common run of urbanised humanity today. The stories concern men for the most part although women also played a role. The work of trapping, shepherding, prospecting and building mountain shacks was men’s work in those days.
Simon’s Mountain Stories Volume 2 continues the tales related in Volume 1 and builds on his 2015 book, Mountain Men, which he wrote with fellow-historian Nic Haygarth. That earlier book relates the stories of the people for whom the Plateau was both exploration-place and workplace.
In his two volumes we find stories of hunters and trappers, prospectors and shepherds, horsemen and walkers, places found and people lost. These are books not only for those with a penchant for history. They are also for those interested in landuse and in places that, despite the presence of Europeans for more than 150 years, are still wild.
Mountain Stories — echoes from the Tasmanian high country, volume 1; Simon Cubit, 2016; Forty South Publishing Pty Ltd, Hobart, ISBN 978–0–9953673–9–5.
Mountain Stories — echoes from the Tasmanian high country, volume 2; Simon Cubit, 2017; Forty South Publishing Pty Ltd, Hobart, ISBN 978–0–6480286–6–6.
Mountain Men — stories from the Tasmanian high country. Simon Cubit and Nic Haygarth, 2015; Forty South Publishing Pty Ltd, Hobart, ISBN 978–0–9942527–9–1.
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