Stories of the road…
Vignettes of Tasmania
Vignettes are short pieces… descriptions of a few minutes of observation, of experience, of fleeting moments… snapshots of a place, an incident, a person.
The highway
“I SAW A highway of diamonds with nobody on it.” Bob Dylan sang that.
“Highways are long streams of asphalt along which life flows from here to there or maybe to no particular place at all, like logs carried downstream on a flood.” I said that.
We pull into the clearing where the road turns off and I get out to stretch my legs. Feels like I’ve been driving for hours. Truth to tell it hasn’t been all that long. Just seems like that. Traffic speeds by along the highway heading north or south with the sound of rubber on asphalt… a wwwhhhooooshhh that you hear just before the vehicles pass and which fades into silence as they speed into the distance. From here the highway continues south towards the city or maybe away from it if that’s the way you are headed.
The road we are about to follow is no highway. Just a two-lane that winds and undulates past farms where herbivores munch in green fields and where ridges have been shaved bare or still retain a cap of forest. Down that two-lane a distance lies another road and along it yet another diverts off. That one will take us to our destination. It is a route we usually follow as it leads more or less directly to where we want to go and avoids the long dogleg that lies in wait were we to stay on the highway.
I get out and wander around and think how dramatic this landscape is. There, over to the west across the undulations of farm fields the land rises into hills that this winter afternoon are silhouetted dark against a sky banded by low, dark cloud. There is little colour in this landscape, just bands of light and shade that give the land a gloomy, cold feel, a landscape of blacks and whites.
I do the inevitable and try to capture the feel of this landscape in camera but like all such attempts to capture a fleeting moment of reality it can’t catch the actuality of standing there in the cold air gazing on those distant hills and sky. Photographs are representations, not realities. They suggest but do not encapsulate the feel of a place, of being there at a particular time and feeling the cold air and the wind.
I stow the camera in its bag and we set off along the two-lane that winds and undulates past farms where herbivores munch in fields and ridges are either shaved bare or sawtoothed by a skyline of forest. Home is an hour away now, an hour along that winding strip of asphalt that takes those who travel it homeward or, maybe, to no particular place at all.
This is no highway of diamonds that Bob Dylan sang about. Just an asphalt strip through the landscape under the big broad sky of this blessed southern island.
The golden light of a late winter afternoon
TIME FOR a walk. That’s my partner talking. She has been behind the keyboard all day designing a recipe book that brings together the multicultural offerings of community gardeners in Launceston. Now, she feels the necessity to stretch her legs. I guess you might describe my response as reluctant, but I know that no matter how much I dally and delay I will eventually give in. So why bother. Go and put your shoes on.
I compensate for being dragged out of the house this cool, early winter day by packing my camara. I always do this because at this time of day, when the sun is low in the sky, it produces colours that can be astounding in their intensity or subtle in their pastels and that reflect off the surface of the bay.
Our path lies along the informal foreshore track. It is used mainly by locals for walking or for being walked by their dogs. We follow the shoreline where Tiger Bay becomes the inland sea of Pitt Water, through a patch of tagasaste, past native banksias and eucalypts and a plethora of non-native plants that over the decades have made the foreshore sands their home. A strong tide flows back and forth in the deeper channel over on the far side, however during very low tides this side drains to reveal extensive sand flats.
The usual birds are about this late afternoon — pied oystercatchers, silver gulls, Pacific gulls, kelp gulls, strutting long-legged grey herons, black cockatoos, galahs, noisy plovers and all the rest. These shallow, calmer waters and shores are waterbird heaven. Upstream, pied cormorants rest on a pier. Like other locals we kayak these waters and know from sighting them that stingrays too inhabit these flooded sand flats, and occasionally we see a pod of dolphins rise and fall as they make their way along.
It is one of those cool and windless afternoons as the sun sits a mere 10 minutes above the silhouetted distant hills that are the horizon below which it will soon disappear. Clouds are being blown along by strong winds higher up and there is only the white noise you hear in nature, the sum of all sounds out there, comingled. Now, the sun reflects off the still surface of the bay and the peace of late afternoon comes over the land and waters. The sea is an intense yellow, the distant mountain, a full 40km to the west, takes on a monochromal shade of blue.
That big blue bulk way beyond the rounded hills across the bay is kunanyi-Wellington, all 1200m of it, with Collins Cap projecting from the range further along. Out of sight below it is the city of Hobart. We stand watching the colours of late afternoon and images of journeys made by foot on the mountain come and go in mind, journeys up steep trails, journeys to far waterfalls and journeys when moist maritime air masses come in from the Southern Ocean to dump their load on the mountain as snow. There, too, is the memory of a rescue I was on a long time ago to get someone off of the vertical face of the Organ Pipes, the high, columnar cliffline on the mountain.
So, this is what we do these days. Walk the foreshore track, kayak the waters of the bay, watch the birds come and go. I’m thankful for it, and for doing those things here where afternoon’s colours ripple on the surface of the waters.
The city
STREETS SLICKED by passing showers reflect early evening’s yellow light
Grey clouds scud low across the pale glow of fading day
People are few at this time on a rainy Sunday evening
Home is drier, warmer
There is family there. Or friends. A dog or cat perhaps. Or maybe no one.
Still, it is warmer in that out
Listen! The sound or raindrops on the roof.
The rivulet
IT GOES largely unnoticed here in the city where it disappears and reappears, exposed to the light of day in some places and hidden below buildings and streets in others. Maybe you would call it an engineered stream. The unkind among us might call it a drain. Whatever you call it, the Hobart Rivulet along its downstream end is a tamed and confined insult to what upstream is a clean and vibrant waterway.
This is the fate of urban streams. Except for the few places where the concrete has been smashed and carted away and the banks planted and rewilded, urban rivers become the playthings of engineers who treat them as water in need of draining, rather than as ecosystems. Hobart Rivulet reminds me of Sydney’s Tank Stream which, like the Rivulet, provided the early European colony with fresh water, as both streams did the indigenous people who once wandered their banks.
You can make a daywalk of following the Hobart Rivulet. Like any track you follow, you start at the beginning. For the Rivelet, that means starting in the lower forests of kunanyi-Wellington, the 1200m dolerite block of a mountain that dominates the city of Hobart and that blocks the more severe weather streaming in from the west. It is that weather which drops the water that flows over scree slopes and through the soils to do what incipient streams do—cooperate with gravity to find the easiest path downslope and to come together into a creek that becomes wider, but not all that much wider where it tumbles down the mountain as a clear, pure stream.
O’Grady’s Falls is a convenient place to pick up the Rivulet. You reach them along an easy foot track across the lower mountain. They are not high falls, just a drop of a few metres in the forest. Only the hardier walkers used to off-track hiking would attempt to follow the Rivulet down to where it enters the suburbs around Strickland Avenue. A more convenient place to find the Rivulet is Cascades. Here, it becomes more substantial but is still a shallow stream that gurgles through the bush. It was because of the clean mountain water that Cascade Brewery was built on its banks.
Hobart Rivelet leaves the wild country of its forested origins and becomes an urban stream. Past the Female Factory where in colonial times female prisoners were put to work, past a line of Nineteenth Century stone cottages perched precariously on its banks, the Rivelet is joined by a walking track through Hobart Rivulet Linear Park. Not far beyond it encounters the central business district where it comes and goes below buildings and streets.
This is not a major waterway, but here in the city it contributes the mountain’s waters to the wide Derwent with which they flow into Storm Bay to join the great ocean beyond.
Vignettes…
Stories of coast and mountain…
