Tasmania’s New Normal
Many in Tasmania had high hopes that ecotourism would secure the state’s economic future. But the relentless march of climate change, capped off with a pandemic, presents a threat like no other. Jess Cockerill reports.
Even in the middle of winter in Tasmania, the earth was on fire. The catastrophic blazes of summer 2019 were out, but the island state was still coming to terms with the damage, and beneath the gravel paths of the Tahune Airwalk — a major tourism attraction in the south-west’s Huon Valley — the large roots of eucalyptus trees glowed red, smoking and collapsing.
Ken Stronach opened Tahune Adventures in 2001. His business complex includes the airwalk, other trails, a flying fox, kayak tours and a cafe, all situated in state forest bordering on the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (WHA). Before the January 2019 blaze, the land in Stronach’s tenure had not been touched by fire for decades.
“If you drive down and you’re looking at the mountains, you will see these really tall dead trees above the regrowth,” Stronach said. “They’re the result of previous fires which killed those really old established trees… they’re fondly known within the forestry industry as stags, because they look like stag horns.” The regrowth dates from 40 years ago, when the forest last burned. A lot has changed in Tasmania since then. Once prized above all for their timber assets, these forests are now increasingly valued as ecotourism destinations.
When the fire hit Tahune in 2019, it was the summer holidays, and Stronach’s business was in full swing.
“We’d had such a nice summer from a tourism perspective, but not much rain,” Stronach said. The alert was raised by the Tasmanian Fire Service on January 21. With dozens of people out on the trails, and even more rafting on the river, Stronach’s team implemented an emergency evacuation plan they’d never had to put into action before, clearing the walk on foot and getting kayakers back on shore, while trying not to arouse panic. It took about an hour to get everyone out. By then the fire brigades were arriving, bracing to defend the built assets from the fire being fanned by a strong easterly wind from within the WHA.
“The sky coloured changed; it went to a dark orange-yellow colour,” Stronach said. “I couldn’t tell if it was going to burst through the forest at me or not.”
After that first day, Stronach watched the damage from a distance. To his surprise, the CCTV cameras on the property were still intact, affording a live view of the action.
“The fire came down a different direction the following morning and burnt out the entry area, and we could see it coming, the people trying to fight it,” Stronach described. “It was very surreal. And the next day the fire came across the back of the airwalk, and they couldn’t hold it back. It burnt all underneath the airwalk, and underneath the Huon Pine Walk, and then burnt out all of this beautiful timber entryway.”
The entryway was designed to mimic a boat’s hull, in tribute to the area’s wooden boat-building history. As Stronach explained, although many south-western towns had been established to service the forestry industry, Tasmanians’ views and aspirations for forests changed as the conservation movement made gains. The land Tahune Adventures sits on is still owned by Sustainable Timbers Tasmania (SST) and, apart from its World Heritage border, is surrounded by forests with ‘productive’ potential. The airwalk, Stronach said, was a kind of experiment, to see whether tourism might pick up some of the slack once forestry jobs were lost, and if it might “help transition the life and soul of those areas”.
“Many Tasmanians have grown up really valuing space and solitude and now that Tasmania has become a popular tourism destination, it’s causing a lot of angst for some people.”
Tasmanians on all sides of the political spectrum are proud of their wilderness. It is an integral part of the state’s identity: at times, boastful; at other times, hostile. As Anne Hardy, author of Tourism in Tasmania told The Mercury: “Many Tasmanians have grown up really valuing space and solitude and now that Tasmania has become a popular tourism destination, it’s causing a lot of angst for some people.”
In Tasmania the ‘green’ attitude was, historically, an economic antagonist: a blockade against development and profit. As Stronach put it: “Tourism has become much more of a mainstay in Tasmania generally, in the last 25 years, than it was before, and a lot of that has been at the expense of the forestry industry and other primary industries.” Consequently, the argument for ecological protection is increasingly becoming a financial one.
Indeed, in a state where 40 percent of the land is now protected in reserves or national parks, there is increasing pressure — and political will — to make Tasmania’s natural assets earn their keep by branding the state as a global eco-tourism hotspot. And it’s working: late last year, Tasmania was the only place in Australia to make National Geographic’s 25 must-see destinations for 2020.
Late last year, Tasmania was the only place in Australia to make National Geographic’s 25 must-see destinations for 2020.
In 2019, tourism directly and indirectly accounted for more than 10 per cent of Tasmania’s gross state product, and 17 per cent of its employment. Before the COVID-19 crisis struck, then-premier Will Hodgman was determined to see this grow, and his 2014 election promise to attract 1.5 million annual visitors by 2020 appeared almost on track before the pandemic interrupted. Current premier Peter Gutwein continues to carry this torch, holding the tourism and climate change portfolios and describing Tasmania as a “leader in climate change” at every opportunity.
Still, conservation groups have been sceptical of the government’s approach to ecotourism, which they fear may actually degrade the ecological and cultural value of natural assets in the name of profit. On Hodgman’s retirement, former Greens leader Bob Brown said his government had turned Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service into a “handmaiden of private tourism operations”.
With active support from Hodgman and now Gutwein, both the Lake Malbena development and the high-profile cable car up Mount Wellington have proceeded despite an outcry from the local communities, Aboriginal groups, ecologists and seasoned mountaineers. Even though locals may stand to gain from increased tourism to their regions, preserving the integrity of the natural assets they live alongside is no less of a concern to them.
Robyn Lewis has been a regular visitor to the Great Lakes region of Tasmania’s Central Highlands, where she owns a lakeside shack, since she was a young girl. The area has few year-round residents but draws visitors for fishing, hunting, and other outdoor activities. Like the Huon region, the Central Highlands are still recovering from a catastrophic fire in the summer of 2019.
While fires have always been a part of the landscape in this area, the scale and intensity of this blaze was unlike anything Lewis had seen in her lifetime. The winter snowmelt last season eroded what was left of the topsoil, further depleting the already fire-scarred habitat.
As a result of this extensive habitat loss, a large number of native mammals — wallabies, pademelons, wombats — died from starvation and exposure. Lewis coordinated a wildlife rescue with a group of local volunteers who put out extra food and took in orphaned or injured animals.
But the project, according to Lewis, lacked government support, and was bolstered mostly by crowdfunding and the goodwill of volunteers. Her communications with the Parks and Wildlife Service, Lewis said, gave her the impression they did not have the resources for wildlife recovery, which is why the local community had to step in.
“How can you be ‘The Natural State’ when the things that you’re espousing as being important actually have no standing, no rights, and are last in the consideration?” Lewis said. She is concerned that the government’s focus on revenue-raising tourism projects has actually sidelined the main attractions.
“People come here because of our natural assets, and wildlife’s part of that, and looking at the environment is part of that,” Lewis said. “People don’t want to see burnt out stuff, and they don’t want to see no animals.” Just as the area was recovering, the push for tourism into fire-affected areas like the Central Highlands and the Huon Valley has now been further interrupted by travel restrictions.
The Eaglehawk Dive Centre is another Tasmanian ecotourism business bearing the brunt of a changing climate. Owner and dive instructor Mick Barron runs his business out of a simple shed at the back of a sloping, forested property, overlooking the magnificently steep scarp of Pirate’s Bay. The shed is utilitarian, with oxygen tanks and wetsuits hung neatly, but a small door leads to a cosy wood-panelled room lined with shelves stocking books on marine species, as well as maps and charts. The windows look east to the dramatic sea cliff vista, crowned that morning with a dense fog.
Barron set up the business in 1991 to offer tourists a chance to see one of the world’s very few giant kelp forests. The giant kelp — Macrocystis pyrifera — is probably most famous in North America, where it is home to the playful sea otters that lounge in its leathery leaves. In Tasmania, the kelp is a nursery for all kinds of underwater species, including the fresh seafood that tourists go out of their way to taste. Barron said most of his clients were seeking an escape from their urban lives in bustling, smog-ridden cities like Beijing and Hong Kong.
“I’ll ask them the question: of all the places in the world, why do you come to Tasmania?” he said. “And they go, ‘Nature.’ Nature. That’s what it’s for. They’re looking for places that have not been changed.’
But, as with the catastrophic fires on land, a lot has changed beneath the waves of Tasmania’s east coast.
“As a kid, up in Penguin, which is where I come from, the only reason you’d learn to dive is to take stuff: abalone, crays,” Barron said. But over time, his attitude shifted. Barron rarely takes anything from the sea these days. Instead, Barron’s and his friends’ underwater photography features on coastal signage throughout the Tasman National Park, giving shore-bound visitors a glimpse of the seals, sea dragons, handfish, crays and kelp that make a home beneath the hellish surf. But even these recent photos have dated, as memorials to an ecosystem that’s no longer there.
Kelp forests are known to die out in extreme weather events — for instance, the marine heatwave that hit the Great Southern Reef in 2016 — and as one of the world’s fastest growing species, Macrocystis is incredibly good at coming back. Barron has seen these fluctuations time and again in his life as a diver. But after the 2016 marine heat wave, the kelp showed no sign of returning. In its place, urchin barrens formed: infestations of long-spined invaders that, historically, could not survive Tasmania’s cold seas. But warming waters have allowed them to thrive, in part by grazing any kelp saplings that might try to re-emerge. As of 2019, less than five percent of the original kelp forests remain.
“It’s a total disaster, the fact that it’s gone,” Barron said. “People would call and say, ‘I’d like to dive with the kelp’ and I go, ‘Sorry mate, there’s none here’.”
“It’s a total disaster, the fact that [the kelp] is gone,” Barron said. “People would call and say, ‘I’d like to dive with the kelp’ and I go, ‘Sorry mate, there’s none here’.”
“When we started, all those years ago, there was forest everywhere, all the way up the coast… Fortescue Bay was chockers with it, you couldn’t even drive a boat through it.” A giant kelp forest as dense as Fortescue Bay once was protects itself: Barron noted that if you can’t drive a boat through it, you can’t put in nets or pots, or use hookah gear to fish. The forests were their own natural nurseries, harbouring crayfish in their infant stages, and giving shelter to abalone “as big as dinner plates”.
For Barron, his business will only stay afloat so long as he can offer dives with seals and sea dragons, but these have always been secondary to the draw of the kelp.
“In the past, the priorities were: kelp forest; seals; and the weedy dragons. You’ve got to have an attraction, and that’s what we’ve got left,” he said. He doesn’t bother diving in Fortescue Bay any more. There’s nothing left to see but urchins.
Since the fire in January 2019, Tahune Adventures has been out of action. Ken Stronach was keen to see his business rise from the ashes, but the anticipated comeback — it reopened on February 29, 2020 — was suspended three weeks later by the global spread of the coronavirus.
Reconstruction of the badly-burnt Swinging Bridges Walk and Huon Pine Walk continues at the site, but Tahune staff and guides had to be sent home just when things were looking up. Stronach’s aspirations for restoring the site have been subdued for another season, along with the hopes of the Hobart and Huon Valley businesses that serve the thousands who visit in a ‘normal’ year.
And yet, in the face of immediate travel restrictions and the escalating rhythms of climate change, Stronach is somehow keeping his chin up: he is optimistic for the future of tourism and wants to make science education a part of the experience.
“I’m a great believer in citizen science,” he said. “There are fascinating ways to involve the public in things they wouldn’t necessarily be aware of otherwise.”
Where the charred entranceway devoted to forestry once stood, Stronach plans to create a new experience: one that shares the story of fire and climate at Tahune, and across Tasmania. Ken hopes the story of resilience and recovery may actually add to tourists’ experiences of Tasmania and Australia’s wilderness — when visitors are, once again, able to explore it.
This reporting was funded through the Walkley Public Fund and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas through a Walkley Grant for Freelance Journalism.
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Read “Bolt from the blue” here.
Read “Reigniting a land of extinction” here.
