Broken Dreams

Broken Dreams was the title of an exhibition at the art school in Launceston. Bottle stoppers, stone inkwells, tobacco pipes and other sundry personal effects from the State’s maritime disasters of the 19th century were on display. Many of the ships sailed without incident all the way from the U.K., India or Singapore, only to wreck on Tassie's shoreline. This Longfellow poem was posted at the exhibit entrance:

“And ever the fitful
gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the
Trampling surf,
On the rocks and hard
Sea-sand.
The breakers were right
Beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow
Swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.”

Bruny Island

Today, I went to the Neck, a thin isthmus that joins North and South Bruny into a single, oblong island. The first time I visited Bruny, in March 2003 --recorded in my journal as the day dissidents painted “No War in Iraq” on the Sydney Opera House--the beach at the Neck was covered with scores of penguin tracks. Penguins and muttonbirds spend October to April at the rookery here, and their numbers can be impressive. While climbing to the top of the Truganini Lookout, a steep, 200-stair ascent that affords you a 365 degree view of the Channel and the Tasman Peninsula, I could hear some Japanese tourists scream "blue" at the staggering vista of the ocean below.

Down on the beach itself, though, it was mostly deserted. As I walked a little ways, the wind picked up suddenly, and the smell of death grew distinctive. Further on, what must have been either a seal or a small whale, I couldn’t tell, was being buried under a shifting sheet of sand. Out in the surf, some children were swimming unsupervised, which made my chest tighten: certainly, if they got into trouble, they were on their own. This is the most remote and utterly wild beach, isolated as it is on the edge of terra cognita; it stretches for miles, hemmed in to the north and south by headlands.



Penguin tracks/
Children on the beach at the Neck

The Neck isthmus/
A penguin being buried by sand

The Central Highlands

The Central Highlands

This drive up to Launceston, (approx. 4 hours from Hobart) instead of taking the main highway all the way, I decided to turn off at Melton Mowbay to detour through the Central Highlands/Great Lake Highway. The geology and plateau landscape of Tasmania’s Central Highlands is nothing short of mind-boggling, with breath-taking escarpments and mountain cirques, 700 million years of turbulent geological history and glaciation that make you stop every five minutes to pop out of the car and take another picture. The alpine ecology is equally fantastic, with unique plant communities such as cushion plants and pencil pines, the visual effect of which is a staged bonsai display the size of a park. At one day-walk destination there was a sign explaining: “Pencil pines are found only in Tasmania, but they belong to the same family as the tallest tree in the world, the giant Californian Sequoia. They have their origins on the southern continent of Gondwana and are among the great survivors of eons of ravaging change.”