Cathedral Rock, Tasmania

Cathedral Rock is the big hump of exposed dolerite lying on the south flank of Mt. Wellington. From a distance, it looks like a very formidable hike to the top, and indeed, it took us five hours to reach the summit. You come upon the summit suddenly, and peering off of the edge, which is a sheer vertical cliff face, is not for the faint hearted. The peripheral outlook onto scree fields and towering organ pipe dolerite columns is breathtaking. The rock attracts different kinds of algae that make it look like it has been splashed with paint. When I got home, I found an essay by Philip Hutch who, in talking about perception, landscape and the imagination, discusses how the early explorers of Van Dieman's Land thought the natural environment here verged on the “absurd and ridiculous.” With no familiar reference to the Old World, this new landscape was visually “bland and depressing.” Hutch then makes the juxtaposition to the poet Petrarch who, in spite of his fear of heights, climbed Mount Ventoux to “pursue a visual experience that would reach beyond the limitations of anything he had perceived before.” He “traveled and collected views as a poet, an artist in search of the extraordinary, the supernatural, the abstract, the metaphysical.” Petrarch: “Yes, the life which we call blessed is to be sought for on a high eminence, and straight is the way that leads to it. Many also are the hills that lie between and we must ascend by a glorious stairway from strength to strength.” (*Philip Hutch, Traversing South, 2002)