An-ti-ci-pa-a-tion...

“…is making me late, is keeping me waiting…”

For some reason, Carly Simon is rolling around my brain this morning...

… or maybe it’s the Heinz ketchup (oops… tomato sauce!) commercial… remember that one? Thick red ketchup oozing toward the bottle’s neck, slow as molasses in January… where it inevitably gets stuck and you need to use a knife to unplug it and then – splat! - your French fries are swimming in it…

Oh, I know why I’m on tenterhooks: my sweetie arrives in Hobart Monday - only four more sleeps! Then I get to show him everything I’ve been saving up of Tasmania… our version of “Ten Days on the Island”! And then we’ll be heading home…

What prompted this post was a note via Facebook from my daughter Heather – who’s had to go home to Canada from London, England, where she's teaching, to renew her visa. She was in the Toronto airport, enjoying an ice-cap* at Tim Hortons. It made me long for home - and I don't even like ice-caps! All these triggers: a photo from David Sims of one last dirt-encrusted snowpile on a bed of dead yellow grass; photos of Mikhala and Mike crossing the stage at UPEI’s graduation; a shot of Michaye Boulter's golden retriever Splash looking up at me, thumping her tail expectantly; Frank and Jude Driscoll on the front page of this morning's Charlottetown Guardian; Heather's words reminding me of my last visit to Tim Horton's in the Toronto airport, waiting for the plane to Charlottetown last December... (And just for the record: I also don't like Tim Hortons excuse for coffee - especially after all the good "flat whites" I've been drinking here!)

  

But that also means I’m leaving this wonderful island in two weeks’ time. So it got me thinking: what will I miss the most?

Stewart and Denbeigh and Maddie and Harry… Maddie’s six a.m. thump upstairs as she hits the ground running, and the big hug when I come up for breakfast... Three-month-old Harry’s gurgling smiles… Denbeigh’s fabulous cooking and our chats about parenting... Stewart’s fabulous cooking and our chats about academia and islands…

Lunch with Pete at Shippie’s – bangers and mash and "skinny" beer, and talk of islands and poetry and art and cricket…

Ferry rides over to Bruny Island with Pete and Anna… anticipating the fire at the shack and walks on Nebraska Beach with Ollie and Flossie… and that mad dash at the end when we close everything up and spin out to catch whatever ferry we’re trying to get…

Coffee with Millie and Anna and Catherine at Sandy Bay Coffee Roasters or The Jam Jar in Battery Point – talking methodology chapters and writing, commiserating about the PhD life (and afterlife), and editing papers... we're each other's “guerilla supervisors”…

The walk in the morning along Proctors Road – seeing the huge palm tree that is so distinctly “from away,” like me…

The sunrise over Hobart from my bedroom window or the Tasman Bridge fairy lights at night…

Playing Scrabble with Millie and Garth and Tessa and Qug in their wonderfully homey sharehouse on Wellesley Street…

Beating Pete at crib… and Anna beating both of us at Scrabble...

My officemate Jenny, and hearing all about her stories about kayaking around Flinders Island, or weeding on Maatsuyker Island, or her involvement with the rabbit eradication program on Macquarie Island…

Morning tea downstairs in Geography, where conversation with Dave and Annette and Tracy and Kate and Trish and Paulene ALWAYS comes back to sex… having them complain about my too-strong coffee (I have to have it that way – I brought my aerolatte milk frother with me!)… remembering the look on everyone’s faces when Kate brought in her gigantic bowl of tiramisu for Monday cake day …

Jane and Ralph, and Valentine’s Day lunch at their house on Poet’s Road, when we drank champagne, ate chocolate, and read love poetry… and sharing a house and drive, with Emily, at the Poetry Festival in Launceston… and a spring morning at the Botanic Gardens with Jane...

Walking along the waterfront to the Art School Library, and writing poems at “my” table by the window…

Drinking coffee at the Wrest Point Casino Coffee Shop with Leo Cheverie's cousin Pamela and her partner Paul...

Getting to meet my artists and writers, photographers and musicians, in their homes and studios and favourite haunts…

Driving the island with Pete, for cricket matches or interviews or a Tassie Tiger Beer at the Thylacinians' 11 home pub in Mole Creek...

Having Mount Wellington looking over my shoulder... 

Tromping on yet another glorious beach...

There’s so much more… so many more people… I suspect this post will be a running post.  I'll pass something, knowing it’ll be for the last time, and think, I'll miss that, I must write about that...

But for now I’m waiting waiting waiting… that delicious in-between time when it’s hard to focus for the bubbling stomach… knowing that I’m finishing something here, but starting another anew...

*iced cappuccino (a quadruple hit of caffeine and sugar)

A shack of a different stripe

Sunday morning, and we’re heading to the northwest – to the village of Marrawah and Joe King’s shack, to be precise. It’s not your ordinary shack – the vacation kind that many Tasmanians have on the beach or in the bush – the place for all the things worn out at the house but too good for the tip…

No, Joe King’s shack is a place where the main window of the house doesn’t face the beach – the same spectacularly raw beach that you’d find just a few kilometers south at the Edge of the World. An 8’ x 16’ grey weatherboard box that looks like it was washed up on the shore – as my friend Matt Newton says – like a movie set dropped in just above the high water mark. A place where the sound of the surf at your back door doesn’t penetrate the walls or the howling wind doesn’t shake the floorboards. The only place you can expect to see live Tasmanian devils in the wild.

Joe started his business, "King’s Run,” in 1999, when his friend Nick Mooney, a conservation officer who worked with endangered species for the State Government, suggested that it was possible to show people Tasmanian devils feeding just after dusk using a halogen light. This way, he reckoned, people might begin to care that what was normally considered a nuisance was under threat from the Facial Tumour Disease that was devastating the devil population in other parts of the island. At the same time, Joe was looking at a way to restore his land – on which Kings had farmed cattle for generations – back to its original state.  Joe recognized that it was also a way of caring for a land that had obvious remains of Aboriginal settlement – middens and hut depressions and seal “hides,” where Aboriginals hunted Australian fur seals. To ensure that devils didn’t become dependent on the road kill that Joe leaves for them, Joe started taking tourists in only five nights in a fortnight. It’s one of the more popular (and I hate to use the word, but it seems terribly appropriate) “authentic” things you can do when you visit Tasmania.

The purpose of our visit was for Pete to interview, and Matt Newton to photograph, Joe for a book on Tasmanian activists. This is their second collaboration – the first was The Forests, published in 2008 and featuring Matt’s evocative black-and-white photographs documenting Tasmanian activism: confrontations between loggers and activists over Tasmania’s Draconian forestry practices. The cover image featuring “the Weld Angel” has become the iconic photo representing the conflict that has been the Tasmanian forestry situation for the last fifty or so years. Indeed, Matt was a 2011 finalist for "Australian of the Year" for his work defending the forests. 

We met Joe at his house in Marrawah mid-afternoon, where he had just opened a bottle of Ninth Island Pinot and was getting ready to sit down to watch footy. He set up the tape for later, then whisked us out the door – wine and a pot of seafood bouillabaisse in hand. We followed him toward Arthur River, before turning onto a winding gravel road. At the first gate he tied a small dead wallaby (he collects roadkill and freezes it) behind the truck, which bounced along just ahead, laying a scent for the devils.

At the second gate we transferred our gear to his truck and we set off for the shack. As we got closer to the shore, gravel turned to sand, taller scrub trees to smaller, until finally none at all – just grass, dunes, and the big blue ocean – knowing that if you kept on going you’d end up in South America, missing entirely the Cape of Good Hope. It looked like a giant hand had strewn chunks of dolerite all around the sea’s edge then churned up the sea to make sure they were knocked silly every few seconds. The largest lump, called “The Church,” dwarfed the shack. 

After we took in our gear and Joe got the fire going, we headed out for the photo shoot, and a walk along the beach.

Joe showed us middens and the seal hides, devil tracks, wallaby and wombat poo, and the places where four-wheelers had ripped up the dunes, revealing layers of middens that had been buried in the sand for centuries. At the top of one of the highest points was a depression in the hill, which Joe told us had once been the site of an Aboriginal hut. Surrounded by a wide ring of seashells, it felt like a sacred place. From up there you could see all up and down the coastline, rugged and wild and achingly beautiful. You knew that the Aboriginal people had probably chosen it for the same reason – plus the wind that would keep away the mosquitoes…

Just before dusk we headed back to the shack, where Joe set up the outside light and staked down another dead wallaby. He turned on the baby monitor so we could hear any action… then he warmed up the soup.

Matt had just been up in Sydney, attending a photography exhibition, and had spent a lot of evenings looking for THE great restaurant. He said the meals he ate didn’t compare with our bouillabaisse – fresh-cut Tassie salmon, abalone, and shark (and a few imported prawns from Asian), with some cooked whole potatoes that I added to my bowl for good measure.  If Joe ever gives up on devils, he could always become a cook.

After dinner, Joe turned off the light, lit a candle, and while Matt and I enjoyed the wine, he answered Pete’s questions about his decades-long struggle to protect the Arthur and Pieman Rivers coastal zone – along with its extensive Aboriginal middens, hut depressions, and hieroglyphs – from ATVs, motorbikes, and other destroyers of local environment and heritage. I look forward to reliving the interview when the book comes out. 

During the interview I was appointed chief devil spotter through the uber flat-screen TV masquerading as a picture window, but it got darker and darker and no critters big or small appeared. After the interview, Joe headed home, leaving us with the rest of the Aussie cab-sav, the Ninth Island, and some Aberlor single malt – and the hope that a diner would turn up. And at around 9:30, one did. Really. It’s not just the scotch talking. The healthy young devil was a little nervous at first as he seemed to look straight up through the window at us peering back at him, but soon the food became much more attractive than sketchy shadows behind the glass. We watched the black furry creature with the extraordinarily strong jaw tear into his food for about half an hour, before movement from what could have been another devil scared him off. We waited for a bit longer before throwing another log on the fire and heading off to bed. Long after we stumbled into our bunks, I heard crunch-crunch-crunch through the baby monitor, but my sleeping bag was too warm for me to leave it and go check it out. In the morning, the tattered remains of the wallaby were proof that something had returned to feed. It wasn’t just my imagination…

Joe came back to fetch us at 8:30 on the dot – happy that we’d seen our devil. But even if we hadn’t, he knows that if one doesn’t show up, that’s fine, too – it means that the animals aren’t becoming dependent on us humans for their supper. But he also knows that we left with a greater appreciation for the endangered critters – and for what he’s trying to do at King’s Run.

We were sorry to leave such a magical place. I felt like I’d been given a gift that not many people have had the honour of receiving. Plus the sky was washed clean, the sea was running hard – and Joe was going fishing.