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.