Rock Magazine

Ross Taylor walks the Tarkine coastline in Tasmania

‘Zzzzzz zzzzz.’
It was when my father began a gentle, rhythmic snore that I realised I had no option but to escape the tent if I was going to get any sleep.
It had all started benignly enough around the campfire earlier in the night when Andy offered me a cup of coffee. Unable to resist the temptation of a hot beverage I foolishly accepted. Twenty minutes later he handed me the strongest cup of cowboy coffee ever to have passed my lips: a dark, evil concoction, half fluid, half grounds, and strong enough to make my heart race and set me to sweating despite a stiff ocean breeze. Retiring shortly after to the tent I lay down in a state of wakefulness not conducive to the act of sleep. We’d also set the tent up on top of a dune, fully in the wind, which was causing the fly to rub on the inner, creating an annoying synthetic sound my too-awake mind found impossible to ignore. To compound my misery the coffee was also having a powerful diuretic effect.
The final straw was the snoring. Cursing under my breath, I slid out of my sleeping bag, gathered my gear together, climbed over my father’s prone body and exited the tent. Then I spent ten minutes stumbling around in the dark trying to find a suitable flat spot to sleep. Eventually I found level ground under a wind-swept bush and laid myself down. There I spent a wakeful night until my father woke me the next morning shouting, ‘Ross, where are you?’ Good question.

The Tarkine coast was where I was. Just south of Temma, in the Arthur – Pieman Conservation Area to be more exact, on that wild stretch of land called the West Coast of Tasmania, a windswept coastline which greets the enormity of the Southern Ocean, where if you sailed due east you wouldn’t hit anything until you ploughed into the tip of South America some 17 000 kilometres distant. A length of coastline battered by the Roaring Forties and lined by long beaches and giant dunes through which tannin-stained creeks flow, home to thousands of shell-strewn middens, the signs of a Indigenous history that reaches back 40 000 years.

The previous afternoon my dad and I had been dropped off at the metropolis of Temma – a collection of decaying beach shacks devoid of any human presence – along with legendary climber and bushwalker Bob McMahon and various members of his family: his adult son Andy, Andy’s 13-year-old son Lawry and Leila, Bob’s 13-year-old granddaughter. Our plan was to walk south down the coast, where in four days time we would meet the ferry that plies the Pieman River from the small town of Corinna.. The walk was one short, 60-kilometre leg of Bob’s eventual goal to walk around the entire coastline of Tassie, a goal that had so far taken him 1200 kilometres of an estimated 3000 kilometres. My dad and I were along for the ride because I had invited myself on the trip after interviewing Bob for short profile in Wild: Bob being a decent bloke had foolishly agreed and now he was stuck with a pair of Taylors.

So it was a motley collection of walkers that set off from Temma under louring skies; two old blokes, two young(ish) blokes and two young whippersnappers. We didn’t know what we would find along the way, but Bob was confident that we would find an easy route by following beaches and the tracks of four-wheel drivers.

To read the rest of the story pick up a copy of Wild no 124…