Devils
4 - 8 Dec, Ian
Several people had told us that we would love
Tasmania because it's just like England, and specifically like Devon. Every
time I've heard this it seems curious that anyone would suppose that our hope in
making such a big commitment to travel could be to find another place like home.
One or two Kiwis told me that Tasmania was just like New Zealand. Generally
this was also intended as a positive, except in the case of hairdresser AnTHony
who knew and hated both. Well, parts of Tasmania
are
just England - and like Devon, actually - but like an idealised TV version of
England with far fewer people (less than half a million); and other parts of
Tasmania are something else
entirely.
We arrived here on Monday morning on the choppiest flight we've had since we left home. At the arrivals area there is no carousel, just an area where the luggage carts drive in and park, leaving passengers to grab their own bags. If I'd been a bit more awake I could have taken a photo of a party of Japanese chowing down mangoes as quickly as they could, having not realised that they wouldn't be able to bring them into the state, while two dogs and a cat were wheeled in with the luggage a couple of metres away and let straight through.
We're staying at a place that I found on the internet or Lonely Planet and it couldn't be better. Ignorance helped: if I'd been more knowledgeable I'd probably have picked a cabin by/in Cradle Mountain NP, and, while I'm sure they're equally good, where we are is a more secluded spot with easy access to at least as much quality walking. On the drive here we stopped to let an echidna cross the road and wallabies are all over the place. The very personable owner of our retreat, John, came over from South Africa six years ago. He lived in Cape Town but had to travel to Jo'burg a lot with work. I asked him if he preferred it here; he replied that he'd never been arm-robbed here and none of his friends had been the subject of brutal assault. (It seemed inappropriate to mention that Australia has the highest per capita reported incidence of serious assault of any country.)
We even have a little TV here, but it only gets a couple of grainy channels. I caught the last feature on the news the other night, which reported that it's now been proven that stress releases hormones that suppress the immune system and lead to a range of illnesses including cancer. I doubt that this concept of "stress AIDS" surprises anyone, though I know plenty of people who are in denial about it. Anyhow, with Morcheeba on my iPod, a cheap beach necklace on most days and tan lines from my Reef shoes burnt into my feet I'm having a good period of remission.
The only other TV program I've caught a few minutes of here was an Aussie film review show. Even though the two presenters spent most of my viewing minutes raving about Steve Martin (I must be the world's only non-fan) I liked the show: in England and the US these programmes are always presented by done-nothing-love-myself media types and it was refreshing to hear the girls on this show giving it some serious Aussie accent. Since then the TV has been unplugged so we can recharge our camera batteries.
The girls have space to run around here too, and there's even an indoor pool for them to splash around in.
I should report that just before we left Melbourne we went to see the latest Harry Potter film. In my opinion it was the best so far, and the girls particularly enjoyed listing the huge number of scenes that are in the book (which they've both read several times) and not the film, starting before we'd even left the cinema. Before the film started there was a nicely scripted interaction between a (real) girl in the audience and a character on screen. It was an ad for the local tech college and the first such exchange I've seen, though the idea is familiar from movies (I think The Purple Rose of Cairo was one such); I'm sure I'll see more.
The weather here has been very changeable: we arrived to sun and blue skies but by the time we'd settled in the rain had started, and the rain can be torrential. It should be over by this time of year, they say, but it's keeping the countryside verdant for our stay - usually everywhere starts to brown off by now.
We'd decided that we wanted to see Cradle Mountain so we drove there on Tuesday, despite the black clouds. There's a lake there called Dove Lake that has a gentle 6 km walk around it that we fancied but we gave into the rain after 15 or 20 minutes of pottering around the boardwalks near to the car park. The next day we drove there again with more resolve and did the walk despite the probability that the light rain would turn heavier. It did and we all got pretty wet, especially the girls. But it was such a beautiful place to be. If we return to Tassie, which I believe we shall, I'll probably arrange for at least some of us to walk the Overland Track, which starts in just this area and takes five or six days. We plan to scout out more of it before we leave.
We spent the dry hours of Wednesday morning at a wildlife centre, Trowunna, that specialises in Tasmanian devils. What will become of zoos? Zoos, as everyone really knows, are for seeing lions and tigers. Since caging animals is now unfashionable - partly because fashion-setters can see lions, at least, in more congenial settings, partly because there is more public sympathy for the evident psychosis induced in the animals by their enclosure and partly because zoologists probably have no appetite to seem like Coney Island freak show throwbacks - zoos have invented new purposes for themselves. At just the time that entertainment emerged as the dominant post-Christian US (and hence western) value zoos tried to rise above it. So, as elsewhere, there are two themes at Trowunna: the first is the miscellany of individual animals who are not viable in the wild - orphaned wombats, wing-damaged wedge-tailed eagles and so forth - and the second is the program to maintain a healthy population of devils, whose numbers are declining in the wild. Zoos, in this role as a display cabinet of creatures that environmental changes (usually caused by negligent people) are pushing to extinction, provide concrete evidence of the paradox in right wing thinking (if that's not an oxymoron). The doctrine of conservatism - the belief that people, particularly governments, are not smart enough to interfere with the status quo in a way that's likely to improve it - is incompatible with the doctrine of free markets, since free markets eliminate species that good Tories should want to see stay alive.
It's not possible to give a good estimate of how many devils there are on Tasmania but there's no doubt that the number is falling sharply as a consequence of the devil facial tumour disease (DFT), which is suspected to have been started by 1080, an agri-spray. As the devil population has tumbled the number of possums, wombats and wallabies has increased through reduced predation. All of this is approximately indexed in the roadkill. In Trowunna they believe that once a shot is developed to counter DFT they will be able to release some of their unaffected devils back into the wild to restore the population.
We got a little show at feeding time. The scientific bona fides of the person who did the talk became doubtful in my mind almost as soon as she started talking and referred to Tassie splitting off from Aus "thousands" of years ago; I'd assumed that it was much earlier than this but I checked later and it turns out that there was indeed a land bridge until 18,000 to 12,000 years ago. And she was very good with the animals.
Anyone who wanted to got to hold and stroke most of them, though the last of the animals we saw, the devils, could only be stroked. After we were done with stroking, she brought out a huge skeleto-muscular fragment of (I think) wallaby and clung onto it as the devils jumped up and started to tear off chunks. When she released it half a dozen to a dozen devils fell on it viciously. It was awesome to see how rapidly and effectively they ripped into the carcass, gripping onto it as tenaciously as we absolutists can hold a grudge. Uniquely, they eat not only the meat but everything else too: the guts, the fur, the bone; all that they're ever seen to leave is horn. They're the size of small dogs and have the jaw strength of crocodiles. As each of the animals manages to tear off a hunk of flesh it runs away with it pursued by others who want to snatch it for themselves. (Is it me or does anyone else find it disturbing to hear that they "love" their food?) If it wasn't for the chilling noise they make it would almost be cute. It was from this noise, we were told, that they acquired the name "devils": early catholic settlers could only think that such howls coming from the bush must be the cries of demons.
Yesterday we went to Devonport, the third largest town on the island. After our soaking the day before we locked the stable door by buying ourselves better waterproof gloves. Around the retreat we don't have a great choice of places to buy wine so we stocked up at a store in town, and had the new (for us) experience of buying alcohol at a drive-through bottle shop. They look miserable as the areas next to the car lanes are stacked with low price, high volume grog - I drove straight out of the first one as it was so grim but we found another and inside they had a good selection of wines. Since it got recommended to me a few years ago (someone please thank Mark Jefford) I've been drinking Ninth Island Pinot Noir, which is grown around here, though the locals seem to favour the wines from the mainland. John has formed the view that the locals here, being largely descended from convicts and soldiers who never wanted to be on the island, have inherited an attitude of surly resentment and (in recent generations) never having been anywhere else, don't realise the value of what they have. Whether right or wrong, this chimes with the book I'm reading here - English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. I've had this in my hands in book shops in England more than once and not bought it, but since it's set in (and about) Tasmania it was one of the books I was pleased to be able to buy in Melbourne. It's very entertaining and well worth a read even if you don't come here (but especially if you do).
The other reason we went to Devonport was that it's en route to a National Park I was keen to visit: previously known as The Asbestos Range, it's been renamed Narawntapu, hitting the two related birds of aboriginal correctness and the promotion of tourism with the same stone. While we were there we had a rare and archetypal Aussie moment: we saw a small Tasmanian devil eating a wombat on a beautiful and remote stretch of coastline. You can see most of the fur has already been stripped off:
Seeing a devil out in the daytime is quite rare but in general the fluffy animals are easy to find. At Cradle just before dusk we walked out over a stretch of boardwalk with a ranger to see the wombats frisking around near their burrows. Before we'd even left the little car park a wombat came waddling along the road, holding up a couple of cars that were heading down to join us.
We have also been out a couple of times at night with John to see the possums that hang out by the retreat - Paula took the girls the night we arrived and I went with Zoe and a few other guests last night. Over the years that he's been here John's built up quite a rapport with one particular family and now they're quite tame and take little apple slices from him and his guests. On the way there and back the fields were alive with pademelons, which are a species of hare wallaby, having some of the characteristics of both. John says that they eat three times as much grass as sheep and so are an enemy of the local farmers, since they significantly reduce the number of productive animals they can keep; he says that there were hundreds of pademelons hopping around, which sounded right. These same farmers scoffed at John when he told them that he was feeding possums: "We don't feed possums, we shoot them!" I'm starting to sense what it might be about the place that AnTHony from the salon didn't take to.
As we headed into the forest where John has built a little shack for the possum encounters he claimed that, "there's nothing that can harm you here". I knew he would have to qualify this and after a long pause he did: "The only thing you have to look out for are the snakes". There are three types found on the island and they're all highly venomous. Nonetheless, John reassured his little gang of guests with the joke that, "if you found one in these temperatures you could use it as a walking stick". He undermined his own image by immediately going on to add that, "any self-respecting snake would hear us and be well out of our way before we got anywhere near it". And I know that his wife wont take people horse riding over midday for fear that the horses will be killed by a snake bite. Someone asked him about the quolls, an indigenous feral cat. John answered that the quolls only attack people when they feel cornered. Hmm. And they can say what they like but I wouldn't want to be accidentally running into a pack of Tasmanian devils. The ferocity with which they dismantled the wallaby at lunchtime was scary, and even dumb dozy horses don't always do what you expect them to. That's not the end of it: as we watched Cheeky the possum hanging upside down on a log I saw an inch-long insect and asked John if it was really an ant. He confirmed that it was, and that it had a nasty bite. And that there are other ants they get here whose bite can be fatal, "but not if you're only bitten once - people only die when they're bitten a few times".
While we were out last night we also looked for platypuses, but they proved elusive, although they're less elusive than the Tasmanian tiger. It is widely known that Tasmanian tigers are extinct, but apparently this is not really believed by the locals, including, it seems, John. As we sat around in the lounge waiting for it to get dark enough for the nocturnal animals to show, one curious American lady excitedly asked him about them. He opined that no-one knows whether they're extinct or not since there's so much unexplored land in Tassie, that several people he knows (himself included) have had sightings of what may be tigers and couldn't really be anything else, and that if anyone who truly liked the tigers actually saw one they would neither publicise the location nor keep any photos they might take. It was all getting very Scottish.
It's not only the fauna that's unusual here. Yesterday we drove past fenced fields of white to pale lilac poppies. Prohibition signs around the fields indicating that "Illegal use may cause DEATH" fuelled my suspicion that these were being grown under license to provide opiates, and I confirmed this later. They're used to make painkillers such as codeine and it's the only place south of the equator where the practice is legal.
We arrived here on Monday morning on the choppiest flight we've had since we left home. At the arrivals area there is no carousel, just an area where the luggage carts drive in and park, leaving passengers to grab their own bags. If I'd been a bit more awake I could have taken a photo of a party of Japanese chowing down mangoes as quickly as they could, having not realised that they wouldn't be able to bring them into the state, while two dogs and a cat were wheeled in with the luggage a couple of metres away and let straight through.
We're staying at a place that I found on the internet or Lonely Planet and it couldn't be better. Ignorance helped: if I'd been more knowledgeable I'd probably have picked a cabin by/in Cradle Mountain NP, and, while I'm sure they're equally good, where we are is a more secluded spot with easy access to at least as much quality walking. On the drive here we stopped to let an echidna cross the road and wallabies are all over the place. The very personable owner of our retreat, John, came over from South Africa six years ago. He lived in Cape Town but had to travel to Jo'burg a lot with work. I asked him if he preferred it here; he replied that he'd never been arm-robbed here and none of his friends had been the subject of brutal assault. (It seemed inappropriate to mention that Australia has the highest per capita reported incidence of serious assault of any country.)
We even have a little TV here, but it only gets a couple of grainy channels. I caught the last feature on the news the other night, which reported that it's now been proven that stress releases hormones that suppress the immune system and lead to a range of illnesses including cancer. I doubt that this concept of "stress AIDS" surprises anyone, though I know plenty of people who are in denial about it. Anyhow, with Morcheeba on my iPod, a cheap beach necklace on most days and tan lines from my Reef shoes burnt into my feet I'm having a good period of remission.
The only other TV program I've caught a few minutes of here was an Aussie film review show. Even though the two presenters spent most of my viewing minutes raving about Steve Martin (I must be the world's only non-fan) I liked the show: in England and the US these programmes are always presented by done-nothing-love-myself media types and it was refreshing to hear the girls on this show giving it some serious Aussie accent. Since then the TV has been unplugged so we can recharge our camera batteries.
The girls have space to run around here too, and there's even an indoor pool for them to splash around in.
I should report that just before we left Melbourne we went to see the latest Harry Potter film. In my opinion it was the best so far, and the girls particularly enjoyed listing the huge number of scenes that are in the book (which they've both read several times) and not the film, starting before we'd even left the cinema. Before the film started there was a nicely scripted interaction between a (real) girl in the audience and a character on screen. It was an ad for the local tech college and the first such exchange I've seen, though the idea is familiar from movies (I think The Purple Rose of Cairo was one such); I'm sure I'll see more.
The weather here has been very changeable: we arrived to sun and blue skies but by the time we'd settled in the rain had started, and the rain can be torrential. It should be over by this time of year, they say, but it's keeping the countryside verdant for our stay - usually everywhere starts to brown off by now.
We'd decided that we wanted to see Cradle Mountain so we drove there on Tuesday, despite the black clouds. There's a lake there called Dove Lake that has a gentle 6 km walk around it that we fancied but we gave into the rain after 15 or 20 minutes of pottering around the boardwalks near to the car park. The next day we drove there again with more resolve and did the walk despite the probability that the light rain would turn heavier. It did and we all got pretty wet, especially the girls. But it was such a beautiful place to be. If we return to Tassie, which I believe we shall, I'll probably arrange for at least some of us to walk the Overland Track, which starts in just this area and takes five or six days. We plan to scout out more of it before we leave.
We spent the dry hours of Wednesday morning at a wildlife centre, Trowunna, that specialises in Tasmanian devils. What will become of zoos? Zoos, as everyone really knows, are for seeing lions and tigers. Since caging animals is now unfashionable - partly because fashion-setters can see lions, at least, in more congenial settings, partly because there is more public sympathy for the evident psychosis induced in the animals by their enclosure and partly because zoologists probably have no appetite to seem like Coney Island freak show throwbacks - zoos have invented new purposes for themselves. At just the time that entertainment emerged as the dominant post-Christian US (and hence western) value zoos tried to rise above it. So, as elsewhere, there are two themes at Trowunna: the first is the miscellany of individual animals who are not viable in the wild - orphaned wombats, wing-damaged wedge-tailed eagles and so forth - and the second is the program to maintain a healthy population of devils, whose numbers are declining in the wild. Zoos, in this role as a display cabinet of creatures that environmental changes (usually caused by negligent people) are pushing to extinction, provide concrete evidence of the paradox in right wing thinking (if that's not an oxymoron). The doctrine of conservatism - the belief that people, particularly governments, are not smart enough to interfere with the status quo in a way that's likely to improve it - is incompatible with the doctrine of free markets, since free markets eliminate species that good Tories should want to see stay alive.
It's not possible to give a good estimate of how many devils there are on Tasmania but there's no doubt that the number is falling sharply as a consequence of the devil facial tumour disease (DFT), which is suspected to have been started by 1080, an agri-spray. As the devil population has tumbled the number of possums, wombats and wallabies has increased through reduced predation. All of this is approximately indexed in the roadkill. In Trowunna they believe that once a shot is developed to counter DFT they will be able to release some of their unaffected devils back into the wild to restore the population.
We got a little show at feeding time. The scientific bona fides of the person who did the talk became doubtful in my mind almost as soon as she started talking and referred to Tassie splitting off from Aus "thousands" of years ago; I'd assumed that it was much earlier than this but I checked later and it turns out that there was indeed a land bridge until 18,000 to 12,000 years ago. And she was very good with the animals.
Anyone who wanted to got to hold and stroke most of them, though the last of the animals we saw, the devils, could only be stroked. After we were done with stroking, she brought out a huge skeleto-muscular fragment of (I think) wallaby and clung onto it as the devils jumped up and started to tear off chunks. When she released it half a dozen to a dozen devils fell on it viciously. It was awesome to see how rapidly and effectively they ripped into the carcass, gripping onto it as tenaciously as we absolutists can hold a grudge. Uniquely, they eat not only the meat but everything else too: the guts, the fur, the bone; all that they're ever seen to leave is horn. They're the size of small dogs and have the jaw strength of crocodiles. As each of the animals manages to tear off a hunk of flesh it runs away with it pursued by others who want to snatch it for themselves. (Is it me or does anyone else find it disturbing to hear that they "love" their food?) If it wasn't for the chilling noise they make it would almost be cute. It was from this noise, we were told, that they acquired the name "devils": early catholic settlers could only think that such howls coming from the bush must be the cries of demons.
Yesterday we went to Devonport, the third largest town on the island. After our soaking the day before we locked the stable door by buying ourselves better waterproof gloves. Around the retreat we don't have a great choice of places to buy wine so we stocked up at a store in town, and had the new (for us) experience of buying alcohol at a drive-through bottle shop. They look miserable as the areas next to the car lanes are stacked with low price, high volume grog - I drove straight out of the first one as it was so grim but we found another and inside they had a good selection of wines. Since it got recommended to me a few years ago (someone please thank Mark Jefford) I've been drinking Ninth Island Pinot Noir, which is grown around here, though the locals seem to favour the wines from the mainland. John has formed the view that the locals here, being largely descended from convicts and soldiers who never wanted to be on the island, have inherited an attitude of surly resentment and (in recent generations) never having been anywhere else, don't realise the value of what they have. Whether right or wrong, this chimes with the book I'm reading here - English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. I've had this in my hands in book shops in England more than once and not bought it, but since it's set in (and about) Tasmania it was one of the books I was pleased to be able to buy in Melbourne. It's very entertaining and well worth a read even if you don't come here (but especially if you do).
The other reason we went to Devonport was that it's en route to a National Park I was keen to visit: previously known as The Asbestos Range, it's been renamed Narawntapu, hitting the two related birds of aboriginal correctness and the promotion of tourism with the same stone. While we were there we had a rare and archetypal Aussie moment: we saw a small Tasmanian devil eating a wombat on a beautiful and remote stretch of coastline. You can see most of the fur has already been stripped off:
Seeing a devil out in the daytime is quite rare but in general the fluffy animals are easy to find. At Cradle just before dusk we walked out over a stretch of boardwalk with a ranger to see the wombats frisking around near their burrows. Before we'd even left the little car park a wombat came waddling along the road, holding up a couple of cars that were heading down to join us.
We have also been out a couple of times at night with John to see the possums that hang out by the retreat - Paula took the girls the night we arrived and I went with Zoe and a few other guests last night. Over the years that he's been here John's built up quite a rapport with one particular family and now they're quite tame and take little apple slices from him and his guests. On the way there and back the fields were alive with pademelons, which are a species of hare wallaby, having some of the characteristics of both. John says that they eat three times as much grass as sheep and so are an enemy of the local farmers, since they significantly reduce the number of productive animals they can keep; he says that there were hundreds of pademelons hopping around, which sounded right. These same farmers scoffed at John when he told them that he was feeding possums: "We don't feed possums, we shoot them!" I'm starting to sense what it might be about the place that AnTHony from the salon didn't take to.
As we headed into the forest where John has built a little shack for the possum encounters he claimed that, "there's nothing that can harm you here". I knew he would have to qualify this and after a long pause he did: "The only thing you have to look out for are the snakes". There are three types found on the island and they're all highly venomous. Nonetheless, John reassured his little gang of guests with the joke that, "if you found one in these temperatures you could use it as a walking stick". He undermined his own image by immediately going on to add that, "any self-respecting snake would hear us and be well out of our way before we got anywhere near it". And I know that his wife wont take people horse riding over midday for fear that the horses will be killed by a snake bite. Someone asked him about the quolls, an indigenous feral cat. John answered that the quolls only attack people when they feel cornered. Hmm. And they can say what they like but I wouldn't want to be accidentally running into a pack of Tasmanian devils. The ferocity with which they dismantled the wallaby at lunchtime was scary, and even dumb dozy horses don't always do what you expect them to. That's not the end of it: as we watched Cheeky the possum hanging upside down on a log I saw an inch-long insect and asked John if it was really an ant. He confirmed that it was, and that it had a nasty bite. And that there are other ants they get here whose bite can be fatal, "but not if you're only bitten once - people only die when they're bitten a few times".
While we were out last night we also looked for platypuses, but they proved elusive, although they're less elusive than the Tasmanian tiger. It is widely known that Tasmanian tigers are extinct, but apparently this is not really believed by the locals, including, it seems, John. As we sat around in the lounge waiting for it to get dark enough for the nocturnal animals to show, one curious American lady excitedly asked him about them. He opined that no-one knows whether they're extinct or not since there's so much unexplored land in Tassie, that several people he knows (himself included) have had sightings of what may be tigers and couldn't really be anything else, and that if anyone who truly liked the tigers actually saw one they would neither publicise the location nor keep any photos they might take. It was all getting very Scottish.
It's not only the fauna that's unusual here. Yesterday we drove past fenced fields of white to pale lilac poppies. Prohibition signs around the fields indicating that "Illegal use may cause DEATH" fuelled my suspicion that these were being grown under license to provide opiates, and I confirmed this later. They're used to make painkillers such as codeine and it's the only place south of the equator where the practice is legal.
Posted: Fri - December 9, 2005 at 11:31 AM
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Published On: Dec 15, 2005 02:07 PM
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Published On: Dec 15, 2005 02:07 PM