It’s quite disorientating, or perhaps weirdly orientating, being in Tasmania.
If you open Google Maps, that little blue dot puts you as close to Antarctica as you’re ever likely to get unless you’ve got a heap of money for a tour down there, which, admittedly, would be pretty incredible. Anyone wanna lend me $20K Australian? If you come from the south of Australia, chances are you've looked out to see a lot and imagined that almost mythical icy land mass. You might have even known people to work out there. Admired the Sea Shephard fighting Japanese whalers in its surrounding waters.
I do love this cold southern ocean. There’s a feeling of standing at the edge of things, like the world just runs out if you keep going south. But it’s not just empty. There’s movement out there too, animals and people, waves, wind, saltstreams.
Every so often, ships pass through - icebreakers and research vessels making their way back from Antarctica toward Hobart. You can stand on a quiet beach and watch something that’s just come from the bottom of the world, cutting a slow line across the horizon. There's sailboats too, breezing along, seals, dolphins, seabirds, clouds. The low Autumnal sun.
Even so, there are more mainlanders here now, and plenty of people moving from the bigger part of Australia chasing something quieter, wilder, more beautiful. A place that still feels like it has space in it, wildness, freedom. People used to leave Tassie to get jobs and go to uni on the mainland and never make it back - now it seems people flock there or return to their roots. There's hikers and explorers and climbers and surfers, people drifting, sailing, fighting for the environment. It feels like a last frontier.
Every time I come here, I end up back in that same feeling: just looking out at the sea and thinking about how far away everything else is. How it'd be easy to be cut off from the mainland if a disaster stopped the planes and boats coming. There's understandable a lot of climate fiction set in Tassie.
Here, we're on Hope’s Beach, on the South Arm, Nipaluna (another word for Hobart), is one of those places you wouldn’t find unless you knew it was there. A dirt track leads you down to a wide stretch of sand that feels tucked away from everything - no asphalted carpark or paid for parking. There’s often surf here, usually big, messy waves even when it’s onshore and a bit chaotic. Not like the calmer beaches on the other side of the bay I’ve written about before - and it's a place local surfers will flock to even if it's tiny, particularly when it's clean and offshore like this weekend.
When I go there, it’s usually to watch Tam surf. She’s a strong surfer, much fitter than me, and tends to take on bigger waves without hesitation - her Dad was a big wave surfer. On this particular day though, there’s barely any swell at all. So we just take the dog for a walk and end up swimming in the freezing water anyway.
It’s icy, a whole 3 degrees colder than home, which makes a difference. Still, it’s refreshing. It knocks the edge off everything, like washing out the red wine from the night before. I tend to just experience cold as a sensation these days not a warning to squeal and get the fuck out. I'm safe, there, held for a moment.
Tam does end up paddling out into the tiny waves regardless, chasing whatever little ocean fix she can get. I sit on the sand watching, the sun low in the sky all day, warm but with that persistent Tasmanian chill underneath it. The light starts getting afternoony golden way earlier than home - by 3, it feels like it's getting dark.
The beach is littered with shellsp - pipis, mussels, oyster shells - washed in from the harbour and the bay. We don't know how safe they are to eat, though the air is cleaner than anywhere in teh world.
Looking out to sea, Betsy Island sits low on the horizon, just another marker in a chain of land and water that’s always been about passage, but seems like a cool place to have a shack, if you wanted an island off an island off an island and to be totally isolated. I wonder if it is 'owned'.
We bring the dog down because of his separation anxiety. He’s a sweetheart, mostly, but spends a lot of time staring out at the water waiting for Tam to come back in, and barely tolerates me. Though he does eventually decide I’m useful enough to carry him up the sanddune because he does have very short legs and he is very, very old.
On the walk back, black cockatoos move through the pines, breaking open cones. There's more than I've ever seen in one place before - some forty of them, making a noise and chucking pine cones.
I love Tassie, so much.
