Devil's Playground: Southern Gothic

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Outside Magazine November 2002

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Devil's Playground: Southern Gothic
Trek the Bay of Fires and soak in Tasmania's wild northeastern shores

By Tony Perrottet


	Not even convict settlers could tame this landscape: Tasmania's South Cape coastline (Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Corbis).

ON ONE OF TASMANIA'S remotest beaches, I was awakened by the screams of devils in the night—a sound that was, in the sinister words of Tassie novelist Richard Flanagan, "like that of a woman being strangled." Personally, I thought they sounded more like hissing vampires. Perhaps I'd been reading too much about Tassie's 19th-century colonial days, when the island was settled as a British penal colony and the convicts thought these marsupials were tormented souls in the bush. To calm my imagination, I fumbled for a flashlight and staggered out of my canvas tent into the night: There was nothing to see but the empty, ominous scrub, rustling in the damp sea wind.

The next morning, as I continued on my 18-mile hike along the island's northeastern coast, my nightmares evaporated in the warm South Pacific sun. Beach after beach stretched into the distance. The sand was paper white; giant round boulders, covered in a scaly orange lichen called xanthoria, glistened like salmon roe all along the virgin shore; the horizon sparkled an indigo blue.

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Tasmania's past is so outrageously gothic that it was hard to reconcile with the candy-bright pageant before me. Tortured convicts would escape their chain gangs and plan to walk to China, I hazily recalled; many got lost in the wilderness and turned into cannibals. Most of Tasmania's landscape suits its history: wild, wet, fungal, and mountainous, battered by gales and shrouded in bone-chilling mist. At night, you can sense the ghosts just outside the tent flaps. But come dawn, the haunted shore looks suspiciously like paradise—Tahiti with eucalyptus trees, suffused with piercing light. This helps explain why the recently inaugurated Bay of Fires Walk—named after the most spectacular of the many coves on this forgotten coastline—has become the hot ticket for nature lovers from mainland Australia. I was hiking with nine urban Aussies, guided by a pair of feisty Tasmanian country girls in their twenties. On the four-day excursion, we would follow the surf line for almost 20 miles through 34,345-acre Mount William National Park, the least visited refuge in the least visited Australian state, spending the first night in a canvas-covered beach tent and the last two in the luxurious Bay of Fires Lodge.

Remoteness has long been Tasmania's trademark, and these days obscurity is quite a PR boon. Tassie is one of the few places on earth to report an increase in travelers after 9/11. "We're safe, we're clean, we're a hell of a long way from anywhere else," one local shrugged. (Statistics are charmingly vague, but foreign arrivals appear to increase by about 25 percent every year.)

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Sydney-born Tony Perrottet has written travel guides to Australia, Melbourne, and other destinations, and contributes to publications such as Outside, Esquire, Civilization, Escape, Islands, Blue, Travel Holiday, and the U.K.'s Sunday Times.