Issue 7 – Into the Forest and Out of the Fire
Hello Defender subscribers!
I usually leave a personal note at the end of the newsletter but 🎉 new year, new me 🎉 or whatever it is we tell ourselves every time the calendar turns over once more. I hope the start of this year has been markedly better for you than the two that have preceded it. If I'm being honest, I wasn't sure I would be sending out another issue of Defender. I had a rough 2021, mental health-wise, and took a hiatus from writing and reporting in an effort to come back to myself. I often think of journalism as a kind of utilitarian art that, at its best, can help make sense of the horrors of the world while showing the beauty that persists despite it. But it's also fraught with the same challenges and insecurities as other creative pursuits and although I've been lucky to weather freelance life for a couple of years now, the second year of the pandemic was trying (as it probably was for you and everyone you know).
But we're back — kind of.
For the next couple of months, I'll be working on a longer, feature story along with a few potential investigative projects. Because of that, Defender's format is going to change a little. In addition to some short essays, I thought I could show you how the vegan sausage is made, so to speak. That means sharing some of the behind-the-scenes of reporting and writing with a specific focus on environmental justice journalism. I don't claim to know what I'm doing but I do enjoy reading about the ways in which other people approach their work, schedule their day, and plan for future projects so maybe it's time I share my own. (On a similar note, I highly recommend Mason Currey's newsletter, Subtle Maneuvers)
This current issue, however, is a throwback to a sort of personal-ish essay I wrote in early 2016. While the story is about climate change and the great outdoors, it's probably not a piece I'd write today and is certainly more unpolished than much of my work now. There is something to be said for raw, largely unedited dispatches from the frontlines of a world on fire (literally and metaphorically) and at the very least, it's interesting/depressing to see how the situation in Australia has only worsened in the years since. Also, Tasmania is dope.
Cheers to radical honesty,
Alessandra
Inside the silver billycan — a cooking pot that is deeper than it is wide and cheaper than it is sturdy — a small mountain of lentils is bubbling and spluttering, gently tapping at the underside of a closed lid. They are plump and steamy and make a squelching sound as though they are wading through mud rather than becoming the dahl that will soon be dinner. In the communal area of New Pelion Hut, the German couple we met on the first day of the hike is seated on the wooden picnic table near us. Usually, our conversation switches between pleasant nods and overviews of the trail so far. But right now, as they rehydrate their spaghetti bolognese in a room of ambiguous food smells, they bear the kind of ravenous expression that means there will be no chit-chat.
“I think it’s ready,” says my hiking partner who is seated across the table.
But before I have the chance to dish out the thick lentil dahl, take the billycan off the stove or even turn off the gas, Eric the ponytailed ranger gathers our attention.
“Because of the bushfire near Mount Oakleigh,” he says. “Everyone is going to be evacuated, a helicopter will be here in an hour.”
I look at my hiking buddy. At the billycan. Then at our German friends at the other picnic table, looking at their own simmering dinner. Someone asks whether we can wait to pack up our tents.
“So long as you’re ready when the helicopter arrives,” Eric says.
Another hiker asks where we’ll be going — to the start of the trail or, further along, the track? Eric doesn’t know. Then someone asks what is on everyone’s mind — can we eat dinner first?
“Just be ready,” he replies.
After a few days of coughing through smoke as though we are kindling in some kind of huge fireplace, the news of an evacuation was no surprise. Yet amid the drama of a bushfire, one so close it could burn through this flammable eucalyptus forest and chase the straps of our backpacks, this fixation on food can mean only one thing — it is past five o’clock and we are all bloody hungry.
Blue skies throughout the first day of hiking with a cushion plant (foreground) at the foothills of Cradle Mountain. Photo by A Bergamin
For the past three days, I have been hiking Tasmania’s Overland Track, a trail that crawls more than 50 miles from the saddle-shaped peak of Cradle Mountain to the glycerine tides of Australia’s deepest lake, Lake St. Clair. While it lacks the distance of the Pacific Crest Trail, the fame of the Camino de Santiago, or the Mars-like desertscape of Australia’s own Larapinta Trail, it is fiercely popular, sometimes booked out months in advance, and often makes lists of the world’s best long walks. It is not unfounded popularity, either. As we planned our hike, I swooned over photos of distant mountain ranges, dreamed of summiting rocky peaks, and imagined a blissful eight days spent in the company of a broad landscape verdant with eucalypts, King Billy pine trees, and fern-like pandani. In fact, there is a photo — easily found by a Google search — of the exact view from the wide porch of New Pelion Hut. It builds from a low brush of button grass, staked with skinny and windswept eucalyptus and backdropped to the north by Mount Oakleigh and its dolerite spires, piercing the sky like the devil’s teeth.
But when I arrived at the hut and stood on that porch, nature had largely erased itself. In place of mountains and eucalypts was an opaque white smoke that choked out the cornflower blue sky, the dolerite peaks, and even the distant buttongrass trailing to the mountain’s base. It was a Turner type of landscape — a series of fuzzy shapes that suggested the presence of something greater. And it was deeply, almost cruelly disappointing.
At New Pelion, Eric has returned to the ranger hut, leaving in his absence a muddle of hikers gathering dirty boots and rolling up sleeping mats. We pack up the stove, gather our cooking utensils, and trudge back to our campsite in a flat, grass clearing beneath a circle of towering gums trees. Earlier that day, we descended from the buttongrass moorlands that sprawled out toward the mountains in a series of red-tinged tufts to the first real sheltered forest of the hike. Frog Flats, the literal low point of the trail, was a damp and moss-laden myrtle-beech rainforest watered by the Forth River and home to leatherwood trees, sassafras, and in the right season, fungi. Today, there was just one sun-sapped specimen of beech orange, growing on a myrtle tree like a shriveled golf ball. This section of the forest, however, was enchanting in the way that I imagine the Pacific Northwest or some patch of New Zealand to be, and its dampness offered some respite from the thick smoke — even for a few miles.
Emerging from the forest, we strode across another length of alpine grassland, this time following a horse trail built in 1898 to serve a now-defunct copper mine. At a fork in the path, we encountered a fellow hiker.
“You missed happy hour!” he says with a grin.
We met Steve — a Canadian living in Chicago traveling in Australia — on the first day of the hike at Waterfall Valley and soon became familiar with his infectious, cartoon-like laugh that rose at the end of each chuckle. From Steve, we learned that the hut was full, the track to the north of us was maybe closed and the sky — in the form of ash — was falling. We decided to make camp later and dropping our packs, followed the side path toward historic Old Pelion Hut.
At New Pelion Hut. Photo by A Bergamin.
The Overland Track, even in its isolation, is strewn with reminders of Tasmania’s colonial history, a history that involves not only the eradication of species like the thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger, but also Tasmania’s indigenous population, the Palawa. Over decades, a stream of explorers, whalers, sealers, convicts, and eventually settlers would arrive in Tasmania, each leaving the indigenous population — a previously isolated group of people — vulnerable to disease, and later, violence.
Following the Black War of the late 1820s, the remaining Palawa were persuaded by a missionary — George Augustus Robinson — to relocate to Flinders Island with the assurance that they would be returned to their land. The families at Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment were again decimated by disease and only 47 Palawa were returned to Tasmania in 1847. In this context, it is difficult to reconcile such an oppressive, callous past — the effects of which still linger today — with the sheer natural beauty of Australia’s island state. But perhaps, as Matthew Power wrote, wildness is that which survives the brutality thrust upon it. And Tasmania has been close to losing its wildness too.
It was only in the 1980s, following a fierce battle between conservationists, loggers, and hydroelectric supporters, that the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area — an area which includes the Cradle Mountain Lake St. Clair National Park — was established. Among these conservationists were the descendants of the Palawa. Nearly a century after their ancestors were forced off their land, they stood against the damming of the Franklin River to preserve a parcel of land that is crossed by a single highway, covers some 20 percent of Tasmania and is one of the world’s last great swathes of temperate rainforest.
Yet, it would be foolish to think that anything, especially when pitched against a state’s flailing economy, is truly safe. In 2014, the Australian Government led by then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, proposed delisting the wilderness area from its World Heritage Site status to allow the logging of trees within protected areas. The proposal was rejected by the World Heritage Committee that same year and, for now, has been honoured by both the federal and state governments.
Back at New Pelion Hut, it is about 6 pm. The sun is low and the sky is all beige and white. We are seated on a log beside our tent. Our half-packed backpacks are nearby. The billycan of dahl is at our feet, lid on. In the camp clearing, other hikers are seated obediently by their belongings. We are all waiting for the last minute, or five when we will pack up our tents and mats and board a helicopter to someplace else.
Tonight, that moment will not come. Eric will soon gather us to announce that no helicopter is coming. It has instead been diverted to the white waters of the Franklin River for an emergency greater than our own. We are told to wake up early, pack up quickly, and hike on. No camping away from the huts. No stoves along the track. Maybe, we will be evacuated tomorrow.
But seated on the log, we have no way of knowing this. Instead, we tuck into dinner — two spoons, one billycan, a bunch of lentils — and finally, our hunger is satiated. Around us, the air swirls with fine grey, white flecks of ash that crumble when touched. They fall like fresh snow powder, dissolving before it reaches the ground.
The view from New Pelion Hut moments after being informed of our impending (faux) evacuation. Photo by A Bergamin.
It is the first day of the hike, January 25th, and we are en route to Waterfall Valley via the peak of Cradle Mountain. We have left our packs in a small shack at the foot of the mountain and begin a slow and steady climb. Toward the top, we scramble and crawl over rust-colored dolerite boulders until we reach its peak at more than 5,000 feet. The sky is perfect — a crisp blue with cumulus clouds puffed like cotton candy, stretching to the horizon. To the southwest rises the flat-topped peak of Barn Bluff. But to the west are huge, gray plumes of smoke that billow from a dozen or so fires ignited ten days before.
Unlike Australia’s red desert heart where fire is not only a land management tool but also the sole means of germination for dormant plant species, Tasmania’s alpine area was not one forged in flames. While large-scale fires are said to have occurred around 10,000 years ago, they increased with the arrival of Europeans and pastoralism. Since the World Heritage declaration, they have been somewhat controlled through the prohibition of campfires. But something like a dry lightning storm is harder to control and while these fires were caused by nature, they are hardly a natural event.
A report from the Australian Climate Council describes the way in which climate change is affecting all three factors that make a bushfire possible that is: ignition, fuel, and weather. While these factors interact in complex ways, it can be said that climate change is providing both the dry, hot weather conditions conducive to bushfires and also the kind of storms that ignite them. Ecosystems such as Tasmania’s alpine region with its slow-growing, long-lived flora species are particularly vulnerable and the consequences can be irreversible.
It was only months after I hiked the Overland Track that I saw photos of the source of those plumes of smoke — that is, the fire damage to some 177,915 acres of wilderness within the Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair and Walls of Jerusalem National Parks. It is a stretch of soot and ash and charred forest that bears the same horror and beauty of Sebastio Salgado’s images of burning Kuwaiti oil fields. Stands of 1,000-year-old King Billy pines and pencil pines, remnants of species that evolved on the ancient landmass of Pangaea and whose close relatives are the Californian redwood, have been burned. The Nothofagus, Australia’s only native deciduous beech whose ancestors grow on the slopes of the Andes, are gone. Then, there are the humble cushion plants.
A personal hiking favorite, the cushion plant is a compact, mini ecosystem ingeniously designed to survive Tasmania’s inclement weather. Throughout the landscape they appear, as the name suggests, like bright green cushions — firm and bulbous and made up of several flora species including the tiny white flowering alpine sundew. By being grouped in mounds cushion plants can better cope with icy winds and frequent snow, as well as raise the temperature within to prevent their water supply from freezing.
The cushion plant, designed with all the right specifications for what it should be and where it should be, is, in fact, a microcosm of a much bigger problem. Like many natural environments and individual species, its sturdy appearance belies its fragile existence. Our Overland Track guide, issued by the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, says that a cushion plant can take some thirty years to recover from a single misplaced boot step. Now, in these photos from the fire, they are just piles of soot, yellowed on top. How will they — how will anything — recover from this?
A cushion plant and its intricate ecosystem. Photo by A Bergamin.
It is sunrise and someone, somewhere, is laughing. It is a rolling, cackling laugh that switches from a series of ha-has to a dolphin-like chortle. Perhaps, they are laughing at us. Laughing at a failed evacuation, at an opaque sky, at an eclipsed mountain view. But this is a familiar laugh. It is that of the stout-bodied, long-billed kookaburra — a species native to eastern Australia but introduced in these parts.
Outside our tent, we are surrounded by animal scat from the possums and quolls and (we hope) Tasmanian devils, who screeched and squealed at the night. The sky is still a shade of off-white but it is balmy and warm. We could almost be in the tropics. The kookaburra laughs again.
Our hike starts by following Douglas Creek before beginning a gradual ascent to Pelion Gap. While the busy period of the Overland Track from October to May operates on a strict reservation system, this hike has felt particularly overcrowded. I had hoped for solitude and isolation, or at least the feeling of it, but without the option of camping away from the hut or taking less frequented side-trails, we are rarely alone. This section of balmy myrtle forest with its palm-like pandani, King Billy pine and blanket of neon moss, however, is quiet and still. We linger.
Today, there has been much talk of skipping huts. One guy, a kind of fitness bro who talks plenty but says nothing, has been telling anyone who will listen that he plans to complete the trail in four days, skipping a few huts and opting for the ferry back to Cynthia Bay. Normally, he would be the exception. But between the smoky air, the smoky sky, and at one hut, the smoky drinking water, morale is low and whispers of ‘getting the hell outta here’ are growing louder.
“What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” wrote American naturalist and author Henry David Thoreau in his 1861 treatise, Walking, penned seven years after Walden. What Thoreau did not anticipate, however, was a walk in the woods — without the woods there. When we arrive at Pelion Gap, a flat valley expanse between Tasmania’s highest point of Mount Ossa and Mount Pelion East, the dolerite mountains are only teasing outlines, existing solely behind a veil of smog.
We are, unfortunately, used to this landscape by now. The previous day, we had stopped at a lookout in the hope of seeing the dramatic glacial valley and giant eucalyptus forest promised. We saw nothing. At the lookout, I chatted with Peter who was hiking with his two adult children. Like most people on the track, they were disappointed there was nothing to see. And they were right. This is big country — mountains and boulders and broad, scenic views — for which you would walk through rainstorms and cross rivers to see. But it had become small.
So then, for what do we hike?
An echidna waddles across the buttongrass moorland largely oblivious to the smoky scene around us (and the hikers gawking at it). Photo by Alessandra Bergamin.
There is the mental and physical challenge of such a backpacking trip. Or, the meditative nature of walking, of placing one foot in front of the other with the sureness that the earth will catch the weight beneath our feet. In the age of Instagram, there’s also the opportunity to be an adventurer — real or imagined — to hashtag a photo just so, and show that you have been places that others perhaps have not. Of course, I am guilty of this.
But then there are the things which surround us, the nature itself. There are the snow peppermint gums with tan, orange, and gray-streaked bark, the curled white tendrils of the flowering guitar plant, the yellow brushlike flowers of the silver banksia, and the thick crust of lichens in yellows and oranges and greens padding the trees and the rocks and the wooden poles of trail markers. Then there is the yellow eye of the clever and crowlike Currawong, the deliberate waddle of a short-beaked echidna, and the midnight shrieks of an imagined Tasmanian devil. But beyond the beauty, what we are really watching are the effects of climate change in real-time. And it already feels like it's too late.
From the quiet of the bush, there is a whirring, buzzing, humming sound. Ever since the scenic tour helicopters disappeared near Cradle Mountain, we have not heard anything even slightly mechanical. But, outside, there is an unmistakable motoring. A crowd has gathered on the porch of the hut. Everyone stares at the sky, mouths ajar, eyes wide. Hovering before us is a red and yellow four-blade helicopter with ‘police’ emblazoned across the side.
“Are they coming for us?” someone says as if we are witnessing the landing of a UFO.
The helicopter lands. The blades continue to whip the air. There is silence. Then, four people clamber out. They put on their packs and walk toward us. More silence. Finally, someone says hello. Everyone laughs. The nervous quiet has broken. The helicopter makes two more trips to this hut, carrying about ten hikers two days ahead on the trail. Amanda, another ranger, soon arrives. “The track is officially closed now,” she says. “Until further notice.” We are alone. All forty or so people cramped and camped at a hut designed for twenty. But we are still technically evacuating. That is, we are evacuating ourselves on foot. Walking further and further, out of the fire.
After the heavens opened, the sky began to clear. Photo by A Bergamin.
It is early evening at Kia Ora hut and we have just finished dinner. Since the helicopters left, there has been a stormy downpour with the rain falling heavy and cold. While the dampness has lured out the thin and tensile Tasmanian leaches, it is certainly welcome. Rain will smother the fires, stifling their hurried advances and wash away some of the smoke, albeit temporarily.
Outside, the air smells like a storm, the ground is muddy, the plants are glossy. The world is suddenly alive. Heavy rain clouds begin to drift away, revealing a patchy blue sky. The nearby Kia Ora stream cascades and bubbles. Crickets chirp. From the empty tent platform opposite our own, there is an opening in the trees and, slowly, Cathedral Mountain comes into view. People rush to find their cameras and a small crowd gathers once again to stare at the sky.
The heavens have spectacularly opened, and for a moment it seems the hand of humanity is slight. We watch as pink-tinged clouds and gentle mist rises from rocky columns and peaks, revealing dolerite folds in an otherwise flat cliff face. Below, the forest runs thick and deep, concealing the upper reaches of the Mersey River. It is big country. It is what we have come to see. It is nature — unpredictable, beautiful, frustrating — in its holiest of forms. And we, it's most rapacious of pilgrims, can do little but watch.
If you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee, or check out my Bookshop page. Any money donated or earned through affiliate links will be reinvested in my work. Thank you to everyone who has supported me so far — it is so very appreciated.
You can also follow me on Twitter (where I’m mostly a lurker), or on Instagram (which comes with photos of my dog). Otherwise, feel free to reply to this email and we’ll chat!
Thank you for once again reading Defender. Rage On. ❤️🔥