Wild

[Letter of the Issue] KNOWN UNKNOWNS I read with interest Megan Holbeck’s ‘To Plan or Not to Plan’ article in Wild Issue #185, and overall I agree with her thesis: “Through the sheer amount of planning, I felt they’d removed most of the adventure.” As Anthony Sharwood points out in his great book From Snow to Ash, dealing with the unknown is both a challenge and a reward of adventurous activities. To illustrate the point let me relate an example from one of my adventures. In October 2020, I was a member of a group of septuagenarians (the oldest in his 80th year) who decided to walk from Katoomba to Mittagong. This walk was well documented in an edition of Bushwalks in the Sydney Region, so what could go wrong? Our first taste of…

“THE NEXT RAPID IS GRADE 5 and we’ll need to portage,” our friend and guide, Barny Young, told us as we paddled downriver toward the thundering whitewater. “Just wait for the water to surge up, climb onto the rock, then throw your boat down the other side and jump on top before it floats away!” Barny grabbed my partner’s arm and hauled her onto the rock, boat and paddle in hand, before it could be sucked into the rapid. Below this set of rapids, we found ourselves in the most beautiful, peaceful gorge either of us had ever seen (pictured on the cover). Electric-blue water coloured by rock dust from glacial melt flowed between tall schist walls. The gruelling walk in, the difficult portages and the risk were all worth it,…

“Early in 1976, a young doctor from New South Wales “Early joined a rafting trip which changed his life.” So wrote Rob Mitchell in the opening sentence of his story that, back in 1983, ran in Wild Issue #7, the subject of which was Bob Brown. The trip, of course, was down the Franklin. Paul Smith, a forester from Launceston, had been casting around for people to join on a rafting trip down the then little-known Franklin River. He’d asked fifteen or twenty people; they’d all turned him down. But Bob didn’t. Despite having no real paddling experience, and despite the fact that before that point no-one had hitherto paddled the Franklin in inflatable rafts, he decided to join Paul. To prepare for the trip, he practised paddling beforehand a little…

Andrew Jenour paddling into Western Creek where it meets the Meander River in Northern Tasmania. Much of this area is cleared farmland, but the pockets of forest clinging to waterways create narrow corridors of ‘almost-wilderness’ to explore. This day we were dropped a few kilometres upstream and leisurely steered the packrafts back to a secluded campsite beside the river. by LACHLAN GARDINER DJI Mavic Pro 2, f2.8, 1/120, ISO 100 Ben Armstrong rappels into the lush sinkhole above Arakis Cave in Tasmania. Below this is an abyssal, vertical shaft that plunges seemingly forever into midnight darkness. The bottom is seldom visited, with only a couple of recorded visits. by SHAUN MITTWOLLEN Nikon Z7, Nikkor Z 14-30mm f/4S, f5.6, 1/50, ISO 640 After Alex Mougenot, Kyle Addy and I rapped into the mouth of the beast that…

Forty years ago, on 14th December 1982, the Franklin Blockade began after a seven year campaign failed to stop work on the Gordon-below-Franklin dam. Six months later, with the Hawke government elected, the High Court stopped the dam, but not before $70 million had been spent by Tasmania’s Hydro-Electric Commission. During the controversy, HEC supremo Russell Ashton complained that “if parliament is to work through popular decisions, we are doomed here and we are doomed around the world.” He was speaking for the power-brokers on Earth who want to bulldoze nature for profitable conversion into human-desired dead stuff, regardless of what humans really desire. The result is unique. In my lifetime, Earth’s wildlife numbers have dropped by 75 per cent. Abraham Lincoln warned that corporations were out to “seize the throne of democracy”…

In three days of walking, we saw only a handful of people. Instead of humans, we saw nature. We watched whales splash in a sheltered bay, followed cliffs along the coast, the red rock contrasting beautifully with the blue sea. The sun was out, the weather perfect—we walked in T-shirts and shorts and stopped to swim at empty, sandy beaches, squealing with the July cold. This wonderland of winter walking was the Light to Light walk near Eden, on the South Coast of NSW, in the newly renamed Beowa National Park (previously Ben Boyd). Nine of us walked the 30km track, a trip that’s been on my rather long list for a couple of decades. For the last 14 years, it’s been kids that have stopped me, the logistics of carrying, complaining…