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Imagine, if you can, the
southern portion of the West Coast of Tasmania between Macquarie
Harbour and Port Davey. The coast is a lee shore, wreck-strewn and
windswept, where short beaches alternate with great headlands of
rock ending in broken, knife-edged reefs, the whole guarded on the
land side by a barrier of toughly twisted scrub. Between this
barrier and the mountains behind run, in some places, button-grass
plains—strips of hilly country covered with high tussocks of
button-grass and broken by steep gullies choked with scrub. These
orange-green plains are not so easy to negotiate as they look from
the heights of the mountains, but when floundering and cutting a way
through the scrub one thinks of them as a paradise of open going. To
the west of this coast is an ocean whose nearest shore is Patagonia,
and to the east a week or more of travel through an almost
terrifying, though beautiful, desolation of mountains, gorges, and
scrub.
In this large-scale setting
our party of six small human beings walked in pairs, one couple
being far ahead. The central pair were women, my cousin and myself,
lurching with our packs between the waist-high tussocks. My cousin
fell and swore wholeheartedly, expressing to my satisfaction the
feelings I had not the breath to express for myself. But the West
Coast, which, through the years, has taken such a heavy toll of
ships and lives, does not tamely submit to the hard words of woman.
The next moment, while going down a steep bank the button-grass
tripped my companion, who fell again, her pack swinging her outwards
while her foot remained caught between the tussocks. There were two
nasty cracks and a cry of pain ; the Coast had made us pay for our
temerity with a broken leg. In addition to the pain, the victim was
for the moment overwhelmed by recognition of our awkward situation.
Our party was on the return journey, but we were still two days of
heavy going from our base, a fishing ketch at Port Davey.
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