Truchanas Huon Pine Forest
Across the Gordon dam and down the Denison River, Southwest Tasmania.
March – April 2023
Consider a forest that breathes unseen millennia.
A dark river flows through it, scored with broken timber and stony islands. Crowded with foliage. To the west, shy hostile mountains.
Your eyeballs on this river are filled with warm brown and viridescent rays, rainstrewn blown highlights, shadowy banks collecting foam at the extent of your reach. The day layered in colours and quiet threats.
It is misty and wet. You’re soaked through. You are resilient, yes sure, but your body is officesoft and your arms are acid. You’re made of beer and code commits and it’s fuck me cold on the water. You’ve paddled an inflatable over drowned contours, camped on silt and desolation, pushed through horizontal falling turtle useless on your back, to be floating here.
You breathe in the world as you drift down the river, swept into little rapids and languid bends.
It flows slowly mostly and kicks in at times.
Consider your tools and your technical garments. You have everything you need, even as the constant moisture clouds your camera’s insides. You may leave with your mind’s eye memories.
Relax—you’re floating through the forest, down this wondrous stretch of water that wouldn’t otherwise be here but for the voices raised for it. Your chest trembles under fleece but you’re safe enough, wrapped in your thousands of dollars of plastic and seated in several thousand more.
Olegas’ forest comprises the most significant stand of Huon pine remnant in the world. Huon pine is some of the oldest living stuff on the planet. These trees perhaps easy upwards of a 1,000 years old—fresh, vibrant, aromatic. Their delicate fronds overhang your craft.
Rest your paddle. Reach out and touch the trees. Brush history. Your fingertips. The needles soft, overhanging your craft. Your outstretched hand, your shivering body. The scent in your nostrils. The slanted light and shadow, the quiet and mist. The waters, the rocks beneath.
Can you sense the future? What does it feel like? How does it smell?
This whole tract of Tasmania is imperilled. Wild fires, often caused by an increasing volume of dry lightning strikes, combined with prolonged abnormally dry conditions across the Southwest, threaten the survival of these delicate wet perennial ecosystems.
If the forest burns, it’s not coming back. 60,000 years of human experience played out in a couple centuries of destruction.
It’s truly fucking wet right now though.
You camp sodden ensconced in forest. A dense understory, moss and fern and branches uneven every which way. Punctuated with these feathery trees. You pick an angle and stumble down a knoll into a stream likely untouched by anyone. Your mate moves on a bare five metres and you lose each other for half an hour, sound swallowed, your line of sight woven and broken by miniature vignettes too complex to compose on a logical plane. Back at the river bank you sink the last of your whiskey and talk things.
How many voices, raised in this forest? Does it matter?
Next day the river flows stronger. You pull from the water before you’re swept into Marriotts Gorge. From the ridgeline above, Olegas Bluff is a shifting monument in cloud. A buttongrass stem jabs you good in the eye as you pull your body higher. The sky darkens the scrub thins. Fingers nimble as rice on a tweeter cone, you set camp bonefrozen somewhere high on the Hamiltons.
The forest and the river lost below.
When we look around, the time is rapdily approaching when natural environment, natural unspoiled vistas are sadly beginning to look like left-overs of a vanishing world.
This vanishing world is beautiful beyond our dreams and contains in itself rewards and gratifications never found in artificial landscape, or man-made objects, so often regarded as exciting evidence of a new world in the making.
—Olegas Truchanas, 1971 1
1. Olegas Truchanas, quoted in Max Angus, The World of Olegas Truchanas (Hawthorn:Australian Conservation Foundation), 51.