The Tyndall Range and its surrounds, located 30 minutes north of Queenstown, has been selected by the Tasmanian government for development as the state’s next “iconic walk”. Since the walk was first announced in 2019, it has been hugely controversial with environmental groups and local bushwalkers questioning the selection process and the walk’s impact on the Tyndalls’s sensitive alpine environments. Now, the final route has been tweaked and released to the public in a series of information sessions held around the state this month, with public viewings of the plan finishing up in Hobart last month.

To read our full story about the future of the Tyndall Range and our experiences hiking there, visit our new website at www.awildland.com.au.

The Long Tarns

A new blog is now live on our website so jump over to awildland.com.au and click on 'Stories' in the top menu to read all about a winter walk to the Long Tarns in Tasmania.

Long Tarns is right on the eastern border of the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, where it abuts The Great Western Tiers. 

This story was written primarily to accompany a new online exhibition of Craig’s photos, themed along our encounters with ice. The exhibition is also live now on our new website. The temporary show is called Pro Tempore - Ice.

What’s it mean? Pro Tempore is Latin for “for the time being”. That’s Ice, right. But also that is the exhibition - the images will only be available to view until the 21st August 2024. To accompany the exhibition is the new story.

Jump straight to the exhibition with this link - https://www.awildland.com.au/pro-tempore

Or straight to the story with this link - https://www.awildland.com.au/stories/the-long-tarns

If you want to be kept up-to-date with future images, stories, products and news then why not subscribe to the awildland website. We won’t bother you with regular emails or newsletters but subscribing does give you early notification of new content. There's a subscription button at the bottom of every page on the website. 

Visit the future of awildland

It all began here at our long-serving, hard working little blog page - a free, open access site detailing our many Australian adventures. But now...we are mixing things up a little and we have (finally) launched our own dedicated website with a changing gallery of never before seen images, new stories and even (possibly) prints and gifts - awildland.com.au. 

But we still love this blog page. It's not going anywhere. Our first blog was published here in 2012. Now the page boasts 137 posts detailing adventures from every state and territory in Australia. It has always been a place for us to hone our crafts and express our love of adventure, exploration and the Australian landscape. 

But, if you have been a regular visitor to this blog or followed our socials, you probably noticed that it all went really quiet in 2020.  

The lapse had many causes - changes in writing motivation and writing time were the main two. Even the simplest of blogs takes many hours of research, writing, and compilation but our commitment to spreading the word about adventure and nature also earnt us nothing. We have always kept this page ad-free and subscription free. And for the blog to continue, we felt we needed something to supplement or supercharge the motivation required to keep blogging. 

So we took a step back, enjoyed our adventures for a while, wrote and photographed for ourselves. Thinking all the time of how to mix things up.  

The end result is a new website! A fresh look and a slightly different approach. 

You can visit us at awildland.com.au

The website gives us greater flexibility and the chance to be more dynamic and varied as well as giving us a platform to promote our professional writing and photography. 

At awildland.com.au our plan is to make the photo gallery ever-changing; with the best on offer and not always tied to a story. We've started small, with themed galleries, but already it contains many never-before-published images. These images stand alone as things of beauty and exploration. The blog posts may be less frequent but still informative with a stronger focus on the story they have to tell, the histories in place and the things we can all do to ensure nature thrives into the future. 

awildland.blogspot.com.au will continue to exist as an archive, as long as blogspot exists. We may move some of the more relevant pieces to the new website and all new blogs will appear there rather than here. 

The idea is to evolve - us and this site; for the blog to evolve with nature and its voice.

Pawenyapeena (Spring); Lake Belton, Tasmania

And winter only just turned over on that man-made bureaucracy known as a calendar as we set off walking for two nights and three days of sanity saving spring sunshine - finally, a three day forecast of no rain; clear skies. It is spring; technically, and, I’ll come back to that later.

The aim of this trip is to introduce two new awildland team members to the world of wild places. Blue and Yella are secondhand packrafts purchased months earlier. They have been waiting patiently in the garage as winter cold fronts have swept, one after the other, over the Tasmanian mountains. They’ve heard rumours of snow camping and frozen boots. They’ve seen the awildland team returning wet to the bones. They’ve glimpsed photos of white-capped mountains and ice-covered tarns. Now it’s spring. This is to be their maiden voyage. We choose something simple for this first adventure, and, it turns out something totally sublime. 

Standing Guard - The Sentinel Range, Tasmania

Seeing is believing - Mt King William I

There is meant to be a mountain above us. I keep looking up in hope. I see nothing but a ceiling of cloud - the sky, overcast and low. It seems, if I stood on tippy toes I could touch it. As we follow the track towards the base of this invisible peak, it is tempting to turn around. I am wondering, what fun could we possibly have on a mountain in grey, wet soup like this? We keep walking, despite. There is, after all, a mountain above us, whether we can see it or not. 

'The Monarch of Tasmania's west' - Frenchmans Cap

Picture this: a large rock midstream in a fast flowing river. The rock protrudes above the water. A swift current races around it and on the downstream side is a pocket of calm water. The current causes the sides of this calm to change and swirl with movement. But immediately behind the rock is complete stillness. 

Now imagine the protruding rock is Frenchman’s Cap. The river's current is the wind and the water is dense cloud. The mountain’s bare, white quartzite peak holds firm above it all. Picture two little bushwalkers, sitting in that calm spot on the downstream side, sheltered from the howling south-westerly wind. A tongue of clear, still air stretches away before them while either side, the dense clouds whip past, whirling on the edge of the eddy in a dance of mesmerising flurries. Then the sun rises above this streaming world. The light is crystalline but diffuse. Picture the two bushwalkers sitting in the morning sun completely entranced, watching this wild show of streaming clouds, backs leaning against the bulk of the mountain. Sudden pirouettes of cloud rise and fall on either side. They are alone, for more than 4 hours, bewitched. The day warms. The flood of streaming cloud slowly disperses, swept away across the world.

Capturing the Ephemeral - mist and fog in the Australian landscape

This is an old, but strong, memory: Caz and I standing on the edge of an extinct volcano at dawn. Mist, settled in the valley below. In the distance, the volcanoes remnant central vent, Wollumbin (Mt Warning), and 600m below my feet lush farmland now covering the ancient crater. We are at Pinnacle Lookout in Border Ranges National Park, entranced and awestruck by the day’s first casting of shadows. 

The sun’s morning light is soft and golden. Birds are calling in the rainforest behind me. The metal lookout fence is cold beneath my arms. The sky is clear. And, the mist is making this moment magic. It has thrown a thin veil over the landscape below. The trees, the paddocks, the farmhouses and dams are a mosaic of light and dark - long rays of shadow streak across the hills like the strands of a fine and delicate tapestry still being woven.

The Western Arthur Range - Southwest National Park, Tasmania

We awake to wind roaring across the range and powerful gusts pulling the guy ropes as the tent walls flex and bend. A southerly, blowing unobstructed for thousands of kilometres across the Southern Ocean is crashing into our mountains. But, it is not until we finally emerge, at dawn, that the ferocity of the weather hits home. 

We are camped on one of the wooden platforms beneath the southern cirque of Lake Oberon, high on the Western Arthur Range. Just metres away the surface of the lake is being swept into a spectacular, swirling vortex of mist that rises 10 metres into the air. Waves, driven by the wind, surge up the small creek that feeds the lake, forcing it to flow backwards. The simple act of walking is a struggle. We retreat, stumbling, back to our tent. 

This is meant to be our day for traversing high across the mountain peaks of Capricorn and Pegasus but as a wall of black clouds approach from the south a lay day is called. It is another round in our Western Arthur's weather spanking.

Scott-Kilvert Hut - Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park, TAS

This is like escaping behind the scenes at the theatre. Huge towering columns jut out of the mist, holding up a familiar and world-famous façade. But from behind, the shape of the mountain is unrecognisable. Nothing looks familiar. This is Cradle Mountain's hidden side.

Back at Dove Lake car park, the crowd mingles; selfie sticks in hand, wearing their smartest outdoor outfits and shoes and striking fashion poses for the camera. That is the auditorium. People mill around, waiting to see the main show-stopping attraction - the mirror surface of Dove Lake, the wooden boat shed, with the dramatic, rugged cliffs of Cradle Mountain framing it all.

On the cirque - Mt Murchison, Tasmania

This is when it pays to sleep high – sitting in the sun on a mountaintop, above a thick layer of morning fog. It feels a bit like take off - when a jet planes carries you up into a different world, rising above an overcast city into a bright day where the horizon is a long way off and you know the invisible towns below are colder and greyer and lonelier.

View along the cirque to Mt Murchison summit (left)

These are my thoughts at dawn, waking on top of Mt Murchison in Tasmania's western region, sitting at 1275m and seeing the cloud curling and lapping below our feet.

Walls of Jerusalem National Park, Tasmania

Tucked away amongst an ancient pencil pine forest beside Lake Ball in Tasmania's wild Central Plateau, is a small wooden slab-and-shingle hut which houses a reflective story. 

Known simply as Lake Ball Hut, it was built in 1968 as a secret retreat by Ray 'Boy' Miles. This respected local bushman increasingly sought solace and healing in the high country of his childhood after returning from World War 2 and three harrowing years as a prisoner of war on the Burma railway.  A plaque in the hut explains the importance of the place and its wild surrounds: "Here he left behind the cares of the lowlands and found a relationship with the land that he was unable to replicate in the human world."

Way down south - Southwest National Park, Tasmania

Here, where the world is quiet,

Here, where all trouble seems dead

Winds and spent waves riot

- A.C. Swinburne