It’s in our nature

LET’S build a hotel and visitor centre on the mountain and market it as the headquarters for Tasmania: The Walking Capital of the World.

Let’s reboot Hobart architect Robert MorrisNunn’s deferred plans for a 60-room hotel, with restaurant, at the 722-metre mark of kunanyi/Mt Wellington, known as The Springs.

Let’s have HQ-based snowmobile buses clear snow off the road in winter as they ferry people to the summit, in the process taking many cars off the route.

Let’s have the HQ as the start point for existing mountain trails and a new 70km walk to the Styx River Bridge, similar to that proposed by conservationist Bob Brown years ago.

“Along the way is enough adventure, wildlife and human history to ensure that any well-guided group from Beijing, Boston, Berlin or Bendigo will be hastening home to have other folk mark it up as a must-do future destination,” Brown suggested in 2012.

Let’s make the HQ home to a “walk into the landscape” campaign, with photos, film and other art celebrating the Overland Track, the Three Capes Track, the revamped Remarkable Cave to Crescent Bay trail, the South Coast Track and Brown’s proposed $20 million Trans Tarkine Track.

Let’s develop walks on private and public land: Midland strolls through paddocks and Aboriginal heritage, high-country treks on buttongrass plains, coast trails and forest treks.

The Springs has a rich walking history. Evolution theorist Charles Darwin and Lady Jane Franklin, wife of governor John Franklin, visited while walking the mountain. The first track was cut to The Springs by prisoners in 1845, the first hut built in 1859.

The road was laid in 1890 and The Springs Hotel erected at the turn of the century to be promoted as the Commonwealth’s top health resort, but it struggled for clientele and closed in World War I.

In 1921 the Hobart council bought it and leased it as a boarding house for bushwalkers until it was razed in the 1967 fires.

Old photos show a glorious alpine lodge by architect Alan Cameron-Walker, who also designed the Hobart General Post Office. The wooden structure, ill-suited to the fire-prone site, reminds me of the exclusive 1880s homestead Lilianfels Blue Mountains Resort and Spa.

IMAGINE a new hotel by Morris-Nunn, who designed the stingray-shape Saffire at Freycinet. After a 30-minute stroll through the hotel’s native garden or freshly returned from a half-day hike to the summit, you look out the window to watch wombats fossick in the snow just as they do at Cradle Mountain, warm in your lodgings waiting for room service or a fireside restaurant meal.

You might later pop down to the city. It’s only a short bus ride to Salamanca, the concert hall and the CBD. Yes, a Cradle experience 15 minutes from the Tasmanian capital.

Of course, as with many tour groups, there’s a loud American: “Where’s the cable car to the top?”

The bell boy responds: “We chose not to have one.”

“Why on Earth not?” the Yank retorts. “The views would be spectacular.”

“True,” concedes the bell boy, telling the group about community opposition to a cable car.

The bell boy explains that the mountain has looked much as it does now for eons, and that more than 40,000 years of humans have gazed at its majesty.

He says that as the world was being developed faster than ever before, Tasmanians recognised the intrinsic good about keeping the mountain much as it has looked for thousands of generations.

“It’s Tasmania’s statement to the world,” the bell boy says, detailing the many developments already on the mountain. “We drew a line in the sand. No more. From now on it’s wild, natural, and when we have the technology to replace it, we’ll get rid of that ugly communications tower too.”

“Baloney,” bellows the Yank and marches off, his browbeaten wife secretly relieved not to have to ride yet another cable car on their world tour.

Your group wanders with trumpets of local bubbles and ice-cool tens of Cascade Lager into a snug mountain cinema to watch a film about Tassie’s natural beauty.

“You gotta hand it to Tasmanians, they think deeply,” says a handsome Kiwi cuddled by the fire with the stylish French girlfriend he met on a walk to Crescent Beach. She replies, with a purr: “I came here for nature, wilderness, the way the world once was. I love it. I want to live here.”

COMMENTING on Brown’s proposed West Coast walk, Tourism Industry Council Tasmania chief executive Luke Martin suggested Tasmania could lead the world.

“The Tarkine is an amazing tourism brand with a very underdeveloped tourism industry,” Martin told one newspaper. “We are talking about Tasmania potentially becoming the walking capital of the world.”

Not long ago many Tasmanians refused to even accept there was a place called the Tarkine, saying the name was made up by the greens, and essentially it was.

But the idea of our wilderness — whether Cradle Mountain or the Tarkine — now enchants the world.

I have voted independent, Liberal, Labor and the Greens at different times. I don’t subscribe to any party and have been furious at all of them. Politics is a dark art that taints all, despite most politicians being good, wellintentioned people.

Whatever you think of the green movement, the fact is that what it started saying decades ago has turned out to be true. The national parks and wilderness it fought to protect, and the ideas behind this protection, now underpin our economy and our brand.

The ancient mountain that towers over Tasmania’s capital could be emblematic of this.

The reason not to have a cable car cuts to the very essence of Tasmania.

Are we brave enough to accept it is in our nature?