Strangers in a strange land

WALKING the shore between Susan Bay and Connellys Marsh, it dawned on me.

It came like a flash as I thought about stories I had read in the Mercury lately — the little girl being swooped by a rogue kelp gull that had been stealing hats from people on Bellerive Beach; the white shark on the North-West Coast that leapt clear out of the water into a boat fishing off Stanley to bite a boy; and the husband who punched a shark as it tore his wife off her surfboard at Port Macquarie in northern New South Wales.

Could nature’s creatures finally be fighting back? Could wild beasts have drawn a line in the sand at humankind’s rampant colonising and conquering of the planet?

My mind raced to Daphne du Maurier’s classic 1952 story The Birds, which Alfred Hitchcock turned into a terrifying film in 1963. The plot is simple: flocks of birds act with co-ordinated malice to launch kamikaze attacks on the unsuspecting folk of an English seaside town.

Run for the hills! Du Maurier’s story haunted me as a child because I had seen the menacing look in the beady, red-rimmed eyes of swarming, hustling seagulls when they decide unilaterally that your food — whether the clovespiced ham in the sandwich prepared by Mum, or the hot gravy-dipped chip from the corner shop — is actually theirs.

This boyhood flashback startled me and I stumbled on wet pebbles. I fell, but safely caught myself by thrusting out my hands. Ungracefully and vulnerably prostrated on the rocks, I glanced nervously over the calm of Frederick Henry Bay, expecting to see a squadron of angry gulls ready to swoop at my misfortune.

But there was nowt to see, not a bird or any other living thing. It was silent. I rolled over into a seated position to take in my surrounds. They were hauntingly beautiful.

I was in a secluded cove, east of Susan Bay, where there was no hint of breeze, and a blazing midday sun mocked winter. Further east, I could see shacks at Connellys Marsh, and south across the sparkling blue to the cliffs of Lime Bay on the pointy tip of the hook that is the Tasman Peninsula.

I love these oft-forgotten shores because they hold surprises. If you go to a famous stretch of Tasmanian coast, you get the awe, beauty and grandeur you came for, but when trekking lesser-known trails the journey is a mystery.

This particular shore is hard to walk because of the tide’s obsessive compulsion to sort every stone and rock into shape, size and type, and distribute each strictly into its own category and own specific nook of the zigzagging shore. This results in coves and inlets of cricket-ball-sized rocks that move with each step and are slippery when wet. The crunch of footsteps sounds satisfying, but it’s slow going and tests the flexibility of achilles tendons.

This shore is not commonly walked because the fences and pasture of surrounding farms restrict access unless you come along the coastline. At one point, confronted by brittle cliffs, I scrambled over the top to be met with an enchanting pastoral scene of sheep and playful lambs feasting on lush, boggy, verdant pasture.

These districts were among the first settled by the British two centuries ago. In the 1800s the area was on the route from Port Arthur to the ferry at Pitt Water, bound for Hobart Town. There are many tales of Port Arthur prison escapees hiding out in these parts. A party of constables was housed at Fulham en route to Dunalley to sniff out those on the lam.

Colonial farms were planted with wheat, potatoes and barley for beer. Most ran sheep. In the early days of the colony it was said that sheep walked into Van Diemen’s Land like they were always here. The island’s lightly forested woody grasslands were compared to English parklands. Certainly, the frolicking lambs I saw this week as I strolled by appeared about as chuffed as sheep can be, and their pastures as idyllic as any painted canvas of an English pastoral scene. But it’s not England. The deeper you look, the more Tasmania can appear to have been uncomfortably and oppressively anglicised.

Walking these coasts, I often squint at distant hills and vales to imagine them before colonisation. I pretend forests are without plantations, and denuded headlands still have stands of gums and thickets leading to grassy bogs and marshes that had for aeons been grazed by wallabies and emus, and once were hunting grounds for tigers, devils and Aborigines with tea-tree spears.

I wonder whether our thirst for stories about gulls stalking children, sharks biting wives, snakes in sheds, spiders in dunnies and wedgetails taking sheep is because we see this land as alien and dangerous, and have not yet come to terms with it. I wonder whether an inability to shake the cultural mindset of our colonial roots blinds us to some of the unique beauty of our island home.

This question courses deeply through Tasmanian literature and academia. Our brightest have long grappled with the psychological, sociological and ideological fallout of this transplanted society. It’s a theme for writers like Pete Hay and James Boyce, who dare try to look their island home squarely in the eye, without the coloured glass of a British lens.

As Hay wrote in his introduction to legendary lensman Peter Dombrovskis’s Wilderness Diary 1994: “So we will remain strangers in a strange land; transplanted, homeless Europeans, belonging neither here nor there — emotional refugees — until we can look at our little island, recognise its specialness and the here-only-ness of its living and geophysical processes, and say, ‘this is not inert matter for my manipulation; this is my home, and it bestows upon me a duty of care. I am one with this. I belong here’.”