Tuesday

Tuesday morning found me up at seven, on the road to Taranna with an apple and a cup of coffee. I rolled into the Tassie Devil Conservation Park at 0915, one of only three early morning visitors. The park is an old farm, given back to the wild. I walked out of the visitor’s centre onto the path and was abruptly alone with the birds and the wind. In the old orchards, even the distant car sounds of the A9 faded. The sunlight dripped to earth through tiny gnarled pears on a few crooked trees. Walking a dirt path, I came to a wooden fence. As I put my shoulder to the heavy door and pushed, a rough-hewn counter weight dropped just beside my head, startling me. I walked through a little enclosure and out through a second door, and found myself in a paddock of about forty kangaroos and wallabies, interspersed with huge white ugly birds which, I thought, may or may not have been cassowaries. The animals were all frozen, motionless, some in mid-hop, and I froze too as every single head swivelled toward me. About sixty pairs of eyes followed me as, nervously avoiding sudden movements, I crossed the long, long length of the paddock, even skirting around the trail where it was blocked by a mama wallaby. With a sense of relief, I reached the heavy gate on the other side and escaped.

Now somewhat lost on the trails, which wound around and crisscrossed each other and were walled in by endless seeming forests of stunted trees and overgrowing weeds, I found the Tassie Devil enclosure just in time for the ten o’clock feeding. Unlike their photos, the Tassie Devils are far from adorable. They snarled and bit and mindlessly screamed at each other, cracked bones with their jaws, licked blood from their snouts, leapt and snapped at the cameras people held over the low fence.
Next was the kangaroo feed. There were now about fifteen visitors in the park, and we followed the park keeper back to the paddock, where the animals which had been so intimidating half an hour before, now scanned the crowd, located the keeper and his big gray bucket of food pellets, and swarmed him in an excited pushing mob. All of us took big double handfuls of pellets and in minutes, every tourist was surrounded by five or six hungry jumpers. Their noses were warm and I felt the coarse fur of their cheeks, and the softer fur of chins, as teeth like slabs scraped at my flat palm. The birds, which I had taken to be cassowaries, were actually just geese who, the park keeper said, stopped by every day about this time for a free feed. The kangaroos didn’t bite, but one Englishwoman sustained a nip from a goose. As I crouched with six animals of assorted sizes happily chewing away, the dominant alpha kangaroo sauntered over, reared up and cuffed a few others out of his way. All seven of us jumped!



At 1145 I saw another Devil feeding, just as unpleasant as the first, and managed to watch part of the Raptor show before buying an awesome t-shirt and hightailing it back to Hobart, for my cycling trip down Mount Wellington. This is me holding a branch with a Tawny Frogmouth, a kind of nightjar:




I made it back at 1300 with just enough time to park, change, and run to the info centre to be picked up with ten other tourists for the journey. We loaded into a van and roared up, up, up, learning the history of the mountain and its trails, and then hopped on bikes at the top and whizzed around the hairpin turns and past hair-raising cliffs, going way too fast and getting windburn on our cold faces and hoping a car wasn’t about to try to pass us. I was relieved when we reached the bottom of the mountain in far less time than it had taken us to drive up it, and I thoroughly enjoyed the last ten minutes of the ride, heading downtown through Battery Point and finishing off at Salamanca.



I walked the ten minutes home, almost light-headed with hunger, showered, and set off down Castray Esplanade in search of somewhere to eat. At last I chose T42, the Tavern at Forty-Two Degrees South. Seated outside on the pier, I had a gorgeous view of the slowly setting sun, yellow in a bright blue sky, the whole scene reflected identically in the harbour but dotted with the shadows of white yachts. Across from me two ladies, maybe in their 40s, with youthfully dyed hair, dined on their salads and chatted with two men. I nearly cried with joy as I ate every last bite of my rocket, blue cheese, and candied walnut salad and confit chicken Maryland, cooked to fall-off-the-bone perfection in a bed of onions and spinach and roast parsnips. The two men left while I was still working on the chicken, but the two ladies stayed, chatting. Then I unwisely ordered dessert, a chocolate whisky mudcake, and moved to a warmer table inside. By the time it came, I was stuffed, but the sun had set and dark flickering tango music was playing and I ate my way slowly through the muddy mountain, picking out the sultanas and laying them in a pile on the side of my plate—what better way to ruin chocolate cake than by raisins, ugh—and accidently licking a forkful of the round white ball that I thought was ice cream, which turned out to be pure cream. Aussies sure love their cream. The two ladies, now seated outside in the dark, had finally ordered mains, which now arrived. The restaurant was nearly empty, but I accidently caught the eye of a man of perhaps 40 who had entered. The waitresses were loitering at the bar, cleaning up with the barmen, and ignoring me and the ladies and the gentleman near me, who kept trying to see what I was writing (my notes for the day, of course). We chatted, a little. He was a German professor of philosophy and he really was feeling the need to expound some life theories. I was falling asleep, but I managed to listen politely for a while before saying goodnight and heading home. I had been in the restaurant two and a half hours. The ladies were still chatting over their espressos.