If you have been following this blog, you will know that I have been trying to get out snow camping almost every weekend since I returned from Europe, but that something has always come up to prevent it. At last this weekend I got my wish. Angela had time free and wanted an adventure; snow was predicted: we were off. Initially we were (we thought) going to climb Blue Peaks and be on the Western Tiers, but road access problems meant that we had to choose the Cradle area in order to get both an open road and snow. I wasn’t sad. I love this place, and don’t always need to be somewhere new.
We were both feeling a bit out of practice at Tassie-style snow work, so I also enjoyed being in an area that offered us plenty of dramatic snow and yet was only a couple of hours from the lodge, so somehow that felt less remote if anything went wrong. It was good to have a chance to refine our methodology and test some of our new gear here before committing ourselves to the really deep wild wilderness. Mind you, during the night, with the wind howling and the tent making explosive whiplash noises, I didn’t feel so terribly secure, and kept wondering if I’d survive if the tent broke in one of these furious gusts. Plenty of people have died within five kilometres of Cradle, so it didn’t feel particularly wussy during the night.
Robert Macfarlane in The Wild Places, a book searching for wild locations in Britain, spends a night in midwinter on a Lake District mountain exposing himself to the fury of a storm in order to experience and appreciate nature’s unleashed force. When I read his book (which I loved) I felt so sorry for the people of the British Isles, that there were so few places where they could experience the might of undiminished nature. We are somewhat spoiled in Tasmania to have reasonably easy access to abundant places that satisfy this longing – but we need to be wary. People who only see nature as the means for making money and who wish to thus subject nature to their concept of what tourists want and who are willing to sacrifice what they neither know nor understand to the great god of dollar are encroaching on the wildness and wilderness we have left and are chomping bits out of it at an alarming rate.
Many, many Tasmanians mourn the loss of the access to wilderness that we used to enjoy in our own national parks as our old freedoms are removed with each new development, for the most part brought in to allow better management of visiting tourists rather than any motive of caring for the land. Our love of this land is being ignored. Our attachment to the land, our sense of spirituality that comes from being in infinite space and beauty, and our culture of camping and walking in it are treated as nugatory. Of course the tourist industry has myriad excellent features, but that does not mean we allow it to run out of control so that the only wild thing left in our state is that government department. Like alcohol, tourism should be used in moderation. I would love to live in a land where values other than money ruled our ethos and regulations. I fear this worship of money above all other values will ultimately bring about the collapse of western civilisation as we know it, for it is fast running out of control in a destructive solipsistic spiral. The object so valued because it can bring so much can also be the object of demise when not controlled.
I thought of Robert Macfarlane during the night of not-all-that-much sleep, and pondered such issues. We cannot respect nature if we don’t know what it is, and if we fail to respect it, we will harm this beautiful earth beyond repair.
