Two friends and I spent three days in the Tullah region, climbing this and that, sleeping high and sleeping low. It’s a great area for exploring.
Unfortunately, it has too often been my observation that pretty photos with names and locations attached have inspired the wrong sort of people to flood our beautiful wilderness and thereby ruin it. The Western Arthurs and the Walls of Jerusalem are two extreme cases in point.
And who are the wrong sort of people? People who have not been taught any bushcraft and have made no effort to learn any; people for whom the words “Leave no trace” are a foreign language; people who seem to think that it’s just fine to spoil fragile areas now that they have seen them themselves; people whose sole aim in being there is to take some insta-photo and exit, without ever stopping to understand the place where they are; people whose sole concern is the self, who don’t care about the people who live near the area, or the children and ones yet to be born who might want to see the place. In short, shallow, selfish people.
For some of us, these regions are our quasi “holy places”. They are places where we revive our spirits and refresh our souls; where we take time out to connect with the wider natural environment. They are not just precious to us: they are essential to our mental and spiritual wellbeing. They are not just huge playgrounds (which they are also. Give me a mountain rather than a gym and treadmill any day, thanks!!).
My lack of blogs over the summer has had nothing to do with any inactivity on my part – I seem to have lived in the wilderness this summer – but rather due to my not wanting to over-popularise the beautiful areas I have been in. These spots are, or rather, were, our playgrounds, but we are now being locked out of them so that the tourists can come in and spoil them. They have been turned into a money-making commodity.
Thus I don’t want to aid and abet that process by being too specific about anything much other than indicating “Tullah region”. If you can enjoy photos of beauty that don’t specify location, then please enjoy these examples of what our amazing planet has to offer to those who have worked on their fitness, and acquired bush skills to survive in lonely and challenging locations. We left no trace. Keep tassie Wild.
