RABBITS SCATTER-BOLT throughout the misty garden when I close Wandering Trout’s side-entrance door behind me. A few steps and I’m on Mole Creek’s main drag where streetlights are still on even though it’s light enough to see without them. There’s nobody else around except a lone truck driver passing by with a load of felled trees that may have started life well before the name Tasmania was ever spoken here.
I arrived late yesterday afternoon from Launceston, rejecting the highway for a more inefficient scenic route between blackberry-lined paddocks of red soil while the sinking sun made silhouettes of the surrounding outcrops of kooparoona niara/Great Western Tiers. This northern part of Tasmania’s Central Highlands has recently been rebranded the Heartlands, with signs and everything. Yet, no matter how you reframe it, this is
