What do we mean when we talk about WILDERNESS?
Imagine setting out on a three-day walk to a remote lake in Tasmania’s Central Highlands. The lake is in a trackless area, far from the nearest roads and vehicle tracks. The walk in, which can take eight hours even by the quickest route, involves navigating across a mosaic of woodlands and moorlands, past several other lakes, and through patches of dense scrub.
Early on the second morning, you cross a small clearing and pick your way through rocky woodland to the crest of a low ridge. You’re rewarded with the view of a sky-blue alpine lake, nearly three kilometres long, fringed by heavily timbered slopes. Scattered pines grow along the shoreline. And in the midst of the lake there is an island. The island is like a miniature of the surrounding wilderness, complete with its own tiny bays and peninsulas, its own woodland and moorland, even a small patch of King Billy pine forest.
It’s a glorious morning. Wisps of mist drift on the lake’s surface. The only sound is the whisper of wind in the trees. The landscape seems to resonate with that quality of immense peace that one often senses in remote areas: the peace of places not mutilated by chainsaws and bulldozers, not built up and roaded, not disturbed by the racket of machinery and the hubbub of the modern world.
Then you hear a helicopter. It’s distant at first; the sound can travel over fifteen kilometres. But it’s getting closer. Within a few minutes, the noise reverberates around the lake’s basin, and the helicopter comes into view, flying low. It circles still lower and lands in the small clearing that you crossed twenty minutes ago. It sits there a while, its engine still going, then takes off with a five-seater helicopter’s inimitable hundred-decibel roar.
By the time the noise has receded, you hear voices heading your way. A group of tourists has arrived, fresh from the comforts of their hotel, to enjoy a ‘luxury wilderness
