Taking the hard path
ON THE PORT Davey Track, deep inside the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, a team of park rangers is thigh-deep in black mud. Their progress is slow as the mud sucks at gaiters and boots, which have become as heavy as bricks.
Ahead of them, the peaks of the Western Arthurs serrate the sky, and two hikers splash towards them, returning from this most challenging of Tasmanian mountain ranges. “How’s the mud ahead?” asks James Flittner, a ranger far from his usual beat on the Overland Track. The hikers shrug: “We’re desensitised now.”
This section of the Arthur Plains is one of the most notorious stretches of mud in South West Tasmania. But these rangers have been out, in various configurations, for 19 days on a mission to cross the state. Behind them have been greater challenges than this mud, and even greater ones still lie ahead. They shrug also and walk on. The Tasmanian Ranger Relay continues its journey south.
REWIND ALMOST THREE weeks to the northern Tasmanian town of Penguin. The boots were lighter, the legs fresher, when I joined five rangers and park staff at the Big Penguin monument near the town’s foreshore. Auntie Erica Maynard welcomed us to Country before we stepped through the morning traffic and set the relay in motion.
During the next month, the relay would travel 525km by foot, bike and kayak from Penguin, on the edge of Bass Strait, southwards to Cockle Creek near Tasmania’s most southerly tip. Organised by the Tasmanian Rangers Association (TRA), a professional organisation of more than 80 Tasmanian park rangers and staff, the relay’s goal was to raise money to help fellow rangers at Timor-Leste’s first and only national park, Nino Konis Santana National Park.
The project was initiated by
