THIS IS ONE of the few walks in lutruwita/Tasmania on which you can see both where you’ve been and where you’re going, photographer Matt Newton points out, as we approach the highest part of the South Coast Track. Up here on the Ironbound Range, in light mist, we’re 900m higher than we were last night at our rainforest camp on an elbow of Louisa River. Catching my breath, I look back over buttongrass plains to the track we’ve followed for three days. It stretches to the coast and trails west. Everything around us – the land, snaking waterways, sea, sky above and the plants and animals these ecosystems support – is palawa Country. More specifically, it’s the traditional homelands of the Needwonnee.
But the Needwonnee are no longer living, as a direct result of British invasion in 1803 and the ensuing violence of colonisation. The Aboriginal community of lutruwita today knows it’s their responsibility to care for this cultural landscape.
Located in Southwest National Park, the South Coast Track is an 84km-long bushwalk between Melaleuca and Cockle Creek. At 6183sq.km, Southwest is the largest national park in lutruwita. Along with Franklin–Gordon Wild Rivers and Hartz Mountains national parks, which both border it, Southwest contributes to the 15,800sq.km Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) – a chain of national parks and reserves covering almost a quarter of the island.
While lutruwita’s intense natural beauty has long attracted visitors, the state has more recently become a popular ecotourism destination. Nature-based tourism now significantly contributes to the state’s economy and, undeniably, there’s merit in the alternatives it offers to the more destructive mining and logging industries. However, there are concerns some economically driven tourism-related decisions could be jeopardising the natural
