When I meet Tyto, she has been living in a myrtle tree in takayna/Tarkine for 71 days. That’s over 1,700 hours. During that time, she has been bored exactly once. “I was complaining, like, “Olive, I am feeling bored!” Tyto jokes. “That happened somewhere near the beginning, for three hours, and it didn’t appear again.”
takayna/Tarkine is a vast wild area, a rarity in a world where nature has increasingly been diminished and fragmented into remnant pockets. Gleaming white shores punctuated by dark jagged rocks are buffeted by the Roaring Forties (next landfall is Argentina). Rivers, darkened by tannin, wind gently through primeval forest. Cultural living sites, rock carvings and buttongrass plains mark the palawa people’s long custodianship of these lands. It’s a place that makes you feel small in space and time. Despite all this, it is not a protected area. Which explains
