INTO THE WILDS OF TASMANIA

In northern Tasmania, the road from Deloraine to Mole Creek became narrower and more corrugated by the mile. A few miles west of Mole Creek it degenerated into an irregular series of potholes and boulders. The sun disappeared behind a curtain of light mist that in turn developed into a cold, sleeting rain.

It had been some miles since another car had passed, and I thought I might be lost. When at last a car approached, I was so eager for information of any sort that I flagged it down.

“Is this the way to Cradle Mountain?” I asked.

“Sure is,” the man replied with a grin. “Just keep on your way.” He estimated it to be another 30 miles or so, and he said the road would improve by and by.

After his car and mine squeezed past each other, he rolled his window down and stuck his head out in the rain for one final comment:

“It’s worth it!”

Some destinations are so remote that they seem like ends of the earth. Cradle Mountain seems more like a beginning, a primordial place touching the inner edge of time, a land as old as the ages. It is a place of craggy mountains, vast moors and rock-walled lakes, an escape into the grandeur of raw nature. Roads have been carved into the wilderness, but there is little doubt that the wilderness will prevail in the end.

However, there is a better way to get to Cradle Mountain, I learned later, and I recommend it.

You make your way to Devonport, Tasmania, usually on an overnight ferry from Melbourne, and arrange to be met at the ferry by the Cradle Mountain Lodge driver. His name is Darryl Stafford, but he is rapidly becoming known as “Devil Dundee.”

He has a gap-toothed smile and wears a battered bushman’s hat, moleskin trousers and hiking boots.

He says his father was a logger who died when a tree fell on his head. The ancestor who led the clan’s way to Tasmania in the first place was a pickpocket who was “transported” from England for that minor crime. Somewhere in the family tree, Stafford thinks there might also have been an aborigine, though his eyes are blue and what hair he has left is quite light. He looks considerably older than his age of 43.

And in a case of life imitating art, or at least a Tasmanian version of “Crocodile Dundee,” Stafford has found himself a celebrity of sorts since Linda Fox, a reporter for the Toronto Sun, wrote a story about him a few months ago. The Sun has invited Devil to visit Toronto, which he plans to do this summer.

Stafford also got his picture in the Australian version of Time magazine recently with his folksy comments on the controversy between loggers and environmentalists over how many of Tasmania’s gum trees should be chopped down.

(Dead gum trees line portions of the road to Cradle Mountain. Some of them have been there for 75 years or longer.)

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that every living thing has to die sometime,” Stafford says. He claims the weather is getting wetter in Tasmania and the gum trees are doomed in any case. “All this is old timber; there’s no new growth.”

As a tour guide, Devil Stafford invariably chooses the route less traveled by. In his photo album are picture after picture of tourists trying to push the bus out of the mud. “I have to get stuck occasionally,” he claims. “Gives ‘em something to do.”

And as a husband, he claims that he and his schoolteacher wife of 20 years get along quite well. “If I want to argue with her, I phone her up and we argue.”

Stafford worked as a truck driver and a logger before he started Devil Four-Wheel-Drive Tours a couple of years ago with one well-used jeep and a 20-passenger bus. On his upcoming trip to Canada, he says he’ll come on down to the States, too, and try to drum up some business for his Tasmanian tours.

Any night at the Cradle Mountain Lodge will produce a cast of characters worthy of print. And the dining tables are big, so guests have a chance to get acquainted.

Dinner is like summer camp with wine and beer or liquor, although the food is a lot better than summer camp chow. People drift down from their rooms or cabins to congregate in the bar or dining room, and the hosts seat them with some eye to their mutual interests and potentialcompatibility with other guests.

At my table were a free-lance photographer from Hobart--Tasmania’s seaport capital--by way of England (originally from South Africa, but now a political exile), and his companion, a noted Australian sculptor, along with her mother.

Mountain Climber

Other Americans at the lodge were a former forest firefighter and a young woman from Los Angeles who was camping her way around Australia. She had climbed Cradle Mountain that afternoon only to have the clouds close in behind her just as she reached the summit. Rounding out our group were a nurse on vacation from the San Francisco County Jail and Stafford.

That night’s offering included a fish that they billed as “blue grenadine” (they’ll cook what you catch) along with pasta Nicoise. Dessert was mousse with creme de menthe sauce and fresh strawberries. One day’s lunch was a rich and creamy pumpkin soup served with whole-grain bread and cheese.

The air is so clear at Cradle Mountain that a small brush fire late in the afternoon on a distant mountainside, three lakes away, smeared the sky’s edge with brown. The mountains that earlier had a blue and piercing clarity were surrendering to the haze. As though in protest, a battalion of thunderheads rolled in from the east and drenched the scene, blotting out the haze, the blues and even the sunset.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes” is a saying heard often in these parts.

Cradle Mountain is on an esteemed list. The World Heritage Committee has named it in a catalogue that lists 130 sites as “the planet’s most precious places.”

The Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park is 320,000 acres of wilderness, encompassing rugged mountain ranges, wild heath, lakes and rain forests of myrtle and pencil pine on a carpet of mosses and lichens. The streams and lakes are well stocked with Tasmanian fighting trout. Between June and October the area known as Cradle Plateau is prized by cross-country skiers.

The rest of the year, the park is a great place for bush walks and mountain climbing (guides can be arranged) or for swimming in the clear lakes that are fed by cold mountain streams.

Hikers entering the wilderness area sign in at a starting point and note their intentions and their estimated return time, then they sign out as they leave. Search parties are sent out to look for any hikers who are missing. At any time of the year, visitors should come prepared with woolen sweaters or jackets, rain gear and either boots or walking shoes.

Cradle Mountain Lodge is at the north end of the national park. Anne and Simon Currant are the owners of the lodge. There are nine rooms in the main building and 13 cabins; 24 more are being built in a $1.5-million expansion project.

Folksy Warmth

But even increasing the size of the lodge will probably not alter the folksy warmth of the place, what with doonas (featherbed quilts) piled on the beds for people who love to snooze, and gumboots lined up in the anteroom for people who can’t resist sloshing about in the rain.

“Simon and Anne are as different as chalk and cherries,” according to Devil Stafford. “Simon’s English and Anne’s from New South Wales. He takes life serious and she doesn’t give a bugger.” The Currants have owned the 12-year-old lodge for two years, and one of the biggest attractions of the place is the comfortable atmosphere that prevails, with a helpful and friendly staff and guests who are there to enjoy themselves.

Yes, there are Tasmanian devils in Tasmania. And every night after dinner at the lodge, scraps are taken outside to a feeder. Guests line the glass-walled porch for a front-row view of the wildlife.

First come the opossums and wallabies, by the score. The opossums climb to the top of the feeder and practically stand on their heads if necessary to get the best angle on the food.

The Tasmanian devils arrive a bit later and dig in wherever they like. They are fierce, furry little carnivores that apparently will eat anything. They prefer handouts to stalking their own food. They’re not much bigger than a skunk, but their voracious jaws can out-snap most anything this side of a piranha. Wombats and tiger cats make the feeder a stop on their nightly rounds as well.

On Friday morning, the California woman announced that she was heading for Hobart to thaw out and shop at the Saturday morning Salamanca Market.

The sculptor said her mother had left the lodge to hike with full backpack eight miles in the rain to a wilderness campsite. She said it was a long story. I bet it was a good one.

Devil was heading north to pick up some people from the ferry at Devonport. I left Cradle Mountain by another route, as rutted and rocky as the way in. This took me southward through pine and eucalyptus forests, past plains of scrub and button grass and by lakes that looked like a fisherman’s paradise. It was raining again and the wind was howling. At the intersection of two gravel roads there was a pub of sorts with a few pickup trucks parked outside.

I decided to go in for a cup of coffee and reckoned I’d be in Hobart in another three hours, in time for a leisurely supper.

Lumbermen and Locals

This very rustic place must have been the watering hole for lumbermen and locals from miles around.

They cheered and hoisted a beer by way of toasting my American accent and told me that this was a very popular place with Americans--it had only been three years since a fisherman from Utah had stopped in for a visit. It was hard to convince the lot of them that I really wanted a cup of coffee and not beer or whiskey.

“We always come in here for a drink after work,” said one cheerful codger who looked as though he’d had a few already.

I thought his work schedule must be quite flexible since this was early Friday afternoon.

“When did you get off work?” I asked.

He thought a minute, then grinned. “Wednesday,” he said.

Cradle Mountain Lodge, Cradle Mountain, Tasmania, Australia 7310, phone (003) 63-5164. Single room, $28 a night, $7 for each additional adult; housekeeping cabin, $47 for a single or double. Dining room is open to campers as well as lodge guests, and meals are extra.

Devil Four-Wheel-Drive Tours: $16 per person from Devonport to Cradle Mountain; one-day tours, $65 per vehicle for one to three passengers; longer tours and safaris also available; Darryl and June Stafford, Edward Street, Devonport, phone (004) 24-3628.