Tasmania, some time in the 1970s. CLAAAANG! Someone slams the car door and the party sets off into the early evening gloom of the rainforest. A short slope leads  from the forestry road to the Fish River. Here is the first challenge. The river is perhaps 10 metres wide and too deep to wade, even  Read more »

PERHAPS I DIDN’T KNOW how to enjoy hardship. Perhaps I wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing. Perhaps the authors of those adventure books I had read were misrepresenting the experience. Why was it, I reasoned, that those writers of mountaineering adventure, those climbers of the world’s high places, made the experience seem so  Read more »

On the southern edge of Sydney, on the banks of the Hacking River, is the remnant of a once-popular holiday town of fibro shacks…

Tasmania, the late 1970s. UP AND UP. Through a dark, wet forest of towering trees. Along a rough track that never saw the work of a maintenance gang. Squishing through muddy patches, slowing as we climb the steeper sections. All familiar stuff to mountain walkers. It feels as though we have been in this soggy  Read more »