the end of the road

I am at the end of the road. Not figuratively. Literally. There is no more road. There is no more Australia. Unless you count the seven kilometres across the wilderness to Tasmania's Southeast Cape. This is where Australia ends and the Southern Ocean begins.

We arrive at Cockle Creek late Thursday afternoon. A friend has bought a house here, a memento of times past, when he and mates, me included, came here to embark on epic journeys into Tassie's wild places: the South Coast Track, Precipitous Bluff, the Arthurs and Federation Peak, the holy grail for hardy souls.

This is a magic place for it's solitude (population 3), it's remoteness (no electricity, solar-powered phone), and it's transcendent beauty (glittering bays, beaches clean as silver gulls).

The French were the first Europeans to land here in 1792; Bruny D'entrecasteaux came with two floating laboratories of scientists and philosophers. His mission: to find the missing explorer La Pérouse and to examine everything in 'the South' while disturbing nothing.

The French got on famously with the Aborigines. The English arrived ten years later bent on pillaging the place of its wood and its whales. They slaughtered the indignant indigenes. The fuckers fucked it up, fucked it over, and fucked off. (The French, of course, behaved shamefully in other places, but not here.)

We walk and walk and walk. It's four-wheel drive in and out of Cockle Creek, but while here, feet are the only means of going places. Despite her sore little toes—tripping on the back door step (left), and bumping into the corner of the couch (right)—and the shoes that give me blisters on my Achilles tendons, my good woman and I set off across the hills and plains for South Cape Bay.

The South Coast Track to South Cape Bay has everything: every surface—boardwalks snaking across boggy lowlands, benched footpads skirting higher places, rocks and roots to clamber over; every vegetation—the tallest, straightest trees, fern glades, impenetrable ti-tree thickets, sedges; and every vista—distant and not-so-distant bluffs, a moonscape above the ocean, rocky ridges descending the dark dells of gurgling tea-coloured rivulets.

In the evening we walk again. To the Whale Sculpture. Next morning when the rain stops we walk to the sculpture and beyond. The beaches sap the calves of energy and spring;  rock-hopping is doing endless lunges. But it is not training. It's not the bike.

In the end it is seven days without riding. I excuse, I explain, I rationalise: it is a holiday, a retreat, a break from the drudgery of racking up the miles that I have been telling myself is no drudgery at all. It will do me good, refresh me.