"Absolute wilderness is those boundless places in the eye of the mind of the beholder where no human footprints can be found and for which all those enter there and become lost have no hope of rescue. Only the most reckless trapper or sibylline shaman venture into the wilderness, as a pebble falls to the bottom of the deepest pool, in the hope of returning to civilization with a fortune in furs or a secret wisdom or allegory thereof. Long before crass and foppish adventurers claimed the wilderness it had already fallen to a more mythopoeia mob for which survival was merely one of many options.
"Wilderness exists today, as always, mainly in the mind’s eye. Once long ago it was always just out there beyond the last black stump. Actually, it still is.
"Today it is called Mars or the mid-ocean ridges.
"And, humankind, as always, has little stomach for it."
Wes George
Beyond Darwin, Northern Australia, Photographed October 3, 2005
Gavin, the Darling will flood again dont you worry about that [just ask Luke].
The Diamantina floods regularly and it's further west. 120 kilometers wide in full song.
We were taking a mob of bullocks to meet the drover and we had to swim them up to a kilometer between sandhills. The mob split on one swim and the second half turned back and refused to go any further.
Luckily it was a big sandhill with plenty of feed on it.
They arrived at the saleyards in Adelaide 6 months behind the leaders.
When you're bareskinned, naked and hungry your future is measured in hours.
Wilderness can only be adored from a position of comfort. They were mutually exclusive prehistorically.
Half the world is still wilderness if we really want it. I can still surf an endless ocean waterfall in a storm with 5,000 miles of sea room and a wandering albatross at my shoulder telling me, "Relax, I do this for a living", or paddle a kayak into the mangroves and eat with golden wallabies in full view of high rise buildings.
Man has been trying to escape the wilderness forever and with his refined anxiety is succeeding too well.
He knows in the back of his mind it also contains death and blowflies.
Wilderness, all that which is essentially wild by itself should seem to be timeless in our scale of memorable things. It should be enough to know that it is still there and not just captured in a wall print. Fate may allow some children to discover it again as it was.
As my elbow rests on battered copper tone Schwarzburger print from the original “Eldon Bluff” (with flying ducks) by W C Piguenit 1886, I can recommend that everyone glance at another work from his expedition to “Lake Pedder” and “Crossing the Picton”.
http://images.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/Search/Search.asp?Letter=P&Creator=Piguenit%2C+W.+C.+1836-1914
Establishing the “South West Wilderness” as a “Reserve” in Tasmania took quite a while.
However it’s your last chance to view “The flood in the Darling” 1890 at the NGA. It’s a brilliant insight to conditions in another wild place that we may have lost forever.
http://www.nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Turnertomonet/Detail.cfm?IRN=9445
Highly recommended viewing.
Feel better yet, Jennifer B? I don't recall making any reference to self, nor to spivs, but given your past form who knows what a brain like yours could read into it.
And as for the tripe about a "whole ecosystem died", would you care to list for us all the species that were there prior to the flooding so we can compare it with all the species that are there today?
You do accept that there are still many species using that location today, don't you?
Thanks Gavin. I enjoyed your post.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to tell the world about something beautiful. God knows you feel the need to tell everyone here unpleasantries Ian. Get past your personal attitude towards posters and reply to what they write, not who they are.
Unless the child whose face showed a momentary splash of glee is suddenly hit by a truck, or your lover is killed by cancer, your analogies are nothing by trivial pursuits to discredit what has been written. What "interior decor" plants and animals died in the process of hydroenergy? We are talking about the loss of whole ecosystems, not some anthropocentric, emotional twaddle.
You have totally lost the plot here, and must bring your pespective of what wilderness is back to your good self, the centre of the universe. It all gets taken back to your tired old arguments about consumerism, ecotourists, areas being locked up, government spivs, blah, blah , blah. Get out and smell the wild flowers Ian, just for the sake of smelling the wildflowers.
Sorry Gavin, these images are nothing but interior decore for those who, having had a glimpse of something special, feel the need to tell the whole planet about it. The additional layer of meaning from being no longer present does not make it any more special than the glee captured on a toddlers face or the intoxication of a first romance. All of them were there, all were almost painfully exquisite, and all pass on, leaving a partial image to be misinterpreted by those who were not there.
In the real Lake Pedder, big fish ate little fish, some birds went hungry while others fed well, and it would be just as gone forever if it was covered by backpackers rather than water.
But one can't help reflecting on the possibility that if it had been "saved" from both ecotourism and innundation, it would still be cheapened by the very acts of exclusion that were intended to protect it. Protect it for whom? Did the fish really care if the beach was unique? Do they still care?
early immages
http://www.lakepedder.org/images/index.html
Ian: The question of our isolation is resolved when the silence is shattered by a 2 stroke working hard in the distance. Does anyone have permission to shatter the natural solitude from afar?
Four wheel drive enthusiasts and trail riders have the capacity to carry almost anything in and out of their target areas but we are stuck with the questions regarding a continuous footprint from traffic in popular off road places including beaches. Generally we each carry some sort of beacon and it may only be a box of waterproof matches.
In capturing wilderness we need to have a sense of vastness from simply being in the surrounding landscapes of water, sand, rocks, forests and sky. Then there is the detail, things we find enhanced in colour after rain or seemingly closer under mist, the moss and squiggly trails left by other creatures, objects we can touch.
Getting politicians and executives close-up to appreciate our various wildernesses has been a major problem. Building a climate for a wider public appreciation of wilderness and a pivot for the media was less difficult however an upsurge in interest creates its own problems.
For me it was a case of finally flying over what I could not expect to walk in time to collect enough information to balance a personal perspective. Each time I asked my pilot to show me wilderness, they circled places they had walked into. We flew very close to Frenchman’s Cap, Mt Anne and Mt Wedge several times as this region in SW Tasmania was considered most at risk from road making, dam building and new forestry operations. These pilots flew many tourists to the center of controversy before they were temporarily grounded by federal aviation authorities in 1972. Public access and control can slip away on a whim with a blind government in charge.
These two links show the contrast before and after tourism that was thwarted by authorities till the original lake and its associated wetlands was fully inundated under many meters of stored hydro energy.
Note: IMO some slides in the latter page are likely to be late summer, early 1972.
http://bushwalk-tasmania.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&p=4830