Looking back to the halcyon days of bushwalking

by Robert McLean

Bushwalking once held my gaze.

The experience of such printine wilderness
 is common for bushwalkers in Tasmania.

Much of my leisure time saw me a bush inspired-like trance as I considered, prepared for and set off on many adventurous walks.

A friend, with rich and vast experience of life in the bush, advised that autumn was the kindliest time to be outdoors as it generally had the most stable weather in that there were fewer wet days; it was cooler than the extremes of summer and warmer than the depths of winter, and the wind less intense.

He was correct and beyond a few days when the weather was somewhat less than what was hoped for, conditions for bushwalking were benign, bordering on ideal.

Bushwalking is about experiencing and soaking up the world’s wilderness areas, at least those in my corner.

Oddly, the more who visit those very areas in search of that experience, the more eroded the wilderness becomes. Arrival of humans signals the death of a wilderness.

And so it goes. Humans seek out the wilderness, but their very behaviour destroys what they are looking for.

Having been to a few wilderness areas and adhering to the bushwalking adage of taking only pictures and leaving only footprints – the former has never been a practice and the latter can’t be avoided – the wilderness, however, was a little less “wild” subsequent to my visit.

Therein rests the difficulty as the richness and the prodigiousness of life, of which we are just one troublesome species, that some have likened to a plague, finds much of its fertility in what we call wilderness, but what nature considers “just right”.

Ever since standing upright it has been man’s endeavour to master nature, to shape it in response to its wants and needs.

Untroubled for billions of years by mankind’s demands, nature went about its business stocking its larder and burying, as it does, its ancient sunlight and the plan, as erratic as it might seem to us, was evolving smoothly until man stumbled on the code, unlocked the pantry to gorge itself on the contents.

Those locked away fossils fuels and other resources were not free, contrary to the view of many, and although there was no obvious checkout, we are now being asked to pay.

Floods recently devasted parts of
Victorai and New South Wales.

And we are certainly are paying now with our troubled climate producing notably unseasonable autumn weather – record rains and subsequent floods, heat waves and coastal cyclones.

My friend was right, at the time, about the constancy of autumn weather, but that seems to be slipping away even though that argument is defied by glancing out the window to a beautiful, classic autumn day.

Despite that, my return to those halcyon bushwalking days is unlikely, just as will be the return of predictable near ideal autumn weather.