Harry Saddler - Questions Raised by Quolls

Published by Affirm Press in 2021

28 Thistlethwaite Street, South Melbourne,

Boon Wurrung Country, VIC 3205

affirmpress.com.au

Text and copyright Harry Saddler, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

without prior permission of the publisher.

Title: Questions Raised By Quolls / Harry Saddler, author.

eISBN: 9781922626417

Cover design by Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs

Typeset in Granjon by J&M Typesetting

Dedicated to my parents, Hugh and Marilyn thank you for raising me the way you did.

And in fond memory of Loretta Hemensley (19452021) who, along with her husband Kris, was one of the first people to welcome me into Melbournes literary community.

Author Note

Thank you to everyone who so generously and readily shared their knowledge and expertise to help me write this book. In no particular order: Nicholas Dexter, Dion Maple, Shane Sturgeon, Gavin McLeod, Tyson Simpson-Brown, Mark Sawa, Rob Brewster, Guy Ballard, David Hamilton, Chris Jolly, Ella Kelly, Belinda Wilson, and Katherine Tuft. I hope Ive done all your work justice. If Ive left anyone out I apologise, but know that when I suddenly remember you three days after this book goes to print Ill kick myself and know also that your help has been appreciated more deeply than Im able to express.

Thank you to everyone at or associated with Affirm Press but in particular Coco McGrath for her expert guidance in helping to shape this book, Lesley Halm for her diligent and thorough copy-editing, and Martin Hughes for trusting me to create something coherent out of what was a fairly wild and woolly initial pitch. Thank you to Christa Moffitt for designing a cover that took my breath away when I first saw it; it has grown richer and more complex each time Ive thought about it.

And lastly, thank you to my friends, family, and colleagues everywhere who got in touch during the darkest days of the pandemic, sent something in the mail, called on the phone, or organised communal spaces online when nothing else was possible. Im sorry if I havent always been so good at returning the kindness. None of us are meant to get through this life alone.

They came at dusk, drawn to our camp site by the smell of food. We were cleaning up after dinner in the gathering dark, the pots and pans scraped empty but with traces of our meal still lingering, when we heard the noise of them: yapping calls, as if in excitement.

We were at Solomons Jewels, on the outskirts of the Walls of Jerusalem National Park in Tasmania, my father and I. I must have been in my late teens, and my father had become passionate about hiking in the island states remote mountains and forests. As a young man, before he met my mother, before they had a family, hed worked for a time on the roads in south-west Tasmania. Now, decades later, hed returned to the island state, his passion perhaps reignited by the fact that his two children, my brother and I, were old enough to join him on deep hikes into the forest and mountains as something approaching equals.

First he took my older brother to Frenchmans Cap, hiking through kilometres of mud a trip which would become notorious within the folklore of our family. Then he took me along the Overland Track, then to Mount Anne: one of my favourite photos is of us both in our hiking gear shorts and boots and gaiters and floppy hats and old khaki shirts; my bush aesthetic then, as now, closely modelled on his unpacking lunch on the shoulder of Mount Anne with the dizzying heights and depths of Tasmanias glacial landscape behind us. In the valley below us is Lake Pedder, which, in 1972, was infamously flooded to become a hydroelectric reservoir despite a passionate campaign to save it. In February every year or so, wed travel from Canberra down to Tasmania for a week or more. Once on the island wed drive or catch a bus on one occasion we even took a light plane to the start of our walk, and away wed go.

Twice we went to the Walls of Jerusalem National Park. Tucked off to the side of the more famous Cradle MountainLake St Clair National Park, through which the Overland Track runs, the Walls of Jerusalem is a small park a natural amphitheatre surrounded by the distinctive columnar cliffs of Tasmanias mountains. You hike in and then you hike out again, not staying long, entranced by the landscape which, even by Tasmanian standards, is stunningly beautiful. On our second visit to the Walls of Jerusalem, hiking through pine forest and alpine meadow in February, in the snow (not an unusual occurrence in that part of Tasmania at that time of year, but still disconcerting to a mainlander) I remember feeling as though Id somehow stepped through a portal and ended up in Europe until a Bennetts wallaby hopped across our path. On our last night we camped at Solomons Jewels, a collection of alpine tarns scattered throughout the bush. We had pitched our tents on the rocky ground and it was on that night that we were ambushed by the eastern quolls, those yapping creatures who came sniffing for our dinner.

Predatory marsupials, nocturnal and endemic to Australia somewhat like cats but with long pointed snouts eastern quolls are either a sandy colour, like the colour of the night sky above a large city, or else theyre midnight black, and covering their bodies from neck to haunches are large white spots, like spotlights searching the sky. I have a photo, somewhere from the days when youd take a photo and hope for the best not knowing how itd turn out till you got the film developed of one of the quolls roaming through our camp site, agile and light on its feet: the bright circles of its eyes in the cameras flash echo the white spots on its flanks. The whole photo is almost washed out by the silver side of our tent reflecting the flash back at the camera a photo taken hastily, such was my excitement at this nocturnal invasion. It was the first time Id seen eastern quolls, and its still the only time Ive ever seen them in the wild.

Another trip to Tasmania, another hike, another camp site: the first night on the South Coast Track, which we walked from west to east, and for which wed had to catch that light plane from Hobart to the starting point at Melaleuca, far up a coastal valley. As we hiked down the valley to the coast, critically endangered orange-bellied parrots flitted overhead from time to time Melaleuca is the only place in the world where they breed. With us was Dads old friend Geoff. Its good to hike in a group: hiking alone for a long distance in a remote landscape with unpredictable weather is dangerous. Hiking in a group also creates camaraderie, and staves off boredom: its easy, during long, tiring hours of trudging through the bush, even in spectacularly beautiful country, to become lost in the monotony of it another footstep, another raindrop. Often Id have a song, or a fraction of a song, stuck in my head for days Id come to wonder at the start of each hike what that trips song would be so having other people to point out something interesting, or something beautiful, or just to chat to, can be invaluable.