Photographers HILARY BURDEN, JASON HILL, GREG WELLS and STU GIBSON
“Every person I take on a tour would stand in front of a dozer if this place was ever threatened.” ~ Greg Wells
“You know, if they ever put a hotel in here, that’d be terrible. If they ever put a road in, that’d be the last straw.” ~ Deny King
From the wintry summit of remote Mount Beattie, bathed in late afternoon light, Greg Wells looks out over Southwest National Park with photographer Jason Hill and pilot Liam Peters. The eagle’s view makes you whisper, or not speak at all. From here on is world heritage: wild country, a place without roads as far as the eye can see. The panorama extends through the Bathurst Narrows to Port Davey, Mount Rugby, Bathurst Harbour, the Western Arthur Range, down to Cox Bight and the infinity of the Southern Ocean.
The group lingers on the summit until dark and walks the hour back to the wilderness camp on the shores of Bathurst Harbour using starlight and torches. Hill’s photographs were disseminated through social media to attract the international traveller. Since the global pandemic closed Tasmania’s borders, a new audience has been turned on to the south-west: Tasmanians who might otherwise have been in Morocco, Europe or Queensland, discovering all over again why people love the island, reminded about what there is to protect.
Despite Covid, 2020 was a good year for Tasmania, says Wells, who helped diversify his father’s Par Avion aviation business into tourism 30 years ago. The south-west guide, surfer, musician and father of seven has always known Tasmania was gold. While he’s stepped back from the business a little – brother Shannon runs the day to day activities – Wells is still guiding and this year has seen more locals visit the south-west than ever before.
“Tasmanians are just beside themselves,” he says. “They don’t get it until they go. I’ve always believed for the longevity and protection of these places you’ve got to turn people onto them – in a managed way. Every person I take on a tour would stand in front of a dozer if this place was ever threatened and say, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”
Greg Wells has taken people into the south-west since he joined his father Don Wells’ Cambridge-based aviation business in 1993. With no road access, he says the area hasn’t changed in 30 years.
“As far as you can see there are very few tracks. it’s a massive area. We’re talking 6,000 square kilometres, and a Marine Reserve three times the size of Sydney Harbour.
“And nothing has changed. You can’t overvalue what we have. It may not have much economic value – it’s no good for agriculture and there’s no mineral wealth – but it is an incredible natural environment. That’s its wealth, and we are the protectors of it. Tassie! It’s pretty cool.”
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The flight to Melaleuca goes via the coast, flying over waves Wells has surfed all his life (and still surfs): Cloudy Bay on Bruny Island, and Southport Lagoon, where he first walked in with a surfboard as a teenager. He takes a photo with his smart phone through the aircraft window. It looks like it belongs in National Geographic.
“In those days there were all these stories about places that hadn’t been surfed. Southport Lagoon had great mystique. We walked in there with our boards and wetsuits and a bit of tucker, paddling across at Southport on our boards. You wouldn’t see anybody for four or five days. We were catching fish off the beach, surfing the mouth of the lagoon in this world heritage landscape. It was mind-blowing really.”
For Greg Wells, these are the best surfing trips you ever do, earning every big wave in an environment that is untouched, with nothing between the south coast and Argentina to stop the waves breaking. “The Tasmanian surfer is always finding these beaut places. It’s not just walking out the back door like they do in NSW. Here you’re gauging the weather, then you know you’re on a journey with your friends.”
It’s easy to forget that everything about working in the south-west is hard. There’s the weather (100 inches average rainfall a year) and the remoteness – you either fly, boat or walk in. The walk option means slugging it out on the South Coast track for a week. The past was carved out by Melaleuca’s resident (from 1936-1991), south-west legend Deny King, whose tenacity is featured in Deny, one of many songs Greg Wells has written for his Blackwater Band.
Blokes like Deny are a dying breed
They just long, yes long to be free
Working hard just to stay alive
Their spirit of adventure as their drive.
The Wells family used some of Deny King’s tenacity to build a wilderness camp on the shores of Bathurst Harbour where Bob Geeves had once set up camp. “Just getting the timber in there, the manhandling, the walkways, the camp, the amount of work you do … it’s great, but it wasn’t easy,” recalls Wells. “All the infrastructure we’ve set up was done over a number of years – we’ve invested a lot to make it happen.”
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Only a few things make Greg Wells uncomfortable. He thinks the salmon industry has got a little bit out of control, that a high-quality niche market would have been a better option. And he thinks the same can be said for forestry and tourism.
He says it seems impossible to have a public discussion about the right kind of industry for Tasmania. “If you don’t get debate, nothing changes, and you get bad legislation. You need to have those discussions in the public arena. It’s important to find the right balance for all those industries. Ron Christie (Hobart Alderman) got hammered because he dared ask the question, ‘How many is too many?’ ”
Wells says people don’t want to come to Tasmania to walk Wineglass Bay with wall-to-wall people. “The way you manage it in Tasmania is there’s only a certain number of beds, only a certain number of seats on planes, on boats, hire cars. You try and limit it to a number that doesn’t destroy the ambience of the place. You don’t want to have cruise boats with 5,000 people turn up in Bathurst Harbour. That’s where governments are supposed to step in and determine what is ideal. How many is too many, and how do we limit it? Otherwise Tasmania is going to lose what makes it special in the first place.”
Greg Wells is the kind of original Tasmanian who reminds us that living here is about the outdoors. He thinks enough young Tasmanians have an appreciation of landscape and nature to keep it wild. “Nature is at our back door. We don’t feel like it’s not accessible so there is an appreciation of the wild side. I know a lot of young people, through my kids and through music, who have concerns that we’re not getting the balance right.
“Tasmania has something that a lot of places in the world would crave to have. And those places need to be protected.”
Overnight in the wilderness camp, Greg loves telling people tiger stories. “I’m a believer,” he says. “Standing on top of Frenchman’s Cap looking south, I like to think they’re out there doing their thing in spite of us foolish humans who did everything we could to destroy them.”
On board the boat on the Melaleuca Inlet, Wells likes to show a film by Bert Taylor made in the south-west. Filmed in the 1970s, it features interviews with old-time residents Deny King, Win and Clyde Clayton, and Bob Geeves. The last scene, says Wells, is priceless. Deny, standing on TV Hill with a view of the south-west, says, “You know, if they ever put a hotel in here, that’d be terrible. If they ever put a road in, that’d be the last straw.”
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers - Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.
