I often think of the Tassie devil as a swaggie: old-fashioned, unfashionable, humping a billy through the woods, dressed in a thick jumper of black wool, a v-neck with a white trim around the collar. Such is the nature of a critter that likes to wander alone, unperturbed by darkness.

A while back, I borrowed a friend’s motion-sensor trail camera and tied it to various tree trunks around the yard. Almost immediately it yielded a three-second video of a wombat shuffling through the scrub near the train carriage. I knew that wombats lived around here; I’d sometimes seen the familiar structures of their scat placed tidily on clear paths through the forest. But I hadn’t seen an actual wombat on the property, not once in the five-plus years I’ve stayed out here.

You shouldn’t be too surprised. I’m not exactly a nocturnal creature. I tend to run out of mental energy for reading by about 8pm and the train carriage has very limited electricity, so there’s not much else to do. Sometimes I sit by the brick-lined firepit until a little later, entertaining myself with embers and sparks and flaring gum leaves. Or else I might go for a walk. Usually, though, I lie in bed and eventually dream.

Yet much of the life here does come alive at night. A common reminder of this is the sound of boobook calls repeating through the woods, each remark of theirs sincere (although their placid bisyllabic call is sometimes replaced by more strident screeching). Likewise, most nights I hear the hiss and wheeze of possums, who sometimes climb up the posts of my little sleeping shack. En masse, pademelons materialise on dusk, and melt away in the morning. The midnight hours are theirs.

I sleep outside sometimes, though not as much as I used to. When I worked as a mountain guide, we’d often drag mattresses onto the heli-pad so we could fall asleep to the song of mosquitoes and wake up drenched in dew. I once had to yank my blanket back from a wombat who had decided to claim it, pulling it away from me with its teeth.

Even before that, when my share-house bedroom had a small balcony attached to it, I’d sleep out there. Far below, it felt, was the quiet hum of Launceston – more somnolent than it probably is these days – and on every hour, the daft gong of the town clock would drift up the hill towards me.

There were also frequent possum visitors on that balcony, performing a balancing act on the balustrade, scowling and growling as they went. I often wondered if they were annoyed to find me in the way of some midnight stage act they performed of a night. Though there seemed not to be an audience.

Occasionally I’d go out on the town, drinking and dancing in Launnie’s less-than-salubrious late-night venues. I’d walk home up the hills on the western side of the city. Around the summer solstice, I’d be amazed to find that the sun was rising behind me, splashing colour into the parks. It was a new discovery, as if I’d approached the morning from another side.

I see sunrises more often now, although this is usually after a good night’s sleep. It rises through the bush with the fervent glow of a bonfire built of wattle logs.

As a guide, on one of those heli-pads – high at the base of one of Tassie’s tallest mountains and looking south – I saw the aurora australis. I’d seen the northern lights, a few times, in Iceland – I’d just had to stick my head out of the tent.

Back on the Tasmanian heli-pad, I had two guiding colleagues by my side, and perhaps a bottle of wine, when I saw the lights dance across the mountain sky. We were laughing and telling stories and then one of us shrieked, “Is that an aurora?” The giggling stopped. What I most remember was the eerie sensation of seeing something so large that was also silent.

I have seen auroras since then, although I have more often missed them. Last autumn, a friend sent a text message that read, “I hope you’re out looking at the aurora right now!” My phone was off. I had a visitor and we’d just spent the previous three nights camping, but now we’d returned to the cosiness of the fire and an early night. At some stage, though, my visitor had evidently gone out, to answer the call of nature as they say. She’d seen the red flare that was filling skies to the south, but hadn’t twigged what it was actually was. A forestry burn-off nearby, she guessed. It was apparently one of the most powerful auroras in my lifetime.

I have mentioned my sleeping shack, which I call a “cottage” but is basically a timber box, lined with books, with a bed in it. It’s nice to have separate quarters for sleeping, I reckon. It’s cool out there in winter, but I sleep warm and anyway I have a hefty doona (which is suffocating on some summer nights). I never fully shut the cottage when I’m in there. I have a flyscreen door that I close against the night. Fresh air filters in and when it’s cold, I simply snuggle further into the doona.

One night I strapped the trail camera to one of the posts that hold the cottage roof. This was still early in the trail camera experiment and I expected to catch nothing more than the usual assembly of pademelons and possums. But, when I thought about it later, I had been hearing the odd funny noise out the front in recent nights. When I looked back on the evidence the following day, I realised that I’d been visited by a spotted-tailed quoll. It had come right onto the deck of the sleeping shack and sniffed at the flyscreen, as if it had caught my scent and thought it was worth investigating whether or not I was a corpse.

I have been coming and going a lot lately, and I think that lets the nocturnal critters feel like they have their run of the place. Of course, whenever I’m travelling, even if it’s just for a few days, I do my best to cache food away and tidy the train up, to make sure that none of those rum’uns gets the idea that my kitchen is also theirs. Apart from that, though, I like the thought of sharing my place with these marsupial companions and nocturnal birds. For aeons, after all, humans lived in closer proximity with other animals. It is strange now to have shaped our spaces so we have nothing to do with them.

A mate of mine has a theory that Tasmanian devils would, in another time, have hung around campsites, feeding off the inevitable scraps that would’ve been left behind. It’s an interesting hypothesis, and however false or unprovable it might be, it’s worth musing on what it might mean to have semi-domesticated devils around your yard.

This autumn, too, I was hearing a devil in the forest. I had previously been made aware of their presence in the forest, but not so often. It was encouraging to hear them again. Not that the cry of a devil is meant to be comforting: it is a drawn-out, high-pitched screech, very loud, and must put the whole bush on edge at night. But not that long ago I was convinced that I would live to see these characterful carnivores lost to extinction, and though that seems less likely now, my gratitude that they’re still around hasn’t wavered.

I often think of the Tassie devil as a swaggie: old-fashioned, unfashionable, humping a billy through the woods, dressed in a thick jumper of black wool, a v-neck with a white trim around the collar. Such is the nature of a critter that likes to wander alone, unperturbed by darkness. It prefers the liberty of following the empty routes of night country, on its own timetable, unopposed. I would love to see one in the morning, at the end of a night of carnivorous misadventures, to tell the devil, as in the name of the short story by Clarice Lispector, “Where you were at night.”

I didn’t catch sight of this visitor on the trail camera, and of course the nights had become chilly, so I wasn’t hanging around outside late. But I heard him for a few evenings and then a week later, found my neighbourhood devil on the side of a nearby road. He had been struck by the car of some complacent midnight driver and left for dead.

I visited his body – it was a big male – every day as he decayed, a kind of vigil. The body bloated, the black fur started to turn threadbare, and finally the whole figure rotted – apart from the jaws, which remained shaped into a grimace, sharp teeth bared. I waited there at times as if to hear the corpse growl again. But of course, it never did and later its carcass was gone, perhaps taken at night by another scavenger.

Bert Spinks is a writer, poet, storyteller and bushwalking guide from Tasmania. For many years he has performed and published Tasmanian stories. Most of the time, he's based in an old train carriage in the bush. He has a podcast, "In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere" (soundcloud.com/storytellerspinks), and shares writing and photography at "Letters from a Storyteller" (storytellerspinks.substack.com).