(first published as the Introduction to Peter Dombrovskis's Wilderness Diary 1994 [West Winds Press, Sandy Bay] )

I wish to share with you a fragment of poem. It is my own poem, and it is not particularly good, but it does serve my purpose. Here's how it was written.

I was with a party (this was years ago) that camped on the shores of Banana Lake, in the eastern lee of the King William Range. We walked south from Butler's Gorge on a rare day, with Algonkian Mountain ahead, and the southermost tree-spiked lagoons of Lake King William on the right. I recall that I became unreasonably excited over the realisation that the almost imperceptible ridge upon which we rested was one of Tasmania's most important watersheds. Two big steps this way and, if I got rained upon, that rain would quietly slide, perhaps via Lake Rufus, into Lake King William and the east-flowing Derwent, and thence to the Tasman Sea. Two big steps that way, and the same cold precipitation would flow south, perhaps into Banana Lake, thence into Lake Richmond, nominally the headwaters of the Gordon, and south and west via that mighty flow to the Great Southern Ocean.

We were still preoccupied by this small geographical marvel perhaps. Whatever, we trod the track too far south before striking right across the button grass for Banana Lake. And so we missed the lake, and there we were, night coming on, be-wildered in sodden, slippery, shin-barking rainforest, somewhere between Banana Lake and Lake Richmond.

We were in no danger, but all the terrors of the childhood night came to clamour exultantly about. Later I wrote a poem about this. I wrote it by layering up lines like these:

Some sun, spent and worn.

Slow, the devil-as-tigersnake

Slips through the dapple, flicking scorn:

The leaf-mould quivers, settles in his wake.

Thylacine waits silent in the half-dark.

The forest is the sum of history:

At the eye's edge I almost see

Looming reptiles, terrible and stark.

The viridescence breathes glossy poison.

All is threat...

I was trying to conjure a gathering storm of smothering, choking oppression; hysteria rising in the gorge of fragile civilisation's primeval terror of the still-to-be-tamed. I concluded thus:

The leech fastens, vamps, bloats.

A warm trickle clots the greasy wool

Around my ankle. The cruel

Ancient world turns inward, gloats.

Lose youself here.

Taste panic on your breath.

Run, fall, enfold death:

The creeping moss will kiss your fear.

I am enchanted by the wild places, and I was as enchanted when I penned those lines as I am now. But I hope I would never again write in such a way of those forests; those forests standing in ageless, unbroken descent from the time of the great supercontinent. Enchanting it may have been for me back then, but it was still 'other', still a source of threat, still alien.

Here, it seems to me, is the great failure of perception of we who have come to live in Tasmania. Even a soul as sensitive as Vivian Smith writes, of a 1940s childhood, that his strong sense of attachment to Hobart ceased abruptly at Mount Nelson and Mount Wellington, where the patient, menacing wilderness awaited its people-obliterating destiny. Peter Conrad, in Down Home, reserves his most vitriolic observation for the wilderness, for which he evinces an almost pathological hatred: 'down here, nature and human affection are incommensurate. The skyline is the allegorical graph of our dreads: beyond Huonville, on the edge of the south-western no man's land, looms Mount Misery'.

The less exalted of us are 'Proud To Be Tasmanian', and we cheer lustily for David Boon and Gwen Harwood and Peter Hudson and Errol Flynn and other Tasmanians who have strode the larger stage with distinction. But it is a hollow, contrived Tasmanian-ness we flaunt. Excepting a privileged few, of whom Weindorfer, Bond, Judd, Truchanas, Smithies, King can stand as exemplars, we still cringe from, remain hostile to, what is essential and especial about this island at the end of the earth. That - the unfinished cumulation of its bio- and geo-physical unfolding - we would treat as resource, as commodity, as victim-to-be of our gross and exploitative ambitions. We value it not essentially but instrumentally. And so we are false patriots. We remain estranged from what lies at Tasmania's living heart. Here we live, but here we do not dwell.

Now, 200 years after dispossessing a people who had attained that superior relationship of being-at-home in the land, it is time to for us to dwell; to be ourselves at home in the wild places. To rediscover 'home' is the great unarticulated issue of our time. The global standardisation of architecture, technology, religion, bureaucracy and economics is more comprehensively alienating, more destructive of that especialness of place that conduces to empathetic identity, than any set of circumstances with which we have had to contend in times past. And this matters. The grief, the deep sense of loss experienced by people who are forcibly removed from home, has been well documented. Yet modern (and post-modern) existence seems to opt voluntarily for just such a pathological condition of life, presumably because death by a thousand cuts is assumed to be somehow less 'dead' than death by one dramatic blow. We have a profound need to be 'at home' then; it is the foundation of our identity and our sense of belonging, and without it we will not experience the satisfactions of wellbeing that are each human's birthright, and that are the end-state justification of all governmental action.

So we will remain strangers in a strange land; transplanted, homeless Europeans, belonging neither here nor there - emotional refugees - until we can look at our little island, recognise its especialness and the here-only-ness of its living and geophysical processes, and say, 'this is not inert matter for my manipulation; this is my home, and it bestows upon me a duty of care. I am one with this. I belong here'.

And gradually, against the odds, and against the opposition of the determinedly estranged, in little dribs and drabs, this is happening. Our horizons of care; our attachments of place are expanding. More of us are reaching out to gather the places of wonder and their shifting living processes within the ambit of our fields of care; within our identification of what we mean by 'home'. When we have done this we will no longer be alien; we will belong here; we will dwell in this island. In the words of the great American forester, Aldo Leopold, we will be citizens, not conquerors, of the community of life that is this place - and we will be true Tasmanian patriots.

So I must go back to Banana Lake. It is my home - part of my home - and I have unfinished business there.