The town of Cygnet is the closest town to where my uncle lives in very southern Tasmania. From his windows, in his house on the rocky headland that my dad designed and they built slowly over ten years, there is nothing but ocean between me and Antarctica. When Sarah and I went to Tasmania a month or so back, we went simply to look at the ocean, to comb the beaches for interesting shells and driftwood and take walks through the sketchy coastal forest. We wanted a break from the city, you know, the simple life. But in Tasmania nothing is simple, beside the shells on the beach there is so much rope, colourful as streamers discarded after a kid’s party, washed up from the salmon farms. The rope is cut and cast into the sea. Apparently in the old days in Deep Bay, the bay that Cygnet hugs, a tall ship could be moored right up to the pub in town. Now silt clogs the bay and it’s so shallow Cranes can walk across it. There’s a pub in town that has trucks parked out the front with bumper stickers that say, ‘Green’s Lie’, ‘Earth First Log the Other Planet’s Later’, ‘Keep Warm This Winter Burn a Greenie’.
Most tourists who travel to Tasmania don’t see the logged coupes, tracts of trees are kept at the edges of the roads. Tourists are directed from National Park to National Park so that they never know about the battle for the forests of Tasmania, that is happening between these small sections of protected land. Our friend Anna Krien has written a book about this battle: Into The Woods. It’s out this week, and we’re so gosh darn proud.
When Sarah and I were there, we cooked this rustic apple pie, (with organic apples,) and tried to pull as much rope as we could from the sand.
recipe...