INDIGENOUS-LED WALKING TOUR IN TASMANIA: CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER

In Tasmania, Indigenous-Led Walking Tours Are Sharing Ancestral Stories With Travellers.

​It’s dusk in Larapuna—the Bay of Fires on Tasmania’s remote northeast coast—and I’m looking out over the region’s iconic tangerine-hued coastline from the top of a lighthouse. The lichen-mapped granite boulders and the azure Tasman Sea stretching beyond come together to form the quintessential image of wild, untouched Tasmania. It’s a vista that has been drawing ever greater numbers of travelers to Australia’s smallest and most southern island state in recent years. But it’s also a vista that also holds the tragic past of lutruwita, as Tasmania is known by the local Aboriginal palawa—which I learned on the first day of this three-day guided winter walk with the Indigenous-owned and -operated company wukalina Walk.

As we watch the light drain from the day at the top of Eddystone Point Lighthouse, our two young palawa guides—22-year-old Carleeta Thomas, and 28-year-old Cody Gangell—describe to me and my three travel companions the dark history of the area.

“In [the Indigenous language,] palawa kani, wukalina translates to ‘woman’s breast’, because we see this area as the nurturer of the Country,” says Thomas, spreading her arms wide to encompass wukalina (also known as Mount William National Park), and the land and sea Country beyond that, which her Ancestors have stewarded for over 48,000 years. “But wukalina is also very significant because it was from here that our mob would see the British ships arriving and light signal fires to let communities on the islands know they were coming—basically, to hide the women and children.”

Thomas tells us the history of the Black War, which began when the British first settled Tasmania in 1803, and reached its peak in 1830 with the military offensive known as the Black Line: a human chain of colonists moved south through the settled districts of Tasmania, aiming to intimidate, capture, displace, and relocate the remaining Indigenous people. By that time, it’s estimated that Tasmania’s Aboriginal population had dwindled to about 200, due to murder, violence, disease, and dispossession.

Although the Black Line was considered a failure, Aboriginal survivors of the Black War were then exiled to Wybalenna, a settlement on Flinders Island in Bass Strait. Displaced, traumatized, and plagued by disease and malnourishment, most died within a few years of being in the settlement. By 1876, all but one of who were considered the ‘last remaining’ Indigenous Tasmanians had passed away.

The ongoing effects of this harrowing history are still felt by ancestral Tasmanians today. Less than one percent of lutruwita/Tasmania’s landmass has been returned as Aboriginal Land and the land we’re standing on with Thomas and Gangell is currently only on a 40-year-lease to the Palawa people. But later, as we sip tea brewed from the kunzea plant in the lounge room of a restored late-1800s lighthouse keeper’s cottage, Gangell says that, “telling the story is one way of working towards understanding and reconciliation.”

As the first tourism offering of its kind in lutruwita/Tasmania, wukalina Walk is helping the First Nations guides who lead it to share their stories, and to protect and revive their intimate knowledge of culture and Country. For travelers like myself, it is providing a unique opportunity to sit and walk with smart, passionate palawa over multiple days; to listen and ask questions; and to share the time and space to understand the finer points of their complex history.

For our first dinner, Thomas cooks up a “bush tucka” feast centered around traditional ingredients. The dining table heaves with Tasmanian oysters, wallaby carpaccio, wallaby lasagne, and damper, or bush bread, infused with foraged native herbs, including kunzea, coastal rosemary, and Tasmanian pepperberry. It’s all polished off with “black-fella donuts,” as Thomas calls the damper balls fried in mutton bird fat and dusted with cinnamon sugar.

However dubious one might be about the fishy smell and taste of the mutton bird, muttonbirding is an important cultural practice that Thomas takes part in every year. Her face lights up when she shows us photos and videos of last year’s season on her iPhone, and describes how this species of petrel is sustainably hand-harvested by the palawa on nearby Big Dog Island each April.

After dinner, Thomas and Gangell usher us out to the fire under a star-smattered sky for a smoking ceremony. “Part of the purpose of this is removing any bad negative energies, or spirits you might be carrying with you; cleansing you and opening you up to Country,” says Gangell, stoking the flames.

Smoking ceremonies are also a way for Aboriginal people to absorb their traditional medicinal plants, and Gangell introduces us to a few of the most important. “Black peppermint gum was the totem plant for our people, and it connects us to our Ancestor spirits,” he says, holding up the delicate, narrow leaves for us to see. “Our Ancestors would be placed in the hollow of a peppermint gum tree and cremated there; their remains then nourish those trees. So by burning and breathing those leaves, we’re introducing the Ancestor spirits to the people going through the ceremony.”

Gangell places the gum leaves, and the leaves of two other medicinal herbs—kunzea and tea tree—under the coals. We’re then encouraged to kneel down and scoop the smoke over our faces and hair and down our backs, inhaling the medicinal oils as we do.

Now that we have been properly welcomed to Country, Gangell is ready to “spin a few yarns.” Yarning is a vital part of Australian Aboriginal culture, where stories and knowledge are shared in a relaxed, comfortable place. Gangell shares two Dreamtime stories, passed down orally from generation to generation, that include lessons about how the world was made, and how to live in harmony with the natural world. With the crackle of the fire and the distant roar of the ocean as our soundtrack, the yarns carry us out into the night.

The next morning, Thomas and Gangell guide us on a walk along a stretch of windswept, powder-white sand beach, dotted with shark eggs, abalone shells, and thick bull kelp that Gangell gathers up in his arms. Along the way, we pass a huge midden, or cultural living site, littered with tens of thousands of oyster shells and small stone tools, that were used between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.

Despite the winter chill, we take off our boots and walk barefoot along the wet sand so as not to disturb anything, while terns and oystercatchers wheel overhead. Gangell shows us how to identify which stones were tools, and what they might have been used for. When I marvel at the ingenuity of his Ancestors, Gangell says with a wry smile, “We’ve been managing this land for 48,000 years; we know a thing or two.”

What Gangell’s Ancestors also knew well was how to shelter in lutruwita/Tasmania’s often harsh and unforgiving environment. We soon arrive at wukalina Walk’s standing camp, or krakani lumi, which mimics the traditional seasonal bark huts of Tasmania’s First Nations people.

Set in scrub-throttled bushland thick with native banksias and grass trees, or yaminas, the camp was built in close consultation with the palawa, under the guidance of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania. There is a large, open-fronted central room with a wood-paneled domed ceiling, and five small standalone sleeping huts where, in the summer, we would have spent the night. Made of native timber that has been charred to protect against bushfires, the handsome structures rest on footings that have no long-term impact on the site, and run on solar power, rainwater, and thermal heating and cooling.

We spend the afternoon at camp, where Thomas and Gangell teach us basket weaving using the collected bull kelp, twine making from river reeds, and shell necklace stringing—the oldest continuing cultural practice in Tasmania

“This is an important way of connecting to our elders, and of sharing stories,” says Thomas as we sit around the outdoor fire rolling river reed into twine. “When our women were removed from their land, they weren’t able to access the fibers and the river reeds and pass along that skill of weaving. But now it’s been revived, thanks to our aunties doing that work of looking at each individual basket, examining the techniques and figuring out the way it was done.”

As we drive back to the lighthouse cottage after sunset, the road is dotted with wombats, wallabies, and kangaroos—unfortunately not all alive. Thomas and Gangell stop to move carcasses off the road, checking if there are babies in the pouches. They look after this whole area as if it were their own backyard. Even though it’s Country that still has not been returned to them, they see it as a place to be cared for, a place you never take too much from, a place you always help regenerate. It’s inspiring to witness, and a reminder that if we want to save the world’s wild places, the land’s first caretakers must be involved in the management of them.

On our final morning, a gusty storm blows through and sheets of rain press against the cottage windows. We had a walk planned, and my travel companions and I gather around the windows to decide whether or not to go. But then Thomas walks in, glances out the window and says no. We will stay. “We take note of things like wind and rain; it’s the Ancestors telling us it’s not the right time.”

Her words are a final reminder of the importance of companies like wukalina Walk in getting First Nations people back on Country. Here, they are emotionally, spiritually, and physically stronger. Here, they are connected to the Ancestors. Here, they are home.

This story first appeared online here.