I first walked south into the Tarkine wilderness in 1973, searching for the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger. This large, striped carnivorous marsupial was hunted to the brink of extinction after 1888, when the Tasmanian parliament voted to put a one pound (two dollars) bounty on its head. However sightings persisted, and some of the most promising were in the Tarkine, northwest of Australia's island state of Tasmania.
We saw none, but what I did see had me spellbound: 450,000 hectares of cathedral-like rainforest, rushing rivers, wild flowers and ferns, and fungi of every hue. Named after the Tarkiner people who lived along its coastline for thousands of years before European dispossession in the 1830s, the region remains rich in Aboriginal heritage. This includes the sites of huts just above its shore, and stone engravings thought to be 6,000 years old.
The Tarkine abounds in wildlife. It is a secure habitat for rare and remarkable species like the Tasmanian devil, the spotted-tailed quoll (both are marsupial carnivores), the world's largest freshwater crayfish, as well as platypuses, echidnas and Tasmania's giant wedgetailed eagle. The wedgetails have a wingspan of up to three metres. A decade back I was walking across the buttongrass plain to the Tarkine coast when two wedgetails flew east from the mountains. One turned back but the second circled overhead before flying down in a corkscrew maneuver to land just 10 metres away: the monarch of this domain.
One morning, I frightened ducks off a coastal lagoon. A Tasmanian devil cantered up for a duck snack but shot back into the scrub after it spotted me. Devils are denizens of the night, rarely seen in daylight. Across Tasmania, they have been decimated by a transmissible facial cancer. Their last stronghold is the Tarkine.
Newly discovered by board riders, this coastline is blasted by the Roaring Forties winds bringing the cleanest air on Earth and, in winter, waves of up to 18 metres - more than 50 feet or 5 stories high. In summer, whales migrate along the Tarkine shore on their way to calving grounds off the Australian mainland further north.
Inland, ancient rainforest cloaks the mountainsides and the banks of the Tarkine's pristine, west-flowing rivers. This forest flourished on Gondwanaland, the great prehistoric continent before Australia, Antarctica, South America and India drifted apart 60 million years ago. Fossils of the tree fern Dixonia antarctica have been discovered under the Antarctic ice. In the modern Tarkine rainforest, these same ferns flourish in every dell. Reputed to grow one metre each century, some Tarkine ferns are 10 metres tall.
The British landed in Tasmania in 1803. Most of the island's great forests were cleared. In 2004, responding to growing public clamour against the ongoing destruction, prime minister John Howard protected the Tarkine rainforest from logging. In 2013, the Australian Heritage Council advised the government of Julia Gillard to list the Tarkine as Australian National Heritage.
Gillard's environment minister Tony Burke rejected this advice. He opened 96% of the Tarkine, including its rainforest, to mineral exploration and gave the go-ahead for the first open-cut mine in the Tarkine's “protected area”. This iron ore mine will be more than one kilometre across, and 250 metres deep.
There are 50 other mining applications for exploration, including in the rainforest heartland. The Tasmanian environment protection agency has also given the go-ahead for a strip mine removing all vegetation from a one thousand hectare site in the Tarkine rainforest.
In 1815, Captain James Kelly and his crew set off from Hobart to row a whaleboat around Tasmania. On 2 January 1816, they waded ashore on a Tarkine beach, clutching their muskets and "to our great astonishment we were accosted by six huge men, black natives, each of them above six feet high and very stout made ... they had a spear in each of their right hands and two in their left ... they were quite naked and appeared ready for war ... our men were greatly alarmed". Sensibly, Kelly's party left the beach to the Tarkiner warriors.
Nowadays, a visit to the Tarkine is not so alarming. There are wilderness lodges, cruises on the beautiful lower reaches of the Pieman and Arthur Rivers, guided walks in the rainforest (including a waterfall or two) and wombats and wallabies on the approach road verges.
As controversy grows about the Tarkine – should it be a mining province or a World Heritage area for wonder, adventure and inspiration? – there will never be a better time to visit.