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Outside Magazine November 2002
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Devil's Playground: Southern Gothic (Cont.)
The Bay of Fires and Beyond: Adventure, Tassie Style
Tasmanian devil, mid-hiss (Courtesy, Australia Tourism Commission).
ACCESS AND RESOURCES

FOR MOST OF ITS HISTORY, Tasmania has been dismissed as a Faulkner-meets-the-antipodes backwater, the lost domain of hillbillies and sheep molesters, and the sort of place mapmakers forgot to include on their charts. Until the 1980s, that is, when a string of conservation campaigns publicized Tassie as Australia's ultimate natural escape—an Eden for "greenies." Now everyone wants a piece of the isolation. Thanks in part to the centuries of neglect, the island is still empty and raw. Imagine the Scottish moors with temperate rainforests and sinuous rivers, and you have Tasmania. Mountain ranges furrow the land like ancient wrinkles. Hundred-foot trees create dark empires of rotting foliage. Rivers run with water the color of tea. Luscious ferns blot out the sky. And the underpopulation is extreme even by Australian standards: Only 470,000 Tasmanians occupy an area the size of West Virginia (195,000 of them in the capital, Hobart), with about a quarter of the island marked as protected land.

Getting There
Qantas Airways flies to Hobart, Devonport, and Launceston (800-227-4500; www.qan-tas.com/us)—but nobody comes to Tasmania for the city life. Instead, rent a car and seek out the unpaved roads and some of the world's last great wilderness areas.




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