Before
The canopy swayed overhead and showered Ingvar with winter rain. He didn’t flinch. He pulled out a hand lens and leaned forward for a closer look. Hidden beneath the leaf litter were three glistening flower heads, each the size of a large coin. Each flower was made up of a series of creamy white bracts, splotched with purple, and bunched together in a spiral of inward-facing rows. The inflorescence released a sweet smell that resembled vanilla.
Ingvar thumbed some dirt from the corner of his left eye and blinked. His heart was racing. Before him one of the world’s rarest plants—Rhizanthella slateri, a subterranean orchid, able to germinate, grow and flower without ever rising above the surface of the earth. Using a small trowel, he scraped away more dirt. Beneath the waxy flower heads sat a fleshy white underground stem, growing from a horizontal rhizome. There were no roots. Ingvar was struck by the utter strangeness of the plant. He recalled a passage from an early book on naturalism, which described how an atheist attended an orchid show and left later believing in the existence of the devil.
A burst of cold wind shifted through the trees and Ingvar lifted his head. A raven watched on from a wet branch. The rain had stopped but it was getting dark. He turned his attention back to the orchid and pulled out his phone to snap off some photographs. Then he got to his feet and recorded the GPS coordinates. Time to get back to the city. Back to his home.
Now
Back roads
Now I eat roadkill. When I’m desperate for food I drag dead animals off the road. Rabbits, kangaroos, goannas—as long as the carcass hasn’t stiffened, if it still flexes, then it’s edible. After gutting them, I check for parasites. I roast bits of meat on the end of my knife or on green sapling sticks. Ravens cook well on embers.
When I’m forced to walk into towns to get supplies I see people. I see people shopping or running errands, eating in cafes or waiting in lines. They study their phones or stand around and talk or drive cars around the streets. I see other people jogging. Some walk their dogs or ride bikes. When I stand outside schools, I watch parents pick up their children and help them with their bags. They hug them and talk to them about their day or ruffle their hair. Sometimes I see them laughing. These images scare me more than anything. I see them gliding along in a rowboat, laughing and waving, not knowing they are floating towards a deadly waterfall.
I see them gliding along in a rowboat, laughing and waving, not knowing they are floating towards a deadly waterfall.
But I don’t stay in towns for long, they make me jumpy. I walk country roads. Back roads. I walk until I’m too tired to go on. Day or night, it doesn’t matter. I’m not picky about where I rest—on open ground, in ditches, under bridges or in long grass beside rotting logs. These are my beds now. I watch green clouds of budgerigars kaleidoscope across the sky, then night falls and my mind goes to places where I don’t want it to go, so I get up and keep walking. I’m hit by the wind of passing trucks. When I pass roadside memorials I touch them with my hand.
Last night, I walked north along a back road, and tectonic plates and Tasmanian tigers entered my mind. The moon cast a bright glow, the air was cool and I must have covered thirty kilometres before dawn. I can walk for hours without thinking of much. Some days are completely blank. But last night I thought about how I was walking north over a land that was itself moving north.
When Gondwana broke up, the Australian continental plate drifted north at a rate of around six centimetres a year for fifty million years. After covering roughly three thousand kilometres, it finally collided with the Pacific oceanic plate and forced it into the hot mantle of the earth. Rocks were folded and melted, the earth buckled and mountains were formed. This collision shaped the high mountain ranges of Papua New Guinea as well as the waters of the Torres Strait that now separate it from Australia.
Then, around thirty thousand years ago, when the Ice Age began and sea levels dropped by more than one hundred metres, a landmass emerged that stretched all the way from Tasmania to Papua New Guinea, and Tasmanian tigers, or thylacines, roamed the entire region. Fossilised remains have been found in New Guinea, in mainland Australia and Tasmania. There are even rock paintings of them way up in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
I can walk for hours without thinking of much. Some days are completely blank.
Over the next six thousand years or so, as the ice melted and sea levels rose, water flooded Bass Strait, and Tasmania became separated from the rest of the continent. It was during this period, it’s thought that Asian seafarers brought the dingo to Australia, and its introduction coincided with the dying out of the thylacine on the mainland. But in Tasmania, because of the impassable Bass Strait, thylacines survived at the top of the food chain.
By the time of European settlement in the early 1800s, it’s estimated around five thousand thylacines inhabited the thickly forested island. Distinctive dark stripes led to their common name, but despite the fearsome title they were timid creatures and avoided contact with humans. Most captured thylacines gave up without a struggle. Some died of shock. Not much is known about their behaviour, but it’s thought they were a social species that hunted in pairs. Blamed for killing sheep, the Tasmanian government placed a bounty on their heads, and over two thousand thylacines were hunted down and shot. (Later studies showed they probably lacked the jaw strength to take down large animals.) Another seven hundred and fifty specimens were shipped off to overseas museums, and a further two hundred live animals were transported to zoos. Many perished in transit. In Tasmania, the remaining thylacines fell to habitat destruction, competition from introduced dogs and disease. Until there was one.
In 1933, the last known Tasmanian tiger was trapped in the Florentine Valley and sent to the Hobart Zoo. It’s not known if the animal had been separated from its family or was living alone when it was captured. Forty-three seconds of film still exist of ‘Benjamin’ pacing up and down his small enclosure. Benjamin paced his cage for three years. On 7 September 1936, the last-known thylacine died on a concrete floor after being locked out of his sleeping quarters during a very cold night. And then there was nothing. This is what it’s like living without you.
This is an edited extract from Why Do Horses Run? by Cameron Stewart (Allen & Unwin), available now at your local independent bookseller.