Towards the end of last year, I had an impromptu visit to Ocean Beach on the west coast of Tasmania. Ocean Beach is remote – I can’t imagine anyone visiting it totally spontaneously. But on this day I was in Queenstown and had a few hours to kill, so it was possible. The weather was very fickle – brilliant sunlight at one moment, and then fierce showers the next. It was raining heavily when I got there. I sat in my car, waiting for the driving rain to stop, looking down at the largest beach on the west coast. There was one other car in the small car park. The rain stopped after ten minutes, so I got out of my car and started preparing. Somebody got out of the other car, it was a ranger.
We had a brief but very interesting conversation. She was in the summer ranger program and was here to conduct a tour of the shearwater rookeries above Ocean Beach. It wasn’t going to start until dusk, which was two hours away.
I said that I was planning on going for a long walk on Ocean Beach. She told me to watch out for cars – cars are allowed to drive on Ocean Beach, it’s considered a part of Tasmania’s road system. She told me about the birds I was likely to see if I walked down the beach. She also said that if I went south towards Hell’s Gates, I would eventually come to the body of a large seal, which had been washed up onto the beach last week. She suspected it had been shot for eating fish from nearby fish farms. She mentioned that if I walked even further, I would come across the carcass of a very rare pygmy sperm whale.
I did see just a few cars on my walk, but it's a wide beach and so they never got very close. I did end up seeing both the seal and the whale. I was amazed at how large the teeth of seals are. I also had a good glimpse of Hells Gates (the entrance to Macquarie Harbour, named by convicts on their way to the Hell on Earth that was Sarah Island) before I turned back. It was getting dark when I returned and the ranger’s shearwater tour was just starting. I was footsore and feeling almost deafened from the relentless wind of the roaring forties, so I passed on that. I was glad to see that a few families had shown up for that, and the children seemed very interested.
This ranger was able give me information about this place which helped me appreciate where I was and what I was seeing. She gave meaning and context to this place. She reminded me of a good librarian.
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