Tasmanian Pademelons

We're just back from Tasmania -- where we attended and presented at the Antarctic Visions Conference at the University of Tasmania, Hobart.

How did the talk go? I believe it is always ill-advised to begin a new slide deck at 3:30 am the day of -- because one suddenly has a "great new idea."

And yet this was the predicament I sucked myself into, suddenly obsessed with capturing larger ideas of how we understand and talk about place. And the name I gave it was Lyrical Geomorphology. (Expect to see more of these notions here, as I tease them out for my book.)

The rest of the panel "killed" (modish high-praise lingo vectored into my brain via my 13-year-old daughter) that day. Bill Fox, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent, gave a rousing discussion of his own path to Antarctica -- how understanding The Ice as Place began with conversations -- with Barry Lopez and Stephen Pyne. Gretchen Legler, author of On Ice , detailed her ever-expanding list of women's writing on The Ice.

I quoted my good friend David Campbell's brilliant Antarctic book The Crystal Desert , showed slides from my exploding collection of Antarctic images, and chatted about how "personal" stories offer us writers a sort of wild creativity and freedom.

When the conference ended we drove south towards Recherche Bay, to a solar-powered shack in the forests.

Unexpected, dominant piece of each day: In the land of nocturnal animals, road kill takes on stunning proportions.

Part of our morning ritual entailed pausing to shovel small, unfamiliar animals off the road. It felt like the right thing to do.

While doing so one day, Ed said to me, "What the hell is this one?" The grey-brown back and reddish belly, the muscular forearms, stocky, short legs.

Only yesterday as I culled photos from the trip did I sit down to add name to image. I came again to this guy and found it to be a male pademelon -- and Aboriginal name, sometimes called the rufous wallaby.

Looking at its living rellies online, I considered how islands like Tas tell a specific wild story of adaptation, how this adaptation is often portrayed as "exotic" and how site-specific plants and animals hold us in their thrall.

Thanks for that inspiration, pademelons. More about native plants and animals and how their life The Presidio in our next post.