The Story Of Our Owner & Guide
Meet Jarrah
My name is Jarrah and I’m a 56 year old, sixth generation Australian fella. I’ve spent a lot of my life defending Old Growth Forests in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.
I’d been trying to get to lutra witra (the palawa or First Nation people of Tasmania’s name for the Island) ever since the days of the Franklin Dam dispute. In 1995, I finally got the opportunity to move down, ostensibly to help the campaign to stop a road being driven through the heart of a huge and unprotected Wild Place.
This Wild Place is called the Tarkine or takayna in palawa. It is over five hundred thousand hectares of ancient rainforest, windswept moorlands, towering eucalypts and wild coastline. Free of people, the remote nature of the Place has ensured that it has escaped most of the development that has happened to the rest of our planet. It is home to a vast number of endemic species of animals and plants, many of which are now critically endangered.
I fell deeply in love with the Tarkine over the next few years, spending many incredible days walking and exploring. We failed in our efforts to stop The Road To Nowhere, as the road became known. Rather than walking away, I became even more determined to do what I could to save this amazing region.
We became aware of a proposal to clearfell vast swathes of the Gondwanan aged rainforest, allegedly for sawlogs which would be turned into furniture in a local, as yet to be built, mill. The big problem with this idea was that to find the targets of this operation (Myrtle or Nothofagus cunninghamii, the dominant tree of the Tarkine’s rainforest), ten trees would be cut and only one would be used in the sawmill. This is because their target was the 10% of the myrtles which are deep red in colour The other nine were destined to become woodchips.
What were we to do? This looked like it was the final death knell for these forests, the likes of which are found nowhere else in Australia in such vast tracts. It’s the second largest cool temperate rainforest in the world.
In 1998, a group of like-minded people came together with a radical counter proposal to the horror of clearfelling. We set up a small tourism operation called “Club Tarkine” and ran day tours of the forests and coastline. Popular? We were overwhelmed by the interest in the idea, filling buses within hours of the ads being published in the local paper.
Unfortunately Club Tarkine only lasted about a year, with a few greedy individuals taking over and wrecking the operation.
I knew that taking people into the Tarkine was a great and sustainable alternative to the industrial logging proposal on the table. Club Tarkine showed me that I was on to a good thing, but I felt I needed to learn more about being an interpreter of the language of the Forests, a skill I had been developing and refining. So in 1999, I headed off to central Victoria to do a degree in Outdoor Education.
In 2002, a couple of friends and I launched Tiger Trails, a full-blown bushwalking company offering multiple day journeys to the rainforest and coastline, as well as the Overland and South Coast tracks. Our operation coincided with a big enquiry into the use of the unprotected crown land of the Tarkine and Tiger Trails were invited to give evidence. After many months, low-level protection occurred, with our argument that tourism was a much more sustainable use winning favour and the clearfelling idea was quashed.
Tarkine Trails, as it is known now, is still very much in operation but I am no longer connected to it. I left Tasmania in 2006, not to return for over a decade.
I finally got back to my island home and realised that I had missed this place intensely! While I was away, nothing much had changed – takayna was still not protected….
I settled in the village of Waratah, on the eastern side of my favorite Wild Place and set up Wild Wombat Walks. My knowing that the most popular way to see takayna is day long wanders has determined the main WWW experiences.
As well as the day walks, I am giving everyone a chance to see this place in a very different way. Wild Wombat Walks offers three- and four day “off track, destination free” experiences. Exploration. Navigation. Adventure.
Come. Experience takayna.
