Charles Wooley: Career path takes me a fare way to heaven

Flying around the world can be great fun, but it can also make you forget how much Tasmania has to offer, writes Charles Wooley.

Charles Wooley visits the Tarkine on the Pieman River. Picture: Arron Hage

Travel is back.

I haven’t been any further afield than Sydney and the Gold Coast in three years. Now the world tourism industry is anticipating a return to pre-Covid travel, and so apparently is the television business.

Not to say Covid has gone away. Just our apprehensions.

And so I am able to tentatively return to my old travelling life. An Australian television network asked me to shoot a story. They asked so nicely and the location (although the rest of the world would consider it a remote place) was only 364km from home.

I could drive there, so I said yes.

I have already had more than my fair share of adventures and have been fortunate to see so much of the best of the world. Back in the golden age when free-to-air TV was king, I was indulged by a television career that put Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Himalayas and the remote Pacific all within my reach.

As I say, more than my fair share without paying my share of the fare.

I have at this moment of writing just spun the wobbly old globe on my desk at Carlton Beach in Tasmania, which again might seem a remote enough spot, if you live in Paris or New York.

This week in a quick spin of the globe I was surprised to count more than 70 countries I can remember visiting, admittedly some only vaguely. And that rough tally was without jabbing my well-travelled finger at the Pacific, where there are 10 separate nations along with thousands of islands that feel like they are.

There are about 200 countries on Earth, and I think I have been to about half of them. Sometimes it’s not a bucket list so much as a doleful itinerary.

Ireland not for the Guinness, but for a war.

Haiti not to drink the famous fierce and tasty cremas, but for a disastrous earthquake.

Ethiopia not for the wildlife in the fabulous Omo National Park, but for a terrible famine.

But there was also good along with the bad.

Charles Wooley visits the Tarkine. Picture: Aaron Hage

Chasing wild salmon in Scotland and uncovering the secrets of the whisky business (I can’t remember what I discovered).

A story on port wine in Portugal’s Douro Valley, where they invented the stuff hundreds of years ago.

Polygamy in a crowded little house on the prairie in the wilds of Mormon Utah.

Surviving voodoo in Benin on the west coast of Africa.

Hunting the aurora on a dog sled in the far north of Norway.

Now I am not one for bragging. I have always been a modest bloke with much to be modest about. I am only too aware that I have been lucky.

I might have had a favourite bookshop in London, a favourite diner in New York and a favourite old bar in San Francisco, but I haven’t been everywhere, man.

Not by a long shot.

Somehow, I’ve never been to Japan.

And I went to Pisa once and was too busy filming to see the tower.

Which proves what I’ve always insisted to those who stayed home, that journalism might look like a paid holiday, but it isn’t.

Travel was and still is travail. It was a job.

If it wasn’t tough, they would’ve wanted me to pay them.

I am the first to concede that any man who has had a platinum frequent flyer card for decades has not had a virtuous home life. His children hardly know him, and his dog threatens to bite him when he comes through the front gate.

These days, for staying home, Qantas has busted me to Gold Class and booted me out of the Business Lounge down to the Qantas Club.

It’s a bit more crowded there. Otherwise, I wouldn’t notice the difference. Indeed, if airlines actually flew on time, I wouldn’t even use their lounges.

But long before Covid was a justification for delays, I had spent hours at a time, sometimes days, in airports around the world with different airlines and for different reasons, waiting for flights that never flew.

Charles Wooley

My first television assignment in two years was especially enticing because there would be none of that. The world has never heard of the Tarkine; half a million hectares of Tasmanian wilderness on the west coast of an island at the bottom of the world.

Most Australians have never heard of it, just as back in the 1980s few had ever heard of the Franklin River.

It is said to be the second largest temperate rainforest in a world that has lost so much.

In fact, the 500,000ha of the Tarkine is just a patch, a remnant pocket to remind us of how the planet must have looked 200 million years ago. It’s a land of ancient forests and mighty rivers. It is every bit as haunting and brooding as places I have travelled to in New Guinea and Brazil. It is so serenely beautiful, it is unnerving. The place defies description, which I guess is why I had to film it. That and the fact that it took only a day’s drive to get there.

The place is by no means safe. Only 10 per cent of it is protected from logging and mining, so you should see it as soon as possible.

Drive to the Pieman River and cross it on the “Fatman” Barge to Corinna and start the adventure with a night at the pub in the wilderness.

I’m a jaded traveller and it takes a lot to knock me out.

But the Tarkine certainly did.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian journalist and deputy mayor of Sorell.