Wooley: Thanks to my dear mum, my heart’s always in the highlands

Having immigrated from Scotland my late Mum, Ella, embraced Tasmania’s high country and passed on that love to me. A lifetime later I still haunt the highland lake shores, writes Charles Wooley

The Tarraleah Hydro Power Station where Charles Wooley’s engineer dad worked; Picture: Hydro Tasmania

Tarraleah.

My late Mum Ella was a literary old soul.

When she left Scotland and the beautiful Hebridean Isle of Arran for a life at Tarraleah on the Nive River, in the then remote wilderness of Tasmania’s Central Plateau, she sought consolation in verse. She called the place “Tirra Lirra by the river” invoking the song of Lancelot in Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott”.

I can hear her now, “Tirra Lirra, Tirra Lirra: (by the river), sang Sir Lancelot.”

It was a wild place. A vivid scar in the densest bush. A frontier village plonked down in a hostile bulldozed wasteland, as remote and lonely as a settlement on the moon. We lived on the edge of a great canyon so thickly forested that when a car plunged off the road a search party would have to walk the track to find where the driver was lost in the thickest immensity of rainforest and giant ferns.

“Stay close or the bush will just swallow you up,” Charlie, my dad, told me.

The Tarraleah Hydro Power Station where Charles Wooley’s engineer dad worked. Picture: Hydro Tasmania

He was a power station operator. He’d worked as an engineer in ships and run power plants in Fiji and in Scotland where he had married the boss’s daughter and told her they were going to Tasmania, ‘a South Pacific Island’.

In a way I suppose it was, but not as my mum expected.

But she came to love it up there. With a small child in tow, she explored the bush and was never lost. I became a creature of the deep wild forest, a place of moss and fungi, where strident birdsong bounced off the trunks of massive trees, the girth of whole houses. Under a thick, leafy canopy that blocked out the sun, we brewed billy-tea and flavoured it with sassafras, a trick learned from the old bushmen. I learned to swing the billycan to settle the tea-leaves before we washed down Mum’s famous rock cakes.

I still vividly remember the smell of the bush after rain and how it mingled with the scent of the burning gum leaves with which Mum expertly kindled a small fire.

Charles Wooley with his dear late Mother, Ella, in Tarraleah. Picture: Supplied

She embraced the high country and passed on that love to me. A lifetime later I still haunt the highland lake shores and sometimes the old girl is there with me, reciting her favourite Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.

“I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore

While I stand on the roadway or on the pavement grey

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

The point being, wherever you are in the world you’ll never forget the highlands. It might have been a world away but Ella had just swapped one highland for another.

Last weekend when Hydro Tasmania held an open day at Tarraleah I discovered that while everything had changed, nothing had changed.

The ugly scars have gone, and the village is beautifully landscaped, but my house on the edge of town is no longer. It was one of a number of houses that were transported to other sites, mostly for fishing shacks.

I’m writing from my shack in Bronte Park. It was built in the early 1950s at Glenorchy as a ‘pre-fab’ and transported to the plateau for the duration of the Hydro construction phase. It is still here. The Hydro built things to last.

The peaceful Nive River that rekindled memories for Charles’s mum, Ella, of her Scottish homeland. Picture Charles Wooley

The power station, the pipelines and the glassy canals are all as I remember them from childhood. There is even a timber pipeline built by Italian prisoners of war in the 1940s when there was a shortage of steel. The Italians must have had some wine barrel-making skills and hard wood was plentiful. Running into nearby Bronte Lagoon the pipeline is still in service and might be the world’s longest wooden barrel.

“The Hydro” as it was known through different incarnations is a Tasmanian institution which, from time to time, has divided Tasmanians. During the Franklin River debate I remember my mother forbidding any arguments at the dinner table. Dad was a passionate Hydro man while I loved the wild places. Ironically the Hydro was equally responsible for both frames of mind.

Six hundred Tasmanians, mostly with connections to the Hydro (who doesn’t have them) were at the open day.

The small church at Tarraleah, which now houses a gymnasium, is still standing but not as Charles remembers it. Picture Charles Wooley

Most of them toured the power station. I remember visiting my father there and hating it. For young ears the noise was horrendous. Stepping in I was hit by a wall of sound. I could feel it as a physical force.

Dad didn’t wear any protection but didn’t seem to notice the din. In time, like so many of his colleagues, he became quite deaf and once confided that might be the secret of a 60-year marriage. Don’t tell Ella.

The small church is still there but not as I remember it.

Peering into the sacristy I could see just how much times have changed. The church is now a gymnasium.

My abiding and terrifying childhood memory is that early one Sunday morning the minister went walking in the bush to compose his sermon.

He was never seen again. My dad, Charlie, was part of a search party that, after a week or so, gave up looking.

Tarraleah Power Station. Picture: Supplied

I remember an old bushman telling him. “It’s too late now Charlie, the devil’s got him.”

It had to be explained to me before I would ever go back into the woods that the old bloke meant the Tasmanian devil, which in those days could devour a dead human body, flesh and bones and down to the leather shoes.

As my dad had said: “The bush will just swallow you up.”

It is a tribute to the Hydro’s preservation of our pioneer heritage that Tarraleah has not been swallowed up by the bush.

Indeed, there are great plans for the future with a redevelopment plan to increase the Tarraleah power output by 30 per cent from the same amount of water.

My old man would be proud.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based columnist