Cafe Society: Helping tourists go wild in the wilderness

Guide Reg Grundy reveals how it feels to introduce our wilderness to his kayaking patrons.

Roaring 40s Kayaking’s Reg Grundy at Foodstore Cafe, South Hobart. Picture: MATHEW FARRELL

THE burning question for many kayakers heading into the wilderness with guide Reg Grundy is what sort of coffee he will be able to make them.

At this stage, before their immersion in a primordial world, they are still sweating the small stuff. His answer seems to satisfy them, though. It’s espresso, brewed on a white-spirit camp stove.

We catch up in civilisation at South Hobart’s Foodstore Cafe, just down the road from where Grundy grew up, following Roaring 40s Kayaking’s major win at the Tasmanian Tourism Awards last Friday.

Usually Grundy is pumping a fist on a beach after hearing the news by phone from his wife and business partner Jenny, but last week he collected their third Adventure Tourism gold in person.

“It feels great to be recognised for all the work you put in,” he says.

It was a chance to celebrate, but Grundy’s uneasiness about the future of tourism in the state soon returned.

He’s not sure what we are really chasing. He wants clarity from the State Government over what exactly it hopes to achieve by growing annual visitation to 1.5 million by 2020.

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Our conversation shifts to potential future commercial developments in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in which he operates.

He doesn’t want to talk about specific projects, such as the Lake Malbena proposal for a chopper-accessed luxury standing camp and the Wilderness Society’s upcoming Federal Court challenge over the Federal Environment Minister’s approval of it.

He thinks Tourism Industry Council boss Luke Martin is off the mark, though, in describing mounting concern over some such developments as “hysterical campaigning”.

“Tasmania is very good at having those big opposite ends arguments, but meeting in that middle ground is super-important,” says Grundy.

“In the South-West we say the landscape dies by the foot and replenishes by the inch when people move over some parts of it.”

What does the State Government’s commitment to sensible sustainable development even mean when it’s so vague, he asks.

“What can folks have down there? Do they want helicopters buzzing overhead? Do they want more planes? Do they want a road going into the South-West? I don’t think they do.”

Grundy has been leading expeditions to the remote area for the past six years and as one of its most frequent guests – and an invested operator – he frets over how easily its wildness could be broken simply by making access easier.

“You would lose the immersive nature, which is what it’s all about [in a tourism sense].”

Currently the only access to the parts of the Southwest National Park he frequents is by air, sea or foot on the 85km South Coast Track. The harsh weather and the difficult access do a good job keeping the visitor numbers down, he says with a laugh.

Roaring 40s Kayaking guests fly in by small plane, landing on a decades-old airstrip at Melaleuca. They stay a two-hour paddle away at Par Avion’s Forest Lagoon camp.

Grundy describes it as a true standing camp, without any permanent structures, concrete or visibility from the water.

He stayed there Tuesday night in one of the canvas-clad yurts and went for a dawn paddle yesterday morning before flying back to Hobart and heading straight to our breakfast meeting.

It was his first trip to the South-West – and a relished opportunity for solo time in nature – since the kayaking season ended in April.

It will resume next month, when his team returns to guiding small groups from Melaleuca Creek right out to the Southern Ocean, through Bathurst Harbour and beyond Port Davey.

“It blows their mind to think they are out there paddling in 3.5 metre swell at times,” he says.

“We come around the corner of the Breaksea Islands into the Southern Ocean and it’s almost life-changing for some of them.

“They can’t believe they’ve achieved it. There is massive euphoria back on shore after that.”

He has noticed something else, too, among guests on the week-long trip. After two or three days they stop needing a regimented itinerary.

“As we make decisions around the weather, they become more dynamic and flexible,” he says. “We lay out a paddle plan in the morning, but we know full well it’s going to [play out] pretty organically.

“After a few days, folks are really not concerned about the plan. They are concerned about what’s happening in the next 20 minutes.”

Grundy loves it when the weather occasionally delays the pick-up plane on the official last day of the trip.

“When we first tell them the plane is not coming, there is anxiety and it takes them about an hour before they twig that it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.”

And that, he says, is a big part of what’s so precious about wilderness tourism today. It’s a portal to a way of being the western world has largely lost.