Rusty’s journal

This is a story of tragedy in Tasmania’s mountains. In posting the link I recall how some experienced mountain walkers have posted critical comments about social media influencers sharing responsibility for accidents in Tasmania’s mountains. First, a word about influencers…

NOTES FROM THE TRAIL… Let me state the obvious: social media influencers are seldom experts.

Those I’m talking about post photographs of our wild places, our mountains and isolated areas. I’m not talking about landscape or adventure photographers. Their art is more in their images and less in highlighting themselves as having reached some isolated place or got there by following some dangerous route.

The problem comes when reaching those places involves exposure to some danger, to risk. It also comes from athletes who pack light, sometimes dangerously light and inadequately and get from point A to point B in quick time, like they are in some kind of race against themselves. That’s about athletic achievement rather than immersion in the environment. It is not something most bushwalkers do. It is something that few people at all can do. It is about athletic elitism. It’s danger? Creating the impression that the less fit, the less experienced, the less adequately equipped for terrain and weather can also venture into rough country. Their posts can make it appear easy.

That’s a different story do what we find in this report. This is about misadventure and it is something that happens to even the most experienced in the mountains. The value of the story is that it highlights the danger of climbing Federation Peak. The peak is not for the novice bushwalker. The video clearly shows that is not for those without experience on steep rock.

The unfortunate thing about the way that the Tasmanian government and the tourism industry promotes adventure tourism in our wild places is that it sometimes results in rescue or, occasionally, and something worse.

My question: do influencers posting about walking in high risk isolated environments have a duty of care to mention at risks in their comments? Would doing that constitute due diligence?

What do you think?

THE OUTDOOR MUSEUM…

Change is coming. The discarded goods of life litter the narrow space between footpath and house. An old structure. What is to come? Renovation? Demolition and rebuilding?

Many times I’ve walked past this old house not far from Hobart’s downtown. Classic weatherboard construction. A roof of galvanised iron that can’t be all that old. I recall there might’ve been a small tree in the front space. There was always junk, the discards of life. It’s a cottage, it is more than a shack.  Small. Smaller than the houses adjacent. Old. But how old?

When I’ve walked past I’ve wondered who lives here. This is something I do when passing old dwellings. It comes from an awareness that old dwellings persist, but not the generations who pass through them. They are the shells in which lives are lived. How did the people whom for a time called them home live? Were their’s good lives? Prosperous? Poor? Happy? But I’ve never seen anybody in this little cottage. No sign of life. It has always been silent.

And now it appears that the time of change has come. Seeing it that day with its discarded contents out front reminded me that cities are constantly being rebuilt in the way the body generates new cells to replace the old. In so doing they perpetuate themselves. Cities, too, are organisms. 

It is the 28th of February 2026. In Israel and on US aircraft carriers outside the Strait of Hormuz, military strike aircraft are running up their engines. Precision-guided weapons hang menacingly from their wings. Their opening strikes kill Iranian leader Khamenei and other political and military leaders. The 2026 Iran War is underway.

It is yet another conflict in a region that has been plagued by war for decades. The Iran/Iraq war. The First Gulf War. The war to push the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Second Gulf War in Afghanistan. The war against ISIS. Israel’s smaller scale incursions into Lebanon and its neighbours. Israel's war in Gaza. Israel's current attack of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

A conditional ceasefire follows in April followed by a memorandum aimed at formally ending the conflict. Every ceasefire that follows is broken.

The Strait of Hormuz closes to shipping and precipitates a global fuel crisis. Then the Houthies in Yemen fire on shipping in an act that could close the Suez Canal-Red Sea shipping route. The world plunges into uncertainty. We wait to see what happens there.

How are we to make sense of this war? Let’s see what the military theorist Clausewitz has to say.

1. War is the continuation of political policy, not a substitute for it

Clausewitz’s core warning is that military action must serve political strategy.

The US’s political objective is to prevent Iran building nuclear weapons and force regime change. But the US is reportedly running short of offensive munitions and defensive anti-missile weapons. It may be this, not achieving a military victory over Iran, that ends the war.

2. Center of gravity: misidentified

Clausewitz argued you must find a vulnerability, a critical centre of gravity whose collapse breaks the enemy’s capacity to resist.

The opening attack was a classic decapitation strike on Iran’s senior leadership. But, Iran’s actual centres of gravity and resistance turned out to be more diffuse. The IRGC command chain survived the strike and orchestrated retaliation. They exploited their own centre of gravity: the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. A 95% drop in oil tankers transiting the strait followed.

Killing the head didn’t disable the body’s most effective weapon. Iran, it turns out, has well-learned the lessons of asymmetric warfare.

3. The law of diminishing returns comes with a vengeance

Every offensive has a point past which continuing to attack costs more than it gains.

The initial strikes were a tactical success. The subsequent months bring the Israeli war in Lebanon, Iranian missile and drone strikes on the Gulf states and US bases, and the spread of the war to the Houthies in Yemen.

And now the US faces a severe drawdown in munitions. The tactical costs mount. What looked like a short decisive campaign turns into an open-ended regional conflict.

The US and Israel are fighting a conventional war. Iran fights an asymmetrical war.

4. Friction and the fog of war

Clausewitz wrote that no plan survives initial contact. Contact produces uncertainty. Uncertainty and chance produce friction. Friction leads to confusion. Complications emerge.

The drawing-in of the Gulf states as well as Saudi Arabia come out of this fog. That was not considered in the US/Israeli plan, but geostrategists warned of it. This is the cascading, unplanned consequences Clausewitz meant.

Chance and miscalculation enter the conflict. Each additional factor multiplies the unpredictability of the next move.

5. War trends toward the extreme

War cascades into escalation. Remember Vietnam? Politics is the only thing that can stop it.

Trump’s back-and-forth over negotiating and then resuming attacks, Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon, the entry of the Houthies into the war illustrates how hard capping a war becomes becomes once retaliation cycles start and escalation gains the ascendancy.

6. Victory must produce a usable peace

Clausewitz’s point was that military success only matters insofar as it secures a better political settlement than existed before. With the strength of Iran’s resistance and the vacillations of a weak and confused US presidency, the possibility of a peace that ends Iran’s nuclear program and opens the Strait of Hormuz without it becoming an Iranian tollway is questionable.

The Strait of Hormuz remain effectively unusable. The possibility is that the Houthies might do the same to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, the strategic chokepoint of the shipping channel connecting the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Like the Iranians, the Houthies know their leverage comes from the drawdown of US munitions.

Clausewitz tells us that the war won’t be over until the contributing political factors are resolved, regardless of how the battlefield phase ends.

ALL THAT IS WILD AND EDIBLE… Many of us are familiar with foraging for edible plants and useful materials in the bush. Now, a new book by Tasmanian author, Rees Campbell, who wrote Eat More Wild Tasmanian, takes foraging onto our seashores.

Rees’ book focuses on identifying and processing seaweeds for food. It joins a slew of other seashore guide books that would be useful additions to any beachcomber’s library.

This review takes a look at the growing library of identification guides for Tasmanian foragers.

foraging #seaweed #bushfoods #wildharvest #plants #bookreviews

COMMUNITY GARDEN RECIPE BOOK LAUNCHED IN LAUNCESTON… WOW! It was the best book and website launch I had ever been to… a crowd that easily numbered in the eighties as well as Fijian dancers, a Butanese band and a storyteller.

Those were my thoughts as I sat there at the long table for the launch of Flavours of Launceston, the recipe book produced by Community Gardens Australia, and its associated website. Things only improved when the food was served… recipes straight from the book cooked by chefs from the 24 Carrot School Gardens program. Dessert was by the Red Cross organisation, Connected Women. There was more than we could eat.

In bringing together the collective culinary know-how of Pacific Islander, Afghani, Australian and other community gardeners who grow food in eleven of Launceston's community gardens, the recipe book marks a milestone in the evolution of the national organisation, Community Gardens Australia. The organisation publishes how-to and other stories of community gardening on its website, but this is the first time that it has published a book. You can now download the Flavours of Launceston cookbook.

There is another opportunity for community gardeners that grew out of the Flavours of Launceston project. We—the project team of Jo Dean, Fiona Campbell and I—wondered how we could give the recipe book a longer life, so Fiona set up the Flavours of Our Community Gardens website where community gardeners can upload recipes using what they grow in their gardens. Now, your community garden is invited to participate and share.

Travel author Monty Dwyer says that the grey nomads in their motorhomes and towing their caravans that we pass on the highways might be destined to disappear.

Travel preferences are changing. Combined with longer term economic change this might doom the grey nomad phenomenon. Are grey nomads an artefact of the age of economic growth and cheap fuel?

https://medium.com/pacificedge/end-of-the-road-for-the-mobile-tribe-ccb70f83b17d?source=friends_link&sk=5422a0c1c0cfb165a1442c47b3d0a31

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT How do some fictional films capture a more or less authentic picture of the past?

That is what I wondered when thinking about a film from the 1970s called Big Wednesday.

PERMACULTURE IDEAS FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE… Could there ever be such a thing as bioregional agroforestry—a tree cropping systems producing food and useful materials that also has space for indigenous plant species and that is adapted to regional climate and terrain?

Peter Hardwick thought so. I came across Peter’s idea while on a course at Robin Francis’ Djanbung Gardens permaculture education centre in Nimbin some years ago.

This is a brief introduction to Peter’s idea as it stood at the time. Let’s know what you think of his model and how you would adapt it to the region you call home.

permaculture #permaculturedesign #forestry #agroforestry #treecrops #bioregionalism #perennialcropping

That day comes for some. It came for Anthony Sharwood when the Australian Alps Walking Track called to him and he set out that day in the fateful early summer of 2019.

‘From snow to ash: a journey on foot to an impending crisis’ is the tale of Anthony’s journey, a journey that started as many long distance treks do but that ended in the most unexpected of ways.

A pier projects from a boat shed along the foreshore trail.

In the distance, the big, largely landlocked water body of Pitt Water and the misty hills to the north. Across the water, the pine forest at the end of Five Mile Beach.

The trail is an unmade, rough track along the foreshore that is used by locals for recreational purposes. Atop the slope are the houses of Lewisham.

I made the photo late in the day when the sun, low in the western sky, was casting the landscape and sea into silhouette. With little by way of colour in the scene I thought it would work better as black and white image.

#photography #blackandwhitephotography #seascape #landscapephotography

HERE ON THE COAST…

Orange lichen foregrounds the view across to Sandy Point from the foreshore trail. The Point marks the northern extremity of Seven Mile Beach and, yes, you can walk the beach to Sandy Point from the village of Seven Mile Beach.

The photographic composition uses foreground objects and the leading lines they form as well as a focal point in the distance to create a sense of perspective and depth in the photo. The warm yellow light of the late afternoon sun emphasises the warm orange of the rocks and creates a colour contrast to the cool blues of sea and sky. The white of the sand dunes on Sandy Point are highlighted by the light to draw the eye to the distance and increase the sense of depth in the image.

It is all about representing 3D reality on the 2D plane of an image. In attempting to portray the world in this way, photography has been described as ‘painting with light’. That is an analogy with art, however my photography comes from a photojournalism background rather that art. I leave the arty stuff to fine art photographers who labour for hours to get the tonal range and details of their images just right. I admire their work, however mine is about content to capture what is there or what is going on.

FINDING SOLUTIONS… It was the 1950s and malaria was rampaging through the tropical island of Borneo.

A solution was needed. Time to call in the World Health Organisation, the British Air Force and… a bunch of cats.

This is a story about disease, mosquitoes and cats. It is also a story about the Law of Unintended Consequences and why we should consider it as a factor in design.

THE SEARCH… A mosaic of open button grass plains in the summer, blasted by cold rain, sleet and grainy snow in the winter, Tasmania’s central plateau is no place to get lost on. But that is what happened.

This story is a biographical note, a note now some decades in the past about a search for a lost hiker on the Plateau in the days when I was in a search and rescue unit.

searchandrescue #bushwalking #hiking #Tasmania

A CHANCE MEETING AT THE BEACH HAS CONSEQUENCES: “You have to wonder, don’t you?.

“What do you mean. Have to wonder about what?”.

“About some of the things people claim that they do for a living.”

“Such as?”.

“Well, I was at Parkie the other day and this car pulls up and three people get out and two of them take their boards and head off into the swell but this other one just stands there. So we get to talking and she tells me that she teaches people how to declutter their homes. Ever heard anything so unlikely in your life?”.

“Nah… not really.”

“That’s not all. Let me tell you about it.”

So the conversation went that day on the coast. The kicker, though, was what happened after meeting this declutterer woman.

LIFE AS JOURNEY… For some people, their van is their home and the road their route through their life. That was the situation with Lauren when I encountered her a few years ago.

THINGS IN THE WORLD…

Or, perhaps, a little way off the world.

I looked up and there it was coming over the northeastern horizon at 105°. Something big, very big, very round and very silvery.

Anyone else notice this object?