Unusual hexagonal-like natural wonder:Dip Falls.Credit:Jess Bonde
It turns out you can live in South East Tasmania for well over a decade and have little to no idea about everyday life in the island's diagonally opposite corner. Up in the North West,people snack on something called savoury toast,refer to their ute as their bus,tawdry plough rhymes with the way they pronounce laundry trough. Down one particular road is this incredible waterfall,a welcoming old family-owned apiary,a haunting tiger tale and some curious car art.
A small sign on the Bass Highway points south to Mawbanna. This is Tommeginne Country,the traditional homelands of one of the many nations of lutruwita/Tasmania – an island with a colonial history so brutal and so shameful that much has been swept under the rug of the state's collective consciousness. Mawbanna is the original name of a waterway,further east,now referred to by its English translation:Black River.
After miles of rural homesteads and cultivated paddocks I'm parking in moist bushland beside Dip River where lobster and platypus are sure to be lurking below the tannin-tinged surface. As with most Tassie rivers,the distinctive rich brown water contrasts dramatically with its green forest corridor of ferns and moss-covered tree debris. Yet no waterfall on this island ever seems to look the same.
Dip Falls is located in the Dip River Forest Reserve in Tasman's north west.Credit:Jason Charles Hill
The top of Dip Falls forms a natural infinity pool. I descend a long staircase to gaze back up at the steep field of hexagonal basalt columns. The dark rock of this 34-metre-high double-cascade feature has been eroded into thousands of individual steps. The strong winter flow hits almost every one of them before plunging into a waterhole I'd be dipping into myself if the sun was out.
Further into the reserve is a short walk to the Big Tree. Only about 13 per cent of Tasmania's old growth forest remains so it's a bittersweet embrace with this brown top stringybark towering 62 metres overhead. My hug also feels inadequate given its 16-metre-round base. I find three more gentle giants then return to the car.
There was a time when Mawbanna had a school,a regularly-used hall,a well-attended church and a place to park the firetruck. It has a history of logging operations,gold and silica mining and was a railway stop on Tasmania's Western Line,which opened in 1871.
The unique rock formations of Dip Falls.Credit:Scott Sporleder
Mawbanna is also where the last wild thylacine is reported to have been seen back in 1930. In an interview,decades later,Wilfred Batty described chasing"the tiger"around his garage and across a paddock before shooting it. In a photograph I later find online he's posed,grinning,with gun and dog and the dying thylacine macabrely propped up against a fence.