Page updated:
Friday, 7 September 2007

ON THE ROAD - travel & places...

TASMANIA
lost in the highlands

A line search s made when clues reveal the victim may be in the immediate area.

I release the transmit button and await the pilot's acknowledgment. Two or three kilometres to our east, the Bell Jet Ranger tilts and makes a sweeping turn, coming towards where we stand at the edge of the treeline. The helicopter slows as it descends, hesitating as the pilot seeks solid ground on which to put down. Gently, the skids make contact with the earth, the engine and rotor wind down until there remains only the whine of the turbine.

A door opens and out climb two men. We lead them into the open forest of Eucalyptus, over to where a log has fallen across a trail. I point out fresh-looking scuff marks on the log and the older man bends down, his weatherbeaten face indicating a lifetime spent in the highlands. He places his hand next to the scuffmarks, wrinkles his face as if in deep thought and then announces: "Probably made a day or two ago".

Tasmania's Central Plateau is an easy place to get lost on.

The undulating, rocky terrain supports a sparse vegetation of tussocky button grass interspersed with belts of snow gum. Hundreds of lakes, known locally as 'tarns', dot this region which occupies an extensive uplifted area that forms the centre of the state. There is a sameness to the landscape and even country people lose their way.

The callout comes late in the afternoon. "This is police search and rescue. We have an alert. Can you be at the police garage ready to leave for the Central Plateau at 7.30?", asks the voice on the phone. I reply in the affirmative and go home to pack. Members of search and rescue do well to keep a pack ready to go, so all I have to do is throw in some food, grab a bite to eat and walk down to the garage. We are on the road by 9.30, driving through the darkness of the Derwent Valley.

The bus is old and slow and is the type designed for hauling passengers around cities rather than for long-distance travel. There are no headrests so the team members contort themselves into bizzarre shapes in an attempt to get some sleep. A few stretch out along the passageway.

At 4.30am we arrive at the start point to find a few police officers standing around, a couple police Range Rovers and a large tent. Into this we stumble for sleep. Briefing is at 5.30.

A reconnaissance is the first phase of a search operation. This involves walking or - if it is open country - flying the main tracks and visiting huts and popular campsites in the area. Walkers who are ill or injured are likely to be found during this phase.

If promising signs are found a more detailed search may be ordered. Minor tracks and camping areas, rock overhangs and other places of shelter are checked. Clearly, having someone who is familiar with the area will speed things along and increase the chance of finding a lost hiker. Where they may be in a smaller, more defined area, a line search may find them. This involves setting up a line of searchers who move close together over an area looking for signs. I had only been on a line search in training and all I found was a large tiger snake.

Once, all seachers were carried out on the ground. Now helicopters are brought in. Quite a lot can be seen by flying low and slow over the terrain. But what you miss are the small clues of a person's passing. If you want to find those then you have to be on the ground, on foot. Whatsmore, pilots will not take their machines up in the fog or poor weather that foot searchers venture out in.

Cups of hot tea steam in the cold air as we stand around the map in the pre-dawn glow.

"There's a hut hidden in the trees on the western shore of this lake", the officer tells the group, indicating a point three or so hours walk north of our location.

"Select two others", he says to me, "take a radio and go check it out. Report your position hourly and call in with what you find when you get there and we'll let you know what to do next".

I look at the terrain on the map, planning our course. It is mainly undulating terrain interspersed with button grass and patches of forest.

There is still an early morning chill in the air as we move out in an almost due northerly direction. Other parties are going off to other points. The helicopter will only be leaving Hobart at first light, so it will not be available for awhile.

We figure we are on the most likely route for walkers trekking out to the hut although we have no idea of the lost boy's destination. A faint track comes and goes through the button grass and the bands of forest. The walking is easy and the day looks as though it will be fine. It is clear that people, though apparently only a few, follow this route. In places it looks like the sort of track that wombats make; elsewhere it appears a little too substantial for an animal trail, but only just.

We walk at a moderate pace so as not to miss any tracking signs, scanning the countryside as we go. An hour in, we find the scuff marks and radio search base, explaining our find and giving them our map coordinates. The helicopter has now arrived and they despatch it with two local trackers.

The boy we are searching for has been alone on the Plateau for two nights. The last sign of him was his yellow waterproof parka found by a tree a kilometre north of the search base. It has been left there, hanging from the tree as a marker in case he somehow comes back that way. After that, there is no sign of his passage, nothing.

He was equipped for only a day out and having lost his parka, those who know this country are concerned for his wellbeing. Nights have been cold but not frigid. All the same, cold saps strength and without protective clothing or matches to light a fire a person expends a lot of energy trying to stay warm. Fortunately, there has been no rain while he has been missing.

The killer in these highlands is hypothermia, the progressive loss of body core temperature that ends with collapse and death. The possibility that we are looking for a body is not far from our minds.

The scuffing on the log - it looks like someone has dragged their boot as they stepped over - is inconclusive. Yes, it could have been the boy but it just as well could have been someone else, a trout fishermen, maybe a bushwalker, perhaps a shooter.

The crew returns to the helicopter, doors close, turbine whines, rotor picks up speed and the machine jerks upward and disappears to the south. Back at search base it will take on board a team and drop them to our north-west where they will conduct a more detailed search near another lake. Silence returns. We walk through the belt of trees and out onto a button grass plain.

The party stops to scan the horizon but sees nothing out of the ordinary.

In searches like this you watch both the far and near distance. It is in the near distance, the space around you, that you find the small clues - a scuff mark on a log, the imprint of boots in wet soil, belongings, branches freshly snapped off, remains of a recent campfire, food wrappers, even a direction-of-travel arrow scratched into the soil or tree trunk if the missing person has their wits about them.

In the far distance you look for movement, silhouette and colour, for it is in this order that things are noticed. It is only in closer proximity that sound is of any value, however experienced mountain walkers carry a whistle, the sound of which can carry a fair distance depending on wind strength and direction. We do not know if the boy has one.

"Look!", exclaims the man in the lead, pointing to two boot prints in the sand of the lakeshore. "They look fairly recent". And they do. The lugs of the sole have incised deeply into the moist sand and have not eroded yet. But is the print too big for that of a teenage boy? It seems so. If that is the case, and if they belong to the person who scraped the fallen log we came across earlier, then that person is not the missing boy.

Like most lakes out here, this one is surrounded by a narrow band of trees and among them we search for more signs, but the prints are the only indication that someone has passed this way. Whoever made the footprints was moving north, in the same direction we are going.

I click the transmit button: "Search base this is team 1".

The reply is immediate: "Team one this is search base".

I tell them news of the boot print and our grid reference.

"OK. Copy that, team one, look around the lake then proceed to your search destination and radio in when you get there".

Tasmania's Central Plateau was scoured into its flattish, undulating shape under the weight of an ancient ice cap. The tremendous pressure of the ice on the dolerite rock scoured hundreds of pits which, when the ice age ended between 12 000 and 15 000 years ago, filled with water to become the lakes we see today. Over time, a vegetation of mosses and lichens, button grass, snow gum and other species adapted to the cycle of summer heat and winter cold colonised the bare rock. Forested patches, usually in areas slightly higher than that occupied by the button grass, spread in clumps between the areas of tussock to create a vegetation that alternates haphazardly between forest and grassland.

Periodically, bushfires sweep this region. They burn rapidly across the tussock grass and, when hot enough, kill the snow gums to leave the stark, grey skeletons we see in the patches of forest around us. In winter the plateau is often under snow and the winds howl in from the west. Few venture out then.

This can be visually confusing terrain for those lacking a sense of direction or a compass. It is easy to head in one direction and be turned from that course to follow an easier route. That is why the search is covering such a broad area.

"The hut is in the trees a few metres from the shore", I tell the team. "If we walk along the edge of the treeline we should find it."

The first lake, the one with the boot prints, was a waypoint on our search but this larger lake with its more substantial stand of fringing forest is our destination. We move along the western edge of the trees where they give way to the button grass.

"Here's a bit of a track", calls one of the team. Sure enough, a faint path has been worn through the vegetation. We follow it. "There it is", he says, pointing to the yellowing timbers of a hut now visible through the trees.

The hut is of medium-size, as the scale of mountain huts go, not all that old and in good condition, a sign that it is used regularly. But by whom? Fishermen, probably, less likely bushwalkers. Although walkers do venture into this area, most prefer to travel on to the Lake St Clair region further west. What motivated someone to build here, I wonder? Why this lake?

The door is pushed open to reveal... an empty hut. No warm ash in the fireplace, no sign of recent use. So, the boy did not make for the hut after all.

We inform search base and are instructed to return. Even though we walk faster on our way back we remain alert for any sign of the boy.

Then the radio crackles: "All units, all units. The boy has been found. Return to search base immediately". We make good time.

The boy was well but he was not found by a search team. That afternoon, he wandered into a town on the edge of the Plateau and sought out the police.

Debrief over, vehicles packed, we start the journey home. One point made during the debrief was that we should never assume that we are searching for a body.