In the much loved CS Lewis book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, four children travel through a wardrobe to the land of Narnia. Du Cane Gap, a low pass just north of Lake St Clair, acted as a topographical wardrobe for a number of early hunters giving them access to a somewhat magical land far beyond their normal territories.  Today, one might argue that the Gap continues that role as a key section of the Overland Track.

The story begins in 1910. In November of that year Liena hunter, Paddy Hartnett, and his friend, Ted Clarke, decided to go prospecting at Lake St Clair. Neither had been there before and each had only a vague idea where it was. Nonetheless, they followed the Mersey up beyond Hartnett’s hunting run at Kia Ora Creek before climbing up out of the valley and headed in a south easterly direction across the subalpine Mountains of Jupiter before dropping down into the Narcissus Valley just north of Lake St Clair. They prospected around the lake in a clockwise direction and, a week later, found themselves back in the Narcissus Valley near to the point where they had previously arrived. But rather than climb back up the valley wall, they continued on up the valley where they saw a low pass on their right. They climbed through it finding that it provided relatively easy access down to the Mersey Valley on the other side.

Hartnett immediately understood its strategic significance. He had recognised the tourism potential of Lake St Clair and saw that the pass gave him the opportunity to easily transport visitors from the Mersey Valley into the Narcissus and down to the lake. Within a year he created a packhorse track from his Kia Ora camp, up through the pass, and down into the Narcissus Valley. He also built a highland lodge (Du Cane Hut) at the foot of Falling Mountain as overnight accommodation for his guests and, by 1913, ran his first trip leading guests from Liena to the lake.

The Narcissus valley was also very rich hunting country. By 1912 Hartnett began hunting from a hut and skin shed he built half way down the valley. This was a hugely significant act in a geo-political sense. In the great land rush that took place around the First World War when men staked out winter hunting runs, it served to claim the Narcissus for the northern communities of Mole Creek and Sheffield instead of for the Derwent Bridge community which might legitimately have seen it as being part of its territory.

The extent to which passage through Du Cane Gap represented a journey through the wardrobe into Narnia, can be demonstrated by Bert Nichols’s experiences. When Hartnett abandoned the Upper Mersey to chase osmiridium at Adamsfield in 1925, Lorinna hunter, Bert Nichols, took over his Narcissus run and built a hut of his own just north of Lake St Clair. He had a bumper season in 1925 catching skins that were auctioned in the Sheffield Hotel for £500. But well he earnt it! His Lake St Clair hunting run was 80 kilometres, as the crow flies, from Sheffield and, as he told those at the hotel, he spent 32 days out of the three-month hunting season simply carrying his skins out!

The bounty of the Narcissus, however, did not last long.  In 1927, the Narcissus Valley and a broad strip of land around Lake St Clair, already a scenery reserve, was declared a wildlife sanctuary. The declaration presented real issues to Nichols forcing him further south to the Cheyne Range, Mt Hugel and the Navarre Plains. The boundary of the reserve, however, was not marked. Nor were there maps hunters might use to orient themselves. Many, accidentally or otherwise, wandered across the line. Occasionally, they were caught. Nichols and his brother Ernest were hunting in the Cuvier Valley in August 1927. The police appeared and caught Ernest who was subsequently hauled up before a magistrate and fined.

During the Great Depression when money was very tight, the idea that somehow there was a different world beyond Du Cane Gap continued to play out in the minds of hunters. In 1933 three Deloraine men: John Creely and Keith Sinfield of Western Creek and Frank Youd of the Needles, were also caught hunting in the Cuvier Valley. Despite their pleas that they were unaware they were in the Reserve, these men were each fined £50 or given three months gaol as an alternative. Without any money, they had no option but to serve time.

The very real risk of getting caught by the police encouraged Nichols to try his hand at guiding as Hartnett had done. There was a growing demand from city people wishing to walk from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair or vice versa. At that time there was no track linking the two places with the ‘Overland Track’ being merely a concept tossed around by national park managers. Experienced walkers could generally make it from Cradle Mountain to Pelion Plains but typically became slewed beyond the point. Nichols, of course, knew the way and from 1927 began an active guiding career. He guided groups along the hunting tracks he and Harnett had made and accommodated them overnight in various huts along the way including a number he had built. He took all his groups, whether travelling northward or southward through Du Cane Gap.

In 1931 national park authorities, seeking a time when guides might be unnecessary, offered to pay Nichols to physically mark the track he took from Cradle Valley to Lake St Clair. Recognizing this as a strategy whose ultimate objective was to put him out of business, Nichols accepted their money but only did a cursory job marking the track. Experienced city walkers who attempted to follow his route still became lost. Meanwhile, Nichols kept guiding. Four years later, the authorities returned with a substantial offer. In 1935 the Scenery Preservation Board decided to spend £200 formally creating the Overland Track. Lionel Connell of Waldheim was awarded the contract to cut the northern section from Cradle Mountain to Pelion Gap with Nichols contracted to cut the section from the Gap to Lake St Clair. Nichols was required to slash scrub, cut footholds in logs, place a stake every three chains, and make good crossings over the difficult Kia Ora Creek and the Narcissus River. He was also asked to add an additional room to Du Cane Hut and to his own hut at Nichols Junction.

These substantial works allowed walkers to traverse the Overland Track without guides and thus marked the end of Nichol’s guiding career. Du Cane Gap, like the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, once admitted only a few into the magical land of the Narcissus. But with the establishment of the Overland Track it became a significant thoroughfare. The influence of the hunters, though, remained with the location of the Overland Track from Pelion Plains to Lake St Clair following Hartnett’s and Nichol’s hunting tracks.

Addenda: The new 1900 bridge over the Arm River

In a previous blog (16 May 2014) I wrote about a re-routing of the Howells Plains stock route at Arm River that took place around 1900. The original route did a great loop up into the middle reaches of the Arm Valley to a ford before returning down along the southern bank of the Arm to a point at the toe of Maggs Mountain where it turned to follow up the western bank of the Mersey. This was a poor route subject to flooding requiring stockyards to be maintained to hold cattle until river levels dropped. Then, around 1900, a new route was found that led to the construction of a high level bridge and some significant excavations. This new route, which crossed the Arm River near the Forestry Tasmania camp, was a dramatic improvement that, among other things, allowed wheeled vehicles to be taken into the Upper Mersey.

This was a major project. It involved lots of surveying, track location, bridge building and earthworks. I imagined there would be lots of documentation about this large undertaking but search as I may for years I could find nothing. Who did the work? Who funded it?

Then, in recent times, a bit of information came to me that goes some way in explaining what happened. The late Lewis Lee wrote some notes before he died a copy of which recently came to me. In those notes was a paragraph:

‘In those days, after selecting blocks, for few years you were allowed some money called “Waste Land Money”.  My father and Mr. Field had this money spent on [the] road this side of Howells, to allow bullock dray to get right in to Howells. We could send our provisions in on the dray.  This dray was built a foot wider than was usual, so it would not capsize in rough places. It and bullocks were kept at Howells.’

I believe that the work ‘on the road this side of Howells’ Lewis describes was the rerouting of the stockroute at Arm River. George Lee (of Lees Paddocks) and Richard Field (of Howells Plains) were the two major landowners who had to submit to the flood prone crossing of the Arm on a regular basis. They pooled their resources to create a new route that was not only flood proof but allowed wheeled vehicles such as bullock drays into Howells for the first time.