I bumped into Terry Jones outside the shop on my way home from work. I didn’t want to be there. The December sun was poised high in the sky, still only midway through that long summer arc that pushes lingering afternoons well into what should be night and pulls dew-soaked dawns from the south-east horizon. I’d been sweating under it all day at the devil park, where I work (it’s a kind of zoo-cum-conservation and research site, devoted to breeding and sustaining a healthy population of the endangered Tasmanian devils), and I felt filthy and irritable in a way that reminded me how I’d felt as a child after eating a toffee apple in the sun at the show: sweat, sugar and saliva to the elbows, tears on the drive home. I don’t normally work outside, but they were short-staffed and had asked me to spend the day talking with tourists—doing the hourly spiel and mopping up the questions afterwards. It happens, every now and then, especially in summer when people are on holidays—people being the double-whammy of my colleagues and the tourists. I don’t mind it too much; it means I get to spend more time with the animals and less time with my computer. Wouldn’t want to do it every day, though. And anyway, it’s not like I don’t take holidays, although when I do there’s no immediate impact: the wheels of conservation showbiz continue to churn whether the comms and marketing woman is on-site or not.

That morning I’d watched as rippling horseshoes of groundswell fanned into Pirates Bay and jacked up in punchy peaks on the inside sandbar at the neck. All I wanted was to get home and go for a bodysurf, to let the salt and sand scour the day from my skin. But we were out of milk and my partner, Jem, was diving all day, which meant he couldn’t pick any up, what with him being underwater and all. So I had to detour to the shop at Port Arthur on my way home.

We live at Eaglehawk Neck, the shacky nearly-suburb that clusters the shorelines of the dual bays of Eaglehawk and Pirates. The bays—the former a mudflat-fringed lagoon of calm unless it’s blowing westerly (and then it’s a hall of wind, rooved by sky, walled by the hills of the Forestier and Tasman peninsulas, and carpeted by white horses), and the latter, a curve of blonde sand which merges into turquoise shallows that deepen into the rolling and roiling green of the Tasman Sea—are parted by a thin stretch of dune and a highway: the land-bridge that connects the Tasman Peninsula to mainland Tasmania; the isthmus; or, as Tasmanians call it, ‘the neck’.