The Tasmania Volcano: A Tourist’s Guide

From the August 2008 issue of Pacific Vacationers’ Monthly:

This special PVM feature is devoted to a look at one of the most extraordinary natural wonders in Australia, Mount Edgerton, better known to most people simply as "the Tasmania Volcano." As we celebrate the 125^th anniversary of the creation of Edgerton National Park, the second-oldest such park in Tasmania, we want to share with our readers the fascinating history of Mount Edgerton and the land around it.

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Mount Edgerton, or "the Tasmania volcano" as it’s more widely known, is as much a symbol of Australia as Ayers Rock, the Sydney Opera House, or Foster’s Lager. More than that, it’s a cultural and personal touchstone for the citizens of Tasmania; for Tasmanians, the volcano is their Grand Canyon, their Stonehenge, their Eiffel Tower. The land around Mount Edgerton was considered sacred ground by Tasmania’s Aboriginal community before they died out in the 1840s, and for the past thirty years modern Aborigine activists have been working to restore their people’s presence in the region. The volcano figures prominently in Tasmania’s state flag and coat of arms; Australian politicians of every ideological stripe have used it as a metaphor for crisis at one time or another, and during the Second World War there was a proposal to use its caves as storage bunkers for guns and ammunition in the event of a Japanese invasion.

On a less grim note, the volcano has inspired the famous "lava bomb" whiskey drink which is a staple at Australia’s bars and taverns; given Hobart’s best-known sports team, the Lavamen Cricket Club, the name by which they’ve been recognized since 1923; served as a backdrop for action scenes in no less than fifty movies,  including two of the "Mad Max" films; and hosted some of the most spectacular outdoor entertainment events in Australia’s history. It’s even witnessed two Papal masses during the tenure of Pope John Paul II.

Mount Edgerton is believed to be extinct; no major eruptions have been recorded there since 1877 and only one minor eruption has happened in that region since 1892. Still, the volcano is a source of great fascination to geologists the world over, who believe that Edgerton’s rocky surfaces may provide clues to Australia’s geological history. It’s also a popular study spot for wildlife researchers interested in the feeding and mating patterns of the unusual breeds of animals that call the area home.

Named for British sea captain William Edgerton, who headed six expeditions to the area between 1791 and 1809, Mount Edgerton is estimated to be at least 1.5 million years old-- and some geologists believe its actual age could be closer to 2.2 million. The oldest known fossils discovered at the volcano date back to the mid-Paleozoic era, and anthropologists suggest there may have been human settlements in the land around the volcano as early as 15,000 BC.

The oldest known written account of an eruption by the volcano was recorded in November of 1642 by Dutch merchant and seafarer Abel Tasman shortly after his ship reached the coast of what he would subsequently dub Van Diemen’s Land. In his logbook entry for the day in question, Tasman described "a great towering fire" reaching far into the sky accompanied by thick clouds of smoke that resembled something out of Dante’s Inferno. Tasman’s crew, according to the log entry, cowered in sheer terror at the sight and Tasman himself would later acknowledge feeling slightly unnerved by it. The first English-language record of the volcano appeared in 1777, when Captain James Cook made note of it in his ship’s log as he was passing Tasmania during his third and final Pacific voyage; ten years later William Edgerton would begin recruiting men to participate in his first charting expedition to the peak that would eventually bear his name.

By 1818 the first comprehensive scientific treatise on Mount Edgerton’s eco-system had been published in Great Britain and sketches of the volcano were appearing in newspapers and magazines all over Europe. The first Americans to see the volcano up close were a Columbia University-sponsored geological expedition that visited Tasmania in 1832; the Columbia expedition would provide a number of important early clues about the volcano’s age. Four years later, Oxford University dispatched a fifty-man party to the region to make what was then the most comprehensive physical and biological study yet conducted of the volcano and the land around it.

The most devastating eruption of Mount Edgerton in recorded history took place on April 7^th, 1854 just before midday. Written and photographic records of the disaster indicate the seismic event which triggered the eruption must have been at least 7.9 on the Richter scale; even before Edgerton blew its top the tremors were enough in their own right to level a score of buildings in the towns near the volcano. Many other buildings, including the headquarters of the municipal police force for Port Dalyrymple(today known as Launceston), were wiped out by volcanic lava along with a number of farms in the region. The ash columns from the eruption could be seen as far away as the Tasmanian provincial capital Hobart; the seismic vibrations from the blast were felt all the way to Oatlands. Some of the aftereffects of the eruption were even felt on the Australian mainland-- for example, when a sizable cloud of ash drifted over the Victorian town of Foster. By the time the lava finally stopped flowing there were more than five hundred people dead and another two hundred or so injured or missing. Five years later a statue was erected in Hobart to commemorate the victims of the 1854 eruption.

The outbreak of the American Civil War would cause a steep(although temporary) decline in visits by U.S. citizens to the area around Mount Edgerton as both ships and men were drafted for the Union or Confederate war effort. Even under these circumstances, Harvard University still managed to assemble a world-class team of scientific and cultural experts in the late summer of 1864 for what was then the most comprehensive survey of the Edgerton region yet mounted. The Harvard expedition would literally rewrite the book about the region’s ecosystem, as a number of animal species not previously known to exist were discovered and at least two which for years had been believed extinct were in fact proven to be very much alive.

Mount Edgerton’s last recorded eruption to date, which happened in May of 1892, also produced a first-- the earliest known motion picture footage of the volcano. A party of Australian naturalists who were in the region to film the wildlife inhabiting the woods near Edgerton caught a glimpse of smoke and hastily set up their tripod camera so they could capture the volcano’s wrath on film for posterity. While it might not have been the spectacular fireworks display they’d been hoping for, it was an opportunity no visitors to Edgerton had ever had before and none have had since; the ten-minute reel the naturalists made that day is the only available cinematic footage of any kind of the volcano having an eruption. For over a century since then Edgerton has lain silent, with hardly even a whisper of seismic activity on its part.

That lack of activity, however, didn’t stop Tasmanian state government officials from worrying about a repeat of the 1854 tragedy in the years leading up to World War I. As late as 1910 Australian army and police detachments were still conducting drills for how to evacuate civilians in the event of an eruption; the sentry posts assigned to monitor the volcano for signs of such an eruption didn’t even begin closing down until 1916.(The last such post would remain in service until 1927.)

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If you have a chance to visit a pub either going to or coming back from Mount Edgerton, you owe it to yourself to try what may be Tasmania’s most famous regional  drink, the "lava bomb" whiskey cocktail. This pungent punch-in-the-teeth of a drink, which has put more than one patron on the floor(or in a police holding cell), has been around in one form or another since at least the early 1930s; depending on who you talk to, the "lava bomb" was invented either at an army base as part of a wager between two hard-drinking RAA sergeants or in a hotel tavern in Hobart by a bartender desperate to satisfy the jaded palate of a new patron. But while the legends about the birth of the "lava bomb" differ wildly about when and where it happened, they all agree on one point: the new drink became very popular very fast. By 1936 the "lava bomb" was being served at nearly every major pub in Tasmania and also gaining quite a few fans on the Australian mainland. The long-running ABC radio drama Blue Hills even devoted a subplot of one of its first episodes to the potent whiskey combo.

But in 1940, as the Nazis threatened Australia’s Commonwealth partner Great Britain with invasion and Australia itself was endangered by an increasingly militaristic and expansionist Japanese Empire, there would be little time for drinks of any kind. In June of that year, just after France collapsed in the face of the Nazi blitzkrieg, the Australian cabinet held a special emergency session to discuss contingency plans for using the caves near Mount Edgerton to store fuel and munitions for the RAA in the event Australia was invaded. For geographical and political reasons, this idea was quickly shelved. But Edgerton wouldn’t be left out of the Second World War entirely-- the same sentry posts which had once been used to watch the volcano for hints of an eruption were converted into observation towers to scan the waters off Tasmania’s coastline for enemy subs.

In 1945, with the war over and the threat of a Japanese invasion long gone, the Australian cabinet held another special session on the observation towers-- this time to raise the question of how they could be best used in peacetime. With the Cold War on the horizon and relations between the Soviets and the West starting to deteriorate, there was a great deal of sentiment in favor of using them to monitor Soviet naval activities in the Pacific, but this idea was rejected due to the same geographical and political obstacles that had killed the 1940 proposal to store fuel and ammunition in Edgerton’s caves. Then a junior deputy to prime minister Ben Chifley floated the notion of expanding Edgerton National Park, which had been in operation since 1918, to include the observation towers as a memorial to the servicemen who’d been stationed there during the war with Japan. That moment marked the beginning of the next great boom in tourism for the Edgerton region.

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A joke popular with Australian movie critics claims that Mount Edgerton has made so many on-camera appearances it should have its own press agent. And to be sure, the volcano does boast a pretty impressive list of credits on its resumé; excluding the 1892 ten-minute documentary of Edgerton’s last-ever recorded eruption, the volcano has been featured in fifty or so theatrical film releases over the last one hundred-plus years. The first dramatic movie to give Edgerton a prominent role was the 1909 silent melodrama A Life In Ruins, about a young man driven to commit suicide by throwing himself off the top of the volcano when a love affair goes horribly wrong. Five years later audiences flocked to movie houses in Tasmania and on the Australian mainland to see The Edgerton Tragedy, the first-ever cinematic account of the 1854 eruption.

The first significant Edgerton-related motion picture to be released in the sound era was the 1929 melodrama Port Dalrymple, a romantic epic set during the late 1850s and early 1860s. While its plot was seriously far-fetched even by 1920s standards, millions of movie-goers were enthralled by its vivid depiction of the 1854 eruption and the social turmoil which shook Tasmania in the eruption’s aftermath; many were also drawn to the film’s climactic sequence in which the lead villain was crushed under an avalanche of rock. Three years later a certain well-known ABC radio comedian would spoof the movie’s more exaggerated subplots in the irreverent parody film Mind The Heat. In 1937, with civil war already raging in Spain and World War II just around the corner, a group of independent filmmakers from Sydney traveled to the Edgerton region to use the volcano as a backdrop for their cautionary tale The Insurrection, a chilling vision of Australia under fascist rule.

When Britain and its Commonwealth allies declared war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the RAA communications branch dispatched a documentary film crew to the naval observation towers surrounding Mount Edgerton to shoot a segment for their series We Serve Australia. That segment, subtitled "Sentries on the Ocean", was to later become the basis for the classic 1946 romantic drama Men On The Tower-- the first Australian theatrical release to be nominated by the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for a Best Picture Oscar.

Mount Edgerton obviously makes no distinctions when it comes to cinematic caliber, having appeared in both some of the best Australian feature films ever made and some of the worst. The 1970s alone produced four of the most badly made Edgerton- themed movies to ever deface a screen-- the widely and deservedly panned 1971 remake of Port Dalrymple; 1973’s Mr. Hadley’s Walkabout, a lame-brained excuse for a comedy and third-rate imitation of the British Carry On series; the 1975 animated children’s film The Golden Stallion, a mawkish fantasy tale so ineptly done it drove the film critic for one major Melbourne newspaper to quit his job shortly after turning in his review; and 1978’s The Last Days Of Tasmania, an overblown apocalyptic saga created in a botched attempt to capitalize on the popularity of epic disaster movies like Irwin Allen’s Earthquake and the Japanese drama Nihon Chinbotsu(better known in the States as Tidal Wave).

On the other side of the coin the volcano has served as a backdrop for hits like 1987’s Skies Of Flame, regarded by movie critics both within and outside Australia as the definitive cinematic account of the 1854 eruption; 1953’s Mrs. Huddlesford, a kind of Australian Goodbye Mr. Chips chronicling forty-plus years in the life of a Port Dalrymple schoolteacher; the chilling 1972 science fiction drama Balm In Gilead, which portrays a desperate group of refugees seeking shelter inside Edgerton’s caves after an environmental catastrophe has rendered the rest of Tasmania uninhabitable; and 2002’s Edgerton, a teen coming-of-age story of four friends visiting the volcano in the hope of coming to terms with a classmate’s death. And of course no one can forget Edgerton’s critical part in the original Mad Max movie and Mad Max’s sequel The Road Warrior.

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According to statistics compiled by the Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania, an average of 167,000 tourists visit Edgerton National Park every year. And that’s just the number of visitors who are Australian citizens; the number jumps to 210,000 when you factor in those who travel to Edgerton from countries like Japan, Britain, the United States, and Indonesia. (And if certain books about UFOs can be believed, the totals are raised even higher by nocturnal visits from ETs to the volcano.) But regardless of the numbers, one fact about the park remains indisputably true: no one who comes to see Edgerton up close remains unchanged or unmoved by the experience. More than a few comments written in the park’s guestbooks describe visiting the volcano and the wilds nearby as a "religious" or "cosmic" experience-- which may help explain why Edgerton has become a popular gathering site for spiritual believers of all denominations, as well as the subject of a bitter court dispute between Aboriginal rights organization and Australia’s largest neo-pagan society during the 1990s. The Edgerton land rights trial was one of the most contentious civil cases to be heard by an Australian court since the end of the Second World War, and even now, more than fifteen years after the case’s final verdict was rendered, it’s a still a subject of acrimonious debate in some circles.

In fact, just before this issue of PVM went to press, word came that a prominent Queensland right-wing activist had been arrested on assault charges after getting in a fight with a prominent Aboriginal journalist during a satellite radio forum held to mark the ten-year anniversary of the changing of the volcano’s official name from Edgerton to Gudadurrin by the Tasmanian state government(although it’s still known as Edgerton in popular parlance by Tasmanians and most foreign tourists). Rarely does a week go by without at least one Tasmanian newspaper publishing an angry letter from a reader who either strenuously objects to the name change or seeks to vigorously defend it. And the debate isn’t confined to the newspaper pages: in 1999 police were forced to intervene in a brawl between two groups of students on the campus of the University of Tasmania when a debate about the name change escalated into full-blown violence.

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There’s no admission charged to visit Edgerton National Park itself, but if you want to make use of the park’s camping facilities you will need to pay a modest fee, so if you’re coming to the park from overseas be sure you remember to convert your cash to Australian currency before you make your visit. Also be sure to take an umbrella with you if you happen to visit the park between May and October; Edgerton is notorious for being one of the rainiest spots in Tasmania around that time. In fact, the park currently holds the Tasmanian state record for the second-highest two day amount of rainfall recorded in that state’s written history-- on September 13^th, 1985 over seven inches of rain fell on Edgerton, a figure surpassed only by the 9.1 inches logged at Swansea and Bicheno on June 7^th and 8^th, 1954.

One thing you fortunately won’t have to worry about is the risk of death of snakebite; there are few if any species of venomous snakes present in Tasmania, and these are usually kept under control by park wildlife rangers. And in the unlikely event you are bitten, emergency medical personnel are on standby to provide the necessary antivenin treatment.

If you have any questions about park regulations, especially those pertaining to Aboriginal spiritual and cultural customs, you can visit the FAQ page at the park’s official website, Edgerton.com.au, or contact the Australian Board of Tourism via e-mail. And on that note, we wish you an enjoyable visit to Mount Edgerton(or Gudadurrin, if you’re more inclined to use that name).