Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Honourable Speaker, on Sunday I attended the annual Weindorfer Day, as I do each year up in Wilmot. Weindorfer Day is a commemoration of pioneering couple Kate and Gustav and it is a celebration of Cradle Mountain and Tasmania’s natural places and wild elements. Gustav and Kate were trailblazers of tourism in the Cradle Valley by constructing the Waldheim Chalet. Nestled amongst magnificent King Billy forest, charismatic pandani and the turning fagus. Waldheim provided welcoming hospitality to the adventurous and those with an interest in Tasmania’s mountain environment.
Allured by Cradle after seeing a photograph by Stephen Spurling, the Weindorfer couple caught their first glimpses of the definitive peak from Mt Roland on their 1906 honeymoon. In 1910 they stood atop the summit of Cradle Mountain and with great euphoria, Gustav made his famous declaration that this must be a national park for all people for all time. After 12 years of championing by the Weindorfers and other great Tasmanians – such as Fred Smithies, Frank Hayward, Florence and George Perrin, Stephen Spurling, Charles Mons, and Carl Stackhouse, to name a few – by 1922 Cradle was gazetted as a scenic reserve. Today, it has the highest degree of protection as a National Park and part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.
Weindorfer day, while being a day of reflection, also challenges us and our position today in how we facilitate visitation and tourist experiences at Cradle and through all of our national parks. As was stated at the Weindorfer ceremony, that is ensuring tourism does not come at the cost of the wilderness that it celebrates and that there is access with preservation and that the Weindorfers’ and their friends’ vision is not diluted by convenience and commercial interests.
This was a consideration of the Weindorfers when opening Waldheim. They had notable foresight into the possible tourism growth and the subsequent risk. A draft of Waldheim’s first brochure, called Wilderness Untouched by Human Hands and designed by Kate and Stephen Spurling, showed notes of caution, that making the delicate Cradle Valley more readily accessible might entice inappropriate development and unsustainable levels of visitation to the region, spoiling the very things that made it special.
When Gustav Weindorfer died on 5 May 1932, despite his fastidious daily administration, noting all the maintenance that he did on the chalet and taking naturalist observations, he had neglected to leave a will. A business syndicate of his friend Smithies, Perrin, Mons and Stackhouse, managed to purchase Waldheim to ensure it retained its famous hospitality. They went on to employ the first ranger at Cradle and they set out to improve the road access conditions.
One of the businessmen, bushwalker and photographer, Fred Smithies, reflected on tourism at Cradle in the 1970s compared to his first visits in the early 1900s. Smithies said:
They are feeling the pinch in the Cradle Mountain area and others, too. I should say that the greatly increased number of visitors brings more destruction than is advisable. The brains of our community will have to get together and devise something or we will lose a lot of beauty in our parks. It (Cradle) hasn’t got the same atmosphere. It is like everything else. Progress comes along and the old-world nature of the place, the solitude and the peace of the surroundings seem to disappear, but it is still a place of absolute beauty, and nothing can destroy the mountains.
If people like Smithies thought the region was losing its defining wild character by the 1970s, imagine how they would feel visiting it today. How would they feel, in the future, if they saw a theme park-esque, gimmicky cableway, a cableway that has escalated from $60 million to $190 million to $225 million and the planning is not even complete; a cableway which will not ensure the conservation of public land and the Wilderness World Heritage Area for future generations? But properly investing in our parks and wildlife will prove advantageous.
Investing in restorative tourism options and declaring dark sky protected areas will simultaneously amplify environmental protection and grow our tourism offerings. Such equitably-accessible offerings will do far more good for our wild places than spending limited resources, facilitating the EOI process and propping up private luxury lodges. In a noisy and busy world where wilderness is ever diminishing, we in Tasmania have an extraordinary responsibility to protect and to enhance our wild places, to encompass and restore their defining values: the forgotten virtues of solitude and silence.
