Southwest National Park

The Southwest is one of the last great temperate wildernesses on Earth, and entering it demands respect. Only one road penetrates the park's interior, running west to the hydroelectric township of Strathgordon on the shores of Lake Gordon. Everything beyond - the Arthur Ranges, Bathurst Harbour, Cox Bight, and the legendary South Coast - is accessible only on foot, by private boat, or by light aircraft landing at the remote Melaleuca airstrip. That profound inaccessibility is precisely what has preserved this place. The weather here is famously extreme: Antarctic fronts arrive with little warning, and sun, rain, hail, and gale can follow each other within a single afternoon.\n\nFor serious bushwalkers, Southwest National Park holds some of Australia's most demanding and celebrated multi-day routes. The South Coast Track (85 km, 6 to 8 days, Grade 4) links Cockle Creek to Melaleuca across headlands, beach crossings that require wading at high tide, and exposed ridgelines with no shelter. The Western Arthur Range Traverse (58 km, 5 to 7 days, Grade 5) is regarded as one of the most technical wilderness walks in Australia, threading along a saw-toothed quartzite spine with near-vertical scrambling. The Mount Anne Circuit (Grade 5, 3 to 5 days) climbs to the highest peak in southern Tasmania. Shorter visitors are not left out: the Creepy Crawly Nature Trail near Cockle Creek is a 1-kilometre boardwalked loop (Grade 2, 30 minutes) through cool temperate rainforest draped in cushion plants and moss.\n\nThe park's wildlife is extraordinary in both rarity and diversity. The critically endangered orange-bellied parrot - with only around 50 individuals estimated in the wild - breeds at Melaleuca each summer, making the site a pilgrimage destination for birdwatchers willing to fly in or walk for days. Wedge-tailed eagles and white-bellied sea eagles patrol the ridgelines, while quolls and possums occupy the forest understorey. The Port Davey Marine Reserve, sheltered inside Bathurst Harbour, supports unique deep-water species - including soft corals and brachiopods - living at unusually shallow depths, because the dark tannin-stained freshwater layer floating on top of the salt water filters out light as effectively as deep ocean does.\n\nAboriginal cultural heritage runs through the park as deeply as its geology. The Needwonnee Walk at Melaleuca is a 1.2-kilometre boardwalk featuring sculpture installations and interpretive panels that tell the story of the Needwonnee people's connection to this coastline - a story stretching back at least 34,000 years as evidenced by archaeological sites including the Wargata Mina (Judd's Cavern) ochre site. The Deny King Heritage Museum at Melaleuca commemorates a pioneer naturalist who lived alone in this wilderness for decades and whose meticulous bird counts were central to saving the orange-bellied parrot from extinction. This layering of deep time - Aboriginal, ecological, and European pioneer - gives the Southwest a cultural gravity that pure scenery alone cannot provide.\n\nFor photographers and landscape travellers, the light in the Southwest is unlike anywhere else in Australia. The combination of Southern Ocean spray, sudden storm illumination, and some of the clearest air on the planet produces colour and contrast that justly make this one of the most photographed wilderness areas in the southern hemisphere. Flightseeing tours departing Hobart Airport offer an accessible way to witness the full scale of the landscape - the flooded valleys of Lake Gordon and Lake Pedder, the white quartzite ridges of the Arthur Ranges, and the turquoise shallows of Bathurst Harbour - in a single day, before returning to Hobart for the night.