Hikers at Frenchman’s Cap 1940s
Beattie, John Watt
Frenchman’s Cap picture
Date(s) of creation: [ca. 1900-ca. 1940]
transparency : toned glass lantern slide ; 8.5 x 8.5 cm.
Reproduction rights owned by the State Library of Victoria
Accession Number: H37687/34
Image Number: b15762
However, it is impossible that Beattie had anything to do with this photograph. This exact same photograph is credited to E.T. Emmett as the photographer in his own publication ca. 1952 called Tasmania by Road and Track (MUP). In Chapter 8 Emmett mentions the two companions he took with him, presumably pictured here. They certainly took photos on the trip.Why this photo was reproduced into a lantern slide and credited to Beattie by the State Library of Victoria is very strange.
The caption to the photograph which appears opposite page 64 of Tasmania by Road and Track reads:
Photograph by E.T. Emmett, Frenchmans Cap from Loddon Plains
John Watt Beattie died in 1930. Emmett’s book was based on a trip he took in the late 1940s. Emmett late became Minister for Tourism in Tasmania.
“… I decided to vary the going by a side trip to the Frenchman’s Cap and, anxious to live to finish this book, I asked two young men to accompany me. A mile beyond where the road crosses the Franklin River we set out, my swag swelled to fifty-one pounds by the addition of sleeping gear, an axe and a week’s food. At three in the afternoon we recrossed the Franklin to pick up what was once a track. High above the wide stream stretched five strands of wire laced together, and above this two single wires about three feet apart for handholds, the top wires being connected to the bottom one by V-shaped pieces, specially supplied, I am sure, to catch your swag in. It is ticklish work freeing yourself when you are afraid to take either hand off the “balusters”. In justifiable haste to get the ordeal over, I heartily cursed the companion standing on the bank who asked me to wait to be photographed, and I cursed even more on finding later that the darkness of the forest rendered the picture a “dud”.
Traversing a typical Tasmanian myrtle forest, we stopped at dusk on the banks of the Loddon and pitched our tiny tent. Providentially the recent bushfires had spared some of the loveliness along the river side and it was still a most beautiful spot. Five miles in three and a half hours was fast going, for it is infernally hilly and we kept losing the track. Showing his hoary head for about ten minutes we saw our goal-the Frenchman’s Cap, “Mystery Mountain” of the wild west. He looked unclimbable-as more than one disappointed adventurer had found previously.
Storing some of our food in a cache, we started at daylight on the next stage, over burnt hills to the South Loddon, through a blackened tea-tree forest to the equally black stream. It was the only depressing place on the trip. The “track” we were trying to follow had been cut thirty-four years before by that resolute explorer, T. B. Moore, and naturally the blazes had been nearly erased by time. Just here the track cut ten years later by J. E. Philp branches off to the right, forgotten by the authorities and obliterated by the quick-growing scrub. Crossing button-grass bogs with a wary eye for snakes, we encountered a devilish tangle of the bush which Tasmanian explorers have cursed for nearly a century and a half. Tea-tree, cutting grass and bauera grasped our packs, encircled our legs and lacerated our hands. With scarcely enough breath left to curse we reached the top of the divide and descended through a similar inferno to the shores of a sheet of water known to the dozen or so people who had seen it as Lake Vera. To scramble along its mile of length to the far end took nearly two hours, for every known forest obstacle impeded us, including that devil-tree, the horizontal. It was a relief to throw off our loads and pitch our tent in the darkness made denser by a grove of Huon pines. High cliffs, to be scaled tomorrow, frowned above this, one of the handsomest lakes in all Tasmania.
The next day’s journey will live in my memory for ever and a day. In my time I have traversed countless hundreds of forests, but never such a forest as this upon the slopes that are the outliers of the Frenchman Range. Mounting all the time, even our heavy burdens could not dull our rapture in the kaleidoscope of scenes in that vale of no travellers. Beeches, treeferns and fifty other species beautified our breathless way; grass trees touching fifty feet in height reared their strange heads among the commoner flora, the rare climbing epacris with its long pink and scarlet bells festooned remains of dead beeches and hung in ropes above our heads; gay fungi, red and tangerine, lip-shaped, reminded us of the prevailing female fashion and behind the forest towered the sheer white cliffs dripping their eternal shower-bath upon the puny mortals who had sweated and puffed their way towards the pass. Barron Pass, Philp named it, after the then governor. It is only a hundred yards or so through, but its white walls are many hundred feet in height. Then round a rocky spur, across a basin of “wild artichoke”, through another smaller pass, and Lake Tahune is the welcome sight, for it means rest again. A day-long, slogging journey, and we had covered three miles!
I cannot describe Lake Tahune adequately. The immediate surroundings of this sepia pool are pines, and right out of it for a sheer couple of thousand feet rise the white cliffs of Frenchman’s Cap. Away to the north as far as vision will reach are mountains, Barn Bluff being about the most distant of those that can be recognized.
The actual climbing of the Frenchman is now both a good and a bad dream to me. Before breakfast next morning we were standing at the cairn and peering awe-struck at the country thousands of feet below. First you clamber up a sort of chute for about a thousand feet, coquetting with death in risking a false step near the top of the ridge. Then the final bastions have to be stormed, which are a series of shelves and low precipices. The most daring climber went ahead, and three times during the ascent and descent I found myself dangling from a rope that had been brought in case of emergencies which duly occurred. I am not going to pretend that I enjoy climbing mountains that necessitate ropes. One slip, or sudden loss of nerve, and you would cheat the undertaker, for your mangled body could not be got out for burial. Since I made the trip a much easier way has been found.
We read the names in the few bottles under their little mausoleums, examined the nearly perished piece of pine that once bore the names of Spong, Tully and Glover and still bears the date 1857, then each of us stacked a slab of marble-yes, the Frenchman is partly composed of white marble-on the cairn, and descended. That night we got back to Lake Vera and the next day to the road, and the adventure was over. The “Mystery Mountain” of the west had yielded his secrets to three more pygmy humans. We saw an eagle accomplish in two minutes the journey that had taken us three days. We saw also the eight lakes named by Charles Whitlam, and a ninth not mentioned by him.”
The image below is also held at the State Library of Victoria, and is correctly attributed to E.T. Emmett, but it does not appear in the book Tasmania By Road and Track (1952):
Emmett,
Crater Lake picture
Date(s) of creation: [ca. 1900-ca. 1940]
transparency : toned glass lantern slide ; 8.5 x 8.5 cm.
Reproduction rights owned by the State Library of Victoria
Accession Number: H37687/50
Image Number: b15778
An earlier publication by E.T. Emmett:
Tommy’s trip to Tasmania (c.1914)
E T Emmett, illustrated by Charles Nuttall (1872-c.1950)
Hobart, Tasmanian Tourist Department, c.1914
2nd edition
Front cover displayed
15.3 x 12.1 cm
“Issued by the Tasmanian Government Tourist Bureau in 1913, Tommy’s trip to Tasmania by E T Emmett was illustrated by Charles Nuttall (1872-c.1950). Nuttall drew for Melbourne Punch and the Sydney Bulletin, was the staff artist on the New York Herald and contributed to Life, Century and Harper’s magazines. The front cover is illustrated with probably the earliest example of the shape of Tasmania used as a face”
Source of Tommy’s Trip to Tasmania: Leatherwood Online
