This river, banked in forest, carries the fallen sky to the ocean. Where it runs was once a glacial melt, before the first people crossed a land bridge to the island, on land now sea, and made a thousand paths and smokes of their dreaming over a new land, long before the white man’s name; before mineral prospectors broke rainforest tracks; before mud from tin-dish panning and railway bridges built with London money to carry materials for mines and towns, taking copper, tin, gold and silver, all of those towns and camps now gone; before 30 million super feet of Huon pine was cut for timber and floated down-river; before a million tonnes of effluent from the Rosebery mine and mill flowed in grey, steaming silt, smelling of sulphur, into the river from the Stitt; before that stopped, and the banks cleared, hiding sludge; before the 200-metre-high Reece dam, and all the dams behind it, flooding valleys for hydroelectric lakes of the Pieman Power Development Scheme. Before you left.

Just now, downriver and distant from the Reece dam wall, tannin foam turns on torrents, as it always has after days of rain, and the river’s edge laps as if the turmoil beneath and all that is hidden upriver seeks your feet. You must step carefully on the soft ground of the flooded bank. Kneel to be close. With your sleeve rolled, reach to lift a smooth stone from the shallows. In fluid mechanics the molecules of water are known to be soft and round. Water runs lightly off your lifted arm and the light glides with it.