Hikers near Cradle Mountain (photograph via the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office NS3195)

Muir moved on quickly, though, and missed the naturalists by a few days (just as Muir himself glanced by Henry David Thoreau in Wisconsin in 1861). Despite this, it’s clear they were swept up in the same movement. They were settlers enamoured by the monumentality of remote landscapes and the complexity of the natural systems found therein.

Legge shows that this new attachment to nature was about a holistic appreciation of aesthetic, scientific, and social value. Preserves of ‘wilderness’ then became valuable resources for tourists, scientists, and artists. As newlyweds, the Weindorfers blazed a trail into the wild central highlands of Tasmania and established a base under Cradle Mountain. This ‘wilderness’ was an ‘El Dorado for botanists’, a ‘sculpture garden of rock and cliff and tree’ for photographers, and (increasingly) a ‘valuable asset’ for the state.

Legge shifts between these dimensions by considering the historical foundations of Tasmanian nature leisure in a series of chronologically informed but mostly thematic chapters. The book pivots on a timely question: what happens as the enthusiastic activities of privileged amateurs are scaled up?

This question emerges out of a narrative concerned with Gustav and Kate Weindorfer. These disciples of Thoreau’s mountain-top god – one Austrian and the other Tasmanian – worked single-mindedly between 1909 and 1932 to build a home for nature lovers in the Cradles. Kate’s inheritance and connections in Tasmania made early expeditions possible, and at the critical juncture of 1912, when Gustav spent extended periods in the Cradles building Waldheim, Kate’s labour on the farm at Kindred was essential.

Gustav Weindorfer's chalet Waldheim (photograph by H.U. Küenle/Wikimedia Commons)

Making home in the Cradles involved more than just the construction of comfortable lodgings. It also required a constant absorption in Nature’s book. There was botany, geology, and topography to understand, but settlers and visitors also drew on the more intangible ways that humans appreciated the natural world. There’s a romance here. In Kindred, the real love story is that which develops between the Weindorfers and the Tasmanian highlands. They came to know nature through an attentiveness to its presence, energy, and even agency.  

It is clear that the social aspects of nature leisure were important, too. Ironically, solitude was clearly best experienced alongside others. From the 1910s a group of high-country locals, visitors, and eminent scientists that Legge memorably dubs ‘the Giants’ banded together to lobby officials, build connections, and patronise the lodge. This bore fruit in 1921 when the Cradles were classified as a National Park. Legge’s telling of this story reminds us that building the infrastructure of nature tourism was a communal project that appealed to the settler state. In the words of the promoter Evelyn Temple Emmett, this was about ‘capitalising scenery’.

As with many of the early National Parks, it was the ‘untouched’ nature of the Cradles that attracted visitors. To a certain extent, this was a grand fantasy. Despite the tone of promotional material, it’s clear that the environs of Cradle Mountain were very much a working landscape when the Weindorfers first encountered them in 1909. Van Diemen’s Land Company surveyors charted the territory in the 1830s and 1850s, photographers were active from the 1880s, and trappers, loggers, and farmers were all present in the early twentieth century. The illusion that ‘walkers’ were ‘on their own’ in the highlands was sustained by the Weindorfers, who assembled and promoted a wilderness.

The ignorance of settler heritage in the Cradles compounded a thorough reluctance to explore Indigenous history. Legge skirts this question in early chapters but deals with it explicitly in the fourth. Like many settlers, Gustav was aware of Indigenous dispossession – he had read James Bonwick, was in the orbit of Alfred William Howitt while in Melbourne, and Kate collected Aboriginal flints – but nevertheless he often reverted to the language of eternity, absence, and ‘virgin territory’. Despite their curiosity, the Weindorfers weren’t cognisant of this fundamental conceit at the heart of their appreciation of nature. Like other settler wilderness enthusiasts – John Muir especially – there was little room for an Indigenous history of scenic and scientific landscapes.  

Finally, this book provides new contexts for recent controversies in the Tasmanian highlands. Far from the sparsely populated space that the Weindorfers encountered in 1909, Cradle Mountain is now the destination of some 280,000 tourists a year. It’s an engine for the Tasmanian economy. As a journalist, Legge has recently investigated plans to develop an eco-tourist lodge within the Walls of Jerusalem National Park. Kindred explains how these still-contested sites were initially encountered, belatedly appreciated, and eventually held up as paradigms of settler environmental management.

Though the Weindorfers might have been horrified at the sight of so many tourists flowing off buses or by the notion of them dropping in on helicopters, they would probably also see a fulfilment of their original ambitions. The highlands are still a laboratory for science, but they are also a source of inspiration for tourists and other visitors. It is as if the evangelism of wilderness advocates still puts them in complicated positions. This contradiction hung over the Weindorfers at Waldheim and clearly haunts nature lovers still.