Winter in Tasmania: The Little Island at the Bottom of the World

Blue wrens, wild coastlines, old stories, long love and a little witchy wisdom from our winter in Tasmania travels.

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I’m home.

After almost a month travelling around Tasmania in our tiny caravan, I’m back in the Blue

Mountains, noticing the first little snippets of spring appearing and slowly returning to ordinary life again.

There is something about winter in Tasmania that feels particularly magical to me, and travelling there through August showed me a very different version of that little, almost heart-shaped island at the bottom of Australia.

Perhaps as a working witch and massage therapist living in the Blue Mountains, I’m already predisposed to love cold weather, old places, wild landscapes and anywhere that feels as though it has stories to tell. Winter in Tassie certainly isn’t for everyone. It was cold. It was windy. The days were short, with the sun often not rising until after seven and disappearing again around five. But honestly, that suited me beautifully.

I love winter. I love pulling on layers, woolly socks and big coats. I love climbing into bed in winter pyjamas under too many blankets. And coming from the Blue Mountains, quite a few Tasmanian days actually weren’t dramatically colder than home. There was even a stretch where Leura was colder than parts of the west coast.

The shorter days also gave us something I hadn’t really expected... Long, dark evenings. And in Tasmania, darkness can be wonderful. Once the towns quietened, the wildlife appeared. Little pademelons wandered around our campsites. Possums emerged. Birds settled into the trees for the night. On the west coast, where there are so few towns and so little artificial light, the sky became properly dark and the stars seemed extraordinarily bright. There is something very grounding about sitting outside at night when almost everything around you is wild.

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Stanley

One of the places that completely stole my heart was Stanley. Standing on those green hills above the ocean, looking down over the little village, you could almost imagine yourself somewhere in Europe and then there is The Nut. This enormous ancient volcanic plug rising beside the town like some great sleeping guardian.

Stanley sits beneath its shadow, nestled between green farmland and sea, and it was every bit as beautiful as I had hoped it would be. I’ve read books set there, both fiction and non-fiction, so finally walking those streets felt oddly familiar. We were also lucky enough to have little penguins nesting beside our campsite. It wasn’t even peak penguin season, but every evening they would arrive home from the sea and spend the night chattering away to one another. When we eventually moved on, I genuinely missed falling asleep to the sound of them.

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A quieter west coast

Further south, Strahan gave me that wonderful feeling I always chase when I travel: the sense that you have somehow slipped between the cracks of ordinary life.

Being there out of season meant quiet streets, empty morning walks and time to really notice the place. Macquarie Harbour is enormous, and in the mornings I would walk beside the water listening to it gently lap against the shore. Blackbirds sang from gardens and rooftops, and little blue wrens flitted through the bushes.

I adore blue wrens. When I was a little girl I was a Girl Guide, and my patrol was called the Blue Wrens. I think that has given me a lifelong affection for them. They’re tiny, curious, slightly vain little creatures who seem very aware of just how beautiful they are.

And one particular blue wren gave us one of the strangest and most memorable moments of the entire trip.

We had stopped on the west coast for a bushwalk down to a beautiful lake.

Afterwards, when we returned to the car, a little male blue wren became fascinated with us. He hopped onto the windscreen. Then the bonnet. Then my mirror. Then Adam’s mirror.

He peered through the windows at us and tapped at the glass, constantly returning to look at his reflection. We were ready to leave, but he was so entertaining that we stayed there for several minutes just watching him. I always try to linger when animals appear like that.

To me, those encounters often carry a little message.

Eventually we buckled ourselves in and Adam asked me what I thought the blue wren meant. I told him that perhaps the message was actually for him, since the bird had spent so much time on his side of the car. Adam decided it meant good luck. Then he asked me what I thought. “Be prepared,” I said. Because that was the Girl Guide motto. And I had been a Blue Wren.

A few minutes later we drove away. About five minutes down the road, a man standing in the middle of the winding road waved us down. He was the driver of a semi trailer, and his truck was parked on the side of the road, further along there was another semi-trailer which had left the road and rolled into a ditch on our side of the road but facing the wrong direction. It had just happened 5 mins earlier. Thankfully everyone was okay.

But we were told that the truck had been travelling towards us on the wrong side of the road before swerving. And suddenly we both thought about those few minutes we had spent sitting with that little bird.

Had we left when we originally intended to, our small dark car and caravan may have been travelling through that exact stretch of road at a very different moment.

You can interpret things like that however you like. Coincidence, timing, luck, intuition, magic. For me, it was simply a beautiful reminder to pay attention.

Sometimes the stories we instinctively attach to things are exactly the stories we need to hear. And sometimes lingering for five minutes with a little blue bird is more important than getting somewhere on time.

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Wild Tasmania

There were so many beautiful wildlife encounters. We watched wombats wandering about as though they owned the place. We met Tasmanian devils and learned that they are nothing like the ferocious little monsters they are sometimes portrayed as being. They’re actually rather shy and astonishingly soft. We were even lucky enough to pat one.

I expected something coarse, a little like the famously doormat-like fur of a wombat, but a devil is beautifully soft. Somewhere between a cat and a possum.

It made me love them even more.

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Beautiful places with complicated stories

Tasmania also has a way of making you think about the land differently.

In Queenstown, the landscape is extraordinary.

The bare orange mountains surrounding the town look almost Martian against the lush forests beyond them. Mining shaped Queenstown for generations, providing livelihoods while also leaving enormous scars across the landscape and waterways.

Talking to locals made that history feel much more complicated than simply deciding whether mining was “good” or “bad”. People have built their lives around industries that have also dramatically altered the land, it was one of those places that left me with more questions than answers. And I think travelling should occasionally do that.

And then there was us!

Perhaps the greatest surprise of the trip wasn’t Tasmania at all.

It was us.

Our caravan is tiny. There is a small double bed, a miniature table, a sink, a little stove and a tiny wardrobe. That’s basically it. Adam and I have been together since we were sixteen. We married in 1998. We’ve raised children, buried parents and grandparents, worked, worried, suffered illness, argued, laughed, grieved and grown up alongside one another.

And yet spending almost a month living together inside what is essentially a small box somehow made us feel young again.

We laughed constantly. We played tricks on each other. We explored. We got lost. We ate too much. We sat outside at night looking for animals. We talked. And we never grew tired of one another. Which, frankly, could have gone either way in a caravan that size. There was almost no entertainment, no television very little distraction. And I think that was part of the magic.

When you’ve been with someone for decades, it is very easy for your relationship to become tangled up with everything else; work, children, bills, appointments, homes, responsibilities.

You become parents, workers, carers, organisers and problem solvers.

Travelling slowly together gave us enough time for all of those identities to quieten down.

Eventually there was just Angela and Adam again. The two teenagers who liked each other enough to build an entire life together. I think that may have been the greatest gift Tasmania gave us.

A reminder that long love doesn’t necessarily lose its spark. Sometimes it simply gets buried underneath everything else.

And occasionally you need to get very far away from ordinary life to find it again.

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Looking for the stories underneath a place

Wherever we travel, we try to spend something locally, a cup of tea in a cafe or dinner at a local pub. Something from a small shop. A ticket to a local attraction. A way to give to the community we visit.

We also have another slightly stranger travelling ritual.

We visit cemeteries.

Old cemeteries tell you so much about a place: the families who built it, the names that repeat through generations, epidemics, accidents, industries and lives that existed long before the cafés and souvenir shops arrived, we also look for the stories that existed long before those cemeteries were there.

Whenever we travel, we try to seek out the Indigenous history of a place too.

In Tasmania, more stories of the island’s First People are being shared and brought forward, but the information can still feel surprisingly scarce in some places.

So I look for it. I read. I listen. I ask questions on tours.

And when I can’t find the story written down anywhere, I still try to remember that the landscape had a life, a language and a meaning long before the buildings, roads and towns appeared.

Sometimes I will simply stand somewhere and imagine the land as it might once have been, and wonder how the people who knew it intimately may have moved through it, read it and understood it.

I suppose I do the same thing in old buildings.

I notice the chips in a doorway and wonder who knocked a piece of furniture against it.

I see the worn floorboards and think about how many feet crossed them.

I imagine someone dragging a suitcase home, opening a window, lighting a fire, cooking a meal. I am always looking for little pieces of evidence that tell me the story of where I am.

To me, that history doesn’t take anything away from the raw beauty of a place.

It adds another layer to it.

It reminds me that a landscape is never just scenery.

It has been lived in, loved, altered, remembered and understood in many different ways.

Perhaps that’s the witch in me.

I like remembering that every place has layers.

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Coming home

Now, though, I’m home. And strangely, today feels like the first day I’m properly home.

We’ve been so busy since we arrived back that I haven’t really found my normal rhythm yet. But that is another thing holidays always seem to give me: a renewed appreciation for the ordinary routines that keep me feeling well. My mornings, my walks, my work. The little rituals that shape a day. The familiar things I sometimes take for granted until I step away from them.

So I’m looking forward to finding my rhythm again. The days are getting longer.

The garden is beginning to wake up. There are little signs of spring appearing everywhere.

And after weeks of wandering through forests, old towns, wild coastlines and winter darkness, I’m really looking forward to stepping back into The Awen Room.

I have received so many messages while I’ve been away telling me I’ve been gone far too long and asking when I’m coming back.

I felt very loved.

And I’m back. 🌿

I’m looking forward to the warmth of my little treatment room, beautiful spring energy, familiar faces and welcoming you all back onto the table.

Tasmania filled my cup in ways I hadn’t expected.

Now I’m ready to find my rhythm again, settle back into the things that keep me grounded, and step into a beautiful spring.

Blessed Be,

Angela x

I’d love to hear your thoughts too. Leave me a little note in the comments below. I always love hearing from you. XX

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A little spring reset of your own 🌿

If, like me, you’re feeling ready to find your rhythm again after winter, the Spring Energy Reset is now available in The Awen Room.

It’s a 60 minute seasonal treatment combining Equilibrium Massage, Reiki and Space Clearing, intuitively woven together to help you shake off winter and move into spring feeling lighter, grounded and refreshed.

A little more than massage, and a lovely way to mark the changing season, settle back into yourself and make some space for what spring might bring. ✨

The Spring Sale is also on now, with Spring Energy Reset treatments available for $95 each when you book two.

Have a look at the Spring Energy Reset here: 🌸