Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park
Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park
By Jamie Kirkpatrick
Photographs by Chris Bell, Rob Blakers, Grant Dixon, Peter Dombrovskis, Dennis Harding, Craig Johnson, Geoff Murray, David Noble, Dave Watts, David Ziegler
Produced and published by Rob Blakers – Wilderness Photo
ISBN 0-9579744-0-X
rrp $24.95
A portrait of our most beloved iconic mountain and surrounds, a tribute to our most popular national park, and a breathtaking collection of photographs by names that are a wilderness roll call of honour.
This slender softcover book is ravishing. The photographs cover the seasons, commencing with autumn when the slopes of the mountains and the hillsides sliding into glacial lakes are covered with the rich russet of fagus.
Seasonal canvas
Winter brings snow, with pandani and delicate plumes of poa grass frosted with ice. High-hung tarns are frozen to sheets of glass.
Spring arrives with a fanfare of scarlet richea and diminutive mountain rocket. Shy leatherwood blossom unfolds in showers of palest cream.
Summer is vivid under rare blue skies, the season finishing in a blaze of unearthly red and purple in Geoff Murray’s panoramic dawn. The last note is chimed by Rob Blakers’ vignette of a pale gold moon rising over a mauve-tinted mountain tarn.
This is a “diverse and dramatic region of lofty dolerite peaks, myriad lakes and tarns, deep, rainforested valleys, thundering rivers, impenetrable scrublands and broad plains” to quote Jamie Kirkpatricks’s text.
Turning each page, delving deep into the beauty and detail of each photograph, you are reminded of Gustav Weindorfer’s famous proclamation as he stood on the summit of Cradle Mountain for the first time:
“This must be a national park for the people for all time. It is magnificent, and people must know about it and enjoy it.”
Just as this book is a magificent tribute to a serene and beautiful, sometimes rugged, sometimes mysterious place. It’s a tribute too, to the quality that publisher Rob Blakers is offering with his succession of books on the wilderness that makes Tasmania unique. Patsy Hollis
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