“This is no god’s country, this is god-forsaken: it is perfect and precise. Perfect thousand-year-old trees, their lowest feathered branches almost tip-tipping… No tracks can be left on this hallowed ground, not even by the wind.” 

“Down an easy boulder-studded slope, the smooth legacy of an ice cap spread over sixty-five square kilometres some 20,000 years ago. What must the plateau have been like before? Ragged and jagged, teeming with animals, giant fauna now extinct.”

“Here, a little bluestone house sits quietly on the edge of the rippling flats, and rising beyond the house is the steep dark escarpment which climbs to the Central Plateau itself.”

Climbing up to the Central Plateau: “The track they are on was cut by old trappers. In his study of the area he’d read that a hundred years ago the same ground would have been regularly used by men carrying up to seventy pounds of wallaby and possum pelts across their shoulders. Tiger pelts, too, or carcasses: once upon a time. Up on the plateau more tigers were caught than anywhere else on the island.”

“Out of the forest he follows a pad that runs, speeds through the tussock grass until it comes to a white sandy cove and drowns itself in a lake. The lake is braceleted with dark pines, and rising beyond them is a giant semi-circular [dolerite] wall.”

“‘Welcome to Tiger Town’ reads a sign by the highway, ‘Population: 20 000’.” This sign is actually on the way into Launceston, as Leigh notes in her May 2000 article for the Sydney Morning Herald, “Mystery that burns so bright.”  

“He crosses Tiger Creek, Break O'Day Creek, this creek, that creek.”