As an American of a certain age, until rather recently, I knew three things about Tasmania.
- A character on Bugs Bunny.
- The place that birthed Errol Flynn.
- Errol Flynn’s nickname with the Hollywood press was the same as the character on Bugs Bunny.
That’s about it. When I decided to take The Still Life Stories to Australia and start in Tasmania, I hunted for facts about the place, which are easy enough to find, so I won’t go too far down that wombat hole, but a few basics.
- It’s an Australian state, like Alaska or Hawaii.
- It’s a two-hour flight from Sydney.
- It’s cooler and rainier than much of Australia.
- It’s green.
- It’s an island.
- There are Australian-type animals here, including that Bugs Bunny cartoon character.
- They make a lot of really great whisky here. Along with gin and beer and ale and wine.
- You can get Kangaroo sausage in the local market.
- Wallabies, wallabies, wallabies and more damned wallabies.
- And wombats. Who leaves square poops everywhere?
I’ll be here for a month and learn a lot more, so hang out and fill in your Tasmania knowledge. There will be a test.
First stop: McHenry Distillery
I find that I like whisky makers.
Over and over, I’ve met people who did other things their whole lives and at one point said to themselves, “This is stupid. I’m going to quit and never go back… And I’m gonna make whisky.”
A very Maxfieldian response, and to figure that out, go look for a book on Amazon called “The Maxfieldian Way and Feral Guide to Going Nowhere.” (I wrote that book. This is a shameless sales plug.)
These are people who had an impractical and crazy dream, carried it around in their heads for a big piece of their practical and un-crazy lives, then just pulled the plug and did it.
They’re my tribe.
Making whisky is risky.
Sure, plenty of people and big companies make zillions doing it, and they have no desire to let a new kid into the party. The giant guys can make mediocre juice and throw mountains of money at marketing and make mountains of money. And governments around the world squeeze mountains of taxes out of the whisky makers, and there are huge, impenetrable bureaucracies around moving whisky from one place to another and selling the stuff.
So it is a pretty crazy pursuit.
As in… “Why do you want to climb Mt. Everest…” “Because blah, blah, blah…”
These are my people. Peter Bowyer in Scotland is my people. Jaynie Kean in Scotland is my people. Jan Hinrichsen on Fohr Island is my people.
And Bill McHenry in Port Arthur, Tasmania, is/am/are my people.
The Alchemists and Sorcerers who turn plants into lively spirits, that old lead into gold thing. These are my people.
Y’all are crazy, and for that I’m thankful. We are all thankful.
There are these crazy tribe members all over the planet, but let’s focus, if we can, for a moment on this little corner of the world and on Bill McHenry.
This little corner is a little corner of a little corner far below a big chunk of mostly uninhabited land.
Australia is a big place with less than 10 people per square mile.
And you wonder why your closet is so small.
Now go south of this wonderful and not densely populated country, and there is Tasmania, which, I noticed, is shaped like two hound dogs looking up in different directions. There are other ideas of the shape, but I think mine fits, and maybe nobody else has ever seen it.
So down in the bottom of Tasmania, there is Hobart, and around a hundred clicks away is Port Arthur, and a few clicks away from that is the sign to McHenry Distillery.
So you’re at the bottom of a continent, keep going through an ocean, and keep going to the bottom of a double-hound dog-shaped island, and go past a little town till you get to a dirt road.
And take it.
A couple of miles up a mountain. Through dense forest of giant eucalyptus trees and ferns and plump little wallabies, past the wombats, past the devils, past the black cockatoos, up the dirt road until you’re wondering if your GPS is wrong and you start to think you’re going to be part of some sort of alien experiment.
And the dirt road will end.
And you’re at the McHenry Distillery.
A most inconvenient place.
As I drove up here with Bill McHenry for the first time, he told me, “We’re in a rather inconvenient location…”
He was absolutely right. And he was absolutely right to build a distillery here.
Who the hell would come up this mountain, this far away from The Big City and a couple of hours flight from a faraway continent with ten people per square mile.
The answer is Bill McHenry, and he came here over twenty years ago for one really great reason.
The water.
The Water
True confession here. I’m a water tourist. I don’t know if I’m alone, but I suspect there are others out there. We should form a militia, or a gang, or something.
A water tourist is someone who dearly loves water and drinks it in everywhere they go. They taste the local water and hope it’s fresh and sweet and delicious, and if it is, they mark that spot on some internal x marks the spot.
I spent a month hiking the Appalachian Trail years back and lived on fresh water that came out of the sides of the mountains. I used a water filter, but I didn’t need to. It was pure H20, filtered through the earth, and delicious. And when you’re hiking through the woods alone with a backpack and a tent, you learn to love water because if you run out, you die.
So the inconvenience of getting to the water at McHenry’s Distillery is huge.
Hell, for me, it was a drive to the Austin airport, a flight to LA, a drive up the 405 to LAX, a five hour wait, a 15 hour flight, customs fish eye, dragging bags through an airport, more waiting around, another two hour flight, a couple hours drive, that dirt road up the hill, more dirt road through a primeval forest and pulling out the stainless steel water bottle, putting it under a kitchen sink and turning the knob and then…
A long, slow drink.
I get it, Bill.
I now understand why you pulled the plug on a comfortable corporate life and did all this bandying about to get to this place with THIS water and build a damned distillery.
Here. At the end of this dirt road.
This water.
And when you taste this whisky, you’ll get it.
“The spring comes directly out of the mountain behind us. We’ve got 120 acres of pristine forest and, I think, the best water on earth.”
That line about McHenry Distillery being a “most inconvenient distillery” is Bill’s. As we drove up the long, dirt road (and by dirt, I mean it’s a really nice, hard-packed road through a bloody forest and not some dusty hillbilly hideout…), he mentioned how visitors often would call him, wondering if they’re going the right way.
“A most inconvenient distillery.”
He nailed it. I wish I could take credit for that line, but even though I didn’t think it up, I could recognize its genius.
Bill bought this big side of a mountain 20 years ago because of this water.
How the hell did he figure this out? How the hell did he find THIS place with THAT water on THIS island?
Internet.
“I found it on Google,” he admits in a very non-legendary way.
“There is a spring here that flows constantly. Pure, wonderful water that doesn’t need some chemical soup. It’s the purest water I’ve ever found. We’ve tested it over and over, and it’s exactly what water should be. And it makes great whisky and beer and gin and more. That perfect water from our own spring that makes the difference.”
He’s right.
Inconveniently right.
He lives fifteen minutes down the road, but when he first started building out the distillery, his family, wife, and three kids all lived in Hobart, a real city with schools, services, and grocery stores, and he spent the weeks out here, building out the distillery. He even built The Bothy that I’m living in for two weeks.
What’s The Bothy, you ask?
A bothy is an old Scottish term that’s used for a simple, unlocked shack up in the highlands. A tiny place with a bed, a fireplace, and a simple kitchen. If you were hiking and needed shelter, you’d duck into a bothy. If you were a farmer or a sheep herder, you would live there during the season and go home when it was over.
This bothy is a little bit of heaven.
It’s up on the side of the mountain, utterly off the grid but with solar-powered lights, a little fridge, a cast-iron stove to burn wood, and no internet.
And a view that all us writer types dream about.
The wind blows, it can be cold, it can rain, but build out a fire in the cast iron stove and plug in the laptop when the solar-powered batteries are on, and you’ve got the ultimate writers’ cabin.
And then fill up a big glass of fresh, cool water and start writing.
Oh, oh, and pour a little glass of the ten-year-old single malt, French oak port cask McHenry whisky, and go write the damned Great American Novel.
There is no pesky internet to distract you.
The only heat is the stove.
It’s fancy-ass camping. But honestly. If you were here right now, you’d say to yourself, “I could live here…”
I’ve said it a bunch of times in just a couple of days.
It was a rather inconvenient life, but when you have a mission, you have the fuel to keep going.
And living in The Bothy made it a little worthwhile for Bill McHenry while he built the distillery, and for me while I write about the distillery.
It’s the crowning peak of a rather wonderful universe.
Right now, I’m writing in front of a cast-iron stove with glowing wood burning away the windy chill. My laptop battery is full of life, and my cell phone keeps threatening to give me terrible international news, but I let it stew on a table out of reach.
I made hot coffee that’s terrible, but terrible coffee is still coffee, and I’ve got Hawaiian Slack Key music on a Bluetooth speaker. I don’t know if Bill set out to build the perfect writer’s cabin, but he did. No wifi, but I can get a signal on my phone from a tower over the mountain.
The Wind
Tasmania lies in what they call The Roaring Forties. Meaning, if you head west into the prevailing winds, you won’t hit land till you get to South America.
That’s a long way for a wind to travel without anyone getting in it’s chili.
So Tasmania has a lot of wind. And being halfway up a mountain, where The Bothy sits, means roaring winds can roar all night. I headed here in April, just as the summer was forcing its way into Texas, and I ended up in a place where winter was storming in all the way from Cape Horn.
The Year of Two Winters.
I’m good with that. I’ll trade a Tasmanian fall for a Texas summer. Any living creature would agree. A Texas summer can squeeze the life out of a cactus.
But on the other hand, Tasmania is alive.
The weather moves all over. Sunny and warm, thick clouds, wild winds, sunny and calm, blowing rains, sunny… It changes every day. And there is life here. Birds, wallabies, rabbits, wombats, giant ants, and apparently plenty of things that will kill you, snakes, spiders, and such, but I haven’t seen any of those dangerous types yet.
Except for the huge huntsman spider that breathed its last breath on my kitchen counter this morning. I don’t think he or she had any intention of doing me harm, but I’m glad I saw it on the counter instead of crawling over my face in the middle of the night.
I think that being in a place with so much life gives you life. There is an energy here I can feel. The people seem to have good energy. Everyone I’ve met is in a good mood, and I don’t think it’s because of my joyous light.
Bill certainly has an energy.
When I look at the dozen buildings that make up the distillery and brewery and the road coming up to The Bothy and a cabin and an event center, I can’t begin to imagine the energy it took to visualize all that, in this place, at the end of a couple of miles of dirt road… And then to be the driving force in building it all.
And he still has that energy.
For instance.
It’s cray season here. As in crayfish. Which US-based Gingos call lobster. There is another month left to put out your pots and see if you get lucky and there are a mountain of rules, which means Bill is out checking his, and his friends pots, every morning around 6 AM, which means taking the aluminum skiff to the water on the trailer, getting it in the water, starting the motor and checking the pots. If there is a cray, bring it up, rebait the pots, and do it again tomorrow.
But the cray… Lobster… Damn. Huge, meaty beasts that you eat on a deserted island BBQ without even caring about drawn butter.
So he checked his pots before sunrise, and then I ride along as he delivered two pallets of whisky and gin and beer in the truck and on a trailer into Hobart and then run a half dozen errands and drop off shipping and pick up cans and lids and stop at Mark’s for a beer and a pasty and heading back to the distillery an hour and a half away and then doing a star gazing party that night at the observatory and then getting up at 6 to check the cray pots.
Most basic humans would give up somewhere in the middle.
But maybe it’s a combination of that water, the life abundant on this island, and some kind of energetic DNA that keeps him moving.
Maybe all three.
The Inconvenient Distillery
But back to The Inconvenient Distillery.
Maybe we have a tendency to veer towards convenience, but when we do, we shortchange our lives and what we accomplish.
Bill McHenry could have put his distillery anywhere if the water didn’t matter. But to him, the water mattered, so he carefully carved a unique institution out of the side of a mountain at the end of a dirt road an hour and a half away from the airport. The investor type would furrow a brow and snort about no short-term gains. But Bill McHenry didn’t go through all this inconvenience for short-term gains or a quick buck. He wanted to build an institution that would make great spirits for generations to come, using the best water in the most beautiful and inconvenient place he could possibly find.
And he did. And when you have a taste of the wares he’s bringing to life in this very inconvenient place, you’ll see it was worth the effort.
Cheers Bill. Good on you, mate.
Read the full article at McHenry Distillery Tasmania: The Inconvenient Whisky
