Loving the Devil
There’s no explaining why some places just get under your skin. In 2007, Islands Magazine sent me on assignment to Tasmania — Australia’s wild island state, 120 miles south of Melbourne. Though I visited only a small part of Tassie, I fell madly in love with the island’s flora and fauna — including, of course, its carnivorous marsupial mascot. Here’s my story as it appeared in Islands, entitled Sympathy for the Devil. The wonderful photographs are by my great friend and traveling companion Matthieu Paley.
This is a funny thing about being a freelance journalist; one becomes semi-expert on subjects that, a week or a month or a year ago, one knew nothing about. Like the rest of the world (with the exception of a few people on the island itself), my entire idea of what a Tassie Devil looked like was based on the Looney Tunes character, Taz.
