What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Death and Disappearance in Tasmania’s National Parks, Reserves and Wild Places

by Paul Helleman

Description: Hundreds of thousands of people have ventured into Tasmania’s National Parks, other reserves and remote places in search of riches, adventure, wilderness, challenge and rejuvenation. Sadly, some of them died doing it. Victims of bad decisions, bad weather, foolhardiness, accidents, poor preparation or a combination of factors. Some people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few intentionally made it a one-way trip.
Paul Helleman’s forty-year career with Parks and Wildlife Tasmania has given him a unique perspective when capturing these true tales of tragedy in the Tasmanian bush. Read these stories and you’ll soon be able to recognise the warning signs and dangers.

Genres: History

381 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2025

Reviews

[Byomonkey]

You may be familiar with the OG works Off The Wall: Death in Yosemite and Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon. The author of this work certainly is. The standard of writing, insight, interpretation and contextualisation in those works sets a very high bar when it comes to works cataloguing misadventure in the wilderness. What I can positively say about What Could Go Wrong is that Helleman has clearly done extensive reading and compilation of the public archives and collated the relevant incidences he's uncovered. The work as a whole is let down by poor writing, repetition, typos, clumsy contextualising and the terrible quality of the photos. I think he understands the correct usage of the comma about 60% of the time. Inconsistent use of imperial and metric measurements was very distracting. A decent editor could have advised on many more basic rules and conventions that would have made this much more readable, and raised the quality closer to something professional. It also wasn't clear what additional insight Helleman brought to the topic from his own career working with Parks and Wildlife. Overall, this book read like a first draft. It covers some interesting incidents but is a bit of a slog for fans of the death-in-the-wilderness micro-genre.

[Berny Carroll]

I'd hoped this would be more interesting however it felt very repetitive and read like a text book.

[em]

If you like reading coroners reports then this is the book for you!

[Andrew Bishop]

Not the most cheerful of books, but constructive in raising awareness and addressing complacency as we set off to explore Tasmania's incredible wilderness. Multiple accounts of deaths and disappearances in Tasmania's parks, reserves and wild places. I was surprised there were so many over the years. Structured in such a way you can see mistakes made, hence a learning opportunity. I'll be bearing these lessons in mind when I set out on my next bush walk!

[Monica]

Fascinating reading . I also referenced each case with Find a Grave to look at their place of burial ( not all of them were listed on that website). The supplementary reading / index was very helpful too .

[Jessica]

Definitely not what I was expecting! Lots of old stories with little info, although you can tell author has done a lot of research. I had too high expectations for the book thinking it would tell more of "today's" stories and was very disappointed.