Last days in Tassie...

Stui here!

Well, we have braved the ferry without chucking up (it was quite a bit rougher than the trip over!) and now back to the mainland after almost 2 months in Tassie! We’ve had some fantastic experiences, even with the somewhat wet weather we have encountered!

After our couple of days at Lake St Clair, including our freezing paddle, we spent a very wet day driving through to the west coast at Strahan. On the way we took in the stark hills around Queenstown which have been pretty much completely denuded as a result of all of the trees being cut down to feed the copper mine smelters last century, whilst the pollution from the smelters poisoned any regrowth! With a lack of vegetation, the rain pretty much washed away the topsoil. We later found out that the current mine operators are spending millions on rehabilitating the hillsides.

Once in Strahan we booked ourselves into a cabin for a couple of nights of luxury, along with booking ourselves on the Wilderness Railway and a Gordon River cruise. The historic railway ran from Queenstown through to Strahan and was built to transport the copper from the mines to the port. Given the mountainous terrain, the railway uses the APT system, which is a third toothed rail fitted between the two standard rails which the engine engages via some additional cogs fitted underneath it. The extra rails allow the trail to climb gradients of 1:16, compared to a standard railway’s maximum gradient of 1:40. It was a great little trip, travelling alongside the King River which is now biologically dead – the pH of the river is between 3-4 which is acidic. This is another environmental disaster resulting from the Queenstown’s mining history!


The calm waters of Macquarie Harbour

 The next day the weather cleared, which was brilliant for us as we headed off on our Gordon River cruise. We motored out through the Devils Gates, which is the very narrow entrance to Macquarie Harbour, only about 80m wide and usually pretty rough! Thankfully it wasn’t too bad! From the entrance, we headed down to the actual Gordon River, cruising up the river to have a look at the spectacular reflections on the still water! Absolutely spectacular, with the reflections almost perfect! On the return leg to Strahan, we stopped at Sarah Island, another convict penal settlement. At the time of the settlement, the island was completely cleared, but most of the vegetation has now grown back with a few ruins spread over the island.

From Strahan, we headed up into the Tarkine region, staying a couple of nights at the Corinna wilderness settlement. To get there we had another ferry crossing, on the “Fatman” barge over the Pieman River. It’s actually a big pontoon on cables, and really wallows around quite a bit as you drive on and off!

Given the reflections on the river as we crossed on the barge, it wasn’t long before we dropped the kayaks in the water and went for a paddle down the river. We turned up the Savage River and paddled up to a shipwreck we had been told about. The wreck is of an old steamer that used to haul huon pine logs from the Pieman and surrounding rivers. It went down in suspicious circumstances, with some people suggesting it was scuttled for the insurance money!

I spent the next day out paddling the Pieman and Whyte Rivers, lucklessly trying to catch a trout while Michelle spent the day relaxing in the camper (it was another pretty wet day!).

Leaving Corrina, we took the back roads through the Arthur Pieman Conservation Reserve, which is a huge spectacular wilderness. We originally were planning to stop at Arthur River, but arriving there we found it is a popular spot for off road vehicles, with almost every shack having a few quad bikes parked out the front! Preferring slightly more peaceful surrounds, we decided to head through to the north coast for a couple of nights. The countryside is really beautiful, as are the little towns and coastline. We climbed the Nut in Stanley, which is the remains of a volcanic plug that towers above the town.

A forecast for a couple of days of sunny weather, we decided to head inland to Cradle Mountain National Park a couple of days early to see if we could jag fine weather to climb Cradle Mountain.

On the first day, we walked around Dove Lake in the afternoon. The walk had beautiful views of Cradle Mountain and the lake. We later drove back into the park to watch the sun set over the peaks, and see if we could spot some animals on the way back out. We didn’t see any Tassie devils, but we saw a couple of wombats. We stopped on the side of the road to watch one, who couldn’t have cared less about us – he wandered up to the car, using the mudflap as a back scratcher as he wandered under the ute! The engine was even still running!

Although we woke up in mist, the next day was even more beautiful, and we spent 8 hours hiking up to the top of the mountain and back down. The views were absolutely amazing in every direction. We had our lunch up on top of the mountain taking in the views, whilst it also gave us a breather, as the climb up was pretty full on, scrabbling up and over boulders. Not really a hike, as you needed to hang on tightly in several spots. I ended up having to help two older ladies back down, as they were really struggling to get down and getting more than a little bit worried. We all got back down, but they each took a tumble on the way down! We certainly jagged a couple of beautiful days!

Atop Cradle Mountain

As we left Cradle Mountain, we stopped in at the Chateaux to have a look at a wilderness photograph exhibition, and a special exhibition on the Tassie Tiger, including a rug that was made out of 8 pelts. It was really interesting and there are still a lot of people who believe they might still be surviving in the wilderness somewhere!

We spent my birthday visiting another cheese factory just out of Deloraine. Tasted quite a few different cheeses, including a Wasabi cheese! Given some of the stinking hot wasabi we have been eating with our sushi recently, it wasn’t hot at all, but still retained all of the flavour! So we bought a bit of that, along with some blue cheese! Following the cheese was a salmon farm, where we also stocked up on a small whole smoked salmon!

Given we hadn’t seen a Tassie Devil in the wild, we decided to visit one of the wildlife parks to have a look (although we did heard one from our camped up at Cradle Mountain one night!) Michelle reckons they are pretty cute – until they start growling and snarling at each other, or start chomping down on dinner! Their dinning is all very social and we were told they the snapping and snarling is just establishing the pecking order!

Unfortunately, it is the contact at dinnertime that is passing on the facial cancer through the population. We were told that they suspect that up to 85% of the wild populations have been wiped out by the cancer. The poor little devils (pardon the pun!) are really vulnerable and could be extinct if the research doesn’t come up with something soon!

The wildlife park also had several wombats - the Mack truck of Australia wildlife! As one of the wombats was reared from a really young age and used to humans, we were able to have a hold of a solid 10kg of wombat! They are really solid little things!

Our last couple of days were spent staying with our friends Paul and Carol at their house on the Tamar River just north of Launceston. We missed out on seeing the penny farthing races at Evandale as the rain was bucketing down and the races were cancelled. The cyclists we still riding around the streets, but as one of the riders said to us, barrelling down the road as fast as you can and then trying to take a 90 degree bend on a penny farthing is not a comfortable situation!!!

Anyway, we are now back in Melbourne , with the car booked in for it’s 100,00km service and the camper back with Cub getting a new door zip stitched in (we’ve worn the other one out! Thankfully it’s still under warranty!)

Hope everyone is cruising along! Catch you later!

Stuart & Michelle



Kayaking at Lake St Clair

Checklist -

• Rain - Yep!
• Wind - Yep!
• Near 0 degrees temperature - Yep!
• Snowfall on the mountain tops overnight - Yep!
• Hail! - Yep!
• Our marbles - Temporarily misplaced...

• Are we still having fun?! – YOU BET!





Hobart and surrounds...

Since our last update so long ago, we have continued heading down the east coast of Tassie planning our stops so that we would arrive in Hobart on the 22nd to meet up with my parents who had flown over for a week’s holiday!

As soon as we heard about Maria Island (pronounced Mariah) we were keen to get there – it has no roads or shops and a network of mountain bike and walking trails! Sounds great! We stored the camper in a caravan park and packed our tent, sleeping bags and other gear into our ruck-sacks and then rode our bikes to the ferry terminal!! Much to Stuart’s amusement my pack was so full of stuff I almost fell over trying to get my leg over the bike, let alone raise my head enough to see and peddle in a straight line!! I don’t think Stuart found it all that easy either! Travel note: We need bike panniers!

Cycling on Maria Island

The island’s natural features were quite beautiful with a ‘Fossil cliff’ of world significance, and ‘Painted cliffs’ that revealed stunning patterns on the eroded sandstone. The island has two main sections, connected by a narrow isthmus which we rode out to – stubbornly, as we were advised against this due to the track being a bit sandy! But given the wet sand and a little bit of air out of our tyres, we were able to peddle our way through, giving our leg muscles a good work-out in the process! It was well worth it, as the beaches were beautiful and barely had a footprint on them!

Culturally, the island had a mixed past originally being used as a penal settlement before Port Arthur opened. It has also seen times as a cement works (they mined the wonderful fossil cliffs to produce the cement! Good hey!), followed by agriculture, fishing and as a pleasure island for tourists in the 1920’s. Today, it is an isolated nature reserve, with the Parks Authority using this to their advantage by quarantining and breeding threatened animals there. There were plenty of Cape Barren Geese, the rarest geese in the world apparently. There are about 30 odd different native species that have been introduced to the island, including Tassie Devils. They were trying to breed an isolated population of Devils on the island, one that could be free of the deadly facial tumours that are currently killing them, but the disease unfortunately appeared amongst the population and they haven’t been seen since. We’re hoping that we might see one in the wild somewhere on our trip, as they are now critically endangered!

Back to the main land with one night to spare before we were due in Hobart, we headed to the camp ground at Lime Bay to explore ruins of another harsh penal colony built to mine coal in the area. The remote cliff top and island locations of the penitentiaries, chosen for their natural barriers to prevent prisoners escaping, certainly provide some breathtaking scenery today. Not that this would have had any mental benefits to convicts as much of their life was spent working or being detained underground. Can you imagine being locked up in solitary confinement, underground, in a mine!

On to HOBART! We had been looking forward to Hobart with my parents were flying over for a week’s holiday and a catch up! We had booked a waterfront cabin for them with an adjacent site for our camper trailer. It was great to see family from home and get into some city site-seeing.

Jan & Michelle at the Salamanca Markets

Our first little indulgence was a morning at the Salamanca Markets, followed by the Tasmanian Farm Gate Farmers Market the next morning. We looked forward to relaxing back at camp each evening with beautiful views and a banquet of local beer, wine and artisan foods to sample, including – Bruny Island ODO (one-day-old) cheese, chilli smoked sardines, sourdoughs, chutneys, lemon spread, cherries almost the size of plums, and even homemade baked beans purchased from Matthew Evans of the Gourmet Farmer TV Series.... and the list goes on! Having Mum along for some shopping fun at the Salamanca markets was great!

Another day was spent at the Cascade Brewery Tour and a drive to the top of Mt Wellington for a chilly view down over Hobart. The tour obviously came with tastings – there are actually quite a few Cascade brews that we hadn’t seen before! Stuart especially liked their ‘First Harvest’ which is brewed from the first harvest of fresh Tasmanian hops each year! And we learnt that historically, the brewery workers were provided with an open bar at work throughout the day! After about 40 years, the bosses finally noticed that the staff were a little bit inebriated, so they restricted the open bar times to only four 10 minute sessions per day – morning smoko, lunch, afternoon smoko and knock-off. Apparently at these sessions, talking was not condoned by the workers, as everyone guzzled and refilled their glass as fast as they could, often managing to down today’s equivalent of 18 pints a day!! At Work!! And this continued until the mid 1980’s, when the federal OHS rules kicked in! Bloody Health and Safety regulations – ruined everyone’s fun! Nowadays, the employee’s get to take home a free carton of their choice once a fortnight.

Couldn’t pass up going out to Bruny Island for a day either, so we booked ourselves on a boat trip with Bruny Island Adventures. We drove down to Kettering, just south of Hobart and jumped on a bus which took us to the ferry and down to Adventure Bay on the Island. Here we were kitted out with our full length smocks and loaded aboard our speedboat for the trip down the eastern side of the island. Thankfully, it was relatively calm and we cruised down the spectacular coastline to a seal colony on one of the islands. The colony is a ‘boys only’ colony, as the females reside somewhere further north. The boys swim up to the girls once a year, but otherwise keep to themselves!

Thank you to Mum and Bruce for the great company and fun, we hope you enjoyed hanging out in our camp for a week!

Port Arthur convict settlement ruins

Right then, we are back to the bush! We back tracked a little to fully explore the rest of the Tasman Peninsula. We camped in Fortesque Bay in the Tasman National Park, enjoying a day hike out to Cape Hauy, which ended atop a dramatic cliff of rock columns. The rest of our time was taken up exploring the ruins of the Port Arthur penal settlement. We found Port Arthur very beautiful and historic, but were a little disappointed in the interpretation and information given both by the guides or signage. From what we have read, and from what Stuart remembered from when he visited as a child, it was reputed to be a brutally harsh settlement for the convicts transported from England. Any brief mention of ill treatment or fear was quickly countered with stories of how a man could keep his head down and get through with an education and an early release. The more recent history of the massacre in 1996 wasn’t even acknowledged, although we found the memorial garden. We even heard one lady claim that the convicts food rations didn’t look too bad! Our guide stated and we read that many Tasmanians were opposed to even restoring Port Arthur for tourism as they were keen to forget the horrible events that had occurred on their island. Between the convict days and current tourism, the locals had used the grounds for parties, theatre, sporting events and even a YHA backpackers! We still enjoyed our day, but felt there was so much more to learn about the place which was not being conveyed.

Our next leg was to get past the towns and crowds and out into the wilderness! We spent a day driving south into the South Coast National Park, via the Devils Kitchen, Tasman Arch, Tessalated Pavement and the 'Dog Line'. The 'Dog Line' was the narrow 80 metre isthmus on the Tasman Penisular where in convict times, as row of savage dogs was chained to thwart any escape attempts by the convicts back onto mainland Tasmania. They were chained just far enough apart so that they couldn't reach each other, but barked fiercely at anything that came near them!

We have now actually driven as far south as anyone can in Australia, as “The End of the Road” the sign claimed. To get any further south, you had to hit the trail and hike the hardcore South Coast Trail. At this point, we were actually closer to Antarctica than we were to Cairns, which we thought was pretty cool! The temperature at night reinforced this fact!

We found a perfect little campsite at Cockle Creek, actually just out of the National Park as you can’t have a fire in the park, but you could just outside and it was bloody cold!!! We welcomed the warmth, and it had also been raining heavily, non-stop since we had left Tasman National Park that morning. The next day fined up though, and I took a day out to sprawl out on my picnic blanket, while Stuart went paddling with his fishing gear for about 5 hours. He came back with tales of having caught about a dozen flathead, unfortunately all undersize, much to his disappointment! We heard from some of the other campers/fishermen were having the same problem, some on boats throwing back up to 30 undersized flathead in a day! Steak for dinner again! On our last day we explored the bay and a little way into the South Coast Track (which we will have to do on a separate trip). The area had been charted by the Explorer Bruni D’Entrecasteaux on the same voyage that chartered the South West WA coast. It was this same trip where he named Esperance in WA. We both loved this place and could have stayed here longer, however we needed to move on if we were to going to be able to cover the island before our ferry trip back to the main land.

We were now heading towards the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, but again, there is just too much to see and do! We decided to stay in the Historic town of New Norfolk (we had heaps of clothes to wash!) and explore Mt Fields National Park and Lake Pedder in a day trip, given the weather wasn’t that special. We drove in on one of the only roads into the south west wilderness and I was truly not prepared for how breathtaking and rugged the scenery would be! The looming mountains were truly beautiful! I have recently quite moved by reading the book ‘Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean’ about the controversial flooding of Lake Pedder in the 1970’s for a hydroelectricity dam – Brenda was petitioning to stop the dam but disappeared in mysterious circumstances. So as we got our first glimpse of the Lake it was beautiful but so sad at the same time to know that the beauty of the original Lake Pedder lay deep beneath what we see today.

Looking out over Lake Pedder

However, we are now curious about these hydroelectric dams! So onto the Lake Gordon dam wall! The wall itself is an engineer marvel as it’s curves allow it to be thinner, using less concrete to hold back the enormous amount of water- this fact was a little unsettling as we walked out onto the 140 metre high dam wall! So in short the water in Lake Gordon is gravity fed from a great height, into a pipe with forces turbines to turn, turning generators creating electricity! Lake Pedder was dammed for extra water to be used in the Lake Gordon hydro plant. The top 1.8metres of Lake Pedder is used this way. The Gordon Dam supplies 13% of all Tasmania’s electricity. It raises quite a question about which is better - having so much clean green ‘coal free’ energy or saving all that forest from flooding, much of which was World Heritage listed! We don’t know?! What we do know is that it will all be for nothing if the clean power is not used and Tasmania starts buying their power from Queensland because it’s cheaper! Yes – it’s in the newspapers this week!

To put aside all these dilemmas we headed back out to the forests of Styx Big Tree Reserve and Mt Field National Park. Actually I slept through the drive and Styx Big Tree Reserve – but Stuart tells me that Styx was amazing, and judging from the massive Swamp Gums he photographed on his walk, it is pretty impressive!

Mt Field NP was a relatively quick stopover with a short walk to the multi tiered Russell Falls, followed by a windy drive up to the alpine Lake Dobson. The area around Lake Dobson is a ski field in winter. The stunted alpine bushland was quite beautiful, but it was bitterly cold. Around the edge of the lake are rare Pencil Pines that only grow in Tasmania above 800 metres and live for up to 1300 years. Given their climate and location, they don’t grow very big and are really stunted!

Our next destination is to be Lake St Clair! But we will leave that for next time!

We hope you are all keeping safe and well during this devastating year of La Nina weather. Despite the loss and sadness there are many stories of the human spirit and selflessness emerging. Community is so important, look after yourselves and look after each other!
Whose idea was it to tour Australia this year?!!!