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?!!!