Last post from Tasmania

Sadly, this will be the last blogpost from Tasmania. We are now back in Smithton, saying hello/goodbye to the family, before moving on to Devonport where we’ll spend Sunday night, leaving at 9 the next morning on the day ferry back to Melbourne.

The adventure does not end there, though, as we plan to return to the Central Coast via the high country of Victoria and NSW.

We have met some very interesting people in the past week. At Strahan, we noticed that the youngish man in the hired camper next to us was walking stiffly, and on asking what he’d done to his legs, found out he had run, yes RUN, the 82km Overland Track from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair the previous day. Normally it takes at least 3 days of walking, and more if the walker does some side trips.



The two intrepid walkers halfway around Dove Lake.



This Nowra plumber does such bush marathons as a hobby. He finished the 82km in a bit over 9 hours, coming in 5^th in the race, won by a chap who did it in 8 hours.

Then, when we reached Cradle Mountain, where we donned our own walking boots and took our time (about 2.5 hrs) to do the 6.5km circuit of Dove Lake, our neighbours in the campground were a young Hong Kong couple in a hired motorhome.

They’d come to Australia for their honeymoon. She had studied at the University of Qld and he had studied in Canada, and they had 10 days of wandering Tasmania to complete.

After Cradle Mountain, we really went bush, driving a back road to the west coast which goes along the top of the Reece Dam wall. Wonderful engineering, once again.

We took the little punt . . . and the truck just about filled the whole space, and was just under the length and weight allowed . . . across the Pieman River at Corinna, which we’d visited 2 years ago in a hire car. That time we stayed in one of the refurbished miner’s cottages . . . it had been a mining settlement in the 1800s . . . but this time we had a campsite.

The old huon pine launch that goes from Corinna
to the mouth of the Pieman River. On the opposite
bank is the southern road approach to the punt.

We had a great meal at the pub, which is the centre of activity for the whole place, and at night, everything was wonderfully quiet, with no street lights.

The next night was even quieter, and totally black, as we went north on the dirt road called the Western Explorer, through melaleuca forests and then wonderful buttongrasss uplands, with the white quartzite gravel road winding on and on over the hills for about 70km, then dived into the Tarkine forests to stay at a Forestry picnic and camping area called Julius River.

It’s more of a rivulet and it ran just behind our campspot. It was a beautiful little glade, and we found the nearby rainforest walk utterly delightful, with fabulous huge old trees.



A poppy crop, near Smithton, with the pods ready for
 harvesting. Tasmania provides about half the world's
requirements of medicinal opiates, suich as morphine
 and codeine..



To our special delight, along the road to this place, we spotted a young Tasmanian devil wandering on the road. He soon hightailed it into the scrub when he heard our engine, but that was the first one we’d seen. Later we saw a tiger snake (mostly black with subtle green striped belly) going about his business.

When we left Julius River this morning we wandered the forest roads for quite a time, even taking one that had foliage getting closer and closer on each side . . . and then suddenly we were out in farmland again and before long we were entering Smithton.

We have duly admired the cubbyhouse that John helped Nigel build before we left after Christmas. It is now completed, painted and decorated with all Erin’s favourite things, and we had afternoon tea with her on its verandah when she came home from school.

Thanks for staying with us during our two months in Tasmania. We have loved every moment and are quite sad to be going back to ‘the north island’, as the Tasmanians call it.

Wild about the West Coast

So here we are in Strahan, on the beautiful west coast of Tasmania. West Coasters, who have a very dry wit, say it only rains twice a year in these parts . . . once for five months, and once for seven months.

In Queenstown, up in the mountains behind this harbour, they say it rains for nine months of the year . . . and it’s wet for the other three!

We came here across Tasmania, from the hop fields near New Norfolk, the trout and salmon hatchery at Plenty, and the last of the raspberries, through the great forests and lakes and close to some highly impressive hydro-electric power stations.



The historic salmon ponds at Plenty in a gorgeous
park setting.



While near New Norfolk, I had success in finding the grave of a First Fleet convict ancestor of a friend in NSW. I’d done some research which showed that this man, William Edmunds, was one of 4 Welshmen in the First Fleet, and that he was buried at a ‘Methodist chapel at Lawitta, near New Norfolk’. We found that plain little chapel on a country road, next to an orchard, with a lot of gravestones so old their inscriptions were obliterated. One had been fairly newly marked as that of Betty King, the first white woman to set foot on Australia (she was first off her convict boat).

I took photos of the whole place but was disappointed I couldn’t find the grave. We decided to visit the orchard to see if it had any fruit for sale, which it did, and the owners were incredibly helpful when I mentioned what I had been doing.

The wife dug out local histories and records of graves, the husband even phoned a neighbour who knew a lot about the First Fleeters buried around there, and we left with cherries and the last of the apricots as well as new info, showing that Edmunds was buried in New Norfolk itself. This was quite true, and we found the old cemetery where he’d been laid to rest, aged 92, in 1843. Once again, the old gravestones could not be read, and they’d been lined up against a side fence, but a new memorial listed all those buried there, including him.

On we went then, into the mountains, side-tracking at one stage for lunch and discovering some of the recently-burnt areas in those central highlands. We spent the night at a former hydro village, Tarraleah, built for one of the early schemes in the 1930s, so all the buildings are beautiful art deco style. Some of the later such villages, built in the 1950s, are pretty ordinary.



The water from the River Derwent going down
to the Tarraleah power station. It goes
through eight such stations, and then
becomes Hobart's drinking water.



The whole of Tarraleah was bought by a private company in 2005 and operates as a tourist resort, with people able to book one of the houses, or stay in a small caravan park. There’s an excellent pub, where we ate that night, and it was crowded with young men and women, Hydro employees who were visiting for some work on one of the two massive power stations at the bottom of the valley.

Our next night, after only a short drive, was Lake St Clair, with a detour to see the Wall in the Wilderness, a private project by a sculptor, who is creating a huge huon pine wall showing scenes from the region’s past. It’s highly impressive, in a wonderful timber building which houses it, and a gallery all around of his other works.

We had a lazy day at Lake St Clair, as the weather was fairly frightful. We felt for all the earnest walkers getting on the ferry to be taken to the northern end of the lake to start the Overland trek to Cradle Mountain. It also collects those who’ve done the six-day trek and brings them back to the excellent visitor centre. We had planned to go on the ferry, but frankly, in bad weather one wet lake’s surrounds are like lots of others.

That evening, as we sat outside the motorhome in a lovely bush setting, along came first a totally unafraid currawong to wander around the ground, then an echidna, later a wallaby, and just as were going to bed, we heard something outside, and there was a brush possum investigating our chairs.



Our cruise boat off Sarah Island, former convict station
in Macquarie Harbour.



The next morning, as we headed further west, we saw a wombat on the side of the road. The only other live one I’d seen on this trip had been at night at Petal Point, so I leapt out in the rain to photograph it . . . just as he turned and trundled off into the buttongrass plain.

Since arriving in Strahan we’ve had two wonderful excursions, one a cruise on Macquarie Harbour and up the Gordon River; the other the West Coast Wilderness Railway from Strahan to Queenstown.

We had taken the premium package for each, so it was bubbly all the way, and a hostess to cater to every need whether in the upper cabin of the big catamaran, or the beautifully-timbered railway carriages.



The interior of our carriage, with the steam engine in front.



We left Strahan in a train pulled by a diesel loco, but then changed halfway to a 117-year-old steam loco fitted with the special pinion wheels to haul us up the rack railway system which had been the only way to conquer a 250-metre hill on the original railway, which brought ore from Queenstown down to Strahan for shipping. After reaching Queenstown we returned by bus, making it a full day out.

Magical day in the wilderness



Beautiful Lake Pedder.



From strolling through one of Australia’s oldest botanic gardens, to flying in a light aircraft to Tasmania’s south-west wilderness, and now settled into a National Park campground east of Lake Pedder and Lake Gordon. . . we’ve had a wonderful few days.

It DID rain for our lunch with John’s old friend at the Royal Tasmanian Botanic Gardens, but it cleared away as we ate at The Gardens restaurant, and we were able to prowl around later, enjoying the ambience of the gardens, established in 1818.

Interestingly, Marcus (John’s friend and former bonsai teacher) told us that while a good deal of the garden’s infrastructure had been built by convicts, in fact it has had a continuous labour force of convicts and still has day-release prisoners from near Hobart who work in it.

We had based ourselves at the Hobart Showgrounds motorhome park, still not completely equipped with power and water supplies as any normal caravan park, and it became a bit of a circus when people starting arriving from all over for the annual Horse of the Year event over the Australia Day weekend.

Not only did they have horse floats from which the prized horses stepped into stables, some had massive trucks with horse accommodation at the rear and small motorhome arrangements just behind the cab, so they were parked all around us. The most innovative was a former horse float which had been completely turned into living quarters for a mother and her 2 daughters.

We left all the horsey folk behind on the Sunday when we had a flight from Hobart to Melaleuca organized. We’d seen walkers staggering into campgrounds at Cockle Creek when we were there, having taken 7 days to do the South Coast Walk. We became fascinated by the area, and bought a book about it. The walkers are flown to Melaleuca, then walk out, and in reading that detail we found the same light aircraft company also did day trips, including walking around that area and a boat trip on the nearby Bathurst Harbour.

So . . . off we flew, with two other couples, for a magical day.  A man called Deny King had mined tin in the Melaleuca area for years and he had laboriously built the airstrip among the button grass plains. His house is still there and family members come down for a month once a year to try to keep it all together, but the whole area is now a national park.



The boat in which we toured the waterways, beached
 where we had lunch.



Our pilot wore several hats, as a tour guide and also qualified coxswain, as it was he who took us out in a small boat to tour the creek and inlet that lead to the harbour and eventually out to sea. He had promised us lunch and we thought it would just be a sandwich in the boat, but he took us to a glorious little beach, set up a table with salads, smoked salmon, cheeses and bottles of some of Tasmania’s best wines. When we returned to the airstrip area we were taken to a bird hide where we were lucky enough to see one of the orange-bellied parrots, highly endangered, that summer in the area. It is hoped numbers will increase and there’s much excitement about some fledglings recently spotted.



The airstrip at Melaleuca, with paths through the
peatland visible.

 So home we flew in the late afternoon, this time across the island rather than around its south coast, so we were rubbing shoulders with great peaks and looking down at some of the tarns, little lakes high in the mountains.

Today we saw much bigger lakes near Strathgordon, Lake Pedder and Lake Gordon. The engineering that built the fabulous Gordon Dam curved wall is amazing, as is the underground power station that uses the water from the linked dams to generate 13% of Tasmania’s electricity.


The worker's cable car hovers before
plunging into the gorge in front of the
dam.

 While we were gaping at the Gordon Dam wall, an employee started descending the outside of it in a cable car, which seemed to hover on a curve, then plunged straight down! We didn’t wait around long enough to see him come up again but felt lucky to have even seen that dramatic plunge.

The mountains are splendid and photographs just do not do them justice, but we kept stopping to try.

By late afternoon we had left the lakes and mountains behind and were in the Mt Field National Park campground, among gloriously tall straight trees, feasting on the raspberries, blackberries and cherries that we’d bought along the way this morning.

Sadly, the raspberries seem to be almost finished; the apricots are down to their last few weeks, as are the cherries; but the blackberries are just starting. The ones we bought today were cultivated in an orchard, but the roadsides are full of rapidly ripening blackberries on fences, though avoiding the thorns could be a problem.

Now we have a couple of days to enjoy the way west on the Lyell Highway at leisure, as we’re due in Strahan on Thursday for more excursions by boat and train.

World's end at Boltons Green

We’ve done it! We have driven as far south in Australia as one can, to Recherche Bay which the French explorer Rear-Admiral Bruny D’Entrecasteaux described as ‘a lonely harbour at the world’s end’.



The lifesize sculpture of a 3-month-old southern right
whale, which used to be hunted in Recherche Bay,

 There are several camping areas on the bay and we spent a night at the southernmost, Boltons Green, with just some National Park-serviced pit toilets and one tap supplying rainwater. There were lots of campers, obviously enjoying the fishing in the bay, and even a family of walkers who arrived in the long twilight, great packs on their backs, and we suspect they’d done the 7-day walk along the southern coast.

After that we headed north again and had a wonderful few hours creaking along through the bush on the Ida Bay Railway, just south of Southport. It’s a former tramway that used to take limestone to be loaded on ships for use in making acetylene.

The open carriages can be a bit brisk if the wind is blowing, but the little loco doesn’t get much above walking pace and the driver, a diminutive chap called Tony, was full of information about the people who used to live in that area.


John and Tony, the petrol loco driver for the Ida Bay
 Railway.

 At one stop we saw a little graveyard for the Tyler family.

Mum had died at 55, after having 21 children! The other gravestones are for two of the boys, one had died from TB at 19, and the other, only 10, was cut apart by one of the great saws in the family sawmill in 1885. Legend has it that his mother sewed him together again so he could be buried whole. Tough times, and a strong woman, obviously.

We spent a night in Dover, then drove north again into the Huon Valley, once the home of the Australian apple industry. There are still apple orchards, lots of big old packing sheds right on the road, and an apple museum at Huonville.

This brought back lots of memories for John, who had lived as a boy on an orchard at Amiens, near Stanthorpe.



Some of the apple box labels on show at the Huonville
Apple Museum

 He spotted apple graders like his father had used, and he recalled having to make the timber apple cases after school. As a final reminiscence, he bought a jar of apple jelly, something his mother had often made. She had also dried apples in the sun, and we were interested to learn how Tasmanian growers supplied those in a highly industrial way to the rest of the world, as well as fresh apples.

Because of the bushfires and the closure of the roads on the Tasman Peninsula (leading to Port Arthur) we had almost decided we wouldn’t see it on this trip, but then found we had a couple of days up our sleeve, the roads are now open, and a phone call secured us a place in the Port Arthur caravan park. It’s full of huge trees, has big, private sites, and has been a great place to spend 3 nights.

It’s a 45-minute walk through the bush and along a beach at one stage to the Port Arthur Historic Site, so we did that yesterday . . . dragging our feet a little on the return journey as we’d been walking all day around the old convict settlement.



There's no green grass around the Port Arthur buildings.
As in most of Tasmania, it's dry and brown.

 But it was a glorious sunny day, almost summer we decided, so we thoroughly enjoyed it and I was delighted to see on show in the museum a 1920s guide book that my mother had acquired when she visited there in 1929. I had donated it when we visited in 1995.

Port Arthur had closed as a convict establishment in the 1870s and it was soon afterwards that it became a tourist attraction.

Yesterday it was positively seething with visitors, many of them from overseas.

We’re having a restful day today, ready to move back to Hobart tomorrow for a couple of days, with a highlight being lunch tomorrow with the man who taught John bonsai techniques many years ago. He’s now based at the botanical gardens in Hobart and we hope we can have a good look around there, though rain is forecast.

It’s badly needed, particularly in the burnt-out areas we drove through to reach Port Arthur. It’s a very grim drive indeed, with forests, farmland, and many houses destroyed.

The whole state needs pouring rain for a couple of days so we won’t we concerned if it teems tomorrow.

Getting shucked on Bruny

We’ve been on Bruny Island for a few days, and are loving this wonderful island, which has so many different faces.

It’s only a 15-minute vehicular ferry ride from Kettering, so after we arrived we explored the northern part, which is fairly rural, with great little communities on some of the bays. Right at the north, Dennes Point, is a village with a wonderful new community centre/providore/café/gallery.


The boxes of takeaway shucked oysters that we've been
devouring.

 We came south, stopping to buy oysters at the appropriately named Get Shucked, then crossed the narrow isthmus named The Neck to South Bruny. We are at the caravan park at Adventure Bay, which on the day we arrived, looked positively tropical, with clear turquoise water.

It was only after we rounded the point to the east in a wildlife adventure cruise we’d booked for the next day, that we knew we were really in the Tasman Sea.

Admittedly, it was a gusty, rainy day, and we were all equipped with almost ankle-length storm coats. Part of the 48-seat craft was enclosed, but the rain and spray penetrated well into the rest.

We spent two hours exploring the eastern coast of South Bruny, marvelling at its wild beauty, with 200m cliffs and wonderful little sea caves eaten away by the ocean. The skipper found a relatively sheltered cove in which to lower the submarine camera, so we could watch on screen what was happening in the ocean below.

As we went further south the wind got stronger and stronger until the skipper estimated it at 50 knots . . . and we could really feel it as the boat with its four huge outboard motors thumped its way along.



The boys at ease on the Friars rocks off South Bruny.

 A highlight was the southernmost point, where we really knew we were in the Southern Ocean, when we spent some time around the great rock islands on which fur seal males spend most of their year. They migrate north to the mouth of the Tamar to meet their girlfriends once a year, then trot off south again, leaving the girls to bring up the pups.

They were draped over the rocks, barking and snarling, or just snoozing, and the smell was pretty appalling. The younger males were cavorting in the water but the big old fellows just posed on the rocks, probably being pretty used to the daily boats coming their way full of goggle-eyed tourists.

The crew assured us our rough trip was really pretty good, as though we’d had rain and wind, we hadn’t had big swells.

And so back to dry land, where we explored some of the mountainous areas of Bruny Island, and bought some more oysters. The cherries we bought a few days ago are almost gone so we’ll have to restock. There are cherries grown on the island, a cheesery, and what is claimed to be Australia’s southernmost winery.



One of the Bruny Island swans doing a spot of yoga.



Today we headed to the west coast and south to Cape Bruny. This was once again, a really wild part of Tasmania, and only a few kms away from settlements around the pristine beaches. The wind was howling and rain was threatening . . . but we just went a little way further north from the lighthouse (built by convicts in 1836), and all was serene beside one of the many inlets the island coast offers. When we returned to Adventure Bay we explored the Bligh Museum, a fantastic collection of stuff about the major explorers who'd laid anchor in the bay since the 1770s. Bligh even planted fruit trees here and was delighted on a return visit to find one of the apple trees had survived.

Reluctantly tomorrow we’ll make the return ferry crossing, continuing to explore the southern parts of Tasmania.

Snug at Gordon

As  I write this, looking eastward at South Bruny Island from a gorgeous little camping reserve at a place called Gordon, at the base of the Cygnet peninsula, I’m thinking of you, Judith and Barry, and your many holidays on Bruny.

We’ll go there on Thursday for at least 3 nights, though getting a booking in the caravan park was like winning the lottery.

Our time in Hobart was glorious, topped off with a wonderful cruise south from that city on Sunday, luxury all the way, starting with glasses of bubbly as we left the harbour and continuing with a meal at the Peppermint Bay Hotel at Woodbridge before returning to Hobart.


An art work in the foreshore grounds of Peppermint
Bay Hotel.

 We met some interesting people (Hello to Omar and Diane) and the commentary was excellent, particularly when we stopped just offshore over a marine reserve, a camera was lowered into the water and we saw the marine life swimming among the kelp and algal life forms. We have booked to do a trip with the same company off Bruny on Friday.

So . . . after leaving the Hobart Airport Tourist Park, and its great city shuttle, which we used every day, we headed south on a fish-hook shaped peninsula opposite Hobart (south of the airport) where tourists rarely venture. It is made up of little communities on darling little beaches, some built right onto the beach, and we stayed the night next to the South Arm RSL Club where we received a warm welcome and one of the locals told us of a great beach walk.

We indulged in that this morning before leaving, climbing up onto a headland which is part of a very old army base called Fort Direction (on Cape Direction). Some cadets were obviously in training there but nobody took any notice of us as we took in a Gallipoli memorial there.

From that little peninsula we drove back through Hobart and headed south through wonderful places such as Snug and Flowerpot . . .  but we avoided a destination called Sandfly.

One diversion was at Margate where we found a train. The loco has not moved in many years but it still has a number of carriages behind it. Each one hosts a shop of some kind, from a bookshop to a barber, and two carriages are taken up by a pancake place.



A culinary work of art . . . raspberry pancake, with cream,
 ice-cream in the centre and two kinds of sauces.

 We thoroughly indulged ourselves, following our aim of eating and drinking our way around Tasmania. The raspberry pancake was a work of art, as you’ll see, surrounded by not only berry sauce but also chocolate sauce!

A little further on we found a cherry farm selling fabulous cherries so of course, once again we indulged.

This little recreation reserve at Gordon has several motorhomes and caravans parked under the trees and some campers have arrived late in the afternoon. We’re right on the foreshore, only metres from the water, watching the marine traffic ranging from fishing tinnies to trawlers, yachts and catamarans. There’s a jetty just along from us, where we walked this afternoon. It also features a memorial to the Frenchman, Bruny D’Entrecasteaux, who named the island, the channel beside it, and lots of other places in southern Tasmania when he visited in 1792.

The beach is all large pebbles, or stones really, and when the tide dropped in the late afternoon, we found quite a few oysters growing on the stones. So with John wielding his trusty oyster knife, they were our hors d’oeuvres, fresh from the channel. By the look of much larger oyster shells lying around, all the really good ones have already been found, but we’ll make up with some Bruny Island oysters once we reach there by ferry on Thursday.

Milling around at MONA

Happily now in Hobart, we are really relaxing, not driving anywhere, and soaking up everything this lovely little city has to offer.

Yesterday we left windy, cold Oatlands, a charming little village with an extraordinary number of sandstone buildings, befitting what had been one of Tasmania’s earliest settlements.

We were lucky that on our first morning, when we entered the local tourist info centre, set up in one of the old flour mill buildings, the girl there asked if we’d like to do a mill tour . . . starting in about 10 minutes.

Of course we agreed, so after donning hair nets and hard hats, and divesting ourselves of all handbags, cameras and phones, we climbed the 58 steps to the top of the mill with our guide, and he then explained its workings as we made our way down, floor by floor.



The Callington Mill at Oatlands. We ended
the tour with scones made from its
flour.



The mill was built in 1837 and operated until nearly the end of that century, but when mainland mills were established, Tasmania no longer could compete in the supply of flour. So it sat idle, was burnt out and was derelict until some years ago when a move was made to reinstate it as a working mill.

The stone shell remained and after a grant allowed a millwright to come from Holland to measure it and manufacture all the machinery needed, as well as the great wooden top and its sails, eventually it was reopened about two years ago and now mills wheat grown in the district.

We spent a lot of time in that wind lurking inside the motorhome, highly amused at the antics of the waterfowl just metres away. In Longford, it had been fornicating ducks that kept the adults amused, and the children somewhat bemused, especially when one drake kept falling off . . . but I digress.

At Oatlands, we saw pairs of black swans doing their elegant neck-arching routine, and even one very puzzled male who simply had his head underwater eating something. When he surfaced, there was a very angry cob right in front of him (“Don’t even look at her, you whippersnapper of a bachelor boy!”) who chased him from the water with much flapping of wings and displaying of tail feathers. And all the while the pen swam serenely around, almost saying, “You’re wonderful, darling”. I’m sure the chased male still has no idea of what he had done to deserve it all.

While the local council maintains some wonderful topiary around the town and by the lake, someone has made steel cutouts of Tasmania tigers, which grace a block of sandstone on the far side of the lake. That’s probably as close as we’ll get to the legendary thylacine, though we did see two fairly motheaten stuffed specimens at the Launceston museum, acquired in the 1800s.



This parking spot, as you can see, is for God's Mistress. The
one to the left of it is for God. We presume that's David
Walsh, founder of MONA, which showcases his esoteric
collection of art.



This fabulous concrete truck is one of the outside
 exhibits,  made entirely of wrought iron pieces.



And so we came to Hobart, fairly early yesterday morning, so we called in at MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), had a wonderful, if almost head-spinning several hours there; then went on to drive up Mt Wellington. That was utterly freezing and we had to reach for our biggest jackets before we ventured out. There was a fabulous view of southern Tasmania, Hobart, its harbour and even the fires on the Tasman Peninsula.

We’re staying at the Hobart Airport Tourist Park, next to the airport hotel, mainly because there’s a shuttle to the city (15 minutes) each morning, returning each afternoon.

We used it today to reach the docks where we took the ferry to MONA, this time to enjoy a long and liquid lunch (John did not have to drive!). There are two big cruise liners in dock, so lots and lots of people at MONA.

Where people went before it opened I don’t know, but apparently it has attracted 600,000 people in 18 months.

Tomorrow we’ll go back into town to go to the Salamanca Markets, followed by a tour of the Cascade Brewery, and on Sunday, as a belated birthday present, John has booked us on a luxury day cruise south along the Derwent with lunch at a place called Peppermint Bay.

To say we’re having a ball is an understatement. We’ll have to suck lemons for a week to take the smiles off our faces.