Terra Tasmania: Old bridges and other weary skeletons

Further south we drove trying out wonderful smokey seafood in Eden, and delicious fresh fish at Lakes Entrance.

We stopped for lunch in a what now is virtually a dead village, Genoa. This is the first village once you cross into Victoria from New South Wales. There is little left of Genoa except an old pub that began life as a boarding house and eventually took over licences from dying pubs around about, until now. It is the last-stop pub leaving Victoria, barely still able to hold its aged planks on its frail wooden skeleton.

The bridge opposite has been used for horse and foot traffic since the early twentieth century. Other bridges were built to cross the Genoa, but they disappeared with each rising of the waters. This one with its parallel truss girders was solidified with concert piers and cylinders in the hope that it would stay, and, if you are brave enough, you can walk across it, even today.

Bellbirds sing here. In the greyish gums edging the crumbling Genoa bridge, bellbirds love this place. They remind me of my dad, who used to find bellbirds for us when we were kids, in the Maleny and Kenilworth hinterland he would hunt them down. And always, always, it seems to me, he was able to pull out of his magician's hat slices of fresh white bread thick with lashings of butter, sliced ham and sweet yellow circles of sweet pineapple, which we ate, each summer, juice dripping from our chins as we listening enchanted to the bellbirds.

We took our own bits of ham to a perished wooden picnic table that had seen better days, under the ghostly eucalypts at the end of the Genoa bridge, and listened to the tale the bellbirds told. Still so very sweet.

We came, then, to the waters of the Bass Strait where wind-whipped waves crash over the crest of a gloomy black rock poking its granite head barely above sea water, just near the horizon line, out on the bay. That is the tip of Beware Reef. Beware Reef has only a couple of jagged metres exposed at the top of the waves, home to a colony of fur seals.

Here, where the warm east coast waters meet the cold southern swells a rich variety of marine life has grown. Below the water line, down deep in diver territory, live bull kelp, corals, seaweeds, and shark. And here float the bodies of all those shipwrecked on this reef before they recognised that they had to Beware. Mostly submerged, the reef is way too close to the surface for comfort.

Not far from here we track the mouth of the Snowy River, pretty in summer. Protected this day by sand dunes from the strait. A lone grey driftwood sculpture lies lazily on its shore.

Not far from Orbost, heading towards Melbourne, we turn north up a rough gravel road searching for the remnants of an old bleached trestle railway bridge, built during the first World War by men left behind to do these chores.

The Stoney Creek Trestle Bridge was built to carry railway freight across these soggy floodplains of the Snowy River during and after the first World War.

Built using the restricted means at their disposal during war time, a few brave men carved a bridge that today stands more as a piece of sculpture: a thing of wooden beauty, put together piece by piece from whole and split logs using a simple pulley, as they likely had little else.

A photo at the time of construction shows young boys sitting atop pyramids of prepared logs. Teens. Pre-teens. Probably paid to work there, too.

The timber of construction is cut direct from the surrounding forest: red iron bark and grey box timber. From the surrounding forest you can barely differentiate the bridge from the forest.

And this is as construction should be: organic; integral; growing out of its environment. The last train drove across this bridge in 1988. Today it stands like a large piece of wooden art.

We called in to Warragul enroute to Melbourne. Through our genealogy research we have discovered that my great-grandfather, William John Burt, lived here once for a short while with his wife and young family. We know of their lives and their deaths only in tiny vignettes.

One of those vignettes was a period in the late 1800s when the family occupied a house in Victoria Street in Warragul. Here, the youngest son, the last of seven children, was born, lived only a short time, then died. We found a lone Burt entry for that year in the Warragul cemetery which we assume to be his: Lot COE-2B-036. He was born Frederick Henry Burt on 18 June, 1888. Dr Trumpy saw Frederick on 10 August of that year. Frederick died on 14 August and was buried by Reverend F W Wilcox on 18 August. He had not lived two months. The undertaker was Henry Jephson.

So much we know. So much we don't.

There is no identifying headstone on Frederick's cemetery lot. No marker, not a thing to show for the short life of this tiny soul who died from chronic enteritis and exhaustion. A contamination in his intestine, from either his food or his drink -- often the sign of poverty. Poor little lad.