Once the Apple Isle

From Strahan we headed north, passed the old mining towns of Zeehan and Roseberry, once rich in silver, lead and zinc, but like their tin counterparts in the east, depleted now, with just a couple of Op shops functioning, and a few plucky and proud locals left tending their tidy faded towns.  

Zeehan was one of the very early settled towns as Trial Harbour, down on the water, offered a reasonable shipping dock, but that soon gave way to Strahan.  When silver mining here was at its height Zeehan's population was as large as Hobart and Launceston with some 20 hotels and a variety theatre, the Gaiety.    The remnants of those glory days exist today.  

Arthur River is at the end of the road in the north and the west. If you want to go further you need to find a boat to cross the waves, or walk. Arthur River is not as picturesque as the eastern coast but there is a rugged beauty in its remoteness: lost timber logs cluster like coffins around the bays and red rock lichen is so pervasive it looks like ancient thickly-laid rock art, all red and ochre. 

We drive deep into Leven Canyon country and follow roads that twist and groove in these water-cut ranges till we come across flatter fertile fields planted with onions, leeks, celery and swede, and would you believe, poppies -- for the licit production of morphine and codeine mendicants. I had no idea. 

Tasmania was once called the Apple Isle. No more. Most of the apple trees have been ploughed into the ground as costs for production grew too high. We barely saw a single tree on this trip, except for the occasional back garden variety. 

Potatoes, though, are widely grown, but there is a fear they, too, may go where the apple went. While we were in this region the large frozen food company McCains, who processes some 70,000 tons of Tasmanian potatoes each year, was threatening to close their potato chip plant in Smithton if prices were not better controlled. Out to Stanley on the peninsula we drove loving the scenery and the picturesque church and presbytery on the point.  

Further on we were pleased to see that Sheffield has grown and is looking quite prosperous while it continues to encourage and develop its mural draw card, bringing in lots of tourists. 

This quadrant of Tasmania looks the most prosperous outside of Hobart, and if the traffic on the roads is any indication there are non-stop trucks going to and from the ports and the factories. 

Despite this, there are still too many For Sale signs, even here. And that was what bothered us as we then headed for the ferry and a quick trip home. Those For Sale signs left us with a rather haunting impression of much of the Tasmanian hinterland.  

   

Temporary stopover

Enroute north from Strahan

Wildlife and insects are everywhere 

Domesticated Alpacas

Lush vegetation in a walk enroute 

The Gaiety, once the largest concert hall in Australia in  Zeehan

Arthur River meets the sea

Leven Canyon from on high

Downtown Stanley

St James Church and Presbytery, Stanley

Vegetable fields in the north west

  

Gorgeous colours of the Arthur river cliffs

The Edge of the World

Onions ready for pickup

Sheffield mural competition entries

Men at work in Sheffield

Women in history in Sheffield

Delightful remnant retro storefront in Sheffield

The ship that never was

Twice now we have been to Strahan and twice we've left with the sensation that we have been deftly conned. And we don't like that at all. Both times we've arrived mid afternoon. Both times we were unable to find a vacant camper site, so we might, one of these days, learn to book in advance if we ever think to go back to Strahan, as our very basic accommodation, this time, ended up costing us a clean $200/night. Others we spoke to suffered a similar fate. Basic motel rooms being on offer for a minimum of that price. So, now that we are fully aware of the game, it is unlikely we will return for more of the same. 

What makes this worse is that you have the sense that it is all quite easily avoidable. That campsites could flourish on fallow fields on the outskirts of town, sufficient to cater to this overflow. But that is not happening in Strahan. Not part of the grand plan. 

Which is not surprising. Strahan is totally a tourist town. It exists only because tourists go there. If the tourists don't come the few locals who actually do live in the town all year have a holiday themselves. Others simply head on out, employed only for the season. 

Strahan is pretty much in the hands of the Federal Group which runs practically every tourist spot in Tasmania including the Wrest Point Casino, Freycinet Lodge, Cradle Mountain, Gordon River Cruises and the West Coast wilderness railway. They own and run Strahan Village in its entirety: plus most of the other operations that tourists in Strahan are likely to spend money on, including some of the cruise boats and the tourist railway.

The Federal Group have the monied monopoly in Strahan. They hardly need to share. Or offer more campsites. But, we'll likely not go back to discover if the situation ever improves. The only reason to return a third time is not for the views, the food, or the cruise commentary, but for the sheer delight of hearing, one more time, the actor, who takes you off their lacklustre cruise boat and treats you to an hour's delightfully drawn reincarnation of the notorious Sarah Island penitentiary a la Marcus Clarke. What an entrancing and intriguing tale he tells! 

He then turns around at the end of the day when we are back onshore, and with just one other actor as cast, presents magic in a unique production of The Ship that Never Was, using clever and creative props, and any audience member who cares to participate as one of the ship's collection of crazy historical characters, telling one of the great escape stories of Tasmanian convict history. 

It is amazing fun and cleverly researched effort that is hugely enjoyable. 

Alone among the offerings in this company town is this excellent draw card production which could, like Louisa's Walk in Hobart, hold its head high in the most sophisticated cities on the planet.

But b'ware the tourist traps!

Strahan - a tourist town and company owned

 

Enroute to Sarah Island across Macquarie Harbour

Sustainable fishing on Macquarie Harbour which has  turned into an ecological  nightmare

Sinister lies the forest floor

The earth here is new, moist and fragrant 

Fungi as beatiful as art

The dense rainforest of western Tasmania

Sarah Island penitentiary ruins

 

   

Cast and characters on The Ship That Never Was

Copper spoils of Queenstown

After the Surveyor General had explored this western area with his convict work team the word was out that it was an inhospitable terrain so few but the hardy ventured across the Queen's River crossing. 

One such adventurer found gold here in 1881 which caused a rush of prospectors. Several other adventurers, a few years later, discovered copper. This lead to development, which lead to wealthy investors from London operating as early venture capitalists for what quickly became known as the Mount Lyell Mining Company. A town then quickly grew up at the crossing and was gazetted as Queenstown. 

Mining mushroomed the town from a tent village into a community of stylish homes, stores, public buildings and amenities. Very quickly there were pubs, picture theatre, post office and timber merchants. There were elegant manager's homes and comfortable workers' cottages. Rail and road building followed the mines and their output. 

Timber forests fuelled building work. Each week, at its height, some 2000 tonnes of timber were cut down from the forests. Sulphur fumes from eleven or more furnaces belched grit and poison into the atmosphere that then sank to the ground destroying what was left of plants and trees. Acid rain from the fallout polluted the river. Mountains were hacked for their metal, until they were reduced to rubble and slag spoil. 

The destruction lasted for a hundred years. Copper, silver and gold worth billions of dollars were extracted. It was thought the desecration of the area would last forever once the mine closed. And when we first saw it decades ago, I cried, so barren and lifeless it looked. As if forever scarred and dead. 

But, no. Life is slowly returning to the copper coloured spoils and waters of Queenstown. There is a little green appearing among the rust, like a phoenix rising slowly, or a badly battered copper Chernobyl. I have no idea how long it will take, centuries possibly, but destruction of this magnitude we have to learn to control. I am so thankful that the Franklin and Gordon rivers have been spared this debilitation. More than once Planet Earth has shown she can only take so much man made interference before the rot sets in. Sometimes we go too far. 

We spent the afternoon exploring some of the lovely retro mine boom buildings in Queenstown, some old and tired, some being remodelled. The town was the western terminus of the road from Hobart until the 1930s when a route finally wound down the mountain to Strahan. Until that time, to disperse the ore, the mines built an ingenious cog and rack rail line, to cope with extraordinary steep sections from Queenstown down to the west coast where boats then stowed the ore and shipped it around the south coast to the world markets. An amazing feat by some 400 men, working with with pick and shovel to dig out deep rock culverts and construct trestle bridges over gorges at something like 6 shillings and 6 pence a day. It is their faces that should be stamped on medals. 

We found much of this local history displayed on the walls of the Galley Museum now in elegant old rooms of the Empire Hotel in town thanks to a wonderfully detailed photographic and caption collection of a local fellow, Eric Thomas. Another boon.

Rust colours of Queenstown 

Another barrier protecting the fragile terrain

The corroded hills of Queenstown are recovering 

Metallic colours around Queenstown 

The winding road to Strahan from Queenstown

Convicts in the wilderness

We are high here, and began to realise how extensive the mid century hydro electric works in this area were when we come across Bronte, yet another settlement very similar in substance to Tarraleah.  This, too, was a camp for labourers who fed into the complicated dam and pipe system that evolved into Tasmania's major hydro power supply.  Today it is a shabby but shady rustic campsite for trout fisherman, walkers and seasonal workers.  

The roads are virtually empty.  It is an effort to find someone to chat with, so quiet it is in so much of Tasmania.  

Further west we took a lonely turn right to the blue waters of Lake St Claire at the southern end of the Cradle Mountain National Park. At a depth of 160 meters this is the deepest lake in Australia.  It also marks the start of the River Derwent which flows downhill from here to become Hobart's life force.   

A little further on is a set of peaks, atop which is Donaghy's lookout. Bushwalking tracks wind its slopes and offer expansive views over the Franklin and Gordon Rivers National Park to the south.  This land is for the hardy.  One of the first to venture through this wild and difficult terrain was a convict from the north of England, James Goodwin. After he arrived in Van Diemans land James was chosen as one of the crew to work for the surveyor-general on roads and construction.  He soon became skilled in bushcraft and survival.  

He and another fellow planned an escape in 1828 when they were in a logging party working on the Gordon River just to the south of us. They saved some of their prison rations and stole a compass so that when were ready, and ventured overland, they had considerable success living off the land and surviving on handouts from local aborigines.  Goodwin was eventually recaptured.  The other fellow never was.  So impressed were the authorities with Goodwin's bush survival skills that they pardoned him and gave him a position of trust. Which he eventually abused.  He ended up on Norfolk Island along with the worst of them and died in his mid thirties. Such a waste, I feel, whenever I hear such tales.  Such a shame his talents could not have been better channelled.  

They would have wandered through an awesome wilderness, filled with ancient aboriginal sites some of which are over thirty thousand years old. They would have come across rare plants, tempting starving men, many, quite possibly, deadly.  They would have had wild carnivores, like the Tasmanian devil and quoll, competing with them for frogs, lizards and betongs. Mammals like the platypus and echidna would have held them spellbound in near disbelief. And the rain, some three metres of drenching rain every year in this wilderness, would have ensured their misery as they sought and failed often to find any shelter from it at all.

So challenging and beautiful is this landscape that it is now protected and cared for as one of the most beautiful and rare Heritage Wilderness area in the world.  

Bronte Park,  bush camp

Derwent River rustic pub

Desiccated tree skeletons on the shores of Lake St Clair

The still waters of Lake St Clair 

Donaghy's Lookout with its views into the wilderness

Tree ferns as tall as a man

One man and his dream

Enroute to Strahan there is a simple sign on the side of the road that directs you to The Wall. 

This is a must-visit exhibition.

The Wall is the creation of wood sculptor, Greg Duncan, who has spent 7 years of his life, creating his particular dream.  Inspired to sculpt the tale of hinterland Tasmania he is doing so in bas-relief on large wooden panels, mainly of Huon pine.  His complete work he calls: The Wall.

The Wall will take three more years for Greg to complete. Two massive interlocking panels each 50 metres long and 3 metres high will then be covered in extraordinary carvings, which have been hoisted back to back to sit in pride of place in the central aisle of a massive purpose-built gallery that is just as meticulously crafted as its magnificent piece of art.

The only other single piece of art of this magnitude that I have seen is the Bayeux tapestry. And this piece is just as breathtaking and shows Greg Duncan to be one of the finest wood sculptors in the world.  

With a hammer, chisel, sandpaper and oil he creates images of a living, breathing, straining, bleeding Tasmania.  In his teamster scene you can almost hear wood grinding against the taut metal of the team chains; you see horses rump muscles bulging hard with their heavy load, and feel the sweat pouring from the brows of bent workmen.  

Greg is able to make wood move like flesh and blood, crumple like creased paper, yet look as soft and pliable as old leather worn smooth.   

This display was quite possibly the single most amazing thing we saw in Tasmania.  And not just because it is an extraordinary piece of work, but because Greg Duncan, has unwittingly, fallen upon the recipe for continued success.

Here is this humble, almost shy man, with a simple grand passion as a driving force.  He has no formal training in art, sculpture, or woodwork.  He looks a bit like one of the teamsters or the road builders that he sculpts. And, in truth, they all look a lot like him, as no doubt he is his own model.  It probably wouldn't dawn on him to ask someone to work as hard as he does and model for him.  His efforts and skill have grown out of trial and error and an all-consuming drive to create this piece, and now to finish it.  Before it finishes him.  He has a baker's cyst on the back of his knee -- from straining and high across the panels chiselling, digging out, polishing, sanding until the wee small hours.    

He found a quiet spot to sculpt his panels. Around that he thought to construct a roof and walls to store his ongoing work.  

It just so happens that practically every tourist that ever there was in Tasmania needs to pass his gallery.  Heading either east to Hobart, or west to Strahan.  

So, even when the last panel is just swept-up sawdust in the recycle trash, Greg Duncan's work will still be there.  When he has moved on to other projects in other parts of the world this gallery will not move.  Tourists will come as long as Tasmania has tourists.  

Each of them, if they have not heard of him beforehand, will see a simple sign on the side of the road that says: The Wall.   His entrance is wide and inviting.  They will be tempted to drive in, wondering what on earth the wall is.   And for the simple modest fee of just $10 they will be enter, only to be transported.   

As if it was always meant  to be.  

*Images: Launitz, James, in The Wall, By Greg Duncan. Hobart, Tasmania: Forty Degrees South Pty Ltd. 2009. 

Greg Duncan, creator of The Wall*

Purpose built gallery* 

Teamster and team*

Like wood, like fabric*

Sound of two hands clapping

We took the road west and when we tired for the day we pulled in and put our feet up at Tarraleah. Tarraleah was once the setting for the massive hydro-electric scheme that brought dozens of European immigrants to Tasmania from early in the 1920s, right through to the 1980s. 

Skilled workers from places like Dubrovski and Warsaw channelled the Derwent and waters from surrounding mountains and lakes as far away as Lake Clare, funnelling them into pipes and through power stations until they appear finally as drinking water in Hobart, after recycling through hydroelectric facilities about eight times enroute. 

Today, thanks to the bruises, skill and hard slog of these European workers who arrived in Australia, literally in their war uniforms, most of Tasmania's power comes from these hills, these valleys, these piped waterways. In the fifty years of its use, Tarraleah has been home to around 1,600 people. 

Those folk have gone now. Tarraleah village has been bought, we are told, by a property developer, who owns all of it, save the golf course. 

The facilities and buildings are from an era of craftsmanship when no expense was spared. There is a lodge, a pub, a store, a cricket pavilion, holiday cottages (tho' many in the village have been sold off and gone elsewhere in Tasmania on the backs of trucks), a caravan park and the golf course. 

Yet, only four folk actually live in the village for most of the year: managers, the receptionist and a handymen. And tonight, just a little bit off high season, there were fifteen in the bar for drinks; while a few more were in the campground. One or two might even have bothered the chef at the restaurant to cook them a meal. 

With soft clouds misting the green tips of the surrounding hills this place looks for all the world like a great park of a wealthy English lord, with deer in the paddocks just over yonder, quolls hopping home in the the last rays of the setting sun, and an eagle's eerie not far off, because there soars an eagle. 

Someone told us one of the earlier buyers paid but six hundred thousand dollars for the village. Even so, I doubt there is any way this could ever repay, with just this number of people here now typical of a season. 

I feel our night's accommodation is almost being subsidised in this amazing campground where we, alone of the too few campers, use the available and extensive kitchen facilities and make use of the amenities tucked away in this remarkable village: the immaculate 1930s lodge, the comfortable fully-operational pub, the charming games rooms, the extensive gardens and well kept nature walks.

This would be idyllic at any time of the year, and is firmly on of my top spots in Tasmania to date, despite it being the setting for one of the most morose and haunting novels I have ever read in my life, about the Hydro-Poles brought here to build this hydro-electric scheme: THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING by Richard Flanagan. 

We really enjoyed Tarraleah, and the history of it was a bonus. But the thought keeps nagging me: how long before this, too, is for sale? Because: who would ever come here? And, if longer than a night, what would ever hold them? That needs to be sorted first, I think.

Pipes channelling the Derwent

We had drinks in the Lodge

Other accommodation options

Our Tarraleah camp

Our neighbour for the evening

Empty post boxes fronting empty houses

On the north east coast we'd noticed that most of the houses, cottages, even businesses were For Sale. 

We thought this might have been a regional thing. We even thought there may have been an inclination to sell because the properties were not close enough to a big town, regional roads were narrow and hard to negotiate, and improvements hardly likely to happen fast. But, in all honesty, nothing in Tasmania is more than a couple of hours from the two big cities: which is not like Queensland where you can drive for 500 kilometres and be lucky to see even a single old ruin. 

But to drive down the D'Entrecasteaux and the Huon valleys to remote Cockle Creek and find much, if not most, of the property and the businesses there also For Sale, set our alarm bells ringing. Not only the North East is For Sale, but the Southern sections, too. And this is, give or take Wineglass and Coles Bay over on the Freycinet Peninsula, arguably, the most beautiful part of Tasmania. 

Much of it looks in many parts like a scruffier version of any rural English county countryside. Even blackberries, planted by homesick English settlers in days long past, grow wild as hedgerows along dusty roads, but rich with hard, tiny, sweet, thorny, stain-filled berries that taste of England. 

Despite this, despite the beauty of the D'Entrecasteaux waters and the Huon river which most properties overlook, most properties in these southern regions are also For Sale.  Why? We explored the question and local opinion varies. Some say the sellers are trying to cash in on mainlanders who may be willing to pay top price for properties around here. They tell you of Joe Bloggs who sold his place down the road for $1.2 million dollars last year, enticing others to post their properties as well, hoping to score the same price. 

Trouble is only a small proportion of these For Sale properties look to be worth anything like that sort of money. Many that are for sale are even empty: the houses are vacant, windows have been smashed by vandals, grass is growing out of the gutters, the acres surrounding them are fallow. These have been on the market a long time, and no one appears at all interested in buying these. So, that is not a good look for the region either. 

Some locals tell us Tasmania is broke, and that the For Sale signs are just one of the symptoms: that the government is attempting to run the state on a big deficit, which is only getting bigger. Public spending has dried up and the GST funds are not sufficiently forthcoming. The timber industry is on its last legs and unemployment is higher here than anywhere else in Australia. On and on goes the litany of woes. 

Some 3,000 timber workers we are told, who are being laid off now that the timber contracts have crashed, will shortly have to move states to find other work in other fields. 

Tasmania looks like it has been a long time on this road to gloom and doom. But that is not new. It doesn't help that the state seems ridiculously over-governed. With a population of barely 500,000 people (a quarter of the population of the city of Brisbane) the coffers have to cover the expenditure of something like 26 regional councils throughout Tasmania, along with all the public servants and politicians who govern Tasmania, and those who occasionally represent them in Canberra.

The unnecessary multi-layers of governance, and the hideous expense of all that bureaucracy, for such a tiny population, is simply ridiculous.

Not a letter, not even a bill

Lost jobs, sad futures: a local forest protest we happened on in Huonville

Empty tables in empty resorts