Terra Tasmania: 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.