Monday 9 September 2024 – There being no rest for the wicked, we had to get up early so that we could join the planned activity for the day, billed as a “journey of blissful serenity” – a cruise down the Gordon River, for which we had to check in at 0800, having had breakfast, driven the short distance to the Gordon River Cruise Terminal and had a n argument discussion about where to park the car.

Breakfast was worth a mention for the unique teapot they served our tea in.

We were solemnly told to leave it lying down for the four minutes measured by the egg timer before serving the tea. Once upright, the pot proved to be conventional in that, like hotel teapots everywhere, it dribbled when we tried to pour the tea.

Gordon River cruises are obviously A Thing, since the size of the cruise terminal

is pretty substantial, given the small size of the town it’s in.  The boat we were to cruise in was no dinghy, either.

We had tickets on the (premium, naturally, dahling) upper deck. To my surprise, there was assigned seating, and we actually got seats right at the front of the cabin,

not, as you might have inferred from the picture above, that this was necessarily going to guarantee us a good view of things.

The weather was very changeable during the whole day; we had drizzle, rain and bucketing rain, wind and (occasionally) sunshine; and it was quite cold, about 6°C; so “blissful serenity” looked to be a bit of a long shot, frankly. Still, the boat was reasonably warm, we had a light breakfast available to supplement the reasonably dense one we’d had before checking out, and the coffee was decent.

If you look at the location of Strahan on the map

you can see that it’s at the top of Macquarie Harbour, with the mouth of the Gordon River at the bottom.  But rather than go straight on after leaving Strahan, Captain Rick turned his boat hard to starboard, and our guide, Emily, explained that we would be exploring Macquarie Harbour before the blissful serenity bit along the river.

The harbour is actually the second largest in Australia, after Port Philip Bay, the harbour at the top of which one finds Melbourne. Emily pointed out to any Sydney residents on the cruise that Macquarie Harbour was six times the size of theirs. (Her commentary was very good – informative, interesting and, occasionally, amusing.)

The boat headed towards Macquarie Heads, the harbour entrance, because it’s of interest from several angles. Examination of the map will show that it’s not wide and, in its day, was called “Hell’s Gate” because it was so tricky and dangerous to navigate.  It’s just 83 metres wide,

and the original channel through which colonial vessels could sail was very close to one of the sides; wind could blow the ship on to rocks, which caused a lot of paperwork, even in those days. So a British Civil engineer, Sir John Coode, calculated, by constructing a model of the harbour, that building an underwater wall along one side would channel faster movement of water, dredging the gap and making the shipping channel wider and deeper. The wall was built in two stages (by convicts, natch): a training wall of rocks sufficiently small that they could be handled by people, who simply dropped them overboard into place,

followed by the real thing, with very substantial rocks that needed steam engines to handle them.

This wall once had a railway along its top, to ease the distribution of rocks along its length. As you can see, that railway is no longer in use.

We exited the harbour,

and then turned round and re-entered it, to give some idea of how it must have looked to the captains of those early vessels.

 

In the harbour, we noted long streams of foam in the harbour waters.

These come about because of the nature of the harbour’s waters, which have a layer of fresh water, whose source is mainly the Gordon River, on top of sea water.  The fresh water froths up more easily than sea water; the bubbles tend to clump together because of surface tension  and the wind drives them into these striking lines.  The water itself is quite brown

partly from sand being churned up by the currents, and partly from tannins leaching from the forests that border the harbour.

As we headed towards the Gordon River, we passed an enormous fish farming operation, farming mainly Atlantic salmon and sea trout. Three companies operate these farms, and they seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon at one point.

Emily gave us a lot of information about the efforts made to keep these farms environmentally friendly and ecologically sustainable. Given the horrors of fish farming in Canada and Scotland, one wonders if there’s an element of PR in this messaging. Anyway, the farms are extensive, and managed in quite a sophisticated way, with some feeding being done by ships dispensing food according to computer programming.

Tasmania has a significant place in history as a place where hardened convicts were transported in the 19th century, and Macquarie Harbour has a pair of neighbouring islands within it that were particularly notorious – Sarah Island

and the much smaller Grummett Rock.

Between them, these formed the notorious Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, which was in operation between 1822 and 1833. Sarah Island is about 20 acres (8 hectares) and up to 500 convicts – repeat offenders – would have been imprisoned there at a time. Under normal circumstances, our boat would have called in to Sarah Island so that we could look around it ourselves; but recent storm weather (basically the same as that which delayed our escape from Kangaroo Island) had wrought such damage on the landing location that it was unusable. Emily described the regimen on the Island, which was exceptionally harsh and violent – a special version of the cat o’ nine tails was apparently used for lashing the convicts who were sent there. The female convicts imprisoned there were originally sent over to Grummett Rock overnight to sleep in a cave, thus keeping them away from the male convicts at night time. Very enlightened of the authorities, I’m sure.

Shortly after passing between these two islands, we entered the Gordon River, and the skipper turned off his diesels and put the boat on electric power (“whisper mode”) so that we could cruise slowly and more or less silently along, with minimum disturbance from any wash from the boat – blissful serenity, in fact. Both banks of the river are heavily forested with a variety of eucalypts predominating.

The boat wound its way basically south along the river

past some splendid scenery.

One thing that the skipper steered us towards, and which Emily specifically called out, was a Huon Pine

an example of a very valuable and once much-exploited tree, to which a lot of attention is paid in this area. (As any fule kno, it’s actually a podocarp, not a true pine, of coure.) The wood from a Huon Pine is very heavily laden with oil, which makes it excellent for shipbuilding – it takes nails well and the oil prevents it from rotting.  (As The Wall in the Wilderness shows, it is also excellent for carving). There was once a thriving industry in “pining” – extracting Huon Pine along the river. The tree, however, is very slow-growing, so the industry was ultimately unsustainable and it is now illegal to cut down a living tree. This riverside specimen survived because it was too gnarly to be useful as timber.

By this stage, the forests surrounding the river had changed to being rainforest, and the boat stopped at the Heritage Landing

so that we could take a gentle stroll in this rainforest environment.  The stroll was along a prepared boardwalk

which led, past some very rainforesty surroundings,

to a halfway point, where more Huon Pines grew.

A guide, Erin, was there to explain about the trees in more detail, and there was quite a lot of it available. Long story short, the pines above had all arisen by natural vegetative reproduction from the root system of a very old “mother” tree, which had sadly now fallen. It is estimated that it was over two thousand years old.

In fact all the trees were male… these had survived “pining” simply because they were in very dense forest with no easy route to the river to get the timber out.

There was considerable scope for a philosophical discussion about actually how many trees there were there – one or many? and how old that made it/them. Fortunately, the skipper sounded his horn, which was the signal for us to get back on board and we headed back along the river and back to Strahan.

By this stage it was nearing 2pm, and we had to get to our next accommodation, which was near the Cradle Mountain National Park.  So we refuelled the car and headed off, into the wet (it was still raining).

The road was similar to what we’d seen on our drive over from Hobart – twisty and misty

with some spectacular scenery at times (when one could see it)

and the occasional arboreal sword of Damocles awaiting to alarm the unwary.

Differently, though, this road was hedged by huge amounts of gorse.

Another, and less welcome development, was the appearance of potholes. The lass at Avis back in Hobart had mentioned these, and it seemed that the road to Cradle Mountain attracted a lot of heavy lorries, which in turn created the craters which required the driver to be alert at all times.

Here are a few of the landscapes we passed as we drove the 130-odd kilometres towards Cradle Mountain.

Cradle Mountain is a national park which is known for its wildlife, as can be seen from road signs as we approached our destination for the day.

So we slowed down, and watched out, and eventually reached Peppers Cradle Mountain Lodge, just a little past the Cradle Mountain National Park Visitor Centre.

There was a certain cognitive dissonance between our reception, which was cordial but gave the impression of a place that was somewhat quiet and low-key, and our accommodation, which was a cabin to which we drove around a lake. Our cabin is excellent – large, luxurious, warm and well-organised; some cheese, meats and crackers had been thoughtfully laid in the room for us and there was Early Grey tea, milk, a kettle and a teapot. We even found a wallaby near the front door as a taster for the wildlife we hope to see over the coming days

and a pied currawong came to our balcony to check us out.

If you look closely at the bird, you can see he’s puffed out against the cold, and he’s very wet.  That’s because it was raining really quite hard by this stage

and so we decided to give the hot tub a miss and just enjoy our lovely cabin.

We’re here for a couple of nights, and have nothing organised for the morrow until the late afternoon. Given the cold and wet we’ve experienced so far, the temptation might be just to curl up in the warmth of our cabin and ignore the world for a while; but we’ll see what the weather looks like in case we feel like being more energetic.  You’ll be able to see whether we stayed in or went out if you come back to these pages in due course.