Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Macquarie Harbour and Gordon River Huon Cry

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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.

East Bank

West Bank

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.

Crossing Tasmania – Hobart to Strahan

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Sunday 8 September 2024 – We had to leave the delightful Henry Jones Art Hotel and hightail it across the island to the other coast. Our destination was a town called Strahan, which, for some reason known only to the locals, is pronounced “Strawn”. Audley, the travel chaps who arranged our itinerary, had booked us a rental car, and so, having breakfasted and checked out, we walked the short distance to the Avis office to collect our car, a Toyota C-HR. Australia, of course, is civilised to the extent that they drive on the same side of the road as we do in the UK, so I was expecting to be able to deal with driving a car here with absolutely no problem.

Wrongly, as it turned out.

Not in a major way, you understand. But when I came to indicate left at the first junction and, in doing so, turned on the windscreen wipers, I realised that the cars here are Japanese spec – indicator and wiper stalks are the wrong way round. (Back in the UK, in the late ‘80s, I had a Toyota Celica Supra, which was a lovely motor, but which also suffered from this affliction, causing me to drive round roundabouts with the wipers going if ever I needed to rent a car. However, 30-plus years of driving UK spec cars in the UK has straightened out my left-right dysfunction, and it’s occasionally irritating to find myself once again falling into the trap). Never mind; in all other respects, the car is perfectly fine and provides a good way of getting from Hobart to Strahan.

Every time we mentioned to someone that we were driving to Strahan, someone routinely said something along the lines of “ooh, a windy route” – windy in the sense of twisty, not blowy. They were all correct, but to start with, we travelled along a multi-lane highway as we exited Hobart heading west.

As one might expect, after a while the multi-lane highway narrowed into a conventional road and the scenery became more bucolic.

We even passed some hop crops.

After an hour and a half or so, we got the opportunity to break our journey for a side excursion, to have a coffee and take a short walk to Russell Falls. The visitor centre there has a neat way of telling punters that there’s no WiFi:

not that we needed it, but it gave me a grin.

Several walks are available from the centre but since we had, overall, a five-hour journey to complete we just opted to take the short walk out to see the falls and then come straight back – about 45 minutes’ worth. The walk out is along a properly-surfaced path

past some very tall eucalypts

into rainforest

which features some really big trees.

It doesn’t take long to get to the falls,

which were a great deal more impressive than I had expected from photos I had seen beforehand, like this one.

Image Credit: https://waterfallsoftasmania.com.au/

Even an Icelander would concede that these

are proper falls.

The weather over the previous days has been pretty stormy – many people we’d chatted to have remarked on this – and so the river which feeds the falls is clearly full.

(Side note: the river which feeds these falls is the Russell Falls Creek. I’d aways thought of a creek as being something of rather minor pith and moment compared with a proper river. This one, however, seems pretty momentous at the mo.)

As well as the falls pictured above, it’s possible to walk a little further to another waterfall, called the Horseshoe Falls. To get to this, you have to climb up some steps.

Lots of steps – 200, in fact. But it’s worth the climb.

(Photographic note – this is a handheld, half-second exposure, to capture that highly clichéd “milky water” effect which is supposed to convey dynamism and motion in the photo. Up to now, you would have needed a tripod to achieve an image that’s sharp – except for the intentionally blurred bits of course – but camera technology has progressed to the point where my Nice New Nikon can do it without all that tedious mucking about with extra gear. Nice!)

It’s not particularly cheap to visit the falls – a day pass for a car cost Aus $46, or around £25 – but the place is well-organised and well-maintained, so I don’t begrudge them the money.

Back on the road, in conditions that varied from showers to bucketing rain with the odd clear period thrown in, we could see that the tops of the mountains still had snow on them.

Not too surprising, I suppose – the temperature where we were was about 6°C. We took advantage of the occasional clear periods to take photos of the landscapes we drove through.

We’re not sure whether the yellow flowering tree is a wattle or a mimosa, but there were plenty of them livening up the colours of our route.

It was clear that Tasmania is not a particularly dry place from this hydroelectric infrastructure that we passed, the Tuncatinah Power Station

the occasionally marshy terrain

and the fact that it rained a lot as we went along.

We passed the geometric centre of Tasmania, which was worth a short stop. It was raining quite heavily at this point, so I sent Jane out to take a photo of the structure that marks the spot,

and the map which shows how they worked out the location.

The rain persisted for most of the rest of our journey to Strahan. Originally, we had planned to visit Lake St. Clair, which had been recommended as a side excursion, but frankly the prospect didn’t appeal. There was however one thing that Jane particularly wanted to see which she called “The Wall in the Wilderness”, and described as an evolving sculpture, so I resigned myself to trying to take photos of a large stone installation whilst getting rainwater down the back of my neck.

As we approached it, there were some sculptures mounted on posts on the track.

and a splendid eagle outside.

You can see what the weather was like, and there was something else that didn’t improve my mood, either.

So: I was to be charged Aus$22 to see something and not be allowed to photograph it??? The words rag, bull and red come to mind. However, Jane was adamant, and, importantly, this Wall thing appeared to be indoors, which was a plus, given the weather. So I gloomily stumped up the funds and we went inside.

It turned out that I was wrong on multiple counts: firstly that it was a stone artwork, secondly that I would photograph it and thirdly that I wouldn’t enjoy it.

It started well – there was coffee available. The slightly odd but very charming chap who took my money also served us coffee and explained that one should walk around this thing in a particular direction. So in we went and….

It was breathtaking.

It is a wood carving. It is a vast wood carving. It is huge and hugely impressive – a stupendous piece of work, created by one man over decades. It is not, and never will be, finished, but the unfinished parts of it make what has been completed all the more impressive.

It would have been impossible for me to do justice to it in photography, so, in the end, I didn’t mind being told to put my camera away.

It’s made from 51 panels of wood, each one metre wide and three metres tall. 25 panels form one side, 25 back on to them as the other side and there’s one at the end. The carving on these panels is brilliant envisaged, wonderfully executed and beautifully lit. The panels tell “stories”: Footprints, Hydro, Forestry, Tiger, Endangered Species and “Her Story” (the last a bittersweet imagination of a romance which ended badly).

I normally take pride in using my own photography to tell the story of a day or a part of a day in these blog postings, but not today. It is possible to buy a photographic representation of the panels of The Wall – typically, this is a cynical attempt to get money out of punters (Glory Portico in Santiago, I’m looking at you). But here, because one simply can’t capture it in photos without a huge and complex project, it’s simply a way of taking home a memento of this extraordinary – thing.

One can find on the web a photo of the sculptor in front of his project, which might give some idea of the scale of it.

From the Wall’s website, here is a photo which attempts to show the detail in the carving work

As you can see from this, the textures that the sculptor, Greg Duncan, achieves are remarkable – folded paper, cloth, rope. As I said – breathtaking. He has now retired and although his son is a talented sculptor in metal (we assume those were his works outside) he does not work in wood, so The Wall will never be finished.

Deep breath….

We carried on our journey, coming down from the central plateau

to a town called Queenstown,

whose environs showed a clear history of mining

but which these days is just this town, you know?

And so we eventually reached Strahan some seven hours and 300km after we set out.

It’s not a large place and so we quickly found our accommodation for the night, a charming place called Franklin Manor.

Its interior is well in keeping with its colonial-era appearance,

and our welcome by Leeanne was warm, friendly and well-organised. As was the bar, with husband Chris displaying expert cocktail knowledge and interesting refreshment suggestions.

So ended a long, wet and interesting day. We have just one night at Franklin Manor; tomorrow we’re off on a short cruise before departing for an area of the island where we hope eventually to see some of its unique wildlife. Exactly where and what, you can find out by keeping in touch with these pages.

Diversion: The Henry Jones Art Hotel, Hobart

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Sunday 8 September 2024 – I promised earlier (and earlier) that I would write about the hotel we stayed at in Hobart, the Henry Jones Art Hotel, because it made such an impression on us as we arrived a couple of days ago. For a first impression, the only place to have exceeded it was the Singular Hotel in Patagonia, and for a similar reason – the elegant reuse of a historic space as a hotel. The Singular saw the transformation of an old lamb canning factory; the Henry Jones was a redevelopment of a waterfront warehouse that was once used in the whaling industry and then repurposed for making jam. Henry’s story is a remarkable one; he started in the jam factory, sticking labels on tins, rose through becoming foreman to buying a controlling interest in the business and reconstructing it in his own name, with the “IXL” (“I Excel”) brand name.

Like so many waterfront properties the jam factory fell into disrepair and was practically on the point of collapse when the current owners rescued it a quarter of a century ago and reimagined it as the hotel it is today. The construction of the hotel preserved as much of the surviving jam factory as possible, with only four beams being replaced for safety. So the fabric of the building exudes the history of its links to its jam-making past.

And the connection with the art world? From the 1970s through to the 1990s, art students from the adjacent Tasmanian School of Creative Arts partied (and maybe lived) in the dilapidated building – and photos we saw of that time show that it looked more like a multi-storey carpark that had been destroyed by fire than anything else. The once-students were subsequently invited to walk through the new building and create art based on what they saw. This art became the first art displayed in the hallways upon opening. Ever since then, the hotel has been a living, breathing art gallery. So its charisma comes from the combination of its historic fabric and its unique art displays.

Its fabric: the corridors are redolent of its warehouse origins.

Its walls betray some of its origins: in the mortar, one can see traces of possum hair (compare the use of horsehair in old European buildings)

and fragments of shells, originally taken from an indigenous midden and ground up to use the calcium in the mortar.

There is a great open area, under a uniquely-designed roof, available for conventions and other gatherings

and the hotel’s other spaces have wonderful decor.

Some of the original equipment is used for decor touches

or just pictured

and some places betray its history, such as this leakage of ancient jam down a wall as it was released when the room was warmed up.

What adds to the impact of this fabric is the art on display. We went on an official Art Tour of the hotel (led, it has to be said, by a very irritating lady, but revealing some great stories). Everything in the hotel is available for sale, which means that the pieces around the place do change over time; and there are specific areas which are dedicated as galleries.

I’m not a great one for spending time wringing the meaning or significance out of artworks, but some were very impressive pieces of work. This one, for example, a photo-realistic depiction of an indigenous woven basket

is not, as you might think, a photograph; it is done in, of all things, crayon on sheets of black paper.

This picture of woodland after a forest fire

was created from its actual ashes, individually selected, mixed and dropped in specific patterns – nine months’ work.

Many of the other pieces have political or historical significance; some are winners of the John Glover Art Prize, a competition sponsored by the hotel.

As well as all that intellectual and historical stuff, it does other good hotel things. There is a good bar

where chief cocktail wrangler Jenn will give some good cocktail theatre;

and, in the room, some good attention to detail in little extras provided: a trawl through the historical records to see if there were family connections to the convicts who were transported here; and I draw your attention to the bottom left of this drawer, which was next to the thoughtfully-provided kettle and fridge.

We enjoyed our time in Hobart immensely, and the unique nature of the Henry Jones Art Hotel added unique memories for our time in the city.

OK, then.

Back to the mainstream of our Australian travels in the next post, as we travel across Tasmania to the west coast. Do come back and read about that, won’t you?