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Freixenet Freycinet

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Monday 16 September 2024 – After our two engaging, informative and photogenic days with Bushie, it was time to leave Jetsonville yesterday and head towards our final destination on this unique island (apart from the departure lounge at Hobart airport, that is) – the Freycinet Peninsula, which dangles off the east coast of Tasmania and is a National Park. In theory, the drive should have taken us just over three hours, but we somehow or other spent nearly five hours covering the 220km. Rather than take the swiftest route, we elected to take the coast road, our old friend the A3 along which we’ve covered so many kilometres, as this took us past a couple of places which promised some photographic action. First, though, we passed the hop fields we saw yesterday, and Jane took a photo showing how much more extensive they are than was shown in my photo;

and we passed through Derby, and took a photo of what we think is the bit of scenery which collapsed when the dam broke and ended the town’s tin mining period.

As ever, the scenery on our drive was lovely, made more so by sunshine,

and we soon reached Pyengana, a village which is noted for its cheese production.  We could have stopped for a cheese tasting, but somehow the idea didn’t appeal; instead we took an 11km diversion to see a waterfall, the St. Columba Falls.  Jane wasn’t too sure that this would be a worthwhile detour, an impression which might possibly have been emphasised when we got there and took a look at the track leading to the falls.

Someone had clearly seen the netting across the entry to the track and thought “bugger it, let’s take a look anyway”. We decided that if that person was prepared to take that risk, then so would we, dammit. (Also, we talked to people coming the other way, who said it would be OK; we like to live dangerously, but only when it’s safe to do so). There was a problem on the path

but it was relatively easy to clamber over it and carry on, past some riparian scenes

and some pretty amazing tree ferns

through which we could just about catch sight of the falls

so it looked like it might be worth all that danger after all. The falls are really  quite impressive (yes, an Icelander would concede that they are actually waterfalls), but photographically really quite difficult to capture, partly because of the viewpoint offered and partly because of the position of the sun. The best I could do is via video.

After the falls, we stopped for a coffee at St. Helens, an attractive coastal town,

before moving on towards our next diversion.  En route, we passed a landscape that was difficult to decode.

We think that the foreground planting is grape vines, but can’t explain the background – dead trees among live shrubbery; very strange.

Our next diversion didn’t take us far off our chosen route. We reached Bicheno, another coastal town

and went to look at the beach. Or, rather, the rocks,

which look very fine with their covering of lichen.  Beyond them, you can see froth and foam, which gives a further clue to why we stopped here.

(So does the title of the video, I guess.)

After Bicheno, it was but a short drive to the Freixenet Freycinet peninsula,

National Park and Lodge, which is where we were due to spend a couple of nights.

Freycinet National Park occupies a large part of the peninsula, (named after French navigator Louis de Freycinet), and Schouten Island (which on the map looks like a drip falling off the witch’s nose that is the Freycinet peninsula). Founded in 1916, the park shares the distinction of being Tasmania’s oldest park with Mount Field National Park, which is in the Uncharted Quarter – the southwest of the island.

Freycinet Lodge is quite an impressive operation. By the reception are the bar and restaurant areas

and our cabin, or rather our “coastal pavilion”, which is some 300m away, nestled among the woods

is very swish

and has obviously had a very cool and with-it designer, which made the interior exceedingly chichi and almost totally unusable for practical purposes. I should have realised this when in order to get in to the place we had to open the door by pulling it.  Also, it’s great having nice low mood lighting throughout, but there are times when actually I would appreciate being able to light the place such that I can see what the fuck is going on; but it’s not an option – gloom is, apparently, trendy. The light switch system is so complex and mysterious that it needs the  instruction manual which you can eventually find on the in-room TV, and it’s got a great supply of all the things you need for a comfortable stay – fridge, kettle, that kind of thing – but all hidden behind panels that merge in seamlessly with the walls, so you have to go round experimentally tugging or pushing at bits of the wall to see if they move in some way to reveal what’s behind. Very, very chichi, but very, very frustrating in the dark after a couple of large gins. [ On the plus side, comfortable bed, good shower, and a bath outside on the deck for star-gazing – Ed ]

Generally, the environment around the lodge is very pleasant, again helped by the sunshine we’ve had of late. There are nice views available

but the Australian ravens

sound very derisive.

We had the day to ourselves today, with no formal programme, but a strong recommendation for a walk to a lookout point over Wineglass Bay. One can walk all the way from the lodge to the lookout point; on the other hand, one can drive 3km to the car park whence the actual walk starts. We’re on holiday travelling, so we took the lazier option, but I should make it clear that it’s not like we put in no effort at all.

We had sunshine, which was good, and slightly unexpected, but the wind was a cold one, which made Getting On With It a good idea. It’s a well-marked path

with some steeper bits

past some amazing boulders.

We did stop to take some pictures of the views on the way up. You can see the nearest town, Coles Bay, quite clearly.

The final push to the top is up some more steps,

around 326 of them, and at the top there’s a circuit of viewpoints to navigate,

with more impressive boulders on the hillside

and (of course) a great view of Wineglass Bay.

Had there not been a good view, I would have been a bit tetchy, and not without justification, I think. The way down is slightly different from the way up, if you follow the signposts (like almost everybody did),

and continues to give good boulder.

There’s one mysterious rock quite near the bottom;

we can’t fathom how those dimples came about. Reaching the car park, we passed a rather cute structure shaped like a whale,

which I assume is a bicycle rack.

The road from and back to the lodge passes Honeymoon Bay, so we thought we’d pop down for a quick look;

our visit was short and sweet, much, I suppose, like your average honeymoon (eh, Starmer?) and we were soon back at the lodge and taking it easy for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow, we have, with some regret, to depart these shores and return to the Australian mainland. We’ll therefore be heading north which means that it should at least be warmer. Whether it’s more interesting or not will be revealed in these pages in due course.

 

Bushie, tailed again

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Saturday 14 September – Bushie called for us at around 9.45 and we tailed along again for another day of mystery, excitement and information overload. The only thing Bushie told us was that we were headed for the far north-east of the island. And the first thing he did was to stop at the pond just down the road where yesterday he said there were platypuses. At first I was dubious about the wisdom of this, given our failure yesterday to see anything at this very place. I should have known better, and trusted Bushie’s knowledge and judgement, because

there were three platypuses in the pond, and we saw them all.  I even caught one having a scratch

and got some video snippets, too.

so I was very happy that we’d spent the time there.  Bushie was confident that we’d see them because he knew that they came out here at around 10am, hence his collecting us at 9.45. He was slightly disdainful of the people that walk by the pond, saying that they might walk by every day, but they’d never actually seen a platypus; all you needed to know was the time(s) that they came out to feed.  He was also somewhat more disdainful of the experts who opined that platypuses were crepuscular, and rightly so; here was our evidence that they come out during the day, too.

Between this pond and the next (which also had at least one platypus in it), there was a bank, and one could see the tracks that showed where platypuses move from one pond to the other.

Yesterday, as he’d driven us round, Bushie had casually pointed out various ponds and told us the number of platypuses in them. Today, he proved that he knew whereof he spoke. It seemed that there were more ponds with platypus inhabitants than without; they may be elusive, but in this corner of Tasmania they’re not rare.

A nice little nugget from Bushie: platypus young are called puggles, a term also applied to baby echidnas. There you are; a trivium you can deploy when you’re down the boozer, or trying to solve a crossword puggle clue.

Our next port of call was the town of Legerwood (emphasis on the middle syllable, according to Wikipedia). Its USP is a series of memorial carvings, which have a great story; but first, let me show you the carvings, as they are very impressive.

Private John McDougallPrivate Alan Andrews

On 15 October 1918, twenty-five Turkish pine trees were planted in memory of the village’s fallen soldiers following the end of the Great War. In 1999 the trees were deemed unsafe from blight and the local council recommended they be cut down. Determined to retain the memorial, in 2004 the Legerwood Hall and Reserves Committee commissioned chainsaw sculptor Eddie Freeman to carve a series of sculptures on the dying trunks based on the lives of the people they represented in remembrance. The photos above are just some of the 25.

We pressed on, through some lovely scenery,

(note the incipient distant rain in the last photo) and past some hop fields.

Hop fields were everywhere in this area at one time, but have declined markedly, which Bushie blamed on the Great American Hop Glut of the 1940s; the end of prohibition in the USA led to a vast expansion in their hop production, leading to a major surplus, with knock-on effects globally.

We stopped for coffee in the town of Derby, which is a major, even global, mountain biking centre, because of the excellent trails in the surrounding hills.

They have even staged world championship competitions here several times in recent years and there is a Derby Derby – which only sounds good as a phrase because they pronounce the name of the town as der-by not dar-by. Derby was, in earlier days, also a centre for tin mining; our coffee bar had a picture showing what the town looked like then – pretty ghastly, as is the case for anywhere near a mining operation.  Derby suffered particularly when overuse of water cannon to shift the soil led to a collapse in a river dam and the inundation of much of the town. So the mountain biking craze has brought life back into what had become a very quiet place.

More delightful scenery was on offer at The Little Blue Lake, which is a lake that is

not very big and, erm, not very blue, either. Bushie told us that the colour was due to reflection of a blue sky, but I’m not so sure.  I’ve seen that colour before in glacial lakes (e.g. Lake Louise) but this was possibly mineral in derivation. Anyway, pretty. And inundated with frogs:

We then headed for the Mount William National Park, which sounds a whole lot more impressive than the reality; Mount William is just 150m high. Musselroe Bay is part of this national park and we saw some bird life there.

Pelican
Kelp gulls
Australian pied cormorant
Bushie said this was a Mollymawk, but I reckon it’s a juvenile kelp gull

Just by the beach at Musselroe Bay was an old aboriginal midden.

These show where aboriginal folk had simply discarded things, such as shells. The layers are like a journal, showing that they’d left the area and then come back as the seasons dictated.

There was not much more to see in the Mount William National Park. A pair of kangaroos (mother and grown-up joey)

and, as the weather was really closing in by this stage, a camper grimly determined to have fun no matter what.

We high-tailed it out of the park, with Bushie making rude remarks about the National Parks authority investing its money in white elephants such as the Dove Lake Visitors Centre at Cradle Mountain (which, admittedly, is a major over-achievement) rather than maintaining areas like Mount William, which has fallen into neglect, allowing kunzea shrubs to take over what was once grassland and rich grazing for Forrester Kangaroos.

The dramatically-changing weather gave us some great landscapes as we headed for a village called Gladstone,

which is where I saw my first-ever emu,

with a very haughty-looking demeanour. It’s not strictly a wild bird, having been raised from a chick at a farm, but it’s lived an unpampered life, so I claim the tick box that says “emu” for this trip.

Bushie seemed to be rushing us back to Jetsonville, when he suddenly turned off the road on to a rough track

and we realised that we might be in for another Bushie Evening Special.  Indeed we were. The track led to a pond

(which, of course, had a platypus in it) by a cabin

where Bushie’s wife, Janine, awaited us. We were offered another of Bushie’s excellent snack platters, but had to turn it down, as we knew we had a dinner date with Madeline and Guy back at the farm, and we needed to preserve our appetite for that. But beer was also on offer, and that went down well.  Although the rain (and occasional hail) had stopped by this point it was, however, damn’ cold, so Bushie prepared an outdoor fire in a marvellous contraption

made up of various cogs, wheels and the inside of a washing machine. It was a great chance to meet Janine and talk about their life and business as the sun went down.  Eventually she left us and we repaired inside the cabin, which was delightfully warm

and which had lighting and a window through which we could watch developments on the sward outside. About four pademelons came out and fossicked about until something scared them off.  Eventually, another shape came shuffling out of the undergrowth;

a brush-tailed possum, perhaps with joey(s) in her pouch, which was lovely to see.

Janine and Bushie had agreed to take over stewardship of the cabin from the local council, as it was being used for all sorts of youthful skullduggery, involving drink and guns, and they wanted to avoid the tragedy that was otherwise pretty much inevitable. Their plan is to gradually build back the confidence of the local wildlife to provide even more of a viewing spectacle for their guests – we were only the second set of people to be taken here, so felt very privileged.

We had to leave in order to get back to the farm, and we had a delightful evening talking to Madeline and Guy about their lives and livelihoods.  Two Jetson brothers came over from Leicestershire in the early 19th Century and started farms, which is how the area came to be called Jetsonville; Madeline and Guy are the only Jetsons now farming, raising a mixture of beef cattle and crops. To our mutual delight we discovered that Madeline’s middle name is Jane – while Jane’s middle name is Madeleine – which is wonderfully symmetrical.

We have to move on tomorrow, as we near completion of the circuit of the northern part of Tasmania. Our time in the north east has been excellent, filled with new wildlife and glorious scenery. I wonder what excitement our final destination on Tasmania will bring?

 

Bright-eyed and Bushie

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Friday 13 September 2024 – We had only about an hour’s drive to today’s destination, which allowed for a relaxed morning. We checked out of the delightful Peppers Seaport Hotel and headed (via Woollies to get more of Twining’s finest Earl Grey) towards Jetson Farm, which is in a place or area called Jetsonville. (Anyone remember the Jetsons, the American cartoon series from the early ’60s? It treated the future as reverentially as The Flintstones treated the past.)

The landscape we travelled through was unremarkable. We started out through the same farmland that surrounded Launceston and then skirted the Mount Arthur Forest Reserve, which meant that things got a bit more foresty,

although most of the time the foresty bits were behind cleared spaces beside the road.

The wattle/mimosa continued to be a joyful addition to the scenery.

We passed a viewpoint, or Lookout as they’re called here, the Sideling Lookout, which gave us a great look out over the neighbouring countryside.

We passed a couple of interesting sights en route: a fetching line of trees

planted thus for a reason we wot not of; and, on the outskirts of Scottsdale, this

“Iconic Eco Centre”, which was for sale and a purpose we wot not of. Scottsdale is the nearest town of any pith or moment to Jetsonville, and seems a nice enough place;

we merely hope that it features a petrol station so that we can refuel before we have to move on in a couple of days’ time. Scottsdale and Jetsonville are firmly in farming land (we were told, for example, that nearby Ringarooma is the richest dairy farmland in the whole of Australia)

and our accommodation for the night was a farmhouse, part of Jetson Farm, which is a working farm. We got there at about 11.30, perfect for our appointed midday meeting time with our guide. What with the friendly reception from hosts Madeline and Guy Jetson and the immediate arrival of said guide, I didn’t have a chance to take a photo of the place. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that.

Our guide’s real name name is Craig Williams, but he told us that everyone calls him Bushie.

This explained some of the mystery behind the item in our schedule which describes the next two days as “Bushie’s Quoll Patrol”, but didn’t actually vouchsafe any further intelligence about what this entailed. In the end, that’s just as well, as you’ll find out if you read on.

Bushie’s company is Pepper Bush Adventures, a small business he runs with his wife, Janine, and son Ben. Although his training was as a master butcher, Bushie’s background is steeped in the lore of the bushman. He’s been walking around and spending time in the bush since his childhood (which is how he got his nickname, he says), and doing these tours for about 25 years. He was thus able to display a very solid grasp of the local history, geography, geology, industry, economics and wildlife. His visual acuity was astonishing; as he was driving along he was casually able to identify small birds perched on distant poles, or, as in the photo above, platypuses in roadside ponds. Similar to our experiences in Costa Rica and Madagascar, where without a guide you’d not see 90% of the wildlife around you, Bushie’s ability to spot things was impressive. It was also a bit frustrating, as he pointed out things (such as that platypus) that had disappeared by the time we were in a position to see and, most importantly, photograph them. We did. though, get a chance to admire a couple of galahs before they, too, buggered off.

So the first three hours or so of our time with Bushie was spent being driven around with him telling us about the details of the surrounding landscape – types of forest, trees, berries, leaves, uses of same for cooking and medicine – and identifying wildlife as it disappeared into the middle distance. We did pass some great scenery, though.

The area has many British names, such as Dorset and Bridport, and mountains such as Ben Nevis and Ben Lomond. Unlike Scotland, in Tasmania, you can stand on top of Ben Lomond and see Ben Nevis. Well, except today, that is.

The upper reaches of Ben Lomond were in thick cloud and rain, so we turned back before reaching the top. However, I did get a view which gave me the clearest explanation I’ve yet had of glacial moraine

and we could glimpse, through the mist, cliffs of the dolerite rock that’s unique to Tasmania, Antarctica and South Africa.

The glacial moraine bit is important. The above pictures are extreme examples of moraine, but the whole area is littered with such rock, merely much less densely packed. A rock-strewn landscape is not suitable for farming, but it is perfectly good for growing trees. So forestry is an important industry in this area of Tasmania. Bushie pointed out the very clear distinctions between native forest and plantations, and described the importance of sustainable logging, where a few selected mature trees are extracted from a plantation, leaving others to grow and the ecosystem largely undisturbed, as opposed to clearance logging, which results in destruction of a forest.

Eventually, in latish afternoon, we headed off towards our supper destination, which was, frankly, in the middle of nowhere. As we approached the track that led to it, though, we began to get a clue as to what awaited us.

A mother and 13-month old baby wombat casually pottered out of the undergrowth and across the bridge in front of us. And as we started down the track, it was clear that we had a reception committee awaiting us.

In the acres surrounding Bushie’s rustic cabin

some 60-odd eastern grey kangaroos have made their home. They weren’t always there; when a local wildlife centre had too many kangaroos to look after, they asked Bushie if he could accommodate some. He agreed to take them, and the mob has grown to its current size. They are free to come and go as they please, but they are completely habituated to humans, as Bushie regularly hosts small groups at this cabin as part of his tours and occasionally escapes there himself. When he is there he feeds the ‘roos

which is another reason his place is so popular with the local wildlife. Kangaroos are not the only animals there; there are wallabies and pademelons, too,

which makes Bushie’s cabin just about the only place you’ll see all three of these macropods together in the same place. There are also quolls (which, sadly, we didn’t get to see, as they are nursing young at the moment) and

possums. I also managed to catch a glimpse of flame robins, female and male.

It was getting quite cold at this point, so Bushie built up a nice fire for us

and prepared a delicious meal, which we ate, surrounded by these kangaroos, which wandered about and even came up to demand attention. Bushie showed us where the kangaroos like to be scratched – chest, not head – and their closeness enabled us to see how unwise it could be to tangle with them.

Two kangaroo front feet and one rear foot, with its dagger claw

However, they were all friendly. Bushie knows them by name, and it was interesting to watch their interactions. There were two large males: Yoda, the alpha male

and Rip, who was alpha until Yoda deposed him. Unusually, Rip was not then excommunicated from the group, but is tolerated. Here they both are, having a meal together

You can tell how Rip got his name by looking closely at his left ear.

It was a remarkable occasion, completely unexpected, and one which would have had less impact had we known about it.

Also remarkable was the conversation we had with Bushie on the drive back to Jetson Farm after the meal. It concerned the Thylacine, the Tasmanian Tiger. This animal has widely been thought of as being extinct ever since the last known specimen died in a zoo in 1936. This is increasingly looking unlikely. Bushie told us of one that was shot in 1946, proving that they weren’t extinct in 1936, and also mentioned that some people, notably the late Col Bailey, were firm believers in the continued existence of the Thylacine. Some people have claimed to have seen them within recent times, and there are several others, such as Murray McAllister, who are actively interested in searching for extant animals. Both Jane and I knew the Thylacine extinction story and had found it very sad, and we hope that after all there are some of these creatures still living in some far corner of a Tasmanian Forest.

We meet Bushie again tomorrow, and who knows what the day will bring? Not us, that’s for sure.