From Bron’s delicious Ploughman’s Lunch in Wombat Cove – Through Hell’s Gate to Strahan
An early start brought us back to Wombat Cove on our way out of Bathurst Harbour and during the scenic journey, so reminiscent of the Highlands of Scotland, Bron was busy pummelling the life out of a pile of dough so that once anchored just outside Wombat, as you can see there was another yacht tucked in there, with Nichola alongside, the four of us tucked in to thick slices of her still warm bread with cheese, pickles, olives and celery and, what’s that, honey!
Nichola led the way back out to sea where we were welcomed with a fine 14 knot south easterly and the southern ocean swell. We delighted in being surrounded once more with Shy Albatross and their friends the shearwater or mutton birds as they were named by hungry sailors and settlers and the spearheaded gannets diving for fish. A new addition to the faunal mix were Australian fur seals that would pop their heads above water and take a curious look at us as we sped by and then swim alongside us for a while, they were miles from the shore.
That night we sailed under a jaffa moon and knew that our short reprieve from the smoke of the bush fires was over. The wind was dropping so on went the engine and we motor-sailed with Nichola’s navigation lights to starboard into a surreal misty calm morning.
Fortunately we could make out the light from Cape Sorell Lighthouse but the land upon which it sat was shrouded in smoky mist, the next few minutes would be very interesting. Zoonie’s black outline on the chartplotter had to be trusted, in other words we had to assume the Navionics charts were accurate for this area, or of course, we could take bearings on the lighthouse with the hand held compass and complete a running fix. Then suddenly the automatic light turned off just when we needed it so we trusted to luck we still had plenty of searoom and the closer we approached the more likely we would be able to discern land features.
The entrance to Macquarie Harbour has proved problematic over the years, especially in the days of the engineless square riggers and strong westerly winds and a west to south west swell can make the entrance a real Gate of Hell. Many ships have foundered with the inevitable loss of life. That is one of the reasons the rock training wall you sea was laid at the beginning of the twentieth century, to give ships somewhere to anchor and await better conditions or a pilot to guide them, hence the name Pilot Bay and Pilot Beach.
Rob decided to helm so I was free to photograph the experience. We were lucky that the swell crashing on the rocky shoreline outside had enough south in it to not enter the channel and all Rob had to contend with were currents that could send Zoonie off course as we approached Entrance Island on which you see the pretty lighthouse passing to our left side. It is the left post of Hell’s Gate which was not named because of the natural conditions of weather and tide but the appalling conditions the arriving convicts knew they would encounter at the penal colony on Sarah Island within the harbour. News had reached England of the brutal regime inflicted on the convicts and they must have led lives of utter dread as they were herded across the world to this beautiful place made fearful by the discipline metered out by the Commanders and Governors. More about that later.
How different today when people like us and fare paying passengers choose to come and experience the rugged South West of Tassie.
The conditions we had coming along the channel once safely inside were near perfect as we made our way to Strahan and moored next to Nichola nearly three hours later.
We went ashore to find out about fuel and see what the town had to offer. In the Information Centre one of the ladies gave us a long story about having to get a permit to explore the Gordon River, an area covered with largely untouched temperate rainforest. The pricing of the permits was done in such a way as to make as much money as possible out of visitors and to deter them from coming, so we were temporarily put off. No one likes to feel they are being taken advantage of, do they? We sought another way.
However she did suggest we look around the little museum that occupied a corner of the building and when we entered through a door that could have so easily been missed we went on a fascinating trail of learning about the area.
I don’t want you to miss out on what we learned but as there was so much of it I have divided it up into five separate blogs under the titles; 1 The Needwonnee First Residents, 2 The Life of the Huon Piners felling these ancient trees from around 1810 to the 1960’s and then 3 The Penitentiary Years, within that timescale, between 1822 and 1833. 4 The complex environmental and social issue of Dam Building and finally a bit of philosophy; 5 The Concept of Wilderness. The idea is that if any of these topics do not interest you they are easy to skip. I hope you enjoy them.
I will let the information boards tell the story as they are the words of white and aborigine people talking together about the dark history with honesty and to a small degree hope. I am going to tell you a little about how aboriginal knowledge is helping modern Australians and about a member of the ‘Stolen Generation’ who provides a perfect human window into the typical experience of an aborigine of my generation, the rocky path he has followed and the light that shines from him through his compassion and talent; Archie Roach.
Ancient Wisdom at work today
During the ongoing bushfire destruction hundreds of homes on the east coast of Australia have been saved because individual homeowners have called upon the wisdom of Aboriginal Fire Keepers to advise them on how to protect their homes and surrounding areas. The ostrich government is being asked to start listening to this wisdom at government level since once areas are laid waste by fire, that is when the developers descend to change the nature of that land forever in the name of commercial gain and monetary profit.
Aborigines have always been terrified of fire so they have learned from their surroundings how to fight fire with fire and they lived in the temperate rainforests of south west Tasmania for 35,000 years at least looking after the land using various methods including fire and taking only what they needed to survive.
Aboriginal groups are known by various collective names; tribes, clans, and a new one to me I learned last week when I was reading Archie Roach’s recently released Autobiography ‘Tell Me Why’; the word he uses is ‘mobs’.
Archie was one of the ‘stolen generation’, separated from his parents and numerous siblings when just a boy, stripped of his sustainable hunting, fishing and ceremony cultural heritage as were many others of his race were. He followed the common route of a disaffected people down the path of self-destruction using alcohol and smokes to soften the landing. But Archie discovered he had musical and literary talents and the love and support of many of his people and is now a much loved global musician, writer and poet. He has a lovely soft voice and his narrative songs are one of the mediums he uses to tell his story and give hope to indigenous people the world over. Rob has downloaded some of his music and the use of the didgeridoo in the background adds atmosphere and gravitas. I recommend them.
Huon Piners – The second conservationists
Understandable don’t you think that these tough but sensitive and listening men saw the rivers of the south west as their paths to freedom; if they weren’t ex-convicts themselves they were almost always descendants of them and it appears that even though their fathers’ situation under the penal system might have been dire they did not share the commonly held view of the wilderness as a terrible, hostile and inhospitable place. In fact it was a place with which they lived in harmony for 150 years, a peaceful and generous alternative place to live compared to life on Sarah Island, Hobart or back in England for that matter.
The descendant piners will not have known what European life was like so growing up and living in the wilderness would have come more naturally to them, but their convict fathers had learned the felling business during their captivity which they could put to good use on their release. It makes life in the wilderness sound much more accommodating and attractive than the prospect of town life here or back home after their release.
Perhaps partly because of the solitude, some piners did not marry and have families and because felling the mighty pines became outlawed both these factors combined and led to the decline of these interesting men, who learned to harmonise with their surroundings just as the Aborigines had.
Life on the Penal Colony of Sarah Island
The story boards tell all too well the extreme pain of life on Sarah Island so I thought I’d tell you some stories of a more humorous, hopeful and human kind. I am taking source material from one of the multitude of literary pamphlets and books that exist telling this complex and colourful story; The Round Earth Publishing Company’s ‘The People Ships and Shipwrights’ A Guided Tour.
William Sylvester was a convict gardener on the island and became known as ‘the streaker of Sarah Island’ when he ran naked around the settlement in an attempt to scandalize the wife of Doctor Garrett and her sister. The latter weren’t popular and Bill was responding to bribes from the Commandant’s servants to get rid of them. I’m not sure if he was successful but his punishment was to be relegated to a timber gang, not doubt amidst much mirth and cheers.
George Millar was lashed with the ‘cat o’ nine tails’ 25 times for breaking into a solitary cell when it was occupied. Later research revealed the occupant was a certain Mary Anne Furze! Hope she was worth it.
On the hopeful front one of the few successful escapes was engineered by Richard Morris, John Newton and Thomas Crawley and it is recorded as ‘dead in the woods’ because they were thought to have perished in the dense bush between the shores of the Gordon River and the hinterland. While working as limeburners up the river they managed to steal a boat and row it up the river as far as they could get. Before leaving the boat they posted a hand drawn sign on it saying ‘Now for Sale’. I liked that. Morris was supposedly seen in Oatlands, a town a third the way up the modern Midland Highway between Hobart and Launceston, around one hundred miles to the north east, two months later so he had won his freedom.
Another story of persistent hope was that of Mary Anne Burgess whose husband Henry was a Sydney born carpenter sent to Sarah Island for stealing watches. Henry was struggling to look after his dead brother’s young family at the time (!) when he himself was far from well. Mary repeatedly petitioned Lt. Governor Arthur (remember how he was later torn between using the British Government’s conciliatory approach towards the treatment of Aborigines and the Settlers demand for their removal to Bass Strait Islands or extermination, conceding to the latter) to allow her to be with him on Sarah Island to care for him and eventually she had him assigned as her servant on the penal colony. Their grandson became Lord Mayor of Hobart.
On the humanity front, one freeman who chose to come to the island to build ships of his own design was Master Shipwright David Hoy, who turned the convict shipyard into the most productive in Australia at the time. He specialised in building fast ships which local Masters found hard to handle. In total from 1828 for five years until the colony closed, the yard turned out 31 whale boats, 10 launches, 2 gigs, 6 long boats, 6 skiffs, 3 cutters, 9 punts, 9 yawls, 1 shallop and 6 sundry vessels. The skills thus learned by the convicts would stand them in good stead for their eventual release, but for a few that time was just too far away. You may have twigged the disadvantage to the authorities of producing ships that were so fast they could not be caught by conventional vessels.
The Governor’s yacht, Penelope, a fast sailer built in the yard, was used in an escape attempt to Jamaica by three convicts. Ten others stayed on at the yard in 1833 to complete the building of the ocean going 121 ton Brig, the Frederick, and were last seen disappearing over the horizon to Chile 10,000 miles away in 1834. This incident has been preserved in the form of Australia’s longest running play, ‘The Ship that Never Was’ which is performed at the Museum in Strahan every day at 5.30 from September to May and the ad describes the escape as ‘a hilarious true story’ but sadly we were not there at the right time to see it.
These were not the only vessels removed from the yard; the refurbished Brig Cyprus, David Hoy’s first project in the yard, was sailed by escapees to China in 1829. Prizes for what he said when he saw the space she had previously occupied.
The blog of our visit to the island will come along shortly.
Dam the Dams
Today there is the John Butters Hydro-Electric Dam on the King River near Queenstown and the Gordon River Dam. With the generous supply of rainwater in Tasmania it seems the negative drying effect on the rivers beneath the dams is not the same reality that the drought ridden mainland experiences for example on the Great Murray River. The building of the Franklin River Dam was stopped by the federal government in July 1983 and fortunately set a precedent.
When we were researching our arrival at the Macquarie Harbour entrance we learned that opening the sluices at either dam can increase the outflow at Hell’s Gate dramatically, but we noticed no such excessive flow either when we arrived or left.
It was interesting to read that the division in attitude over the building of the dams was largely a class one, with the working classes seeing only the advantage of short-term employment in the dam building without looking to the future when they would again be unemployed, and the middle class conservationists and ‘greenie’s’ more futuristic opposition which won through on the Franklin Dam issue. Ken tells me that families are still divided over the issue even today. The struggle is never ending.
The Concept of Wilderness
What has been lost from the wilderness and I think is essential if it is to be deemed a wilderness in human eyes, is people living there in a mutual relationship that lacks the desire to exploit and spoil. Today humans seek only a superficial relationship by walking through or, like us, by dipping into the surroundings, preserving what we find in the lens of a camera as the romantic artist did back in the day with painted images of the Scottish Highlands, a genre brought here by artists such as William Charles Piguenit, to trap a visual image as a moment in time which inevitably misses out so much of the changing reality.
This disconnect with the land may in some ways be a good thing, a laisse faire, leave well alone that will allow nature to continue to evolve but it also means there is a vulnerability for the state of the land that could well be exploited by governments with a solely commercial, self-serving policy. Passive tourism is better than physical destruction because it wants to admire what is there.
Other dangerous humans seek only to take, abuse and destroy and the setting up of the World Heritage Site excludes both the baby and the bathwater. Aborigines would like to return one day to live on their traditional lands and maybe one hope for the survival of this country is if they do. What do you think?
To Liberated Sarah Island
The two fast cats you see tied up to Strahan dock both lead sheltered lives taking visitors across the expansive waters of Macquarie Harbour to explore Hell’s Gate, where we entered, Sarah Island and the Gordon River and we will come across both of them in our two day adventure.
We had waited for the twin troughs of a low pressure system, that had held Tasmania between their scissor-like grip for 48 hours, to move east before our much anticipated southern Macquarie Harbour expedition could begin.
The evening before Rob and I had gone for a shore side walk and found a resort where we knew we could buy the two black and white charts you see of Macquarie Harbour and the Gordon River drawn by local architect and businessman Trevor Norton. The lady there was aghast when she heard about the cost of a permit to visit the Gordon, as if it was not the normal way of things. She suggested we take ourselves up there on an experience now and pay later if necessary basis, so that is what we did.
Just before we set off a little blue penguin surfaced beside Zoonie, a complete surprise to us to see one so close to human activity.
There was a stiff breeze against Zoonie as we motored south, the air full of the excitement of adventure. We do not often have people aboard to share our lives on Zoonie, as you know, and memories came back from when we were traversing the Panama Canal and had Jane and Paul from Nora J and the two young Canadian doctors on board for a couple of days and how we asked them to stay for an extra night because we were enjoying their company so much.
We knew Ken and Bron well by now after twelve days cruising with them in Vanuatu and found our foursome to be an easy and thoroughly enjoyable group.
After five hours of motoring I turned Zoonie into the bay that has Sarah and her two outlying islands at the head, the first, Small Island where free women were housed in a cave to do the island’s laundry and nurse the sick and the second a graveyard for the many convicts who died here. We made our way carefully for the single little buoy that we could pick up provided there was enough room around it for Zoonie to swing. The depth gauge dropped to .9 but as the tidal range was about half a metre we figured Zoonie would be fine even with just one foot beneath her. There was a modern jetty to the west of the island but the grey cat was tied up there and as we motored ashore in the tender we saw the group of visitors making their way back to it having returned the colourful sunbrellas to the box at the conclusion of their visit; we had the island to ourselves.
What struck us first was how tiny the island was to be the scene of so much suffering. Only about 700 yards (1400 metres) long and 200 wide. The first thing tasked to the convicts was to clear it of vegetation, including the valuable Huon Pines, many of which can still be seen in the water and were used as the slipway base for the shipyard. In clearing of course the island was then exposed to the strong winds brought by extreme weather systems, so a windbreak fence was built right across the north side of the island (!)
That was the second juxtaposition, the barren landscape of history compared to the varied heights and greens of today’s vegetation. It is a beautiful natural and diverse garden now, silent and peaceful and as far as the local aborigines are concerned, haunted.
Visitors have been coming here through curiosity for over a hundred years and I wondered what impression the Victorians took away with them. The beauty of the surrounding area must have made an impression, the natural waters of the harbour and the mountains in the distance, especially on a clear blue day such as we had. Walking by the ruins of the main buildings, showing the precise care with which they were erected and have withstood the test of time, I imagined Bill streaking past in his attempt to shock the doctor’s wife, causing a ruckus of cheering and merriment I hope and then of course the dragging of re-offending convicts to the post to be flogged, sometimes to death for misdemeanours such as allegedly telling a lie, shoving a fellow prisoner off a jetty and of a more entrepreneurial type, selling brooms and bringing soup to the settlement to sell.
The little pink berry is an edible peppercorn and left a dry sensation in the roof of my mouth.
We thought we had finished our wandering after an hour or so but then saw we had missed the path to the prison buildings, old and new so decided we shouldn’t miss those. The new one, clinging to the rocky cliff reminded me of a Scottish castle and the prisoners found it quite comfortable, but read the story of the aborigines imprisoned underneath for no crimes apart from being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To Kelly’s Basin for the night
So named after Captain James Kelly, a sealer and harbourmaster who found the entrance to Macquarie Harbour in 1815, this little inlet (number 6 on the Trevor Norton chart) provided more than one safe anchorage out of the persistent winds and we anchored Zoonie in the inner bay behind the little ‘hook’ headland known as St Legers Pt, a perfect spot complete with a sea eagle and helicopter at different times circling overhead.
In the distance, at the head of the bay we spotted a long jetty reaching out into the water and were drawn to explore East Pillinger, once a boom copper smelting, logging and brick making town but now consumed by the rainforest. The old jetty still struggled to exist, reaching 240 metres across the water, the steel railway track suspended where the wooden supports have long since rotted away. Sawn timber and bricks made here in the brick kilns were loaded onto steamers for transport to Strahan and beyond.
The town was only active for five short years, like the gold rush towns of North America and there was nothing left to keep people here after the Lyell Company was taken over following the death, back in London of its owner and the preference of Strahan as the main town.
It was fun scrambling around the ruins, peering into the dense bush and seeing the odd man-made structure, imagining the sounds of human activity and the noise of railway trucks trundling along metal in this once 1000 strong settlement. What must it have been like for the few remaining inhabitants who lived her until the mid WW11 years, providing refreshments and water for the passing trains? As peaceful as life was for the Claytons back in Bathurst maybe.
Four go up the Gordon River
I must warn you there are going to be many pictures of trees in this blog as the opportunity to enjoy the few remaining areas of thriving temperate rainforest were just too good to ignore, visually and photographically.
The big grey cat, Spirit of the Wild that was moored at the Sarah Island jetty the day before now overtook us on her way up the Gordon to Heritage Landing, where we hoped we could moor in between the two cats’ visits. She soon disappeared around one of the many gentle bends in the river. We were amazed at the depth of the river, in places it reached over 30 metres and anchoring would have been impossible with the steep to banks. All along the shore little tinnies, small aluminium boats motoring gently along parallel with the shore, the occupants fly fishing and waving to us as we passed.
The density of the trees was a real treat having seen so many areas stripped of their entire crop. But it was not just the density, or the fact they reached right to the shoreline, just as the early navigators saw them, nor was it the multitude of shades and hues of green but also the diversity of tree types. We tried desperately to discern the celery topped pines and the mighty huons, the blackwoods and paperbarks and many others we knew were in there, but in the end we just enjoyed the sheer abundance, a taste of what these areas were all like once upon a time from our vantage route deep in the river valley.
Looking at the time tables on the brochures of the two big tourist cats we tried to work out when they would be away from the Heritage Jetty so we could tie up and have a look around the rainforest walk. To confirm I radioed the skipper of the Spirit of the Wild and he confirmed they would be clear by 1.30. So we made our way downstream from where we had been hovering and Rob circled Zoonie in towards the jetty. This wasn’t going to be easy because the piles and lines were arranged for a high freeboard cat not the likes of a sailing yacht.
Bron and I struggled to get a bow line attached at first but then working together I slung the line around the smooth fat pile and Bron caught it, so the bow was safe. Ken had jumped ashore by this time and was about to take a stern line from Rob when the big red cat arrived. Oh dear.
So we cast off quickly and moved away and the skipper this time said he would be just half an hour and then we’d have the jetty to ourselves for over four hours before the evening cruise arrived. I was impressed by their friendliness and despite the fact this is their jetty they didn’t mind us using it at all.
The 600 metre boardwalk rainforest path led us through a tiny section but was a taste of the dense interior. It was also very dry for a rainforest. The tree types were identified with rusted tubular steel shapes of a chair, a punt, canoe and hut etc and I have included a few, but the overall impression was of natural chaos, the rotted, the living and the dying plant life that makes up the ever changing forest. There is a picture of a little mud mound with a hole in it, there are billions of these and they are where the freshwater crayfish live and nibble the roots of plants in their tunnels for food. The raised boardwalk protects the delicate ground surface where these creatures live.
Imagine trying to make an escape from Sarah Island through this undergrowth as Richard Morris and his two mates did.
We were struck by the lack of bird sounds or presence in the forest but then you can read that ‘a riverine forest offers little variety when it comes to food and shelter’, the birds we saw were along the river, shags, cormorants, kingfisher, currawong and sea eagles feeding from the water.
Back aboard Zoonie we made our way back downriver with that wonderful experience tucked away in our ‘bag’ and turned left for Birch’s Inlet where Ken had spotted a nice little place to anchor for the night.
Our minds were turning now to our departure from Macquarie, Nichola would sail up the coast and follow it around along Bass Strait to complete their circumnavigation back to Low Head and their mooring in George Town near the mouth of the Tamar while we would head for Portland on the south coast of Victoria and back on the mainland.
So we listened to the weather forecast that evening broadcast by a lady with exceptional talent. During the forecast we heard a phone ring in the background of her studio three times during the broadcast and heard the male voice answer and deal with the enquiry. She stayed calm and concentrated and kept going, only cutting the transmission a couple of times despite the distractions.
I was so impressed I called her up at the end of the report when they invite callers and commended her on her professional broadcast despite the interruptions. She came back on laughing and thought my praise was ‘cute’ and giggled through the rest of the callers messages.