Strahan is the only port on the west coast of Tasmania. In fact it’s the only town of any significance on the west coast because if you go west from Tasmania, the first land fall is Argentina. So the weather has quite a long run-up before assaulting poor little Tassie. So why would anyone want to live here? I guess that’s one of the reasons the harshest penal colony in Australia’s colonial history was put on Sarah Island, a few miles away from Strahan in Macquarie Harbour. Now, with its infamous history well and truly behind it, it’s a picturesque little maritime town with terrible weather.
Strahan is also something of a holiday destination. When the CB and I lived in Zeehan (about 40km from Strahan) we were surprised (initially) to learn that some of the locals went to Strahan for their holidays. Some of them hadn’t been to the eastern side of Tassie and considered the north island of Australia to be “overseas”. Salt of the earth people but somewhat insular.
One of the country’s most famous rivers – the Gordon – empties into Macquarie Harbour which incidentally is 6 times as big as Sydney Harbour but has only a 60m wide access to the ocean hence the two lighthouses which attempted, not always successfully, to guide ships into and out of the harbour. Why you would attempt that at night is mystifying, but some did and suffered the consequences.
The Gordon is famous environmentally and by extension politically. You can look it up. Suffice to say it was almost dammed (not damned) but due to political intervention, wasn’t. So a boat trip to Hell’s Gates, the entrance to the harbour, and then down the Gordon was very much on the agenda. And they were serving booze from the get-go which was 9.00am once we were underway so the incentive to do an all day (or most day) tour was irresistible.
Hell’s Gates is very much as the name suggests. Having spent all of my working life in the mining industry I am here to tell you the people on the front of our 34m catamaran, when we passed through the Gates would have been required to wear life jackets, safety harnesses and hard-hats at least and no kids would have been allowed if a mine manager rather than a tour operator was running that boat. But the boat proprietors were obviously oblivious to the risks of having their clients flung to the deck or worse still, overboard as the boat bucked and tossed like a tasered kangaroo. Notwithstanding we all had a jolly good laugh afterwards then settled back for the trip to the Gordon River.
On our Gordon River cruise we had occasion to stop in the heritage area and do a 400m boardwalk through the impenetrable rain forest. While GF2 rushed off to find a spot to have a smoke in the strictly non-smoking dripping wet rain forest, GF1 was taking pictures of everything moss and fungus to add to her extensive photographic collection of such things, the size of which would fill a full set of Encyclopaedias Brittanica. I thought she would be the only person on the planet to engage in such activity. I was wrong. There are 50 or so others with similar interests and they were all on our boat.
Macquarie Harbour is also home to countless fish farms. All I remember about the operation of these things is the fish are the size of your little finger when introduced, are left for 12-18 months then when they are five or six kilos they’re sucked up by a pipe into a boat and despatched to your plate. Sucked up by a pipe – where are the vegans swimming out to these fish farms in the freezing water and chaining themselves to the easily accessible pipe infrastructures to protest this fish sucking. Surely this would be much more effective than invading an abattoir or a nicely temperate farm. Apparently not in the fairyland they occupy.