63 and free

Welcome to Strahan (pronounced “Strawn”) on the west coast of Tazzie. If you look at the map, it’s easy to pick out, given that Macquarie Harbour is HUGE (almost 6X the size of Sydney Harbour). We took a 6 hour cruise of the harbour and Gordon River on the new jet catamaran used by World Heritage Cruises. This beauty cruises at 27 knots in the harbour and about 2 in the river.

It included stops at the infamous prison on Sarah Island, and at Heritage Landing about 12 km upriver.

This harbour was a total bust back in the day. The reason?

Hell’s Gate, an 80 metre wide pass from the harbour to the Indian ocean (or Southern Ocean, depending on where you draw the boundaries).

As you can imagine, the tide currents are ROUGH. Despite many years of efforts and many ship wrecks, they were never able to solve the problem. Eventually all the logging and mining riches were moved out by train.

The next stop was Sarah Island – a tiny island with a brutal history.

Opened in 1822 as a “secondary prison”, that is, for repeat offenders, it was truly “hell on earth”. One convict attempted to kill another, believing death was better than life on Sarah Island.

It served as a model for Port Arthur (see our post entitled “A very somber place”), which opened the year Sarah Island closed. The link below provides some background:

Visiting Hell on Earth

It is almost impossible to sense what it must have been like in 1823… Like Port Arthur, it is a beautiful but eerie place.

It is worth noting that the indomitable spirit of man is fabulously exemplified in the true story of “The Ship that never was”. This is worth a read!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_escape

We then crossed over to the Gordon River. A stunningly beautiful river, it was one of the main places to log the valuable Huon (“Hew-en”) tree, starting in the convict era and continuing through to the l970s. Fortunately, it was never a mechanized operation, so the men could only cherry-pick the big trees by the water. The tree remains to this day.

The most fascinating story was the fight between the all-powerful Hydroelectric Commission (said to be immune from the government) that wanted to build a dam on the Gordon River (flooding the Franklin River basin) and a coalition of environmentalists and loggers (called “piners” here).

It was one helluva fight, lasting from 1978 until the dam was finally cancelled in 1983. The area being named as a World Heritage site helped. We were told that it checked off 7 of the 10 boxes necessary to be considered by UNESCO for such a designation. Four are based on natural beauty and six on cultural significance. Apparently the “Tasmania World Heritage Area” checked off all the natural beauty boxes and three of the six cultural boxes, and remains to this day the only area on earth to achieve this number.

For more on this incredible struggle:

https://digital-classroom.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/franklin-dam-protests

But, back to what we saw: