Strahan

Initially, I’d planned to only be in Strahan for one day. Due to a failure to turn on my cell phone alarm, however, I missed the bus to Hobart. And because it only comes every two days I was stuck in Strahan.

The extra time allowed me to take a hike I’d wanted to do the day before. For some reason the path was closed. It was raining all day, which seemed appropriate for walking through rain forest. Hogarth Falls were beautiful.

On my walk back through town that afternoon, one of the bikers was standing on the footpath by the tavern. He recognized me from the night before and invited me to join the group inside for drinks and watching the Melbourne Cup on TV. Admittedly, none of them seemed to care much about the horse race but had placed bets on it anyway. It was miserable outside so we stayed at the tavern talking sports, art, politics and so on.

The next day I created several sand sculptures. It began with a suggestion of two platypuses. Those two weren't enough to occupy much time--and by this point I'd done everything I wanted to do in town--so I made a turtle and a snail. There were a couple little girls playing with their dads on the playground nearby, so I asked them for advice on what to make next. The girls got fairly excited about a dinosaur and wanted to help. One of them promptly stepped on all of the animals I'd made thus far while the other piled some wet sand into a mound with me. They stuck around for a good fifteen minutes before getting bored and moving on. I finished the dinosaur and think it ended up pretty good.

After creating some art, I went to look at the two galleries. They both had some amazing woodwork as well as paintings, photographs and glass. Most of the wood pieces were crafted from Huon pine. The native tree has an incredibly fine grain, growing miniscule amounts per year, and has thus been highly prized by craftsmen since settlement. Most pine forests were hard to access and high in the mountain bush, which is one of the reasons why the railroads were built to the west from cities like Hobart and Launceston. Had the pines not been so difficult to log and transport there would probably be none left. After a while they realized how slowly the trees grew and that some in the forests were over 3000 years old. Now the piners only use trees after they have fallen naturally. It limits high production of Huon goods but still allows for their use.

The rest of the day was mostly spent birdwatching and drawing. Minimally exciting. Incredibly restful.

To the West

The bus ride between Devonport and Strahan was spectacular. We began by passing through farmland and vineyards, but over the course of several hours the scenery progressively transformed into mountains, rainforest and then the ocean coast.

There were brief stops every few towns to unload passengers and enable other riders to stretch their legs for a bit. Our first stop was in Sheffield.

Almost every building in Sheffield was from the colonial era. There weren’t too many buildings because it’s such a small town, but almost every one of them had a mural. Some were paintings of schoolchildren peering in through the windows of the shop, others related to colonization, and some were purely abstract. And if that wasn’t enough there were a dozen or so freestanding murals displayed in a park by the visitor center.

We also made a short stop off at Cradle Mountain. Several people disembarked there to start the 5-6 day hike on the Overland Track. It’s supposed to be a beautiful hike, going by Dove Lake and ending up at Lake St. Clair. I thought of doing the hike myself but was turned off upon learning in recent years there have been additions of hotel-like accomodation instead of just campsites along the path. Instead, it seemed like a better idea to trek the shorter and less touristy trails and see more of the island.

I arrived in Strahan around 3pm and settled into my room at the nearly empty hostel. There was one other person staying there when I arrived, and we only ran into each other a couple times. It felt far more like a hotel that happened to be in little cabins. There were beautiful plants around the site and a small patch of forest by the creek on one side of the cabins. Rabbits and birds were often hanging around.

Before the sun set I wanted to get a good view of the harbor from Water Tower Hill—which is exactly what it sounds like. There was a row of trees blocking the view from the top of the hill so all I could see was the water. Seeing as how no one was around and the water tower itself was easily accessible… I may have disobeyed an “Authorised Personnel Only” sign. Though the view wasn’t actually much better than one spot on the ground, it was worth the fun of climbing the tower.

At a theater by the water there’s a nightly performance of a play about the last convicts on Sarah Island and their escape. Sarah Island was the first penal colony in Tasmania. It sits in Macquarie Harbor a short boat ride away from Strahan.

After the play it was still light out so I strolled along the beach and started working on a sculpture in the sand. People kept stopping by to look at me working. One woman kept asking questions about how I learned to sculpt (which I had no answer to) and was quite enamoured with the process. She invited me to dinner with her friends who were having a barbeque at the top of the beach.

Apparently these people were a large group of bikers on vacation traveling around Tasmania. Twenty years ago they formed a club in Melbourne and had since moved around the country, raised families and whatnot. This was the first time most of them had seen the entire group in years.