Walking around Strahan harbor, collecting mushrooms for dinner in Wynyard with family.
After a quick continental breakfast in the 1896 mansion that’s our hotel, we walk left around Strahan’s bay to an old train station, look at its Thomas the Tank Engine cars, return to the manse, load the car and go right to the Strahan — pronounced “Strawn” — harbor’s visitor center.
The center houses an exhibit called West Coast Reflections, a somber but vastly informative exhibit about the history of Tasmania’s west coast aborigines, huon pine logging, and environmental movement, which, way back in the 70s, was begun by a group dubbed pejoratively by Tassie press as “the Greenies.” This rag tag group, according to our traveling companion, Maureen, was the origin of today’s Green Party. It was formed to save the Franklin River from being dammed by Tasmania’s HydroElectric Commission (HEC) to produce hydroelectric power. After 13 years of protests and a blockade of the river by small boats, the Greenies managed to gin up enough press and worldwide interest that UNESCO declared the vast area around the Franklin — about 20 percent of all Tasmania — a World Heritage site (the first such site declared for BOTH cultural and geological reasons).
Almost simultaneously, the Greenies were ascendant in Australian politics and, joined by other much larger parties, elected Bob Hawke as Prime Minister in 1983. He declared the Franklin River dam dead but the Tassie liberal government defied the Aussie federal government’s edict so the case went to trial at the High Court, which eventually ruled 4-3 to damn the dam (July 1, 1983). The ruling accomplished many things: It transformed HEC from being a large construction authority determining state policy into a water conservation administrator. It also was one of the first instances in the world where conservationists changed the politics of a nation. And the culture of a continent.
All that is interesting, but a bit dry as history. More affecting were the exhibits about the pioneers who logged the huge huon pines in the forests, and the poem by Jim Everett, an aborigine, that declares his tribe’s feelings about being dispossessed. The poem is long; here is a small but, we think, telling slice:
But those who are not of our kind
Who drain our knowledge with white minds,
And take it all and give back naught
Yet call themselves the expert taught
Are thieves who take a heritage ours,
And twist it so we lose our powers.
We leave Strahan and motor to a small, now defunct mining town named Zeehan for lunch at “The Pit Stop,” one of about four buildings.
We motor on to a small, now defunct tin-mining town named Waratah falls, which has turned its courthouse into a four-room museum. The museum houses a collection, from roughly between 1880 to maybe 1960, without any curated plan or explanation, of pictures, paintings, rock and mineral samples, engine parts, musical instruments, school report cards, family snapshots, maps, engineering drawings, political cartoons, clothing, dolls, court papers, letters to the local council … it’s overwhelming. Meaningless in its breadth and lack of criteria for inclusion, but we leave with the feeling that we know the town and its inhabitants in a very intimate way. That we have been part of its rise and fall. It’s sad and fascinating.
We motor on in a light drizzle on the typical Tasmanian winding, too-narrow, no shoulder two-lane road until Stephen kind of yells softly in surprise and pulls over to the side of the road in the middle of a forest. All four of us get out of the car and pick boletus mushrooms, known locally as Slippery Jacks because they’re the size of Portobellos but their tops are slimy in the extreme. We’re going to have them for dinner … NOT the beautiful white-speckled crimson red mushrooms that also grow near the side of the road.
We motor on … there’s a lot of motoring these past two days, most of it in rain. At the moment, the clouds are so dense over the road that the entire world is gray. Absolute, unvarying, can’t see the trees 10 feet away gray. That lasts about a half hour.
We motor on to Wynyard, to Maureen Corbett’s home right on the bank of the River Inglis. A blue heron sits demurely on a fallen tree in the water. Her flower garden is full of blue and red and violet and orange and white flowers. The water lilies in her pond have passed their prime.
Alan and Linda, who visited us briefly in Hobart, come for a lovely stir-fry dinner that Stephen cooks, and we all drink and play a rummy-like card game called Five Crowns.
And sleep like logs.
Another bizarre, unpredictable, fascinating day in Tasmania.
Two Tramps 