HANG on to your eyeballs when you go out on deck – especially when we get to Hell’s Gate.” The captain’s instructions were conveyed in the typical roughshod Aussie vernacular, and were followed by the announcement we were heading for “a big fat low.’’ That’s low pressure to you and I.
Our boat was heading for the GordonRiver on a day trip from Tasmania’s west coast town of Strahan, gateway to one of the world’s foremost UNESCO World Heritage sites. First it had to negotiate MacquarieHarbour, the notorious entrance where the Southern Ocean crashes in. No wonder it was dubbed Hell’s Gate by UK convicts bound for the SarahIsland penal colony.
As our tour guide on the ‘escape-proof’ island later explained, there were no second chances for riff-raff in 1826 – Britain had a colony to build. Cheshire handkerchief thief John Dady didn’t know his light fingers would find him on a boat bound for Van Diemen’s Land, condemned to a life of forced labour. You can learn about convicts like Dady on the tour.
SarahIsland is so isolated it makes Alcatraz seem like an afternoon in Toys R Us. If you reached Australia without scurvy or rickets getting you first, your chances of escaping were slim. You’d have to sail another 8,000 miles due west before hitting land again – at the Falkland Islands.
Today, Tasmania is much more welcoming. Instead of forced labour there’s forced overindulgence on the excellent local food and wine, and, rather ironically, given the number of failed escape attempts from SarahIsland, forced expulsion for any tourist with pie-in-the-sky ideas about staying.
‘Tassie’ is friendly, familiar and easy. No wonder it’s full of mainland Australians who have left the good life for an even better life. Many Aussies find their spiritual home in the state capital, Hobart, only a 20-minute drive from the bush. But Tasmania’s stunning natural beauty reaches its zenith on the wild and rugged west coast. Take the pristine Gordon River Wilderness Area. Not only is it World Heritage listed, it’s the highest-ranked heritage site in the world, meeting seven of the required 10 criteria.
If there were an equivalent syndrome for overindulging in wild beauty, as there is in culture, it would surely find its roots in Tasmania. And like Florence, where Stendhal syndrome finds its origins, Tasmania packs a lot into a small space. If you’ve already chased possums and Tasmanian devils around Cradle Mountain National Park, and been blown away by the rugged beauty of the Freycinet Peninsula and Wine Glass Bay, you could be forgiven for underestimating the Gordon River experience. The Norfolk Broads it isn’t.
In Australia, no stranger to natural superlatives, it’s never just a bird, but a fiery-chested rosella or a rainbow lorikeet.
A tree is quite possibly the ‘deadly stinging’ or ‘strangling fig’ variety. In this case, our visit to a mere ‘forest’ was actually a peek at the largest strand of wet temperate rainforest in the world, most of it untrod by human feet and where, instead of wet leaves under your shoe, you’ll find Jurassic remains.
Safely through Hell’s Gate we cruised into one of the calmer river arteries, where the treacly water, discoloured by the run-off from 2,000-year-old Huon pine trees, courses a meandering scar through the rainforest. Several kilometres in, we disembarked at Heritage Landing for a tramp through a prehistoric forest that contains trees, rare plants and animals from every period, including the land crayfish, around when dinosaurs roamed the planet.
Gulping down lungfulls of the purest air this side of the equator, we padded past low-light mosses and liverworts, draped like moth-eaten scarves around the branches of King Billy pine and celery-top pine, and leatherwood and native laurel trees. Geologically, Tasmania has more in common with Antarctica than mainland Australia – Hobart is a feeder city for many of the icebreaker cruises – and its southwestern tip was once attached to the ancient land mass known as Gondwana. Many of the state’s endemic plants hark back to a period when the southern continents formed one land mass.
Unlike the loamy humidity of a tropical rainforest, the atmosphere is cool and damp, the rainforest canopy casting a heavy gloom over its interlopers. The silence was so absolute I could hear the leathery fronds of the rattle fern quivering in the breeze. As forests go, it was awesome.
Days later, on the flight back to London, I was handed a bottle of water labelled ‘Product of Cape Grim, NW Tasmania – the purest natural water in the known world’.
The ‘cleanest air in the world’ is measured at CapeGrim – it hasn’t touched land since leaving South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
I couldn’t have asked for a better souvenir – 500ml of Tasmanian wilderness winging its way to a less-than pristine Tooting. I raised a plastic glass to handkerchief thief Dady and the other casualties of progress.
