Journey to the Apple Isle: To Hell and Back

What a day!! A Gordon River Cruise on the Lady Jane Franklin II.

We began with the 20 minute walk to the wharf, ready to board before 8.15am.

Lovely sights in Macquarie Harbour (which heretofore I have called the estuary - whoops)

The first place the boat went was out through Macquarie Heads into the Great Southern Ocean. The heads are referred to as "Hell's Gates", so named by convicts brought through them to Sarah Island in the harbour. They are very narrow - 60 metres across, with rocky outcrops on either side.

The ocean you can see to the right in this picture (below) is very shallow and does not provide entry to the harbour.

Macquarie Harbour is the 2nd largest natural harbour in Australia (in area) - and Sydney Harbour is not the largest!

The row of rocks you can see here (below) are part of a breakwater that was used to channel the water to make the entrance deeper. Later rails were added to get cargo out onto larger ships. There were still some rusty rails in evidence just outside the heads.

Lady Jane went out through the heads, circled and came back into the harbour again. This is the lighthouse as we were coming back in.

I should mention how all these photos look a little on the dark and gloomy side. That's because it was kind of a dark and gloomy day, very cloudy, but not cold or wet, although you could see the rain falling over the mountains in the distance.

The mountains, by the way, were part of the Great Dividing Range before the land separated all those years ago........

Macquarie Harbour is home to auaculture (fish farming). They farm atlantic salmon and ocean trout. Another bit of trivia - the trout are the same fish we call rainbow trout in our inland rivers,

After coming back through the heads we were taken up the Gordon River. All of the water - harbour, river - is brown. This is just like at home when ti-tree from a creek or river stains the water except in this case it comes from a grass that grows prolifically in this area. What is the grass called, I hear you ask. That's a great question..... I never worked out if the captain was saying Butt grass or Buck grass.....................

Anyway - the point is that the brown water provides very good reflections.

First stop for the day was a heritage walk through the forest on the banks of the Gordon River. I believe this is temerate rain forest. There was a lot of amazing lichen and fungi throughout.

Now, although this bit of wood in the photo below just looks like.... well...... a bit of wood really....

It is actually a Huon Pine that is 2,600 years old. It is not dead, just tired (it fell)...............

and these trees shot out from it. They are 900 years old.

These trees are very slow growing, as per the examples below.

This 1,000 year old, tired tree..........

is host to this 80 year old tree.

Now - who has a Tasmanian Oak kitchen??? Well sorry if this is new info for you but there is actually no such thing as Tasmanian Oak. It's actually bluegum - it's just that no-one would buy it when they called it bluegum! Go figure..........

The next stop on the day's itinerary was Sarah Island.

Sarah Island was the very first penal settlement on Van Dieman's Land - before Port Arthur.

No photos can do justice to the guided tour of the island that we were treated to.The tour guides were actors who take part in a play that runs in Strahan every evening. The play tells the story of the final escape from Sarah Island of the last convicts left on the island, who were supposed to sail the last boat built on the island to Hobart. Instead the convicts ditched the soldiers and crew, stole the boat and sailed to Chile. True story!!
I'm pretty sure our tour guides took a certain amount of poetic licence with the stories they told of life on the island but it was very entertaining
The island was completely denuded of trees when the people first arrived, but you would never guess it now as the trees have all grown up through the ruins.

Below is the site of the kitchen