Cruising Macquarie Harbour

Strahan is a nice town. Quiet, and now particularly focussed on the tourism industry, but not (yet) in a garish kind of way. The main task for the day was the cruise, but some unexpected surprises padded out the day.

The Macquarie Harbour cruise has changed little in 20 years. The boat has been updated, travels faster, and so the optional landing on Sarah Island is now included, and I suspect the catering is better. But the fundamental formula remains the same. Leave Strahan harbour, a bit of commentary about the history of the place, cruise to Hell’s Gates, then traverse the full length of the harbour to the Gordon River, cruise upstream to Heritage Landing, a short walk on the boardwalk to a large old huon pine, now fallen over.   Returning to the boat they serve lunch while limited to low speed exiting the river, then dash across to Sarah Island. Here there is an informative guided tour for an hour before returning to the boat for a quick dash home.

For us, the day dawned a little foreboding, but not raining. The few spots on the windscreen on the drive in does not constitute rain in these parts. While the wind was calm enough, a boat that can do 30 knots is going to sweep your hair back, and any kind of headwind at all just adds to the effect.

The Heads of Macquarie Harbour, christened Hell’s Gates by the convicts created havoc on shipping before work was done to stabilise and deepen the channel, from 2 to 7 fathoms. While the damming of the Gordon has stopped the winter flood from snow melt, the depth has reduced to 5, but sufficient for the shipping that plies the waterway. The work was undertaken after the lighthouse keeper’s family all perished less than 200m from home after returning from a holiday.

Macquarie Harbour was settled at Sarah Island to provide convict labour to harvest Huon Pine to be sent to the shipyards in Hobart. Unfortunately, while favourable winds allowed sailing to Hobart in 36 hours, a round trip journey could take 9 weeks and so as a wood supply it was unreliable. The solution was determined to be to build the ships on Sarah Island, and over 10 years, around 130 were produced, mostly small, but ranging in size of to 70 tons. At peak production a boat would roll off the slip every two weeks.

Sarah Island was fabled to be inescapable, but there were many attempts, and a proportion were successful. However, the line between inmate and gaoler was fine at times, and the concept of right and wrong, fair and fraud and rules and justice seemed twisted on occasion. Examples of the terms of trade in such a society, peaking in the hundreds, showed a peculiar adaptation to the conditions.

Sarah Island predates Port Arthur. The latter was responsible for the demise of the former, but the former moulded the latter. The harsh conditions imposed on Sarah Island to reform the inmates were continued at Port Arthur. Even the concept of solitary confinement, catered for but rarely used on Sarah Island because the inmates went mad, was refined into the separate prison for 120 inmates at Port Arthur. Sarah Island was closed because shipbuilding at Port Arthur was more convenient, but not before the final ship built wrote a merry tale in history.

As I said earlier, the authorities liked to share the story that the island was inescapable. However, by the time of its closing, the reputation for Port Arthur was if anything worse. At least, “the devil you know…” certainly applied. The last boat to built on Sarah was one of the biggest, designed to move its cargo of equipment and convicts around to Port Arthur. However, its convict builders were in no mood to go without a fight and so just before the ship was meant to sail, a convict crew of ten stole the ship and sailed it to Chile. Unfortunately part of their plan was to scuttle the ship and claim to be English shipwreck victims with no papers and so the brave little ship with so much history was lost. The convict crew went various ways, but four of the crew were returned some years later to Hobart for trial and were sentenced to hanging. However, in what must be an early example of the Australian rooting for the underdog, a legal loophole found said that without the appropriate paperwork for the ships construction, nor its transferral to the Admiralty, then the ship as such didn’t exist. The crew pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of stealing shipbuilding materials and escaped with their lives.

Strahan’s history is inescapably linked to Huon Pine. The trees grow only in wet ground in riverbanks in SW Tasmania, so their method of harvest was somewhat different. The trees were initially known only from logs floating in Macquarie harbour and in similar nearby river mouths before they were linked with the living specimens that were their source. This discovery led to the preferred method of harvest. Trees were simply felled, dragged the short distance, if any, to the water, and left to float downstream. A boom line was setup near the river mouth to catch the logs and when sufficient were available they were rafted together and towed to Strahan. Here mills were setup and the sawn timber shipped out.

Today Huon is still harvested, but no trees are being felled. The same features of the timber that made it perfect for boatbuilding means that when the trees die of old age and fall, they don’t rot. Fallen trees of up to 35000 years of age have been harvested, some buried metres deep in peat bogs.

Our guide on Sarah Island introduced us to Australia’s longest running theatrical production, now having gone through 5000 performances. It covers the story of the last “Ship that Never Was” from Sarah Island. The two-handed play was ably augmented with willing and convict audience participation.

The performance was not until 5:30pm so we had a little time to fill in. The last remaining sawmill on the Strahan waterfront is still licensed to cut huon and provides a working display to catch the tourists returning from the cruises. There is also available to purchase huon pine in varying forms from raw boards to finished artwork in various guises, all on the waterfront.

Crayfish are also big down here. They even can be caught by visiting Queenslanders apparently, although we chose the easier option of buying one from the shop for a taste.

Home was via the airport, one of the last remaining known habitats of the rare and endangered ground parrot, which the twitcher has claimed, although without a photo. We then went back to our campsite near Macquarie Heads to stroll the beach and watch the sunset. Strahan locals claim the air here is the cleanest in the world, making landfall only three times in it’s journey around the world, in South America, New Zealand and here. Perhaps they are right – trapping colour in a sunset is almost impossible.