Gordon River country

There being little reason to hang around a campground where frankly all we got for our $45 was a toilet, we made the best escape in recent times at the dizzily impressive time of 10am. Long distant memories are the 8am starts in winter in Central Oz. Teenagers will not be moved.

Today was definitely a day of curly roads up and down. The joke here is that manufacturers can’t sell bent roads with double lines, so Tassie got them cheap and proceeded to make straight roads by lining up alternate bends. The up and down gets thrown in for good measure. Still, a nice day for it. Blue skies and the day warmed up so quickly that you could actually feel the warm bits and the cool bits before they mixed up later in the day. May have even nudged 30, so it would appear summer arrived today.

We climbed out of the Derwent valley and soon made our way into the Gordon Valley where we would remain for the rest of the day, more or less. The altitude was still high, but the rising temperature had us peeling off the layers as we struggled to acclimatise to the early morning 20 degrees. We were soon in real summer mode.

The Gordon Valley started with the Franklin River. As I have said earlier, this was the point that the green movement started its run and earned some victories. Flush with the success of the Poatina, then Gordon hydro schemes, the planners had their eye on the next Gordon River scheme, the famous “Gordon Below Franklin” hydroelectric scheme. As the name suggested, this was another dam planned for the Gordon River but at a point below the junction with the Franklin River. The Franklin River would be lost altogether, drowned in a huge dam that would forever make a man-made scar in the last wild river wilderness area in Tasmania.

The surveyors had moved in. There was equipment beginning earthworks. This was going to be a ground-based campaign whose effects would be felt in the highest political and legal circles of the land, and in the media around the world. Activists climbed trees or chained themselves to machinery. There were arrests and confrontation in frontier country in land previously few people had seen, but soon photographs were travelling around the world. The federal government acted to ban the development in the face of compelling Australian public opinion. The Tasmanians appealed at the abuse of power in trampling state’s rights. The High Court of Australia reached a 4-3 split decision than in fact the Federal Government could override the states rights. The project ended and the green movement was up and running.

Today, the Franklin River remains wild, but the frontier tag has been somewhat diluted. We can drive to the river to look at it, and commercial tour operators will take you on a 10-12 day rafting expedition down the Franklin River and into the Gordon, exploring country that can only be reached this way. However, like a wild animal, the river remains unpredictable, and such expeditions are dangerous without an experienced operator.

The other way to get into this country is to walk it. Along the road is the beginning of a walk to Frenchman’s Cap, a 3 day hike through challenging terrain to one of the more dramatic peaks in the area. We experienced a little of it by walking to the bridge over the Franklin that begins the trek, to watch a lone woman walking out, filthy from the waist down from the mud of the high plains.

Another highlight on the way down was a brief pause at Nelson Falls. The crossing of the Nelson River was a site of one of the construction camps for the road to Queenstown, and later to Strahan. Almost all evidence of this settlement has been reclaimed by the forest, perhaps emphasising that nature is forever, and man’s imprint only transient.

The road was constructed to give access to the Mt Lyell Mine at Queenstown. Still active today, the mine area has exploited some 21 separate ore bodies in the area, with copper now the major target, but previously commercial quantities of gold and silver as well. Queenstown shows evidence of a confident beginning with solid buildings.

Strahan was the port for the mine, with a major construction effort made to build a rail line the 40-odd kilometres between the locations. Even with numerous bridges, the grades required novel rack-and-pinion technology to safely traverse the distance. While the kids hit the rail museum, I chased down the IGA, one of the best and most compact in the country (and I have seen a few). I expect the provisioning from this point on may be challenging.

And so on to Strahan. Only a brief drive-through today on the way to our campsite at Macquarie Heads, for tomorrow we are back there, bright and early, for our harbour and river cruise. Should be another good day.