The Unexpected

January 16, 2002-Crusin'
(photos:Lady HJane Elliot,
Captain Toby,
Queenstown copper mine)

We started our day with the Gordon River Cruise on the catamaran Lady Jane Elliot. We’ve never been on a boat that had classes of passengers, but this one did. We went first class. That means we had run of the boat, sat on the top deck in the captain’s lounge, got a buffet lunch (we got to be first in line), gourmet cheese & crackers, gourmet cookies, & all we could drink (hard & soft). The boat holds about 125 passengers, 6 crew, & has 3 bathrooms. We also had our own purser just for our deck & our assigned reclining lounge chairs with tray tables. Life was good. I wish there was a way we could go first class in the air. The boat trip was a 65 mile long, 5-½ hour cruise up the river with two stops of an hour & a half hour each.

We left the harbor at a speed of 27 knots & headed for Hell’s Gate. It’s the entrance/exit to Macquairie Harbor that has claimed a number of ships. The weather was glorious & the seas were only 2.7 meters, so the swells were fun. The captain said that the boat could weather 30 meter seas if the wind was slow & the waves were well spaced. We carefully steered through the narrow channel avoiding the sinister sandbar. Other than being a shipping hazard, Hell’s Gate was named for being the entrance to notorious Sarah Island, a prison. We turned back to the harbor in order to access the mouth of the Gordon River. The water in the ocean was dark blue, but in the harbor it was brown. The reason was twofold. There’s a lot of tannin leeching into the river from the trees along its banks & there’s a 10-foot layer of fresh water that floats on top of the salt water.

The harbor is huge & is the perfect site for rainbow trout fish farms. The trout thrive in the combination salt/fresh water. They’re kept in round net enclosures & are fed fresh fish pellets. Some of the pens are 120 meters (about 360 ft.) in circumference & hold 80,000 fish. Their food has to be sprayed across the pen by a machine called a tucker chucker.

Aye Aye!

The captain of our boat walked away from his chair & the wheel to take a smoke. I asked him who was steering & he said that it was aimed at a rock in the distance & would be ok. I jokingly asked him if I could steer. Before I knew it, I was in his chair & he was giving me a quick lesson. The main object was to aim for that rock until he returned. He left me there on my own. I later heard that some of the passengers had the same visions I had. The Valdez oil spill came to mind, as did the Aeroflot flight that crashed when the pilot let his son fly the plane. What I didn’t know was that the captain had steering “joysticks” on the outside upper deck on either side of the boat in case I totally screwed up. At this point I was still going 27 knots. I don’t know how fast that is, but we were skimming along. As we neared the mouth of the river, the captain returned to the bridge, but didn’t take the controls. Instead, he slowed the boat to 7 knots & told me to go through the markers. I was now steering the boat into a World Heritage Area. The river water is so pure you can drink it. I made it well into the river & past a small fishing boat before he decided to let other passengers have a go. David got to drive too.

World Heritage Forest

We docked at the site of the rainforest. This wasn’t just another rainforest. It’s a cold temperate pre-historic forest. It’s so ancient it was there before the land mass that was Gondwana split into South America, Africa, India, Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, & New Guinea. There are crayfish in that forest that only live on the land & were there with the dinosaurs. The forest was established before birds existed & operates totally independently of them now. They come as visitors, but don’t stay. There’s never been a forest fire there, & because it’s a slow growth forest, a fire would be devastating. The trees don’t reach maturity & start seeding until they are 150-200 years old. Many of the Huon pines that we saw were 2,000 years old. Because they grow so slowly & are so old, scientists can learn a lot about weather conditions from studying the rings. One of the pines was down but not out. The root system is so shallow that even when it falls over, if some of the roots are still in the soil, nutrients will go to sprouts at the tree’s top. They will continue growing & root into the soil to become their own forest. The fallen tree is cloning itself. The Huon pine is made into furniture, but is most noted for its buoyancy & ability to resist rotting when wet. It’s popular in shipbuilding.

Sarah

The water near the Sarah Island dock isn’t very deep so the catamaran had to add ballast. It simply sucked up some river water. As we docked, our prow was sitting noticeably lower than the stern. We disembarked & were met by Richard, our guide. He painted a picture of the evolution of a penal colony from one where the prisoners were so desperate to escape that they called the cemetery Holiday Island to a prison that was requested by the inmates. It was established in 1822 & was run by a sadistic man who upped the ante on punishment by combining three cats of nine tails to be used at one time. One year there were 70 prisoners & over 8,000 lashes administered. There were some aborigines who were interred there. They all died of sickness. The typical prisoner was a repeat offender & several were bush rangers (bandits). They were not a passive lot & several escapes & revolts occurred. It was an early version of labor negotiations & strikes. Most of the men would do almost anything to end the extreme conditions in which they lived. They were religious & believed that suicides went to hell. A solution was to commit a murder, repent, be hanged, & go to heaven.

How did it come to pass that men sought to serve on Sarah Island? A minister was sent there who believed in training rather than torturing. He started a school for the prisoners. At about the same time, a shipbuilder from Boston wanted to build experimental vessels & needed men whom he could train & who were not set in their ways. He knew he couldn’t build good ships with slave labor so he convinced the warden to increase their rations & offer incentives. A decrease in the need for punishment ensued. The evidence of the 96 ships that were built on the island is the 170-year old slipway made of Huon pine that’s still intact & visible under the water.

This penal colony failed as a deterrent to crime & the last prisoners were sent there in 1833. Port Arthur was opened to take its place. The last prisoners left Sarah Island in 1839. They finished building the last boat on the island, stole it, & sailed all the way to Chile. Why Chile? That country had just gained its independence, had a growing ship building industry, & opposed the British for still transporting prisoners & using slave labor. What a finale!

So, who was Sarah? She was Sarah Simmons, a prisoner in the Female Factory on another island in the river. She worked on what is now Sarah Island &, as it was told, provided a diversion for some of the men. As did many of the women from the Factory, Sarah supplemented her rations by trading knowledge of the layouts of the free settler’s homes she had worked in.

Pooped

We sadly left our lovely boat & started our trek back to Hobart. We were spending the night at the Hadley Hotel again & flying out the next morning. We thought the roads yesterday were bad, but this afternoon was worse. Bear in mind this is an “A” road. It’s considered a first rate highway in Tasmania. We both had stiff necks from the hairpin curves & got nauseous. We passed through the copper mining district of Queenstown with the deeply hued hills that told of the metal buried inside. We wound around an endless number of lakes including Lake St. Claire. It was certainly lovelier & more accessible than Dove Lake of yesterday. We twisted under the chalk white escarpments of limestone & prayed for the convoluted to-ing & fro-ing to end. In the middle of it all, as we rounded a 45-degree angle of a curve, we came upon a golf course. Why it was on that road & who would use it is a puzzle. That was followed by active train tracks that crossed the highway. Only the unexpected is to be expected here.

We got into Hobart by 7:30 PM & went to Mure’s in the harbor for fish & chips. It’s 11 PM now & you-know-who is sleeping after a hard day of driving. He’s a real trooper.

Toby