Western Tasmania’s tourism boosted by environmental clash

Press, 11 October 1988, Page 30

Western Tasmania’s tourism boosted by environmental clash

By

NAYLOR HILLARY

Queenstown and Murchison, Collingwood and the Lyell — the names come from settlements in Western Tasmania, even though they sound like a list of the South Island’s remote places. In Tasmania’s Queenstown they play their football (Aussie rules, of course) on a gravel sports field. After decades of sulphur from the Mt Lyell copper smelter, nothing much grows in the little mining town. The smelter has been closed for 20 years but stark, bare mountains still surround the town. In the changing moods of light and weather the barren landscape has a haunting beauty. The Mt Lyell copper mine still operates, underground now. Huge surface workings remain, adding to the desolation.

Queenstown’s population of 4000 or t so makes a virtue of its bizarre landscape. The barren hills, the great man-made holes, the mine itself have become attractions for visitors. Conservationists might cringe, but there is real alarm in Queenstown that traces of scraggy vegetation are beginning to reappear on the wilderness. For Queenstown, it would be a disaster if the hills turn green again and its main attraction vanishes. If man has been harsh to the environment in parts of western Tasmania, the environment has ways

of hitting back. Here is a climate and a terrain — and a history 7 — not unlike parts of the South Island’s West Coast, but even tougher. The rainfall is higher; the cold west winds blow harder. Add in snakes and leeches. And bushfires.

Fire has played a part in giving Queenstown its moonscape. Throughout the region much of the soil is no more than a thin, peaty layer over the rocks. A bad fire burns soil as well as vegetation. Life in western Tasmania has become a series of compromises — between man and nature, between conservation and exploitation. The lure of mineral wealth opened up the region a century ago. Now the tough little port towns such as Trial Harbour have become tiny seaside resorts. The old bush railways have become spectacular walking trails. Relics from the mines, including the rack and pinion Abt railway engines that once hauled supples up to Queenstown, have price of place in local museums.

Queenstown museum puts on a good show. The rival mining town of Zeehan, 40 kilometres away, does even better.

Zeehan, named after one of Abel Tasman’s ships, was once a roaring boom town based on silver and lead deposits. Now its old “School of Mines and Metallurgy” houses the museum, one wall covered with share certificates from mining companies that failed. In recent times Tasmania’s west has found a new source of wealth —

hydro-electric power. The result is a curious clash of interests. The state’s Hydro-Electric Commission builds splendid roads through the wilderness, opening up forests and mountains and lakes for the awe and wonder of visitors.

Along the roads come not only the tourists who help to keep the mining towns alive, but also the conservationists determined to preserve the landscape from the hydro works that in a sense have made their access possible.

Both sides have their victories. South-east from Queenstown, the controversial dam on the Gordon River below the Franklin River was stopped several years ago after demonstrations deep in the forest and much political and legal wrangling. Smaller dams are going ahead.

A vast chunk of south-west Tasmania has been declared a World Heritage area — a super National Park — safe from dams and logging and, as a result, almost inaccessible except for the hardiest trampers -or seamen.

The publicity that came with the wrangle about the Gordon-below-Franklin dam gave a great boost to the region. Something said to be of value was saved, and people now want to see it — or at least the bits that can be reached in comfort.

Forty kilometres south of Queenstown lies Macquarie Harbour, one of the world’s largest harbours. Near its

western end is the tiny port of Strahan (pronounced Strawn) — population about 400. Far to the east, at the other end of the harbour, is the entrance to the Gordon River. Today, Strahan owes much of its prosperity to the thousands of tourists who come each year to cruise up the Gordon, in comfortable boats, amid giant stands of huon pine and sassafras trees. The cruise on the wild and scenic Gordon River is an anti-climax. One huon pine, one forested river bend, quickly comes to look like all the others.

The entrance to Macquarie Harbour is much more spectacular. One can only wonder how a Captain Kelly ever found it in 1815, let alone how anyone managed to bring sailing ships through the narrow tidal race amid rocks and sandbars. But sail in they did, and Macquarie Harbour lays claim to a chunk of history even older and more grim than its days as a way to the mines of Queenstown. Deep in the harbour lies tiny Sarah Island. From 1822 to 1834 this was “home” for hundreds of convicts. They were the toughest of the tough — those too bad for Hobart’s jails and sent to fell huon pine and build ships.

Stories such as Marcus Clarke’s “For the Term of His Natural Life” have drawn on Sarah Island's miserable past. There was little need to invent horrors. Cruise boat commentaries now delight in listing the thousands of lashes inflicted on convicts there over the years. Escaped convicts turned pirate; some turned cannibal to survive in the overwhelming countryside of what has become the World Heritage Park.

And there are local residents now in western Tasmania who would happily reopen Sarah Island — lashes and legirons and all — and stock it with conservationists.

But in general an uneasy live-and-let-live attitude exists between the factions.

One of the new, smaller hydro sites between Macquarie Harbour and Queenstown displays the curious dilemmas that arise.

The Mt Lyell mine discharges its waste — untreated — into Macquarie Harbour and helps to give the waters a curious brown tinge. A new dam proposed for the King River would collect the mine’s waste and stop the pollution for at least the next 80 years — and still supply water for power generation.

Is this a dam that offers real advantages for the environment? But what if the mine is likely to close in a few years anyway as copper deposits become less economic to extract? The dam would also mean better access roads to another chunk of rugged Tasmanian wilderness. Is that good or bad? How many people can a fragile wilderness absorb? They ponder these things while the chill westerlies and the coach-loads of tourists sweep through.

But for the Mt Lyell mine alone, and for the landscape it has created, this remote and rugged world is worth the five-hour drive from Hobart.