Australasia > Australia > Tasmania > Tasmania > Articles > Tasmania: Australia's 'Other Half'

For a moment, think of Tasmania as Australia in miniature - a bonsai Great Southern Land sampler. So much of the best of the mainland can be found here: mountains, beaches, creatures, history, great food... almost everything but deserts and coral reefs. Perhaps because of Tasmania's reduced scale (only 300 km by 300 km), things Taswegian seem to have clearer definition: the oysters are more luscious, the cheeses taste sharper, the air seems tangier, the peaks more gothic, the past darker.

Like many visitors, you may find yourself arriving in the north of the island, at Launceston, George Town or Devonport. Point your car (if renting, be sure to book in advance) roughly south and east. (The west coast is so rugged that few roads exist there). While you're in the north, drop in on Evandale, 15 km south of Launceston, a colonial-era village that's famous for pubs, churches and its annual National Penny Farthing Championship. Held each February, the race attracts riders from around the world who, mounted on these monetarist mutants, pursue each other through the streets like wind-up dolls astride hula hoops.

The 430 km Tasman Highway runs east from Launceston then down almost the entire length of the coast to Hobart. But before joining it, consider a visit to Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair National Park, about 100 km south of Devonport. The shattered crags and cloud-scapes of Cradle Mountain (1545 metres) reflect their moods in the waters of Dove Lake; with alpine tarns, enchanted forests and King Billy pines up to one thousand years old, the landscape seems as epic as a World Heritage version of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

The park's legendary Overland Track is a 60 km, six-day wilderness hike, with mostly wallabies and wombats to cheer you on; the easiest way is to trek with a small group along the string of privately-owned Cradle Huts. Alternatively, you might linger at Cradle Mountain Lodge, where the after-dinner floorshow is unique: on the porch a procession of quolls, possums and Tasmanian Devils arrive, politely waiting for you to hand-feed them.

"So, you're from the North Island?" some friendly Tasmanian is sure to ask. You've just encountered a distinctly Tasmaniacal world view - that Tasmania is, in a sense, one half of Australia. Consequently if you're a mainlander - and thus part of a collective ego as big as a continent - it is humbling to consider your previously giant "half" of the country shrunken to the size of Tasmania.

But, why not? When you do reach the east coast at Binalong Bay, just north of St Helens, you find Nature displaying here an intense palette that any mainland shore would envy - a crystal white beach bounded by orange rock lichen and brilliant blue waters. Then, inevitably, palate meets palette, and you fall upon a spread of local abalone and crayfish that defies being topped by anything from the "North Island".

Sometimes I think of Tasmania as an antipodean Provence - a place where history and cuisine collide in the best of ways. Eastern Tasmania may well be a chain of 19th century towns and pristine bays, but any day's journey there can quickly become a trencherman's tour - of chocolate truffles, King Island brie, pink-eye potatoes ("the spud of spuds," as a restrauteur in Swansea assured me), Atlantic salmon and those delicious oysters the size of small saucers. And wherever you may have reached by evening - from bistros like Launceston's Star Bar to small town restaurants - the day's deeds usually end up reflected in a good local Chablis or Merlot.

About halfway down the coast, on the Tasman Highway, is pretty, pine-shaded Bicheno. This 1830s whaling port, with green pastures extending almost to the Tasman Sea, offers fishing, surfing, boating and just lazing around, and the evening entertainment is no less than a fairy penguin parade.

Summertime in Tasmania can be surprisingly hot. With the noon sun like a feral microwave oven, we rushed into its blast on vigorous, one-hour bush hike, en route to Wineglass Bay on Freycinet Peninsula. A narrow, elegantly curved sandy isthmus separates the turquoise waters of Wineglass Bay from the teal shallows to the west. Above it looms The Hazards, a 375 million-year old granite massif whose weathered, 300-metre high bulk looks like an Ayers Rock that, tired of Outback life, has come for a holiday by the sea.

Be sure to overnight in one of the bed and breakfast cottages or inns that are a distinguishing feature of Tasmanian travel. At the oceanfront Piermont Resort, Swansea, I enjoyed a self-contained two-storey stone villa. Over dinner here, several local couples entertained us with tales of odd Tasmania place-names, most of which I later caught up with - like Break O'Day River, Bust-Me-Gall-Hill and Break-Me-Neck Hill, not to mention the villages of Snug, Sandfly, Penguin, Paradise and Nowhere.

Tasmania's European history goes back to 1642 when Abel Tasman claimed the island for Holland. After British settlement in 1803, Van Diemens Land became the southernmost isle of England's own Gulag Archipelago; depending upon your social station, in those days the island was either convict hell or colonial gentry heaven.

The most famous item in Buckland town, north-east of Hobart, is a beautiful, 14th century stained glass window in St John the Baptist Anglican Church. The window is believed to have come from an English abbey built by William the Conqueror. Buckland's 1836 chapel was the result of a complaint by one of those gentrified types to the Governor that divine service hadn't been performed for the local "servants" (i.e. convicts) in seven years. A church was soon constructed for the uplifting of those servants - no doubt by their very own sweat and toil.

A short diversion from the Tasman Highway will bring you to Richmond, one of the best preserved colonial villages in Australia. Richmond claims Australia's oldest bridge (1823), oldest surviving post office (1829) and oldest Catholic church (St John’s, 1837) which was sometimes known, because of its earlier remoteness, as "the Micks in the Sticks".

Beside St John’s church I found a child's headstone dedicated to, "The infant son of Thomas Francis, exile, and Catherine O'Meagher. Died 8/6/1852, at four months." Much later, I learned from author Tom Keneally that the same Thomas O'Meagher was an Irish rebel transportee who, after the death of his son, escaped from Tasmania to the US in 1854, going on to become a Union Army general in the Civil War and finally Governor of Montana.

Instead of a city whose pulse thumps like a toothache, Hobart gives you swooping hills and stone warehouses, colonial, harbour-side cottages, and Salamanca Place's thriving street market. The latter - probably the such best market in the country - offers quality wares, from curios and crafts, to joke "Tasmanian Mutant T-shirts" (with two neck-holes) and lush, bright vegetables grown by immigrant Hmong farmers.

Our trip ended with, firstly, a ride to the 1270 metre peak of Hobart's Mt Wellington, to see the D'Entrecasteaux and Derwent waters spread below like a shining diorama; and then a sea kayak trip at dusk upon those same channels, out of the little port of Kettering.

The waters of Tasmanian history run deep and, in some places, darkly. One convict author spat goodbye to Van Diemens Land with almost haiku precision: "Farmers' Glory! Prisoners' Hell! / Land of Buggers! Fare ye well!"

In an era when many destinations are presented like theme parks, Tasmania still permits its travellers witness to real history and nature. As I paddled the kayak beneath a long southern twilight, the wakes of stingrays skating across the bottom and black swans drifting on the windless water seemed to scribble a kinder haiku.

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