Voyages of the Banyandah - Macquarie Harbour

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Macquarie Harbour
Across the Southern Ocean from Albany W.A. January 2009

Mount Sorell 1144 metres - Macquarie Harbour on the West Coast of Tasmania

Tiny hamlet of Strahan is overrun with tourist during the warmer summer months - magnificent safe harbour


Oldest copper mine still operating in Tasmania, located in Queenstown near Strahan	Downtown Queenstown The sulfurous gases from early smelters has poisoned the ground


They called it Meeberlee for 35,000 years before white man	Trevor Norton - Skipper of 'Stormbreaker' West Coast Yacht Charters	Strahan tourism ranks highest in Tasmania


Mel and Doreen - nursing friend of Jude	Banyandah hospitality, a cuppa in bed	Mel was worried about our tilt..

Our trek up Mount Sorrel 1144M - no track
Farm Cove on Trevor's Chart shows departure point	Our destination lay across fields of button grass
	5AM - A profusion of stunted trees blocked our passage


Sorell's peak still hidden in wispy cloud	Soldiers Island in Farm Cove - Banyandah in long arm right


Resting alongside a creek hidden in a glen	As close as we got to the peak before needing to turn for home


Some of the wildflowers we encountered

Macquarie Harbour has several coves nipped off its main body, each providing excellent protection from strong winds, and each having served a purpose in an earlier time. Next to Farm Cove lies Kelly Basin which has a most intriguing history. Whereas, in 1822, Farm Cove was used to grow food and provide lime for the penal colony, eight decades later Kelly Basin had a growing community called East Pillinger serving the North Mount Lyell Copper Company. Standing there in the very early 1900’s you would have been in the midst of a bustling port town of six hundred. Railway carriages loaded with timber, bricks and ore would be shunting past, the sound of shouted instructions ringing out and the smell of wood-smoke hanging thickly in the air. It’s an intriguing story because a few years after the extraordinary work felling the forests and creating such an infrastructure so far from supplies, it was abandoned. Today, East Pillinger is a peaceful place. Most of the town has been reclaimed by the forest. Typical of capitalism, the mining company’s chief competitor bought them out then decided to use their own facilities at Strahan to ship out the ore.

Today. from the shores of East Pillinger, it is possible to walk along what was once the rail bed that ran alongside the Bird River through exquisite rainforest to the Bird River Bridge, which can also be reached via a tarmac road out of Queenstown.

East and West Pillinger - Bird River track on right



Just a few of the remnants - Brick kiln, remains of rail carriage and rail bridge over Bird River


Rainforest walk along Bird River	I was feeling fairly whacked. But Jude’s the eternal optimist

Darwin Crater

Our second excursion came about through another chance encounter, and this time maybe we’d angered fate because not all of it was a grand experience. Jamie had mentioned Darwin’s glass, that’s the pale green glass formed when a meteor strikes granite, and he had drawn a circle on our small scale chart about where he thought lay Darwin Crater, saying they had trekked there, but, “We didn’t find any glass.” Then adding they’d seen some in Strahan that had been found in the crater.

“C’mon, it’ll probably open up and be easy.”
So we loaded up and ducked under the green foliage


Our tent site - after vegetation was ripped out	Darwin Crater - mile wide circle of button grass

White toadstools popped out the mulch and without much prompting ogres and trolls would have jumped out the shadows