Veronika Wild

Dark waters of Lake Rosebery, Tullah, Tasmania  -early in the morning. The water is brown due to the tannin in the vegetation, but it is in fact very clean.  Spotify leaps back into life as the car lurches down the last few zig zags onto the Tullah straight. I didn’t really appreciate country music until I came here. It tells the stories of country life.  I think of  John Prine’s “Paradise” for example. Tullah even had a place called “Paradise” on the Macintosh River where everyone used to swim, before it was swallowed up by the Lake. Many places on the West Coast were indeed "hauled away by M r. Peabody’s coal train" or one very similar - Places  like Dundas,   Williamsford, Crotty, Adamsfield and Linda ,  to name just a few.    Tullah - which means "meeting of the waters," did have a couple of near -death experiences. Silver -lead was discovered by Tom Farrell in 1892 and by 1900 two mines had sprung up at each end of the valley, each...

Undeterred by my friend’s departure, I decide to continue with the itinerary I’d planned which took in the Pieman Ferry and some waterfalls I hadn’t seen before. I take the coast road between Strahan and Zeehan built over the railway line which connected Zeehan and Strahan when Zeehan was the third largest city in Tasmania. This is a lovely smooth road over button grass plains with far fewer bends and hills than the one from Strahan to Queenstown. There’s hardly any traffic on it either. After about 10 kilometres it passes by the Henty Dunes, 30 metres high and extending for 15 kilometres. These are some distance inland and date from previous Ice Ages when sea levels were lower, but the still powerful Roaring Forties blew even more strongly.   Usually you can see Ocean Beach and the Henty Dunes from here but today there is a smoke haze   At the Mt. Dundas lookout about 7 kilometres from Zeehan I notice that there’s quite a thick haze which has been getting progre...