Helping Mom
Just to let you know there won’t be any posts for a couple of weeks, as I’m off to mom’s in the morning (just one state over, but a bit of drive). She’s had major spinal surgery, and while she’s been in the convalescence center for a few weeks, she still can’t be allowed to go home alone — and she really wants to go home. So I’ll be moving in with mom for two maybe three weeks, just so there’s someone to drive, shop, cook, and take care of things while mom recovers. But we’ll travel farther up the Gordon River when I return — and beyond.

The Gordon River
The Gordon River is Tasmania’s longest river. It cuts through an area of incredible wildness—an area that has in fact been designated a World Heritage Wilderness Area. Then, near the coast, the river empties into the broad expanse of Macquarie Harbour. While the history surrounding this river dates back to Tasmania’s days as a convict settlement, in more recent history, this river was the focus of a huge environmental controversy that broke out, followed by an international campaign beginning in the late 1970s, over suggestions that the powerful river could produce a great deal of hydroelectric energy, if it were dammed. It was in time decided that the val

Strahan
The Roaring Forties is the name sailors gave long ago to the latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere from the fortieth to fiftieth parallel. It is the same latitude range in which one finds South America’s rugged Patagonia. It’s well south of Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. It is also the latitude range in which one finds Strahan, the lovely but isolated fishing village on Tasmania’s west coast that was our next destination. The Roaring Forties are so called because they do roar. Strong, often gale-force winds blow persistently from the west along these parallels, buffeting this coast all year long. The waves that break on this shore have moved uninterrupted from the

Round Mountain Lookout
Tasmania is actually the tail end of Australia’s Great Dividing Range, the range of mountains that runs like a spine down the Eastern seaboard of the continent. As a result, most travel in Tasmania involves crossing mountains. This afforded us frequent glorious vistas during the time we spent traversing Tassie. My first crossing was soon after we left the north coast, heading southward along the west coast. It was a cloudy day, and the clouds were close overhead. Like most of Australia’s mountains, these were not stunningly high peaks, but rather manageable mountains that invited rather than challenged. A brief stop at Round Mountain Lookout gave me an opportunity

Tiagarra
The Tassie devils were not the only ones to get pushed southward by the arrival of the ancestors of today’s Australian Aborigines. There was an even earlier Aboriginal people group, a different race from the newer Aboriginal peoples, who were pushed off the mainland. By the time Europeans arrived, this other race survived only in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Aborigines lacked many of the skills and technologies (including making fire) that were common among the newer Aborigines, but they still generally ate better because of Tasmania’s abundance. While there are many mixed-blood descendants of the of these people, no pure-blood Tasmanian Aborigines remain. Many