Today was moving on day once again, so the usual routine kicked in. Pack everything away again (amazing how much we can spread ourselves out in a room after just two days), move it to the car and squeeze it all in. Then back to the room again to check once, twice and a third time just in case we have left anything – we hadn’t (we think!).
From there we started heading towards Strahan, but we had plenty of time, so we stopped for breakfast (smashed avo – what else!) by the lake at Tullah. Then on to Rosebery for a stop at a waterfall. This waterfall will remain nameless – not only did it feel like you were driving through the mine to get to it, but it was very disappointing. An old mine trolley jammed in a part of the cascade completed the picture – enough said! Mining though was very much the theme of this route. We had already gone past a gold mine on the road and then we went through Rosebery. Rosebery is the mine and the mine is Rosebery. They apparently mine zinc, copper and lead there. All this is done using mechanical underground mining which is then followed by crushing, grinding and flotation processes. Basically wreak havoc to the landscape and then crush it all to extract what you want with loads left over. The same mine also produces gold doré. This is a semi-pure alloy of gold and silver made into bars at the mine. These are then transported to a refinery for further purification.
The next stop after the disappointing waterfalls was also mining-related. The Spray Tunnel was off down a short gravel track and was created to serve all the silver mines in the area. By the end of the 19th century silver mining in the area had exploded (though not literally!). By 1890 390 leases had been pegged out in the area outside Zeehan. Not all became successful mines, but silver fever had captured the miners. The Silver Spray mine was actually founded as a result of a British capital injection, but eventually taken over by a Tasmanian company. The mine eventually was one of the richest in the field and the tunnel was cut through the hill to enable ore to be transported back down to Zeehan. The boom was short-lived though and by 1909 they were struggling to keep things profitable. The bush has now taken over again and there is little evidence of the extensive activity which took place just over 100 years ago.
The next stop was shortly before Strahan and was the Henty Dunes. A couple of the reviews on Google were a little indifferent, but that says more about people who post reviews than the site itself. We parked in the picnic area and were faced with a steep hill of sand with a couple of trees in the middle. Looking at it hesitantly we decided whether to admit to our age and just look at them, but no …. in the end we decided that if there was a hill, we had to climb it.
Meeting a couple coming down (a lot quicker than we were going up) they suggested that we went on all fours. This was actually easier given how steep it was, but did ensure that sand found its way into even more crevices than it had already. On all fours we found that we made one step up for every three steps as opposed to a one to six ratio previously – it turns out that sand is not solid!
The view at the top made it all worth it though. It was windy, so not always easy to see where you were going, but we walked across until we had a clear view of the sea. The scale of the dunes was monumental. It is easy to run out of adjectives when describing something like these dunes (a state which an Australian friend and I call adjectivally-challenged), but suffice it to say that they were impressive.
The final leg of the day was then to Strahan. We checked in to our accommodation and then headed off to explore town. First stop, as ever, was the tourist information where we checked a few things, but then ended up having a wonderful conversation about Australian children’s books. They had Possum Magic on the shelf for sale and we all remembered one from the same era about a wombat, but couldn’t remember the title, so the lady looked it up – Sebastian Lives in a Hat. Possibly one of the more unusual things she had been asked that day, but we enjoyed the memory and will hunt on the shelves when we get home to see if we still have it.
We then explored around town – a lovely little town, but little is the operative word, so it didn’t take long, so on the way back we walked through the People’s Park and up to the Hogarth Falls – a lovely walk and around 2km each way.
From there we headed back to our hotel via the path running around the harbour – a nice day’s walking and intriguingly different to the last few days.