A Gorge and Greatness

Tourists are warned that Launceston’s Cataract Gorge is not to be missed.

And on this particular Sunday, in their hundreds they obeyed.

A few people were actually swimming in the ‘basin’ itself, but most seem to have come for the chairlift ride.

The Esk river is wild and the rocks are well tumbled. This gorge is as much about rocks as it is about water.

It is an old (mid-late 1800s) reserve, so I was not surprised at this shelter of ‘faux bois’, cement and wire made into fake wood, which reminded me of the older Katoomba shelters in NSW or those in Salso-Maggiore in Italy. It was originally a European Renaissance craze.

The path around the ‘basin’ had plenty of unafraid wildlife, like this young Bennetts Wallaby.

The lawns near the Visitors Centre, which mainly seemed to be selling chairlift tickets, had naturalised peacocks wandering about and families of the endemic Tasmanian Native Hen, often called ’Turbo Chooks’ as they can run very fast. 

This handsome bird is flightless, like the mainland’s Emu and Cassowary, and only found here now.

I have seen them in plenty of places, close to humans, as they like cropped grass, so they are unlikely to become endangered.

They are a plump bird, and supposedly good eating, so I am surprised that the ’settlers’ didn’t wipe them out.

I was about to give the Cataract Gorge a miss, and the Queen Victoria Art Gallery, the latter being the whole reason I had come to Launcestion, because the day before I became hopelessly lost in the one way labryinth of Launceston (like Hobart).

I needed a camping ground, but the Info Centre had shut at 2pm. Buttonholing a passing stranger, I wrote down directions from his phone.

Now my task was to somehow get the maps thingy on my phone to give me directions. So far I had only managed to make it show me where I was but not tell me how to proceed.

Next morning that is all I did… and I succeeded.

I took no photos at ‘Gentle Protagonist,’ the Michael McWilliams exhibition.  I can only say that he/it is wonderful; quirky and moving and summing up all I feel about Tasmania: the Thylacine, the Devil, the fallen forests, the salmon, the sheep. Truly I was torn between laughing and crying; I did a little of both.

So fly there if you must, but do get to see this extraordinary collection. I am ashamed that I did not know his work before.