Erik Skye Travel Journal

19 Jan 2012

For the map, click here: Google Maps – Wizard of Oz

Car’s trip odometer: 8,000 clicks (km)

Last year I read the book The Fatal Shore, a voluminous manuscript about the early history of Australia. I referred to passages from that book quite a bit in my writing for Return to Oz, but I never made it to Tasmania on that journey. I haven’t been thinking about The Fatal Shore much on this trip, until I approached Macquarie Heads, or “Hell’s Gate” as the first mariners here referred to it as:

“Macquarie Harbor lies at latitude 42d14’S, longitude 145d10’E, on the west coast of Tasmania. As you approach it, sea and land curve away to port in a dazzle of white light, diffused through the haze of the incessantly beating ocean. All is sandbank and shallow; the beach that stretches to the northern horizon is dotted with wreckage, the impartial boneyard of ships and whales. No one has ever lived there or ever will. To starboard, there is a sharp jumble of rocks.

To enter the harbor, you must steer between the headland and another rock, Entrance Island, that marks the southern tip of the sandbars. There is no more than fifty yards between them, and at full tidal flow, the neck of water has a glossy, swollen look, ominous to seamen. Macquarie Harbor is one of the few large bodies of tidal water in the world [covering 150 square miles], with a bottleneck entrance that faces the west. Moreover, it looks directly into the Roaring Forties, the prevailing winds are northwesterly, and the waves of the Southern Ocean have the entire circumference of the world in which to build their energy before they crash on this pitiless coast. And so, when tide sets against wind and millions of tons of water a minute come boiling through the entrance, frightful seas rise. Worse, there is a sandbar dead across the entrance, with only eleven feet of water over it at spring tide. For these and other reasons, the place is called Hell’s Gates. It was the first thing that Irish and English convicts saw when their transport ship sailed in, a hundred and sixty year ago…

Past the entrance, past another rust-streaked rock names Bonnet Island, the harbor opens to view. It is so long that its far end is lost in the grayness. The water is tobacco-brown with the ruinous froth, dyed by the peat and bark washed into it by Australia’s last wild river, the Gordon, which flows into the eastern end of the harbor. The sky is gray, the headlands gray, receding one behind the other like flat paper cut-outs. It is an utterly primordial landscape of unceasing interchange, shafts of pallid light reaching down from the low sky, scarves of mist streaming up from impenetrable valleys, water sifting forever down and fuming perpetually back.”^23

That must have been Macquarie Harbor and her heads at the worst of times, for my experience of it today included brilliant sun, lofty white clouds, calm winds, and notice of people enjoying activities such as boating, fishing, picnicking, and sightseeing (i.e. by float plane and train service). It has the feel of a vacation or tourist destination and a few live here permanently. It’s not at all “a ‘Place of Ultra Banishment and Punishment’ [that] for ten years… [was] the worst spot in the English-speaking world.”^24

Hell’s Gate itself was apparently at low tide when I visited, for a giant white sandbar stretched across most of her width with what looked like a foamy river pouring out of the harbor to one side. I tried to imagine what it must have been like in a storm with antique schooners of the day positioned outside of shelter, being pounded by the Southern Ocean, waiting for tides to rise to allow passage over the sandbars to the safety of Macquarie Harbor. I didn’t have to image the wale carcass though, as there was one half-rotted away on the sandbar with me.

I think I’ll go with “journal” instead of “diary” or “blog”. I like the connotations better.

For song of the day, click here (let website load briefly, then click orange “play” next to title): Australia’s Matt Corby - Brother

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Footnotes:

23. Robert Hughes, Th e Fatal Shore (Collins Harvill, 1987) pp. 372, 373.

24. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (Collins Harvill, 1987) p. 371.