The town of Strahan has two separate components, a preserved, picturesque little village down at the water’s edge and, further up the hill a collection of houses and shops where the inhabitants actually live. Our destination was picturesque village which has the advantage of convenience to the water and is actually worth seeing.
Strahan was once a major port. All of the minerals (mainly copper) that were extracted at Queenstown some forty extremely difficult kilometres further inland were transported by rail to Strahan for export to more civilised regions like Hobart and Launceston (just think about that for a moment). Nowadays Strahan survives on tourism and a little cray fishing.
Large comfortable boats convey mostly elderly people up the picturesque (it has trees) Gordon River which conveniently flows into Strahan’s ridiculously oversized harbour. The prospect of spending six hours trapped on a boat with a gaggle slowly declining humanity having failed to appeal we decided to catch a train instead.
To be more accurate my correspondent and I decided to catch a train. The retired diplomat indicated with word and gesture that she would rather remove her own appendix than spend three hours on a train. Somewhat callously we abandoned her to find what amusement she could in Strahan and caught the train anyway.
The Abt Wilderness Railway is the old aforementioned railway from Queenstown to Strahan now repurposed as a tourist railway (although they proudly insist that they still carry freight, mainly beehives, as well) using a collection of heritage steam and Diesel engines. We weren’t travelling the entire distance, rather we had a short in and out lasting three hours through the rainforest.
We ate well on this journey. We were greeted with a glass of champagne (after a quick discussion we decided 9am wasn’t too early to start drinking). After that there were scones with jam and cream, pumpkin soup, tea, coffee and ice cream.
In between gorging ourselves we glanced out the window at the temperate rainforest that the rail line had been gouged through while a guide told us some of the history of the line. Like many great achievements the railway was the result of someone very rich taking a decision and not being particularly concerned with the well-being or continued existence of the employees who actually made it happen.
This charmer’s name was Bowes Kelly and he owned the copper mine in Queenstown. Very lucrative if you can actually get the copper out, hence the railway. Kelly hired a group of surveyors who worked for eighteen months and reported it was impossible. Kelly promptly fired them without pay and hired another group of surveyors who, perhaps unsurprisingly, reported that it was possible, maybe, just. Apparently they were right.
There followed months of agonising, backbreaking work in near constant rain (hence the term rainforest) during which time the workers were literally never dry. It was impossible to even light a fire and the only real difference between the land and the nearby river was it took you slightly longer to drown on the land. Eventually Kelly got his railway and his employees, hopefully, got paid.
But tragedy, if it happened long enough ago becomes heroism and it was certainly an interesting story to listen to as we sat in our seats enjoying the fruits of past labour and wondering if we could stuff in another morsel of food.
There were a couple of stops where we were permitted to heave our bellies off the train and wander briefly through the rainforest in a largely futile attempt to offset the amount we had eaten and drunk. As we stumbled among the trees in a near food coma my correspondent and I competed to see who could take the best fungi photographs. About half the photographs I’ve taken on this trip have been of various mushrooms and fungi, I honestly don’t know the difference. If you do know the difference please don’t feel obliged to tell me, I also honestly don’t care.
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