Stories of the road…
Beautiful place, harsh history
A story from 2022 as Tasmania emerges from its Covid lockdown and we are free to travel again.
OVERNIGHT at Coal Mines Historic Site and you soon discover that the mosquitoes are immune to insect repellent. They are big, and numerous, a spectacle in themselves.
I can see the peninsula where Lime Bay State Reserve is from where I am now living. The Coal Mines Historic Site and its mosquitoes are on the other side. To get there you turn off the Tasman Highway at Taranna and follow the road westwards through rolling farmland to Saltwater River. Just before reaching the Reserve is where the Coal Mines Historic Site camping area sits on the shore of Norfolk Bay. We are on the eastern side of the peninsula that separates the waters of the bay from the larger body of water that is the wide Frederick Henry Bay.
Here on the Tasman Peninsula the artefacts of Tasmania’s brutal, early Nineteenth Century penal colony are scattered. Foot tracks take us to some of them, the remaining signs of the industry that gave the place its name—the coal mines. Mine ventilation shafts and other works remind us of how convicts provided the forced labour which extracted the coal and how harsh Britain’s penal regime was. An outlier of European civilisation built on slavery. It was the worst of the convicts from the Port Arthur penal settlement further south on the peninsula who were sent to Saltwater River over its 15-year life between 1833 and 1848.
Here was Tasmania’s first coal mine. At the end of the day the gangs would be marched from the mines back to their barracks at Saltwater River. Clustered on the shore, looking over the bay to the distant Forestier Peninsula, are the substantial remains of the settlement which accommodated not only the convicts but the guards, the administrators, the bakery and chapel/schoolhouse, the surgeon, supervisor and the people who saw to the loading of the coal onto ships at the end of the 300 metre-long jetty that once projected into the waters.
Also here is testament to the inhumanity of the British penal system in the form of solitary confinement cells. Measuring around three by one and a half metres, prisoners were confined in these small sandstone chambers for 24 hours, presumably to sleep on the cold stone floor. It is strange to stand here among these tumbled blocks of sandstone and collapsed walls while looking out over the waters to the distant hills across the bay and realise that amid this natural beauty was so much suffering. Today, visitors’ children climb on the walls oblivious to what went on here.
It isn’t the remains of the settlement that is most poignant. It is the few remaining fireplaces indented into those partially-collapsed walls. I am surely not the only one to stand there amid the tumbled blocks of what once were rooms and see in my mind’s eye those people of almost 200 years ago clustered around the glowing fires, breathing the smoky air and soaking up their warmth as it steamed the moisture from their clothes on cold winter nights with the rain pounding loudly on the roof.
Campsite by the bay
Forty? Yes. Maybe. Forty vehicles scattered across the tree-studded clearing that is the Coal Mines historic site campground. Modest sedans beside big car-camping tents, specialised 4WD vehicles towing camper trailers, caravans… it’s typical of the basic campsites around this island. Families, groups of friends, a group with too-loud music blaring — the common experience of Tasmania’s outdoor lifestyle.
Few wandered down to the narrow beach that occupies the shallow curve between low, wooded headlands with cliffs of yellow sandstone. No one ventured into the waters of the bay. It is spring and the water still carries the cold of the winter-now-gone.
Everyone camping here is Tasmanian. The island remains isolated from the Australian mainland and enjoys its now-Covid-free status as it has done these past few months. The lockdown here was brief, and it worked. People are free to wander across the state thanks to the government acting early and decisively to eliminate the virus. With Tasmania reopening to visitors from select mainland states there is a pervasive fear that Covid-19 will return, although some of those states now have only a few cases of the virus. Tasmanians wait to see. As one woman said to me, we have been doing well in our isolation and it would be good for it to continue.
The national parks service maintains a network of walking trails that link the Saltwater River ruins to the old mining sites. A complete circuit through the open forest takes something like three and a half hours, depending on how fast you walk and how long you linger.
As AU$13 a night for a vehicle and two people, and with clean composting toilets, the Coal Mines Historic Site campground offers a get-away less than two hours drive from Hobart. Bring your own water.
And bring your own insect repellent, lots of it. Those mossies. They’re big. They’re persistent. They are hungry for human blood. Your blood.
Coal Mine Historic Site coordinates:
Latitude: 42° 59'S
Longitude: 147° 42'E
More info: https://parks.tas.gov.au/things-to-do/60-great-short-walks/coal-mines-historic-site
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