May 8 - Cradle Mountain to Launceston

It was very cold and frosty this morning
looking out from our cabin at the billabong.

After breakfast and before our official day started, we took the King Billy hike at the Cradle Mountain Lodge. It wound up a hill on a wood boardwalk through what looked like untouched growth and deadfall, heavily covered with moss to the largest tree on Tasmania, a King Billy pine. It was named after the name given to an aborigine back in the 1800s, and is considered a hardwood here. It was quite an impressive specimen! We did see a couple wallabies on our hike. These were a small dark variety with a mouse-like face called a pademelon (sounds like 'patty melt' when our guide pronounces it).

I am wearing 6 layers and still chilly. The forest
we walked through looked like it was untouched
except for the boardwalk.

Another pademelon

We checked out of the lodge and headed off for our day of hiking and driving. We started with a 45 minute walk across a meadow of button grass (tussock) and coral fern. The coral fern is very tough and a favorite of the wombat, who leave cube-shaped skat on the boardwalks for us to ogle. We crossed a raging river a couple times, and the water in it was stained a dark red by the tannins from the trees. Next was a hike to Suicide Rock at Dove Lake, just under Cradle Mountain itself. The rock is a is granite boulder that provides a terrific view of the surrounding area. The last hike was to a replica of the original lodge in the park before it was even a park. A couple, Gustav and Kate Weindorfer, who found the area in 1906 on their honeymoon, bought the property and built a lodge they called Waldheim. Although Gustav had some nasty luck (4 deaths in the family in 1916, including his wife and accusations of being a German spy during WWI), his interest and initial building led to the area eventually being preserved as Cradle Mountain National Park.

Dead trees the result of tree rot brought on by excess water after the road above was built.

Steam rising from the ground as the sun melts the frost.

A hillside of frosty button grass

Our group hiking down toward a river with Cradle Mountain in the background

A favorite wombat food, coral fern covered with frost.

These frosty cubic things are wombat scat.
The theory is they like to poop in high places
and this doesn't roll down to where they are.

Jim at Suicide Rock on Dove Lake at the foot of Cradle Mountain

Waldheim

We had gloriously clear, sunny weather, though it was quite cold to start with. I put on six layers, including 2 coats, as I clearly had not anticipated how cold it would be here. Our guide and bus driver were both agog at how beautiful the day was, however, since it rains 290 days a year in the park and is gray and cloudy a lot of the other 75 days. They estimated there are only about 10 sunny days a year and this one was spectacular.

On our way to Launceston, we stopped in Sheffield for lunch. Like many towns here, the initial industry has failed and they have searched to find a claim to fame to bring in visitors. Here, it was murals. There are historical murals all over town and now there is an annual mural contest. The nine best entries are made full size and put on display for a couple weeks of voting. We got to see this year's entries, and found several of them kind of obscure.

The original mural depicting Gustav Weindorfer in his lodge after his wife's death and his abandonment by friends except the wildlife.

On our bus trip, Vic, our guide, told us why we apparently don't see aborigines here. Aborigines arrived in Australia over 45,000 years ago and during the ice age while Tasmania was still part of the Australian land mass, they wandered here 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. When the ice melted, they became a separate group from the mainland and lived a nomadic life here.  They were seen during the early sightings of the island in the 1700s, and were not in evidence when the English established their colony at Hobart in 1804. Estimates of numbers range from 3,000 to 15,000.For some years, before the English got enthusiastic about settling here, they got along okay, (except for the part where the English captured men as slaves and the women as sex slaves because of the heavily male-dominated population) but once the colony started to take over, the English initiated the 'Black War' and the natives retaliated against the random killings. The government offered a bounty on any dead native of any age that could be brought in. Given that the population already included a number of people who were not entirely law-abiding, this was a pretty effective way to eliminate a species. The last 200 were rounded up and sent to a reservation on Flinders Island and from there, petitioned Queen Victoria to return home. The last 47 were successful, but were still held on a reservation on Tasmania and the last full-blooded aborigine died in the late 1800s. Because the English early on took the women as sex slaves and some of the women voluntarily associated with Europeans, there are still people who can claim aborigine heritage, but no one native to Tasmania has the appearance of those people and the language has been lost.

Once in Launceston, we took a short walk around town. We elected to skip dinner, having had many more meals than normal and I got to catch up on our blog and photo downloads.