Tasmania, part 1: Cradle Mountain

Our spring break has taken us across the Bass Strait to Tasmania. We landed in Hobart, the capital, and drove north and west to Cradle Mountain, part of the huge state park system in Tassie.

It only took about 15 minutes to clear Hobart and hit rural Tasmania, nice roads with many, many sheep on all sides, and a few cows. The sheep looked very happy - some were fluffy, some had clearly just been sheared. So many lambs tottered after their mamas. It looked like a happy existence.

Google Maps said it was a 4 hour drive from Hobart to Cradle Mountain. We completed it in a blistering 6.5 hours. Along the way we stopped in Ross, where we visited the Woolen Museum and the Women's Factory Historic Site. The Woolen Museum had samples of different types of wool (Merino, superfine Merino, etc) and a lot about sheep shearing. They had some samples of wool sheared from "renegade sheep" who had run away during shearing, then staggered back into town when their wool became too heavy to handle. Some of the record shears were almost 2 metres long!





The Women's Factory was where many convict women were sent to work out some or all of their sentence. Many of the women who were sent to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen's Land) from England or Scotland or Ireland were sent for thievery of some kind, but some were also sent for crimes like destruction of property.  Stealing two chickens could get you 14 years in Van Diemen's Land.  Any children they had were separated from them almost immediately and raised in a nursery. Once they turned three, the children were shipped to Hobart to live in an orphanage until they were 14, at which point they were expected to find a job and somewhere to live on their own. After the first six months of a woman's prison sentence, if they behaved well they were able to be hired out to a nearby family as a laundress or a maid or nanny. If they got pregnant on the job they were sent back to the factory for more work there as punishment. Many sheep herders, farmers, shearers would go to the women's factory to look for wives. The supervisor of the factory would tell them, "I have just the girl for you," drag one out, and hand her over to be a wife. Crazy stuff.




We also stopped in Sheffield, "city of murals". There are many nice public murals all over the city. Unfortunately I didn't see many because as I was hustling my kids across the street, I tripped over my hiking boot laces and landed splat on my knee. A stranger came up to me and tried to help, the kids were freaking out, Joel was parking the car. I couldn't move for a few minutes I was in such pain, and I left a little of my skin and blood on the footpath for posterity.

After all the adventure, and another hour on really curvy stomach-churning roads, we finally made it to our hotel. Cradle Mountain was opened for tourism in 1911. There are all types of places to stay - luxury hotels and really rustic cabins with a shared bathroom across the path. There are all types of trails. We did a loop around Dove Lake  - a 6.2 km hilly walk that took us 2 hours. We would have been slower but we started late, and unaware of when sundown was, were spurred to hurry by the thought of being on the very dark path with the scary snakes and Tasmanian Devils. On the way I got a bloody nose for no good reason, and of course I had no tissues with me. So we're double-timing it down the path, me holding my nose, blood all over my face and hands - delightful together time. You can see in the photos how long the shadows of the mountains were getting. Isaac kept looking back at me to make sure I hadn't fallen or bled out or whatever.




We were glad we did the hike that first day, because our next two days were really bad weather - cold, rainy, just not the ideal time for hikes. But hike we did. We skipped the big Cradle Mountain peak because we really weren't dressed for it, but there were all sorts of nice walks around the area where we saw pademelons and wombats and interesting plants.

Dove Lake, with Crater Mountain in the background.

Oy, so much blood!

Gratuitous fungus/moss/lichen photo

Also in the Cradle Mountain area was a Tasmanian Devil Sanctuary.  Devils are endangered for multiple reasons. They get run over by cars a lot. They get Facial Tumor Disease, which spreads really easily and makes it hard to eat, and destroys underlying tissue and bone. It is fatal, usually within 6 months, and the Devil population has been decimated from it. At the Sanctuary, they keep Devils safe from infection, then reintroduce them to the wild in safe areas.

The visit was fascinating. We got to see them feed when the keeper threw half a pademelon (previously dead) into the pen with them, and four devils all attached it and growled at each other while doing so.  See video below:

This one liked posing

The sanctuary also had a fair number of quokkas, another marsupial. I'd been sucked into believing that quokkas were friendly little marsupials who loved taking selfies with people. When I asked a question about family bonding in the quokka clans, the keeper scolded me for anthropomorphizing wild animals, saying they don't act like humans.  Still, pretty cute little guys.

As close as we could get to a quokka selfie

Finally, through all the hiking and driving around, we encountered lots of other wildlife.  Below are some videos we took of our wombat and pademelon encounter. The pademelon were all over, but this one came right up to us in the parking lot of our hotel. It was clear he was used to being fed and wasn't afraid of us at all.  Pademelon look like very small kangaroos. Grown roos are as tall as an adult, wallabies about as tall as a kid, and this guy, as you can see, is much smaller. Not sure if people eat them or not. At the devil sanctuary, the keeper said they didn't usually use roadkill to feed the devils, because they wanted to make sure anything they fed to the sanctuary animals was Facial Tumor Disease-free.

The wombats avoided human contact. They are slow moving and generally stay off the roads except for at dawn and dusk. We were warned to watch out for them because it was the season where many would have a baby in the pouch, so we drove really carefully on the roads.