Queenstown main street with Mount Owen in the background. Three and a half hours drive from Hobart to the south and two hours from Burnie to the north, this small mining town is situated in Tasmania's Rugged West.
The tourist information boards say that people came in the early 1900s looking for gold. Instead they found copper. They cut down lots of trees for houses and the heating process to get the copper created a Sulphur byproduct that ran into the creeks. That in turn caused acid rain which killed lots of vegetation in the local area and makes it moonscape-like. The mining supposedly made Queenstown one of the richest towns in the world at one stage.
I remember hitch hiking through here 30 years ago and was a bit confronted by all damage. I remember a football sports field made of gravel.
I was interested to see if much had changed from all those years ago?
Well the gravel sports field was still there but based on my memory it looked like some stuff around town has started to grow back.
It appears as if the town has evolved itself from mining town to a tourist town. Everything was extremely neat, tidy and well laid out.
Suppose all that mining money paid for some nice public buildings.
Interesting toilet block mural.
One tourist drawcard they have actively developed was to turn Mt Owen into a mountain biking mecca.
The pub with the local constabulary not too far away.
This is the other end of that trainline that started in Strahan a couple of posts back. The old mining company railway is now The West Coast Wilderness Railway. If we had the time it looked like it would have been a spectular trip through some big tree county and along the Gordon River, all the way to Strahan on the coast.
The barren moonscape hills with some green regrowth.
The Lookout with Queenstown in the valley below.
The whole area produced a lot of minerals and recourses.
The contrast as we drove out of town was obvious.
More tourist development: a walking track to Horsetail Falls. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to do it on this trip.
Just out of town on the way to Hobart we saw this a pretty serious looking downhill mountain bike track. We have a couple of mountain bikes back home but I not sure I could handle that!
Next stop, Franklin River deeper into the Tasmanian Wilderness.
