FEEL LIKE A FURRY RETREAD?

Your complete guide to the Map of Tasmania

Tips for top routes

For this series of articles on Tasmania, The Bug's travel editor DON GORDON-BROWN flew exclusively with Ansett.
Is he far from happy that Ansett went belly-up when he still had close to 400,000 frequent flier points to redeem? Abso-fucking-lutely!
Is he still steamed up that he'd just renewed his Gold Whingers club membership for $500? Abso-fucking-lutely!
Is he still fuming that Ansett, rather than address its economic woes and fix up its planes, spent $20 million on a bullshit promotional campaign centred on a lot of bottom-shelf Aussie celebs? Abso-fucking-lutely! Is the editor pissed off about how long DGB takes to file stories? Abso-fucking-lutely!

Getting our just deserts

Imagine driving to the outskirts of Moe in Victoria and being welcomed with a sign showing a pig's severed head.
Or approaching Snowtown in South Australian and being confronted with a sign showing a sealed 44-gallon drum with some cartoonish, squiggley lines representing some very unpleasant fumes coming from it.
Clever marketing by the respective towns' progress association or tourist bodies?
Well, they probably learnt about how to make the very best of a very bad situation by the people of Queenstown in Tassie's west coast and east of Strachan.
For not far out of town, you're confronted by a welcome sign that shows a series of stark, uncompromising peaks. Drive a little bit further and you're stunned to see what they're on about.
The lunar landscape that surrounds this historic little town - and no matter how many times you've seen it in docos, you've got to see it to shake your head and disbelieve it - is one of the world's great ecological disasters.
So rather than be embarrassed by it, the local people proudly flaunt it.
TravelBug doesn't intend to bother you with the details, but let's just say that back in the dark ages it seemed like a good idea once coal ran out or got too expensive, they decided to cut down the forests for as far as the eye could see to feed the copper smelters that gave the town its wealth. Now these people weren't entirely capitalist monsters hell-bent on making a quid, as it was then. It seems reforestation was always promised and money was set aside but the tree died, a victim of the toxic smoke that belched out and deposited ash over those denuded peaks. Besides, the rains had washed away all the poisoned topsoil anyway so it was probably for the best.
This writer can remember seeing pictures of Queenstown in his Grade 5 social studies book back in another millennium and from memory, they weren't touted as being an awful by-product of the mineral exploitation age, more the kind of "gee, look what we did and ain't it grand" belief statement that would have made Bjelke-Petersen proud.
Still, all is not lost, and on this Tasmanian safari, that faint smudge of green spied smack in the middle of the endless asphalt-coloured landscape is, in fact, the new sapling they've planted in an on-going bid to return this part of the Apple Isle to its pristine state. It's about a metre high at the moment (probably fully grown now - editor) and the plucky little thing's doing pretty well considering it's trying to set down roots on basically bare rock pitted with acid.
It stands a good chance of hanging around for quite some time, if it can only acclimatise to all those exhaust fumes of the cars of tourists who have pulled over on the winding road down into the town to capture on film its plucky fight for survival.

Furry friends to meat on your way

One of Tassie's last remaining Tigers makes a definat stand as the writer speeds to join a tour of the Cascade Brewery in Hobart

Do you know how many native animals Tasmania has? Of course not. No one does. Ever tried grabbing a Tasmanian devil to stamp a number on it? Ornery critters at the best of times.
But take my word that there's native fauna aplenty, and it's all because they've prospered from the Apple Isle being separated from the mainland. You see, dingoes and the imported foxes that have decimated species on the fat bit of Oz never made it over Bass Strait.
Sure, driven to frenzy by the smell of prey that wafted north on the south-easterly winds, they built some fairly crafty but crude rafts and tried, but perished in the endeavour time and time again.
What this means is that our island state is awash with species ranging from their own distinct brandnames, such as the aforementioned Devil, to possums, wombats, wallabies and the like.
So what does this all mean for the tourist?
Well, do you know that the Tasmanian wildlife service estimates that no less then 900,000 (it's probably closer to two million by now - editor) of the state's native fauna line Tasmania's roadsides annually to give tourists a perfect holiday shot.
In fact, if you're not used to it, it can break your heart to see them stacked up by the verge, many with their feet in the air and ready for their bellies to be scratched.
So plentiful are they that locals call a drive from Launceston to Hobart as "getting a furry retread".
What's more, the locals have made much of the trip 120kph, so it's almost impossible to miss them.
o The writer was adamant he had spotted at least a half-dozen specimens of the supposedly extinct Tasmanian tiger (Thylacine bridgestoneii) on his trip, until locals assured him they were just Devils with skid marks across their backs.

Haunting reminder
There's probably nowhere else in Australia that says more about our nation - and how we came to be the people we are today imbued with the Anzac spirit - than the ruins of the Port Arthur penal settlement.
Lean back against the pitted sandstone walls, close your eyes and listen to the ghosts of inmates as they tell their tales of starvation and beatings. Feel a chill run down your spine as their shouts of despair and pain give just a glimpse of how this nation's pioneer spirit and derring-do atttitude were created and then hardened in the forge of deprivation, unrelenting hardship and mind-numbing hopelessness.
Well, that's what we were told happens. It cost about $18 a ticket (probably closer to $30 now - editor) so we didn't go in.

A shell out
Everywhere you go in Tassie are signs tempting you to stop and try their famous delicacy, the crayfish.
"Half-cray - only $30" bellow the signs outside restaurants and pubs. "Full cray only $50."
The only problem is, of course, that no matter where you stop or at what time of the day, it's "sorry but our last cray was ordered just five minutes ago". It happened so many times we suspect every single crayfish caught in Tassie is exported. And why not: the poor buggers pictured at left being off-loaded at St Helens were worth about $25 each wholesale. (Probably closer to $90 now - editor)
I guess we should look on the bright side: Kiwis probably don't get to eat their famous export fat lamb either.