Wayside Sketches in Tasmania

by S. H. Wintle

Diana’s Basin

and one can well conceive the fair and fleet goddess selecting such a spot to bathe her limbs. Yonder dwelling, partly visible through the trees, which flourish to the water’s edge, is the Summer retreat of F. Groome, Esq. of “Harefield” at St. Mary’s. This lake is like the others which we have passed—an inlet of the sea enclosed by a large and high sandbank. Wild ducks, teal, and the never-absent cormorant, haunt it in vast numbers, for it abounds in fish. Here for the first time since leaving the eastern extremity of the pass we come upon granite the prevailing rock of the stanniferous district we are about to enter. A very interesting and instructive tale of cosmical change does this same granite tell, but time and circumstance alike forbid us staying to listen to it now. It will have been observed that there is a most decided change in the character of the vegetation in these parts. The gum trees no longer have the white, smooth bark which mark them a few miles to the south-east. Instead of this the bark is rough, thick, and deeply furrowed. They are the iron bark, or redgum of the colonists, an exceedingly hard, and durable wood and it is much prized for sluice boxes by the tin miner. Five miles more, and as the sun is setting over the blue and distant mountains in the west—an abrupt turn of the road occurs, and lo! the truly magnificent

George’s Bay

opens to the view, with its numerous points, promontories, inlets and emerald flats. It is justly considered to be the most picturesque bay in the colony, and as a fishing ground is second to none. All the year round fine flounders can be had while crayfish are a drug. There are some very fine oyster beds which yield largely of these molluscs. The township of St. Helens consists of about twenty houses. There are three hotels which is just two too many. The Telegraph hotel is considered the principal one. There is a Bank, Post Office, and Telegraph Office in one neat building. A Police Office and Commissioner of Mines combined. There are two general stores. The climate of George’s Bay is unquestionably the finest in Tasmania. It is warmer than the Capital and not subject to such sudden transitions of temperature. There are very keen frosts in Winter, and also occasional frosts in Summer, but the sun beams out with resplendent glory through soft blue skies, flecked with fleecy clouds, after them. St. Helens is approached through Jason’s Gates, spanned by a bridge at the mouth of the Golden Fleece, an estuary which an artist would love to transfer to canvas. Here the names again carry the memory back to the beautiful poetical legend of the ancients. The traveller is now in the region of tin mines. Try where he may, in the sands of the sea shore, the gravel of the roads, he will obtain tin ore, but it exists only in payable quantity from three to six miles from the coast.

There is a fine river the George, rich in sylvan scenery, and teeming with fish. The chief features of the district are the hills of granite, with their smooth rounded crests. These swell up in all directions, giving the country a highly undulating appearance. There are some very rare scene studies for the artist in the ravines. The Leda Falls on the Saxleby tin claim is one of these. The stream is divided into two falls at the edge of a granite precipice in a deep rock-bound gorge.

Within one mile of the Falls is a singular “weathered” granite mass which I have named Truganini’s Throne. These spots and several others in the neighborhood are well worth a visit, I may be excused for quoting here a description of these two scenes which I lately published in the Australasian Sketcher.

Leda Falls.

These Falls are situated on the Saxleby tin claim, seven miles from George’s Bay, and in the centre of the tin mining district. A stream which takes its rise in the high granite hills of the district after flowing through button-grass marshes, and dense thickets of banera, cutting-grass and ti-tree, suddenly plunges down a deep romantic rocky gorge. Here it is broken into numerous miniature falls—now eddying round the walls of a granite basin which it has carved out through untold ages, and anon babbling among the moss-covered stones which interrupt its course, till when halfway through the gorge it leaps over a deep vertical precipice with deafening roar. At the verge of this precipice the stream is intercepted by a projection of rock which divides it and causes it to fall in two streams into a depression of the granite. At the sides of the ravine, huge overhanging masses of worn granite—some of them thousands of tons in weight, give rise to numerous recesses of sepulchral gloom. Over their portals hang festoons of delicate climbing plants and feathery-fronded ferns grow in profusion, gum-trees, acacia, dogwood and others whose branches meeting overhead form a canopy which excludes the noontide sunshine. If I might venture to call to aid metrical composition I would describe it thus:—

Forth from its secret mountain source it flows

Through em’rald swamps and tangled ti-tree dells;