Tas Tour 06
High & Lonesome's Big Festival Tour back in '06.
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The omnipresent Mt Wellington from Kanagaroo Bay, Bellerive, where I grew up and spent a lot of time ‘mucking around in boats’, including sailing 12 foot centerboard dinghies across to Town to show off for tourists.
I like the little cloud in front of the Organ Pipes at the top of the mountain. The locals can forecast weather from the atmospherics of the Mountain.
A cloud in front of the Organ Pipes in summer means there will be an afternoon seabreeze.
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The Post Office and Boer War/WWI cenotaph in the early 19th century village at Bellerive.
This is where I would be sent ‘down the street’ to get groceries as a child before they invented supermarkets.
From here you could go to the wharf and catch a ferry or wait in front of Vane’s lolly shop for a bus to Town.
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An art installation next to Salamanca Place at Murray Street wharf.
I would disembark the Ferry here with my mother when I was a wee boy from a trip to ‘Town’ - always a big event.
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Literally on the way to Paradise beneath Mt Roland. (Coincidently, if you keep going you’ll end up in Mole Creek.)
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An old farm shed on the Paradise Road, with hand split roof shingles.
This is the image which provides the roof in the High & Lonesome Shack banner.
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Pirate Bay - the other side of the Blowhole. The coastal rock stacks here are awe-inspiring, especially when pounded by huge swells from deep in the Southern Ocean.
Whenever we visited this place as a child my father saw it as his protective duty to instill in us a morbid fear of being washed off the rocks and drowned. The memorials on the rocks to those who had indeed met that fate helped to create the mood of being in a haunted place.
Convicts escaped from Port Arthur and lurked along this coast waiting their chance to swim across Norfolk Bay to avoid the infamous line of chained guard dogs across Eagle Hawk Neck (try saying that when you’re only three). Haunted indeed…
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Chilling out at the H&L camp site, Cygnet.
Reinhart keeps the peace in an intense chess dual between Achyuta and Matiss.
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Georgetown, near the mouth of the Tamar River in Northern Tasmania, site of the Tamar Valley Folk Festival and the proposed largest woodchip mill in the Southern Hemisphere.
Woodchippers have been ripping out native forests in Tasmania since the late 60s and they still want more! If they’d planted native plantations like we told ‘em back the 70s they wouldna have to do it now.
Boycott Gunn’s - the largest company in Tasmania by far, whose share portfolio includes the Tasmanian Parliament!
It was a great festival weekend but none of us took any photos of the band.
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The old Bide-A-Wee Cafe at Eaglehawk Neck.
It used to be sump-oiled vertical board. My family stayed there many times, including the Easter Flood of ‘62 when it didn’t stop raining. We sometimes minded the Cafe when ‘Uncle Bob’ and Aunty ‘Sal’ Mills had time out.
Bob used to catch the biggest crayfish you ever saw off the rocks just below the road. All cooked up with hand cut chips on a wood-fired stove and served with salad, fresh bread and butter curls. It impressed me as a child.
Loved sleeping there, as you could hear the surf at night.
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View of Mount Wellington from ‘The Fort’ - a mid 19th century military battery to ward off potential Russian invaders.
It’s a tourist preservation now, but when I was a kid it was wild and feral. We’d hide and seek through the tunnels and dungeons, throw rocks and firecrackers at rival neighbourhood gangs, catch tadpoles and spy on courting couples in their parked cars.
I was banned from going there many times.
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Fresh off the boat in the early morning before we could find anywhere open that sold coffee.
This is Mt Roland from just outside of Sheffield, about 20 minutes south of Devonport.
