Strahan

Aboriginal people of Tasmania's west coast lived around Macquarie Harbour for thousands of years, travelling the shore and the rivers and leaving middens in the dunes; the colonial frontier of the early 19th century destroyed their communities here as elsewhere on the island. The harbour's recorded European history begins in 1815, when it was charted and named, and in 1822 the British opened a penal station on Sarah Island, deep inside the harbour. Convicts felled Huon pine and built ships in conditions notorious even by the standards of Van Diemen's Land, hemmed in by rainforest and by the narrow entrance the prisoners called Hells Gates. The station closed in 1833.

The town itself came with metal. Copper was found at Mount Lyell behind Queenstown, and from the late 1890s the mining company needed a deepwater outlet: Strahan, named after a colonial governor, grew into the port through which copper, silver from Zeehan and Huon pine from the rivers were shipped, served by the Abt rack railway that climbed over the mountains from Queenstown to Regatta Point. For a time it was a busy port, with regular shipping of passengers and cargo as well as ore.

The railway closed in 1963 and the ore went out by road; the population fell and the town emptied. Strahan returned to national attention in 1982 and 1983 as the base for the campaign against a hydroelectric dam on the Franklin River, a dispute that split the local community and ended in the High Court. The wilderness that the campaign protected became the town's new economy: Gordon River cruises, a rebuilt tourist railway from 2002, and the harbour's salmon farms.

Strahan's identity is that of a working west coast town rather than a resort, even though nearly everyone in it now works with visitors. The old trades — mining, fishing, cutting Huon pine — are still the source of local pride, and Huon pine timber, slow-grown and fragrant, is turned and carved in workshops around the town. The pubs on the Esplanade are where locals and travellers mix, and conversation runs to weather, boats and what the harbour is doing.

Theatre of a very particular kind is part of the place: a comedy about the convicts who seized a brig from the Sarah Island shipyard and sailed it to South America has been performed in the town since 1993 and is the longest-running play in Australia. The interpretation of the convict settlement, the piners and the Franklin campaign is unusually thorough for a town this size, because the visitor economy is built on that history.

Environmental politics still shapes local feeling. The Franklin blockade brought national attention and lasting bitterness between conservationists and timber and hydro workers; more recent arguments concern salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour, its effect on the endangered Maugean skate, and the future of mining nearby. Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage on the west coast, including cave sites in the river valleys inland, is increasingly part of how the region presents itself.

About 630 people live in Strahan, and the wider west coast municipality counts a few thousand across Queenstown, Zeehan, Rosebery and the smaller settlements. The population has fallen for most of a century as mining employment shrank, and the age profile is older than the state average, although tourism brings young seasonal staff each summer.

Work means cruise boats, the railway, hotels, cafés and tour operations, along with the salmon industry in the harbour, commercial fishing, and mining and forestry jobs reached by driving inland. Many households depend on a season that runs hard from December to March and slows sharply after Easter. Shopping beyond basics, secondary schooling and most medical care involve a drive to Queenstown, Burnie or further, and the isolation is real: the nearest large supermarket is hours away.

The rhythm of the day follows the boats and the trains — an early departure across the harbour, a quiet middle of the day, the town busy again in the late afternoon. Weather dominates conversation and plans, since a westerly gale can cancel a cruise or close the beach road. Local concerns are the long-term population decline, the reliability of the roads, housing taken up by holiday letting, and the balance between the industries that built the coast and the wilderness that now pays much of its wages.

Seafood is the strength of the local table. Atlantic salmon and ocean trout are farmed in Macquarie Harbour and appear smoked, grilled and in pies and chowders across the town, while boats bring in ocean fish, and southern rock lobster — called crayfish in Tasmania — is the local luxury when in season. Fish and chips eaten beside the water is the standard evening meal for visitors and residents alike.

Beyond fish, the food is west coast pub and bakery cooking: steaks and roasts, chips and gravy, and the Tasmanian scallop pie, a pastry filled with scallops in a mild curried sauce, sold in bakeries here as across the state. Rainforest products give a few local flavours, among them leatherwood honey, made by bees working the leatherwood trees of the western forests and sold in jars around the town, and native pepperberry and other bush ingredients used by some kitchens.

Drinks follow Tasmania's reputation: cool-climate wine from the north and south-east of the island, craft beer and cider, and single malt whisky from the state's distilleries, all of which travel here rather than being made locally. Self-catering is common, because the number of restaurants is small and hours are short, and most visitors stock up in Queenstown or before they leave the north of the state.