Australian Geographic – July-August 2019

98 Australian Geographic

UEENSTOWN WAS A redneck, hick, burn-it, bash-it,

bury-it mining town,” says third-generation local

Anthony Coulson. This former miner now runs

wildlife-spotting adventures and abandoned mine

tours in the nearby Tasmanian Wilderness World

Heritage Area, one of the planet’s last true wilder-

ness regions. He is part of the revolution taking place in

Tassie’s most misunderstood town, but feels privileged to have

been around for Queenie’s legendary bar fights, lock-ins and

advancing lunar landscape.

Not so long ago Queenstown evoked a polarising effect.

In fact, its mention still triggers some Hobartians to recount

nightmarish experiences. These include running the risk of being

punched at questionable drinking establishments; being subjected

to the finger while walking through town wearing a backpack,

after the protests against the dam that would have tamed the

famously wild Franklin River; or witnessing the in-your-face

environmental damage locals once seemed so proud of.

For decades, residents of the state’s capital have pointedly

bypassed Queenstown and headed to Strahan, a further 40km

to the south-west, for weekend and holiday breaks. West Coast

Tasmanians and people who’ve made ‘Queenie’ home don’t

sugar-coat the brutal landscape, tragic history and rough-edged

locals, but they do understand change and the need for it.

The West Coast region covers 9574sq.km and encompasses

five towns: Queenstown, with a population of about 1800, is the

largest. Travelling from Hobart, 260km away to the south-east,

the Lyell Highway eventually becomes what locals call “the road

of 99 bends” and crests between the shoulders of Mt Lyell and

Mt Owen, where only reed grass and snowberries grow because

of historic pollution. For the final 5km descent, which some

liken to driving into a mining pit, the rock walls are petticoated

in places with wire. Most people are too fixated on the stark

landscape and cliff-drop corners to notice the white stones

arranged on a hillside across the valley that read “W 

Q” in shaky capitals.

Q

UEENSTOWN IS ON the traditional land of the Lowreenne

and Mimegin people. Aboriginal Tasmanians lived here

during the last Ice Age before shifting further west to the

coast where food was more abundant, but returned seasonally for

hunting and ceremony. When geologist Charles Gould surveyed

the area in 1862, he was likely the first European to stand in what

was then undisturbed cool-temperate rainforest fed by a clear,

rocky river. It’s overlooked by the naturally exposed pink-tinged

conglomerate peaks of the West Coast Range where in 1893 an

ironstone outcrop known as the Iron Blow was found to contain

vast copper deposits and shortly after the Mount Lyell Mining

and Railway Company formed. Furnaces for Mount Lyell’s

pyritic smelting were fed accessible clear-felled timber. Bushfires

destroyed remaining trees on the lower slopes of Lyell and

Owen, then sulfurous rain, caused by the smelting, denuded

the landscape and inhibited regrowth.

The Lyell Highway snakes

into Queenstown through a

landscape that still bears the

growth-inhibiting e

ects of

sulfurous rain.

The Queenstown Post Oce, on the corner

of Orr and Sticht streets, was built in 1902

and is one of the town’s oldest buildings.

Q

“

PHOTO CREDITS, PREVIOUS PAGE: TOURISM TASMANIA & NICK OSBORNE;

THIS PAGE, TOP RIGHT: LOOK / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO