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History of the Central Highlands of Tasmania

Poatina Road

The road from Poatina to Arthur’s Lake is a pretty incredible bendy road, as it snakes up the Great Western Tiers. Clarky, who lived next door to my grandparents, and was ever the joker, typically took his pack of dogs up in a trailer. He would joke that some of the bends were so tight that if you stuck your head out the window to spit, you’d kiss rover on the ass hahaha.

It’s a marvel how they built roads in such steep and rugged terrain. I couldn’t even imagine what it was like for the person in charge of planning and designing the road. The first time they got out in the bush to scope out the best place to build it, must have been so daunting.

Gowrie Park

Gowrie Park is a Hydro village on the North West Coast of Tasmania near Sheffield. It was constructed for the Mersey Forth power scheme, which began construction in 1963, with 2,000 people living at Gowrie Park. The Gowrie Park school catered to 250 families with many different languages spoken due to the diversity of the workers.

The Gowrie Park area has a very special connection with me for several reasons. My Dad lived there and helped build the scheme.

An amazing mural at Gowrie Park painted in honour of the Hydro by Atsushi Kase under CC2

Gowrie Park is also on the drive up to Cradle Mountain, where my mother, sister and I bush walked so many times. Just before Gowrie Park is Claude Road. In my younger years I’d feel a really strong connection to this place as we drove through. But I never questioned it. Later in life, I was in Sheffield with my mother, and we had some time to kill before picking up my niece Sharni from school. So we grabbed a coffee and went on an adventure. She took me to where my Grandmother Verna McGee née Treloar was born in the foothills of Mount Roland, near Claude Road. Suddenly the connection made complete sense, it was where my Grandmother lived her early life.

Where my Grandmother Verna McGee née Treloar was born in the foothills of Mount Roland

Shacks

Shacks are very much an iconic Tasmanian tradition, that evolved from those adventurous trappers, shepherds, and bush rangers building Mountain Huts. The first modern-day shacks were built on Crown Land in 1944 that was leased to occupiers. They were then built all over Tasmania, mainly in isolated locations including beaches, and in the Central Plateau for fishing. The high availability of Crown Land in isolated areas assisted this tradition in Tasmania.

The shacks were built for weekend getaways, and while the planning and designs had evolved from the earlier Mountain Huts, it was still quite haphazard. They are generally designed without any regard for planning or environmental concerns; the land areas were not clearly defined or of standard size; water and effluent treatment were virtually nonexistent; road and access infrastructure were poor or ill-defined; owners also had no security of tenure, as they leased the land on a year-to-year basis.

The quality of the shacks also varies quite considerably, the construction techniques used for shacks were also haphazard at best, some are nice little abodes, and others have been clearly slapped together without too much thought to design and using cheap materials. There was generally no plumbing, electricity, or heating. If you were lucky there would be a long drop toilet out the back, which is basically just a plank of wood with a big hole in it, over a deep hole dug into the ground. During the 1970s the shacks started to improve, and owners actually started painting them. By 2008 there were 1370 shacks on Crown Land.

We never owned a shack ourselves. We took our own shack along with us when we went fishing, i.e., the campervan, But we did know many people who had shacks at Hawley Beach, up the Lakes, and many other places.

The campervan

During primary school, I had a good friend Matthew Payne, whose father had an awesome shack at Parramatta Creek, in the Pine Plantation. We had so much fun and games playing around in the bush building cubby houses and trying to catch rabbits.

At the Great Lake, my parents’ friend Johnny Griffiths had an awesome shack right on the lake’s edge in the Breona shack community, which is in Little Lake Bay. Johnny was also an avid fisherman and I’d like to say that we caught many fish casting in from the lake’s edge, but the Great Lake isn’t a great fishing lake. It was a good day’s fishing when you got a bite. It was a great day’s fishing when you actually caught a fish! Such was the reputation of the Great Lake, which is why we rarely fished there. It’s because it’s such a big lake, that the fish are scattered far and wide, so it’s hard to find them.

But there is a really nice pub at the Great Lake, and it was nice to go and get a nice meal in a warm dining room.

My brother now owns the most amazing little shack at the Great Lake. It’s a tiny little thing but it’s packed full of fun and good times.

My brother’s shack

It’s in a small little community of half a dozen shacks and he is friends with many of his neighbours. It’s up on a bit of a hill and has great views of the lake. He has taken an excavator up there and done a lot of landscaping work, both for himself and his neighbours, and this has made it so much easier to get down to the lake. It didn’t have a toilet when he bought it, so he put in a septic tank and built a toilet inside the shack. He has done all this work himself which is impressive.

Dane McCormack
Dane McCormackhttps://danemccormackauthor.wordpress.com/home/
Dane McCormack was born and raised in Tasmania. He escaped to the mainland to pursue his career and has worked as a Business Transformation specialist for several of the world’s biggest companies including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and KPMG. His love of writing was reawakened as he explored how he survived and thrived through a recent cancer journey. After being given 24hours to live several times and losing his long-term memories, he set out on a mighty quest to find them and wrote his autobiography. It emphasised just how important history is because it made him who he was, which helped him survive and thrive. It left him determined to leave a legacy for his family. He’s now sharing his stories, to help others dealing with tough times and develop their careers. He is also exploring his family and friends’ history in more detail.

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