Australian Walks
Footing it in
Tassie
A chance to venture overseas for the first time in ages! By Phillip Donnell
R
eferred to locally as “Tassie”, Tasmania is Australia’s smallest state and the one that is most like our own country’s landscape. Tassie has impressive environmental credentials. It is nature’s verdant holiday house, a place of enormously diverse inland and coastal wilderness areas that range from the wildest of ocean dunes and satellite islets to near-impenetrable rainforest, rugged mountain ranges, soaring sea cliffs and serenely fragile alpine moorlands. Accordingly, It has become world-renowned for its spectacular scenery. Tasmania is also a fascinating human habitat. The main cities of Hobart and Launceston engage in a cosmopolitan face-off across the length of the island, but smaller settlements are getting in on the act, continually adding to their urban inventories with a mixture of historic heritage sites, sit-back-and-relax cafes, artsy shops and markets, festive occasions ad restaurants that feature splendid local food and wines. Flora and fauna are an added attraction. Many of the state’s plants are unlike those found in the rest of Australia and have ties with species that grew millions of years ago. Perhaps the best known is the
Huon pine, heading a family which includes celery-top and pencil varieties. Myrtle beech dominates the wetter forests. Leatherwood, swamp gum, blue gum, buttongrass, cushion plant and horizontal scrub are common. Kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons, platypuses, echidnas, possums, wombats, southern right whales and a host of unique birds accompany the famous Tasmanian Devils. Tasmania’s diversity and relatively compact size make it a great holiday destination. You can see and do a lot in a short space of time
40 Walking New Zealand, issue no 281 - 2021
Above: Walkers on a boardwalk beside a rocky mountain. One of the best ways to see most of what this state has to offer is on foot. Only on foot can you begin to appreciate the grand scale of the physical drama before you and its exquisitely-wrought detailing. Such an opportunity is now available through Footsteps Walking Club of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their first overseas excursion since the pandemic abated is a Tasmania DayWalks Tour, 17 March-10 April 2022, for which registrations are now open. This is a comprehensive 25-day tour which visits every part of the state in what is roughly an anticlockwise loop. www.walkingnewzealand.co.nz
