Many people's reaction, including my own, was "what on earth can you do for two days in Tullah"?
Tullah is a tiny,old town on Tasmania's West Coast. It sits on a beautiful lake and is hemmed in by the two slumbering giants Mt Farrell and Mt Murchinson.
There are many Tasmanian towns, particularly West Coast towns, born of the two great forces: mining and Hydro. Tullah has had both these. The discovery of silver lead in 1900, and the dam building era more recently from the 70's to the 90's.
The Tasmanian landscape keeps her secrets. She takes back her history and hides her stories. There are many places that once were thriving townships, with streets and houses and huge mine workings, that now, unless you knew where you were looking, you would never dream anything once existed there.
Tasmania doesn't have ghost towns, even the ghosts leave and the landscape moves back in as if she never left.
But there is still plenty left at Tullah. However if you walk the streets you see the tell-tale signs of what used to be. Rows of streets and footpaths going nowhere and disappearing, larger open areas where there was once a school, pubs or other public facilities.
Hidden away on the edge of town is the old pioneer cemetery. You walk for five minutes down a very pretty little, well maintained gravel track to get to it.
The track opens up to reveal a spectacular landscape but also an immediate sense of sadness.
It was hard to tell how many plots were at the cemetery, but the most obvious one was this, of a six year old girl.
I've read quite a bit of West Coast history. It's well documented and it is fairly easy to find out about the men who pioneered the area, how many tons of minerals were hauled out of the mountains, or who the mine manager was. But this made me wonder about the history you can never read about. Particularly about the women who are rarely mentioned in the historical accounts. How did they cope in this hostile environment? How did they cope with the stress and how did they grieve their losses? What were their expectations? Was depression an issue? Men used alcohol as a coping mechanism, what did the women use?
And how on earth did they cope with children and babies and washing with all that rainfall?
Because women weren't the ones who constructed the roads, carved out the railways or built the dams, we'll never know their stories, but they'd have to be every bit as brave, tough and heroic as the men who did.
Tullah was always a turn off one sped past. Everyone sped down the old Lyell Highway. Always in a hurry to get north or to work. The locals were the worst. On roads with appalling visibility and driving old underpowererd land rovers they could pass anything anytime.
ReplyDeleteEven the name Tullah somehow held nothing but despair and dereliction.
I can sense a novel coming on.