The weekend just gone, Moira and I left the dog in the care of our youngest and went bush in Tasmania's Tarkine.
The area, in the state's north-west corner, is the largest remaining temperate rainforest area in Australia with a wealth of natural and human heritage including over 1,000 aboriginal archaeological sites and remains of European logging and mining. Today it is one of Tasmania's troubled "multi-use" areas attempting to balance preservation of its special ecology, history and pre-history, tourism and (hopefully sustainable) exploitation of its resources.
Our plan was to overnight at Corinna, an 1890s wild-west mining ghost town recently brought back to life as an eco-tourism base, before taking doing the Pieman and Savage Rivers walk then driving north through Arthur River thence looping the state by driving home along the northern coast. We did do the walk outward (moderate but entirely do-able even by an older f**t with knees well past their use-by date) but grabbed a freebie kayak in the Savage and paddled back to the car.
A bit of Corinna history we hadn't expected was the little graving dock (see the picture) built for the huon pine cruise boat "Arcadia II" in the 1980s. Most people know graving docks as 'drydocks' but when I was learning my trade with the Australian Department of Defence about Garden and Cockatoo Islands, both with somewhat bigger graving docks, they were 'graving docks'.
Actually, graving docks are named over the practice of 'graving' a ship's bottom - burning off the weed growth then paying it with tar to inhibit new growth, ship worm and rot. Graving docks usually have walls of concrete (Garden Island) or stone (Cockatoo Island) but you can see that the "Arcadia's" was just eathern embankments with concrete where a steel gate was lowered in by the crane at the far end in the photo. Arms proped from the sides of the dock would brace the boat upright while it sat on keel blocks when the gate was in place and the dock pumped dry.
I'm not quite old enough to have actually graved a vessel, nor to have seen it done, but it sounds like the sort of sailorizing that is nicer to dream of than actually do . . .
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