Gordon River World Heritage Cruise with Lunch Strahan

Strahan and Macquarie Harbour

Strahan is a small harbour village on the west coast of Tasmania, the only town on Macquarie Harbour and the gateway to the wild rivers and rainforest behind it. The harbour is a vast sheet of water, far larger than Sydney Harbour, fed by the Gordon and King rivers and stained the colour of tea by tannins from the surrounding forests. Strahan grew on timber, fishing and the railway from the mining town of Queenstown, and its waterfront of old wharves is where the cruise departs at 09:00.

The first leg crosses the harbour towards the ocean entrance, passing the fish farms that raise ocean trout and salmon in the deep, sheltered water. The commentary from the skipper and local guides introduces the harbour's geology and the stories of the people who lived and worked on it. For visitors wondering how to get to the Gordon River, this cruise from Strahan is the answer: there is no road, and the river can be reached only by water.

Hells Gates and the lighthouses at Macquarie Heads

Hells Gates is the narrow channel where Macquarie Harbour meets the Southern Ocean, a gap so tight and so troubled by shoals and swell that the convicts who were shipped through it in the 1820s gave it the name. The catamaran approaches the entrance so you can see the ocean rolling in beyond the training walls, the lighthouse on Entrance Island in the middle of the channel and the taller light on Cape Sorell above the heads.

The skipper explains how ships were piloted through the gates, how the walls were built to keep the channel open and why the west coast was so feared by early sailors. On a calm day the contrast between the open sea and the still harbour behind is striking; on a rough one the spray against the walls shows exactly why the name stuck. From here the vessel turns south-east down the harbour towards Sarah Island.

Sarah Island: Tasmania's first penal settlement

Sarah Island was the site of the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, which operated from 1822 to 1833 as the harshest place of secondary punishment in the colony, reserved for convicts who had reoffended. The small island was chosen precisely because escape across the harbour and through the rainforest was thought impossible. Surprisingly, it also became one of the busiest shipbuilding yards in Australia at the time, as convicts under skilled shipwrights turned Huon pine into vessels for the colonial government.

The cruise lands here for a one-hour guided tour on shore led by local guides who bring the ruins to life: the penitentiary walls, the bakehouse, the tannery and the slipways, with stories of punishments, escapes and the daily routine of the settlement. The paths are gravel and mostly level. A Sarah Island tour is included in the cruise and is the historical heart of the day, and many visitors say it is the part they remember most.

The Gordon River and the World Heritage Area

From Sarah Island the catamaran enters the mouth of the Gordon River and slows to a glide so that its wake does not erode the banks. The river runs through the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, and its dark, tannin-stained water becomes a perfect mirror for the rainforest on either side: myrtle, sassafras, leatherwood and Huon pine reflected so sharply that photographs seem doubled. Lunch is served to your seat during this stretch, so you eat with the forest sliding past the windows.

The Gordon River cruise is the best-known way to enter this wilderness, and the quietness is the point: no roads, no buildings, only the river and the forest that have changed little in thousands of years. The guides explain the campaign that saved the Franklin and Gordon rivers from damming and the ecology of temperate rainforest. The best time to visit is a still morning, when the reflections are strongest, which is exactly when this cruise arrives.

Heritage Landing rainforest boardwalk

Heritage Landing is a jetty on the lower Gordon River where the cruise ties up for about 40 minutes so you can walk a looped boardwalk through cool temperate rainforest. The path is flat and easy, passing moss-covered trunks, tree ferns, lichen-draped branches and the forest's celebrated inhabitant, a Huon pine thought to be around 2,000 years old. Interpretive signs and the guides explain how slowly these trees grow and why the timber was so prized by boat builders.

The air here is cool and damp even in summer, so a light jacket is useful, and the quiet of the forest is remarkable after the open harbour. This stop is the only place on the cruise where you step into the World Heritage rainforest itself, and it is why the Gordon River is considered worth visiting even on a tight Tasmanian itinerary. The vessel then returns down the river and across the harbour to Strahan.

Huon pine and the sawmill demonstration

Huon pine grows only in western Tasmania and is one of the slowest-growing and longest-lived trees on Earth, with timber so rich in natural oil that it resists rot and insects for centuries; wrecks of Huon pine boats have been found almost unchanged after decades in the water. The convicts of Sarah Island, the piners who rafted logs down the Gordon in the nineteenth century and the shipwrights of Strahan all depended on it, and harvesting of living trees is now banned, with only salvaged logs used.

On return to Strahan in the mid-afternoon the cruise ends with a demonstration at a working Huon pine sawmill on the Esplanade, where you see the golden timber cut, smell its distinctive scent and learn how salvaged logs are turned into furniture and boats today. It is a fitting close to a Strahan cruise that has followed the story of this tree from forest to shipyard.