Qualla: Macquarie Harbour

Macquarie Harbour: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Here is a harbour where the tide does not answer to the moon. Macquarie Harbour is so vast and so nearly sealed off from the ocean, fed by rivers pouring down from the mountains and pinched at its mouth into a channel barely wide enough for a ship, that its water level rises and falls with the weather instead. When rain hammers the ranges, the harbour swells. When the pressure lifts and the rain eases, it drops. Scientists call them barometric tides, and they belong almost nowhere else on Earth. This is the strange, brooding heart of Tasmania's west coast: a shallow fjord of some 315 square kilometres, stained the colour of strong tea, where almost everything that has ever happened on this coast eventually passed through.

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Image: Public domain

Macquarie Harbour: Hell's Gates

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit M. Murphy, Public domain. The only way in from the Southern Ocean is a channel so narrow and so violent that the convicts who were shipped through it called it Hell's Gates, and the name has never been improved upon. The harbour drowns an enormous volume of fresh water, gathered from the King and Gordon R...

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Image: M. Murphy | Public domain

Macquarie Harbour: The Whale-Road

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. In December 1815, the sealer and explorer James Kelly is said to have rowed a small five-oared whaleboat out of Hobart and become one of the first Europeans to find this harbour, though the records argue over the exact date. He named it for Lachlan Macquarie, the Scottish-born go...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Macquarie Harbour: A Harbour Put to Work

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit User:JarrahTree, CC BY 2.5 au. Macquarie Harbour has rarely been left alone. Its first European settlement was the penal station on Sarah Island, chosen for an isolation so complete it amounted to a sentence in itself. Later the small port of Strahan rose on its northern shore to serve the mines inland, and a ...

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Image: User:JarrahTree | CC BY 2.5 au

Macquarie Harbour: Salmon, Skates, and the Future

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:01:40 GMT

Photo credit Steven Penton from Bakers Beach, Tasmania Australia, CC BY 2.0. The newest pressure swims in pens. Salmon farming arrived in the 1980s and expanded fast in the new century, until the crowded pens stripped oxygen from the deep water and created dead zones on the harbour floor, and mass fish kills forced regulators to cut back stocking. The sta...

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Image: Steven Penton from Bakers Beach, Tasmania Australia | CC BY 2.0