Australia day 7 – Shearwater to Hobart

We are lunching with Ben and Anna (Helen and Adrian’s son and his wife) who live across the estuary on the edge of the Narawntapu National Park. Despite being quite close as the crow flie, it involves a 20 minute drive around the estuary to get to their house. On the way we drive into the National Park to stop at Bakers Beach, a 10 km stretch of fine soft sand borded by grassy dunes. Ben and Anna live on a remote three-acre bush plot with newly-arrived Lily who is just 7 weeks old and has a shock of black, sticky-uppy hair which reminds me of Matt when he was a baby. There is no piped water here and they rely on a tank filled from rain water off the roof and if that fails water has to be delivered. Lots of pine, a stove and day bed lend the interior a slightly scandinavian feel and there are two pretty bedrooms in the eaves. Outside are a number of sheds, a ‘chook’ house in need of some tlc and a number of trees. A lovely spot, secluded but not completely isolated as there are 30 or so houses in the surrounding area.. Helen and Adrian are returning to Hobart this afternoon while we stay on in Shearwater until Thursday. The plan is that they will drop us in Devonport before they leave so that we can pick up a hire car. But just as we are about to leave Ben and Anna’s we realise that we’ve left our driving licences in Hobart! That puts paid to any possibility of getting a hire car today and means we have to change the hire car arrangements and travel back to Hobart with H&A . We will pick up the car in Hobart tomorrow and then drive back to Shearwater. And we thought we had it all so well organised! We return to Hobart via the Great Lake in Tasmania’s Central Plateau. Great Lake is 22km long, is the highest freshwater lake in Australia and is renowned for its brown trout. We pass the ghostly remains of countless eucalypt stumps in the rolling paddocks, their branches left just where they have fallen giving the landscape a curiously haunting beauty.