The Central Highlands

The Central Highlands

This drive up to Launceston, (approx. 4 hours from Hobart) instead of taking the main highway all the way, I decided to turn off at Melton Mowbay to detour through the Central Highlands/Great Lake Highway. The geology and plateau landscape of Tasmania’s Central Highlands is nothing short of mind-boggling, with breath-taking escarpments and mountain cirques, 700 million years of turbulent geological history and glaciation that make you stop every five minutes to pop out of the car and take another picture. The alpine ecology is equally fantastic, with unique plant communities such as cushion plants and pencil pines, the visual effect of which is a staged bonsai display the size of a park. At one day-walk destination there was a sign explaining: “Pencil pines are found only in Tasmania, but they belong to the same family as the tallest tree in the world, the giant Californian Sequoia. They have their origins on the southern continent of Gondwana and are among the great survivors of eons of ravaging change.”