The east coast’s little-known Long Marsh probation station and dam is one of Tasmania’s many out-of-the-way places to explore. With convict ruins, a sandstone quarry and and dam that was never finished, it offers the off-road explorer an untold story and remarkable insight into Tasmania’s past.
It is a very Tasmanian thing to be torn about sharing special places. Walkers, history lovers, four-wheel drivers, for example, will often end a yarn about a place they’ve enjoyed by adding, “Don’t tell too many people – we don’t want to see it messed up.”
Far from being precious, these are people who would rather not see the Tasmania they grew up in destroyed by over-zealous marketing or opportunists. Caring for a layer of Tasmania others either fail to see or view as “neglected”, they prefer to keep it that way, and share their knowledge cautiously.
This story of the Long Marsh Probation Station is shared in the same spirit.
You might ask, why share it at all? Because it shows there is history – a people’s history – that isn’t about the privileged white men cast in bronze in our city squares. Instead, these places hold stories of heroic efforts, epic failures and humble lives not placed on a pedestal, but remembered quietly and kindly, with bush grace. Fittingly, for someone like Thomas Collins, for example, one of 279 convicts stationed at Long Marsh, hand-digging and transporting huge slabs of bluestone to erect a 20-metre dam across the Macquarie River. And who paid for it with his life.
Long Marsh is west of Swansea off the Lake Leake Highway, accessible by vehicle and foot via Honeysuckle Road (M Road). Let’s just say I found out how to get there on the bushman’s grapevine and explored it for myself several times before making further enquiries about what stories it revealed. The friend who told me about it is a professional guide who knows that if you are really keen to reach a place, then you will. The effort to get there – a 4WD track, a weir crossing with a steep hill at the end, or a scramble by foot – operates, if you like, as a kind of filter.
Driving through old forests on gravel roads and bush tracks, mostly unsigned, eventually you find yourself in a forest clearing. In January you walk on ground cracking like gun shots underfoot and on the dried-up river bed.
But in March, after a week of heavy rains, the river running again, heady rainforest smells leave you intoxicated. In the clearing are comforting markers of recent human presence: a circular rock fireplace, a pile of firewood, sawn logs for seats where I picnic. Orange arrows nailed to trees mark the path.
Small signs bearing the insignature of 4WD Tasmania point you to the ruins and quarry, and another to the dam itself. And that’s how I came to talk to Barnaby (Barney) Campbell, secretary of an organisation that represents a dozen 4WD recreational vehicle clubs and their members.
Campbell says Long Marsh has been popular with recreational drivers for a fair while. He says it can be challenging going in, though not too arduous, and an easy day trip for people just starting to learn. For him, the ruins have always been the attraction, and the fact that the whole area has been left as it was. “It hasn’t been turned into a theme park like other convict places,” he says, “and you can debate that. Yes, it’s a tourist attraction, but when you think about the conditions some convicts had to live under and the treatment they got … well, it strikes a bit of a jarring note. By all means preserve the past, but turning it into Disneyland, personally, isn’t the way to go.”
Aside from lichen-covered rocks and fading calligraphy carved into softly worn sandstone, Thomas Collins’ grave is exactly as it would have been when he was lain to rest, killed by a falling stone while working on the Long Marsh dam. In a small clearing sheltered by the tall forest canopy, surrounded by flowering banksia (the British called it “honeysuckle” because of its sweet nectar), you can imagine Thomas Collins’ 36-year-old body cradled by men who may have been thinking, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Men standing back with lowered heads, crossing their chests in remembrance of a fallen mate torn away from his family in this isolated place.
Not much further on, the forest path enters the ruins site, strewn with bricks and rocks, a puzzle of crumbling chimneys, fireplaces and broken dreams. Writer Nicholas Shakespeare once likened it to “an Inca encampment”. It is a version of Port Arthur before tourism. Tall gums have pushed up through cottage floors and crashed down onto the remains of walls. You find your way by the feel of things and this is different for everyone.
Barney Campbell explains how most of the people in 4WD clubs who like to go to these places don’t want to see them shut down. “Historically, whenever there’s a problem with people in 4WDs, the government will put a gate on the track. We’re working to counteract that,” he says.
“And we’re making a bit of progress, particularly with Parks and Wildlife who are starting to realise most 4WD owners aren’t hoons. We want to get out and enjoy places like other recreational people do. Unfortunately, some people think it gives them license to tear up the bush and put it all over social media – and they are the ones who get the profile.”
The subtle but necessary signage was a joint exercise between 4WD Tasmania and the publisher of Roving Tasmania, Chris Boden, a modest, retired Parks and Wildlife ranger whose book Off-Road Tasmania, first published in 2001, is now in its 5th edition. Boden details and maps many out-of-the-way tracks around Tasmania, and includes an entry for Long Marsh Dam, which he’s been visiting for more than 40 years.
“I love its isolation,” he says. “To appreciate it fully is to walk into the old settlement. You’ll need strong walking boots – there’s some rough terrain – but the tracks are marked.”
Orange arrows pinned to ghostlike gums point the way to a rubble of a settlement that is a man-made wonder, built not as a prison but to house convicts tasked to construct one of Australia’s early feats of engineering. Its story is important but not glossy. And the people who find their way there seem to do so through a love of the bush and off-track places, leaving nothing behind, and taking nothing away but the stories they share.
Historical notes
The Long Marsh dam site was first reported on in 1842 by Captain Arthur Cotton, an officer of the East India Company with experience of irrigation and water conservation, as a means of irrigating farmland in the northern midlands. His paper, On Irrigation in Tasmania, published in the Journal of Natural Science, shows an early vision in the life of the colony, putting Van Diemen’s Land at the forefront of water management.
While occupying Aboriginal grounds, northern Midlands landowners known as “the early Ross pioneers” were also visionary pastoralists. From the 1820s, William Kermode showed passion for improving and cultivating land for his Saxon Merino stud at Mona Vale. At Syndal, Phillip Thomas Smith, who helped found the Midland Agricultural Association, also founded the Philip Smith Training College in Hobart. James Bicheno, a naturalist appointed as colonial secretary, was also vice-president of the Mechanics Institute and Royal Society of Tasmania, and lectured in botany and the benefits of gardening. All three jointly corresponded with successive governors to advocate for the wider benefits of the Long Marsh project – to no avail. This was partly due to the depression of the 1840s.
Construction of the dam started in 1843 using convict labour housed at a specially constructed probation station located on the upper Macquarie River, about 13km south of Lake Leake, and north of Tooms Lake. For the first 18 months, convict labour was free until, in 1844, an order from London arrived requiring landowners to pay for it. The landowners, who had already invested significant time and resources into their enterprise, in the belief that the project would be honoured, refused to pay labour costs. The convicts walked off the job, leaving it half complete. The two sides of the dam have never met.
The combined dam and settlement form an extensive area which includes two 20-metre high rock walls and partially completed rubble coffer dam wall. The station area originally consisted of 14 buildings. A nearby sandstone quarry contains a surprising scattering of massive sandstone blocks cut from the quarry face. A path from the dam site leads to the ruins of the convict settlement, situated in open woodland on a hill overlooking Long Marsh. Inside the settlement lie remains of drystone wall compounds, stone lined paths, outbuildings and chimney butts.
The Tasmanian Heritage Council regards the site as one of the largest and most ambitious convict-based land development projects undertaken in Australia.
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers - Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.