Experience the best of Strahan

Strahan sits on Macquarie Harbour, a large shallow inlet that reaches the sea through a narrow gap known as Hells Gates. Timber wharves, cafés and a restored waterfront face the harbour, and a long-running play, The Ship That Never Was, tells the story of a convict escape in 1834.

Cruises cross the harbour to Sarah Island, a ruined penal settlement of the 1820s and 1830s, and up the Gordon River into temperate rainforest with Huon pine. Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, lies inland. Ocean Beach, a straight beach more than thirty kilometres long, stretches north with the Henty Dunes rising behind it, and a rack-and-pinion mining railway runs up through the forest to Queenstown.

Salmon and ocean trout are farmed in the harbour, and crayfish come from the coast. The west coast takes the full force of the Southern Ocean winds, and rain falls on many days of the year, which keeps the forests thick and green.