xenith | Road Trip: North West Coast As Seen From A Bus On The Highway, Mostly

Devonport -- Burnie

Devonport I have covered before. Somewhere. Sort of. Squirrel photos will do? Hmm. OK, Devonport is a port city of about 22,000 people, making it the third biggest city on the island. The Bass Strait ferries come in here, and other things of course.

It does have a nice, if rather dull, beach.

Devonport is also the first place actually on the coast when you're heading west along the Bass Highway (i.e. coming from the rest of the state).

Between Burnie and Devonport there is a string of towns that almost joins together into one long residential strip, but the highway bypasses most of this, so it's not that interesting.

Although you can see Bass Strait for most of the trip.

There's Table Cape off in the distance.

Forth River, which is Lake Barrington further up

Beautiful Burnie, or should that be Industrialised Burnie?

It has been cleaned up a lot in recent years. We used to live here, at Somerset actually, when I was a pre-schooler. After we moved back to Launceston, every year we'd make a trek up here, so my parents could visit with friends. A trek it was for two bored kids back when the travel times were longer, but at least we could always tell when we'd go to Burnie: from the smell and this. Imagine it shining white against a dark hill, with a cloud of smoke rising much higher over it. Quite spectacular for a young kid.

It's gone now. The large APPM paper mill further along has been downgraded too.

Now it's owned by Australian Paper. There are some nice Art Deco buildings in the city, most of which I didn't get a photo of.

Burnie is the fourth and smallest of the Tasmanian cities. As Emu Bay, it was one of the VDL Company's settlements in the 1820s (Burnie being the name of one of their directors), but the town sort of just sat there. Until the West Coast mining boom in the late 19th century, when Burnie became an important port. Then came the paper mills and Tioxide and the like, which were major employers and contributed strongly to the develop of the town. Burnie only became a city recently, certainly since we left. 20 April 1988, the council says.

You can see this reflected in the architecture. APPM came along in the late 1930s, which probably explains the popularity of the Art Deco-style. The older buildings in the city date back just to turn of the 20th century. The only building from before that time that I'm aware off is Burnie Inn which is now located in the park.