As I walked along the road from Deloraine, bound for Mole Creek, I remembered a letter I had received many years before from a Bendigo doctor. He asked me to describe this particular road under one of the three headings-"uniteresting" "medium', "extra good". He went on to explain that if description number one fitted it he would motor; if I classed it among the "medium good" he would cycle or drive; but if the third description were used he would walk. Of course, the first adjective can be ruled out regarding any Tasmanian road, but I had a choice of the other two. My reply was "extra good", and the doctor informed me afterwards that he had thoroughly enjoyed evey step of the way. It is much too good a road to be rushed along in a wheeled vehicle. There is the Meander River to keep you company on the first mile, green fields deck the hillsides, mountains form a background and ever and anon one passes lovely old homesteads and crosses cool creeks, with many a mile of hawthorn hedges flanking fields of buttercups and daisies where browse the cattle, sheep and horses for which the area is renowned.
The name Mole Creek may seem rather repellent, but I for one would not have it changed, for it is as apt a title as any. The creek that gives the township its name definitely burrows like a mole, and while on its underground journey it performs feats that are not equalled by any stream even in this island of surprises. Having noticed the little river in its sober journey through the village preparatory to losing itself in the turbulent Mersey, you wonder at its modesty when you learn of the exploits of its infancy. It merely prattles when it is entitled to shout. Mole Creek and its tributaries have, like Coleridge's sacred river, literally run through "caverns measureless to man". Nobody except the creek itself knows where it has been nor what miracles it has been performing.

The explanation is, of course,  that this is a limestone country, and many a stream plays hide and seek among the hills. Caves are numberless. Some of them are owned privately by farmers; others are exploited to attract sight-seers. Bottomless holes are so common that landholders hardly ever bother to explore them. Noting that nearly all the fences were awry, I enquired whether the district had been settled as long as the fences seemed to indicate. "Well, sir," explained my informant, "the place is so riddled with caves that no fencer is game to sink a hole more than eighteen inches deep for fear of disappearing into the bowels of the earth." This is a sample of a lie that is not a lie. The Mole Creekers love to tell of the man who threw his cat into the river, and heard two days later that it had been found with only two of its nine lives lost, twenty miles away near Beaconsfield, crawling out of the Flowery Gully caves.
Eventually Tasmania will be known as the worlds out-standing caveland. A belt of limestone runs through the island from near Beaconsfield in the north, through Mole Creek, Mount Field National Park and the Huon, terminating at Ida Bay. There are eaves in the foot-hills of Adamsons Peak known as the Hastings Caves, as fascinating as those to be found anywhere. All except one are sealed up, awaiting the day when thousands of sightseers will flock to wonder at them.
Ten miles from Mole Creek the road dives steeply down to the Mersey at Liena. The hillside is riddled with caves, some of which I entered with the aid of a rope. It is eerie work crawling about these dungeons of which the only in-habitants seem to be glow-worms. These lower levels are, in effect, the suburbs of the well-known King Solomon Cave, where, though the monarch may not be seen in all his glory, his palace may. No doubt the visitors thought they got their money's worth in the days when acetylene was the illuminant, but they get many times the value now that electric lighting is provided If the King Solomon is not Australia's finest cave, then Australia is lucky. All the usual features are there -pillars, shawls, furze-bushes, menageries, cathedral chambers and the various freaks that emphasize the limestone wizard's weird skill-and in addition there is a glorious colour scheme. There is not an inch of blank space in the whole cavern.

A few miles away in the foot-hills of the Western Tiers, lies immense Marakoopa Cave. A mile of so of chambers and galleries have been opened up, but nobody knows where the cave ends. The guides say they have walked for a day, and the passages still burrow into the mountain side.
"Why," said the Boots at the Holly Tree Inn, "it would be easier for them to tell of what they hadn't seen than what they had." And Boots spoke for me too, after my ramble from Deloraine to the Mersey. Mole Creek has practically everything except volcanoes and glaciers. The caves would have been enough; but there are also canyons, forests, fern-glades, waterfalls, lakes, mountains, rivers. I once camped a night near the mountain tops by the side of a quiet little lake which proved that utility could be allied to beauty by furnishing tea in the shape of a six-pound trout. It was on this trip that I discovered a practical use for eagles. These monsters of the air - very nearly the world's largest - build their nests in the inaccessible crags of the Tiers, especially round about the wild spot known as Devil's Gullet. Just near here we started a hare, and soon after-wards one of my companions noticed an eagle swoop to the ground. We sprinted to the spot and disturbed the winged hunter just about to administer the knock-out
blow to the hare which he had buffeted half to death. That hare went well, jugged, next day; and we became celebrated as the campers who, too lazy to do their own hunting, trained the eagles to do it for them.
But though I admire the caves and the gorges and the big trees and the wealth of fern, forest and wildflower, the waterfalls and the mountain lakes, the most lingering memory I have of the spot is Mole Creek settlement itself. Early in the morning, after a dip in the creek near the old water-wheel, I climbed the little hill that hides the Mersey and, resting under a clump of gums and blackwoods, looked back and watched Mole Creek wake up, wash, and dress itself ready for the toil of the day. Smoke curled from the farmhouses, the sun broke through the morning mists which had sponged the face of the earth, ploughmen came out into the fields, cows straggled into milking yards, birds chattered and whistled, a motor lorry coughed its way up the hillside road, and amid the variety of sights and sounds and scents I was sorry when the tinkle of the breakfast bell assured me that it was not only fancy on my part that the odour of frying bacon was mingling with the perfumes of the bush- I took one last look, and engraved on my memory for all time is that sweet prospect-the tree-girt homesteads; the fields, some green with clover, some chocolate after ploughing; the snake of willow and black-woods that marks Mole Creek crawling across the plains; the winding roads, the distant forest, and beyond all, the ramparts of Western Tiers burnished by the strengthening sunlight with here and there a patch of snow.

It was on a Sunday morning that I set out from Mole Creek for Sheffield, a distance of some eighteen miles. I revelled in my hule swag of about a dozen pounds weight, for I knew that very soon I should be humping three times that; and when I disputed the distance with a man I had met near Union Bridge he declared that when he saw me I was doing over five miles an hour and that I was no judge of either pace or distance, which I took as a compliment. However, I had not walked too fast to miss the beauty, and I lingered at the crossing of the Mersey to enjoy the prospect. The shapely mass of Mount Roland is in full view nearly all the way and the name Paradise that appears on the map is fully justified.

But why Sheffield? The name is about as ill-endowed as that of the Brighton that has no beach. There is no Joseph Rodgers at Tasmania's Sheffield, nor is cutlery-nor any other commodity as far as I know-manufactured there. The good folk live on their potatoes and turnips and oats;and if they possess souls they employ their spare time in
admiring their mountain. The late Bishop Mereer declared it to be Tasmania's finest peak, and though I do not agree with him I concede it a place in the first halfdozen. If I were writing a guide-book I could say much about Sheffield, for it has many attractions for the tourist, including one of the Island's most bracing climates, and an hotel where
if anything is skimped. it is assuredly not the menu. Sheflield is off the main track by about eight miles, and my next objective, Willmot, was another dozen miles away. I did not expect to find much of interest at Wilmot, and I was right. Pretty? Yes, Wilmot is pretty, but tell me a Tasmanian township that is not. Tasmania's backblock townships are all made off a similar last and the cobbler knew his work and turned out in each case a high class article. At Wilmot there are the eternal hills, the eternal gum trees, potatoes, grazing paddocks and the usual contented population. In the evening I toasted my toes before a blazing fire, and when mine host brought in an armful of wood it was figured blackwood. Next day I saw an immense blackwood tree lying rotting close by a farm-house. Not long before I had inspected a furniture factory in Adelaide, and with this fresh in my memory I remarked to the £-irlner that Pengelly would give a substantial sum to have that tree landed at his premises. "I will give you two pounds," replied the farmer quickly, "if you will remove that log out of my way." Here we were, up against one of the world's great problems-the bringing together of grower and consumer- In Hobart I have seen citizens starving for apples: two hours' journey by car has taken me past an orchard where tons of them were rotting under the trees. Truly, it is a tangled world.
About half-way between Wilmot and Cradle Mountain one crosses Middlesex Plains. Ten thousand acres here were originally part of the Van Diemen's Land Company's allotment, together with very large areas along the north-west coast between Emu Bay (now Burnie) and Woolnorth. To gain overland access to their properties the company in 1827-28 constructed a road from Launceston to Surrey and Hampshire Hills, near Burnie, a distance of about 112 miles. The road was taken inland to save the enormous expense of bridging the several large rivers that make their spectacular progress from the central mountains to the Bass Strait coast. This company-built road crossed the streams before they had assumed any collsiderable dimensions. Of course, it never was a road as we know a road today. It was simply a way hewn through the forests and marked across the plains, and bridged sufficiently for a cart to make the journey in dry weather and to allow stock droving. A hundred years before I knew Middlesex Plains a much more distinguished traveller had ridden and walked over the "road" from Hampshire Hills to Launceston, namely, Mr James Backhouse, who in his Narrative of a visit to the Australian Colonies tells of this journey made in December 1832. It occupied just a week. On the way the party spent some time exploring the caverns at Mole Creek-then called Moleside River.
There is no doubt that this early road construction by the Van Diemens' Land Company was of considerable value to Tasmania as a whole; for; as the fourth Annual Report of the company points out, the road would encourage settlers to establish themselves in the country through which the road passes "The Directors, also, cannot help feeling that they have thereby conferred an important benefit on the Colony, by laying open and rendering accessible so extensive and fertile a district." Looking today at the maps of the north-west, which are veritably cob-webbed with roads, it is difficult to realize the boon that this early road-now mostly passed into oblivion-was to the little community of a century ago.

Chapter Seven