Queenstown Travel Guide

Spion kop is a lookout that gives great panoramic views across Queesntwon and the Mount Lyell mine. It aslo looks over the gravel football pitch that the local team play on. It is gravel because of the high rainfall that Queenstown experiences.

Queenstown is Tasmania's "Wild West", the last place most tourists would want to wander. However the key attraction here is the recently opened "Abt Wilderness Railway". At a price it will take you to the "most beautiful town on the island" Strahan, well out of sight of Queenstown Strahaners may tell you.

Stay a few hours or even a night in Queenstown and walk around a rambling old mining town. If it's raining all the better, as this is when the true colours of this town come out. It rains 300 days of the year in Queenstown!

Start at the Museum, 150m from the train station, and take a look inside as there is plenty to learn about this town's mining history.

Outside the museum you will notice a small row of old shop fronts, know locally as "Evan's Corner" a remnent of days gone by when the corner store supplied the community. On weekends a hap hazard, and very local market, has taken up shop here.

Wander up to Orr Street, the main drag of Queenie, a beer at the grand old Empire Hotel should go down well and tramp along McNamarra Street. Before the Hospital, can be found in the regrowth the old Pioneer Cemetery. It a peaceful little pocket of town.

After here follow the streets back towards the train station, but on the other side of the King River, follow it's banks and note the old mining cars used to hold the embankment in place! Through out the town you will also pass many ripple iron houses, built by the Mt Lyell Mining Co in the good old days of the booming 1920s. Some good examples are found in the vacinity of the new train station.

Then the main purpose for Queenstown's existance was the copper mines, still in operation to the town northern end. The sarounding hills, almost bare are the legacey to copper smelting, closed down in the late 1960s. Originally sarounding hardwood forests were cleared to fuel the furnaces, fallout and heavy rainfall quickening the pace of erosion. You can't really get lost but for a few hours you can in a seemigly other era by walking Queenstown.