THE WIPERS ARE beating like a pair of metronomes set to Prestissimo, but the blizzard is calling the tune. A few hundred metres below, Hobart is basking in warm sunshine, but Mount Wellington is blanketed in snow and it's getting thicker by the minute. With visibility reduced to a couple of metres, I give up the ghost and turn back, edging down the slushy slopes to Tasmania's capital city, where shirt-sleeved spectators are enjoying a cricket match. Summer is just around the corner, they say. Mount Wellington is a mere pimple at 1,270 metres, but when the infamous Tassie weather turns fickle, it's no place to be, even in a motorhome where you can bring a kettle to the boil at any time and huddle up under a warm quilt in a double bed. Unfortunately, the vehicles aren't four-wheel drive. I can't say I wasn't warned. I picked up the vehicle in Launceston in the north of this Australian island state a few days earlier and commented that I was in luck. We had clear blue skies. 'I hope you've brought some warm clothing,' the Autorent Hertz manager warned. 'Tassie weather can change by the minute. You could be sunbathing down here, then drive into the mountains and be hit by a blizzard.' Prophetic words: the weather had closed in at Port Arthur after a few glorious days driving leisurely down the beautiful east coast, which is largely deserted, but for a sprinkling of towns that are little more than large villages. There, the rain pelted through a veil of mist as dusk approached and I welcomed every drop that bounced off the hood of my raincoat. Port Arthur was a living hell for many of the 12,000 convicts who were banished to the Tasman Peninsula between 1830 and 1877. The former granary that was converted into a penitentiary is now a burnt-out shell, yet the site is Tasmania's premier tourist attraction. But I didn't wish to be among the tourists. No guided tour for me. I wanted to be alone, to soak up the atmosphere and so arrived after the last tour had drawn to a close. The melancholy weather was a bonus. Everyone was indoors, inspecting the exhibits, escaping the rain. The penitentiary, the convicts' church, the hospital block, the officers' quarters. I had them all to myself. The rain and mist added the Dickensian touch. My imagination ran riot. Don't miss Port Arthur. To win freedom from this, one of Tasmania's many notorious convict settlements, prisoners would have had to cross 20 kilometres of bush in leg irons to reach Eaglehawk Neck, the entrance to the peninsula, just 100 metres wide at this point. If they got this far without being captured, then they faced their biggest obstacle, a line of ferocious chained dogs, stretching right across the isthmus. In spite of the odds, some actually made it, but had to resort to cannibalism to survive. After my brief encounter with Jack Frost on Mount Wellington, I take full advantage of the sunshine in Hobart, visiting the old colonial homes on Battery Point, the trendy restaurants and craft shops in the converted whaling warehouses at Salamanca Place, and Australia's oldest brewery. Hobart's a small, intimate city - more of a country town - and there's even a camp site conveniently placed just off the city centre, near the cricket field, and only a few minutes walk from the casino. I leave the motorhome there and explore on foot. I'd been pretty lucky for weather, too, coming down the east coast on the first leg of my journey, but as I leave Hobart, I am under no illusion about the weather that lies ahead. This second leg of my journey around Tasmania takes me straight out on to what is officially known as the Wild Way, and with good reason. The east coast, away from the hills, gets up to 300 dry days a year, but they don't call the World Heritage area of the west 'rainforest' for nothing. If the east is sparsely populated, then the west is virtually empty. Here, there are around 300 very wet days a year. And it can get pretty cold, even in summer. But the miserable climate has protected the west side of Tasmania from development and much of the landscape is true wilderness. Soon I can't see the wood for the trees, literally. The World Heritage national parks from the southwest to Cradle Mountain in the northwest cover around 20 per cent of Tasmania. Much of the rainforest is impenetrable. Leave the narrow ribbon of road that is the Wild Way and wander into it at your own risk. There are few tracks, and some believe the Tasmanian Tiger may not be extinct, that it may still wander beneath the thick canopy of the myrtle beeches and huon pines. It's not all forest, though. The Wild Way takes me through buttongrass plains and over crystal clear streams and rivers spawned by distant, craggy mountains. I pass through Derwent Bridge. There's virtually nothing here, a filling station and transport cafe with a sour-faced owner, a small hotel in a jungle clearing. But this forlorn outpost of beans and bacon sandwiches is mecca for the tough trekkers who tackle the 80-km Overland Track from Cradle Valley further north. After five or six days exposed to the elements in the mountains, Derwent Bridge is where they can wash, eat a hot meal and await transport to Hobart or Launceston. I'm heading for the tiny, historic coastal town of Strahan from here. The road linking it with Queenstown, 40 km inland, was only built a few decades ago. Before that, access was by sea, through the narrow, treacherous jaws of massive Macquarie Harbour. The roaring seas and sand banks at the entrance have claimed many a small vessel seeking shelter on the waters within. A former lighthouse keeper there watched helplessly from the tower a few hundred metres away as the jaws swallowed the small ship that was bringing his wife and children home. But the harbour was a godsend to the colonialists, for the Gordon River flows into it, surrounded by endless rainforest, dense with massive, ancient huon pine trees, superb wood for shipbuilding. To fell the pines, they needed labour, so convicts were shipped in from Hobart to live in utterly wretched conditions on the windswept and escape-proof tiny Sarah Island, near the river mouth. If the magnificent scenery of the Wild Way is heaven, then Queenstown is surely hell. After driving in awe of west Tasmania's natural heritage, suddenly the mountains are bare, totally denuded, thousands of trees long since felled, the top soil washed away by decades of deluges. Copper was discovered in these mountains in the late 19th century and the trees were needed to fuel the smelters. Today the mining has virtually stopped, but the stains may never be erased. Queenstown, which once had 14 hotels, is now a village of around 3,000 in a wasteland, offering mine visits. I drive straight through. The Abt Railway, which used to take the ore to the waiting ships at Strahan, was abandoned, but it is being renovated and will soon take tourists along that historic track to now sleepy Strahan. Queenstown is beyond redemption, but the magnificent rainforest and Gordon River have lost none of their splendour, thanks to a blockade by thousands of environmentalists in the early 1980s. Lake Pedder had already been flooded for hydroelectricity and the power moguls were preparing to construct dams on the Franklin and Gordon rivers. The protesters moved in to this isolated town and made their way up-river to obstruct the construction workers. More than 1,000 were arrested and fined and hundreds returned to the Gordon River, defying the courts. In the end they won their battle and the wilderness was saved. So a trip up the Gordon River is a must if you visit Strahan. The modern ferries take passengers out through that treacherous entrance to the harbour and back, on to Sarah Island where conditions were so bad that convicts would commit murder just to be taken off it and returned to Hobart to face trial, and then be hanged - death was seen as a blessing. A buffet lunch awaits passengers when they leave the island for the trip up the Gordon River, into the silent rainforest. You can alight to take a boardwalk under the giant huon pines. After leaving Strahan I drive a few kilometres up the coast, leave the motorhome and wander the sprawling Henty Dunes, once home to Aborigines who were persecuted by the British settlers. And then it's on to Cradle Mountain National Park with arguably Tasmania's most magnificent scenery, with camp sites and lodges. The park headquarters can advise on a host of one-day walks of all grades into the mountains or around Cradle Valley's Lake Dove. I leave for historic Launceston and the end of a 1,600-km journey vowing to return one day. The rangers have convinced me that you haven't really, truly, experienced Tasmania at its wild best until you have made that long, hard trek over the mountains, 80 km to that one-horse town called Derwent Bridge with its greasy sandwiches. Travel Editor Mike Currie received the 2001 Pacific Asia Travel Association Gold Award for Travel Writing - for his account of his motorhome journey down the east coast of Tasmania - in Kuala Lumpur yesterday at the association's 50th annual conference. He also won the award in 1997. Graphic: wildwGFA