Strahan grew up in the late 1870s as a foothold for explorers and miners pushing into the wild west, and in 1881 it took the name of Sir George Cumine Strahan, then governing the colony. It was never an easy place to reach. The only sea route ran through Hell's Gates, the notorious entrance to Macquarie Harbour, where a shallow bar and ferocious currents have always made arrival by water a gamble. Yet for decades this was the lifeline of the whole west coast, the harbour through which the mineral wealth of Mount Lyell and the surrounding ranges left Tasmania. Fishermen, convicts before them, and the rugged timber-cutters called piners all passed through here, and the town carried far more weight than its size suggested.

The piners gave Strahan a trade unlike any other. They went deep into the rainforest along the rivers feeding Macquarie Harbour to fell Huon pine, a slow-growing, honey-coloured timber so dense with oil that it resists rot for centuries and so prized that boatbuilders treasured every plank. It is one of the longest-lived trees on Earth, and cutting it was brutal, lonely work in some of the wettest country in Australia. That timber heritage still scents the town, where Huon pine is worked and sold, and it ties Strahan back through time to the convict shipwrights of nearby Sarah Island, who built ocean-going vessels from the same forests at the very bottom of the world.

No engineering feat captures the old west coast like its railway. To haul copper from Queenstown down to the port, the Mount Lyell company drove a line through rainforest and gorge in the 1890s, using a toothed rack-and-pinion system to grip the steepest grades where ordinary wheels would simply spin. The mining railway closed in 1963 as roads took over, and the line fell silent. Then, in 2002, it returned. The West Coast Wilderness Railway now runs the 34 kilometres between Queenstown and Strahan not for ore but for travellers, climbing through dense forest and over the King River so visitors can see, from a warm carriage, the country the piners and miners once fought.

Today Strahan trades in wilderness instead of minerals. It is the launching point for almost everything on this coast: cruise boats that glide out to Hell's Gates and the haunting ruins of Sarah Island and up the mirror-calm lower Gordon River, jet boats, sea planes, and helicopters that lift over country no road will ever reach. A small ocean fishing fleet still works out of the harbour, and shops sell fresh crayfish to anyone who asks. Just west of town, Ocean Beach runs for kilometres against the full force of the Southern Ocean, where a storm rolling in off the water is, as one old account put it, a salient and sobering thing to witness. For a place that once measured its worth in tonnes of copper, Strahan has found a richer cargo in the wild it guards.