Zeehan

Zeehan is a town of 702 (2021) in the West Coast Tasmania. It was a mining town, but is now a quiet sleepy mountainous tourist town a few kilometers off the A10, one of Tasmania's most scenic highways.

Understand
Zeehan was the town of the West Coast in the years before the First World War. Then the silver lodes ran out, and it has struggled since. It carried on from its legacy of the early 1900s. The buildings, the stories, the ruins, and the struggling hinterland. There never has been the rush or the volume of people that were around in the early days.

The passenger railway service to Burnie was closed by the 1970s, and when Mount Lyell needed to export copper it trucked from Queenstown, and went to Melba Flats, east of Zeehan, to be delivered to the port of Burnie.

There were reprieves for Zeehan in various stages: in the 1970s the rise of the Renison Tin company increased the usage of the town and its facilities.

Most nearby mining ventures tend to be much smaller operations requiring fewer employees, and no new major mines have started, despite a range of deposits of minerals being uncovered every decade in the area.

The emphasis upon tourism on the West Coast has resulted considerable expenditures for maintaining historic surviving buildings and streetscapes.

Get in
From the north


 * Murchison Highway (A10) - from Burnie, through Tullah and Rosebery

From the south


 * Henty Road (B27) - from Strahan

From the southeast


 * Zeehan Highway (A10) – from Queenstown

Get around
The town is small enough to be navigable on foot.

See




Go next

 * north - Rosebery
 * southeast - Queenstown
 * south - Strahan