KEY POINTS:
Beauty Point sits near the headwaters of the River Tamar, its still waters reflecting perfect inversions of yachts moored near its wharf, and of the wooded slopes rising up from the shoreline.
On the wharf, tourists stroll around Seahorse World and Platypus House, and watch work under way on a Bass Strait drilling rig. Downstream, mountains of wood pulp sit beside a distant mill; upstream, near George Town, a new and controversial pulp mill has won state and federal approval.
Out from Beauty Point, the West Tamar highway follows the valley down through the gold mining town of Beaconsfield - site of the tragedy that killed one miner and trapped two others last year - past vineyards, farmland and plantations of pine and eucalypt, and into the city of Launceston.
The drive down the valley captures the conflicting priorities of Australia's island state, and the issues that will be played out passionately as the campaign for the November 24 federal election gathers pace. The way they fall will reverberate across the nation.
The northeastern electorate of Bass, where the new Gunns Ltd pulp mill will be built, is traditionally a bellwether seat, a marker for the way the election is swinging. With the neighbouring northwestern electorate of Braddon, Bass is held for the Liberals by a whisker. Labor holds the island's remaining three seats.
Both parties are heavily courting Tasmanian voters. If Labor can hold its existing three seats of Franklin, Lyons and Denison and regain Bass and Braddon, Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd will have a good chance of finding the 16 extra seats he needs to wrest power from Prime Minister John Howard. In turn, Howard's hopes of winning a fifth successive term would be enhanced by thwarting Rudd in Tasmania.
As it stands, Tasmania is looking good for Rudd. A swing of the magnitude predicted in most polls would almost certainly gather the momentum Labor needs to make a clean sweep of the island.
Recent Morgan polling gives Labor a lead of 56 per cent to 35 per cent across the island, with the Greens gaining ground to record 8 per cent of the vote. In the key marginals of Bass and Braddon, a Newspoll made for The Australian in the first week of the campaign gave narrow but clear leads to Labor, with Rudd well ahead as preferred prime minister.
"Labor's going to give (the Government) a flogging, I reckon," engineer Mick Reed said in George Town.
But nothing is certain or simple in Tasmanian politics. It is a small state with a population of just 456,600, most of whom live in Hobart and Launceston, but with a significant 20 per cent living in rural areas.
Local, state and federal issues overlap, and will merge to influence voting on November 24. Already, political passions are aflame through local government elections that will be held ahead of the federal poll, accentuated by the policies of the Labor State Government. The same concerns that are driving council elections are repeated in discussions on federal issues.
Many people have yet to make up their minds. The Newspoll found that between 10 per cent and 12 per cent of voters in Bass and Braddon could fall either way at the ballot box, and there was a slight chance that more than a quarter could change their intended vote at the last moment.
With razor-thin margins of just 1.1 per cent in Braddon and 2.6 per cent in Bass, this is politics at its most nail-biting, for both parties.
Their future lies with voters who, outside the handful of big centres, live in small towns of Georgian stone and bow-windowed weatherboard, connected by narrow, winding roads that thunder to the roar of huge logging trucks and a steady stream of campervans.
These towns are among Australia's oldest, most beautiful, and most fragile. Although boosted by tourism and enjoying a run of good years, the economy is still an uncertain beast: the major industries of agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining are subject to global commodity cycles. Manufacturing - the biggest contributor to the state economy and second to retail as an employer - has all that sector's uncertainties.
The good is mixed with the bad. A rush of new blood into an island that has long suffered an exodus of people moving to the mainland has helped put new vigour into Tasmania. But it has also helped dramatically drive up house prices, in turn squeezing rents and hurting low-income earners.
The newcomers have also added new complexities to the political mix, already divided between development, forestry, mining and industry, and the Green movement, typified by the aging hippies and alternative lifestylers who moved down a couple of decades ago but bolstered by tourism operators and businesses trading heavily on Tasmania's clean, green image. Fine food and wine are now a growing economic staple; new migrants include many from Victoria, New South Wales and even the Queensland sunbelt who came to sample, and never went home.
And while the rolling hills grazed by black angus cattle, dairy herds and sheep seem safe and prosperous, appearances are deceptive.
Drought has taken its toll. The rim of the huge Great Lake on the high central alpine plateau has been bared by dehydration, dams are only a third of capacity, and the state power authority Hydro Tasmania has just revealed that a 41 per cent dive in profits has been matched by net debt that in the past year has soared from A$80 million ($95.4 million) to more than A$1 billion.
The State Government is under pressure from voters angry at the condition of the health system and roads, and other public services - all of which feed into the mix facing Howard and Rudd.
And there is the new pulp mill. Last month, after a long and bitter fight, federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, supported by State Labor Premier Paul Lennon, approved the construction of a A$2 billion mill at George Town, site of the oldest European settlement in Tasmania.
The decision immediately fed into the November election. Federally, it has hurt both Turnbull - who could lose his Sydney seat of Wentworth as a result - and Labor environment spokesman Peter Garrett, who was forced to swallow his personal opposition and back the development.
Politicians are wary of environmental fights in Tasmania. Hawke scored nationally by opposing - and after his election blocking the damming of the Franklin River in the early 1980s - but was hurt in Tasmania, which swung strongly against Labor in the 1983 election and helped the Liberals run the state for the next decade.
At the last election, doomed Labor Leader Mark Latham flew to Tasmania to unveil a new policy to further lock up Tasmanian forests. It backfired, badly. Howard saw the anger in Tasmania and also flew south to promise a better deal for loggers: the imagery of union workers cheering a Liberal prime minister was one of the seminal moments of the campaign, precipitating a heavy Tasmanian backlash against Labor.
The mill will be built by Gunns Ltd, a local corporate giant whose pulping operations are the largest in the southern hemisphere. Its pine and eucalypt plantations have made it the island's biggest landowner - and the most controversial business in the state.
The project will create 1600 permanent jobs, process pulp locally, and increase the price for timber paid to state agency Forestry Tasmania. But opponents claim the mill will pollute the surrounding environment and chew through more timber than plantations can provide, biting inevitably into old-growth forests.
Gunns did nothing to settle nerves when it pulled out of an environmental audit, sparking a political crisis that saw the head of the inquiry quit over political interference and the state Government rush through new enabling legislation. Nor has opposition been calmed by the environmental conditions placed on the mill, described by Turnbull as the world's most stringent.
But opposition is not evenly spread. There has always been something of a north-south divide on Green issues in Tasmania, and the mill decision may not detonate the political explosion many expect in the northern seats of Bass and Braddon.
Protesters scaled the 100m pylons of Launceston's Batman Bridge, and the Wilderness Society is seeking a court order reversing Turnbull's approval. In the town of Deloraine, below Devonport, delicatessen shelves groan with local cottage produce, and front counters are stacked with Al Gore-Australian Conservation Foundation postcards petitioning action on climate change. Local lifestylers are furious at the mill.
A group called the Voters' Block claims it has almost 12,000 voters - half in Bass - who have promised to vote against any politician supporting the mill.
But polling by suggests that while anger may be real in the two key marginals, the impact will be softened by the fury mill opponents feel for both the Government and Labor. The immediate beneficiary is likely to be the Greens, whose preferences will probably benefit Labor and the swing already favouring Rudd on a much broader front.
In interviews with the Herald in both Bass and Braddon, voters indicated the mill would not be the deciding factor in the way they voted. Asked for their priorities, all placed hospitals and health at the top of a list that also included education, employment and interest rates, the Iraq war, and a strong "time for a change" sentiment.
None volunteered an opinion on the mill. All had to be asked specifically for one.
At the fishing village of Bridport, where the royal blue and white hulls of ocean trawlers tossed in the teal waters of Anderson Bay, service station owner Sharon Jensen said local fishermen were worried that pollution could damage their livelihoods and that others opposed the mill because it could harm old-growth forests - including her father, a retired logger.
"But on the other hand we need the employment boost," she said. "You have to look at it both ways. If they can get good environmental controls, it will be a good thing."
And Jensen scoffed at the popular imagery of a pristine River Tamar: "It's not pristine. There's lots of industry along it already."
In George Town, Huey Wilson could see little point in fighting the decision: "There's no stopping it. The Government here has it all rigged."
And in Scottsdale, housewife Nellie Caulfield had no doubts: "A lot of people don't like it, but I'm all for it because we need the jobs. We need to create jobs. Once logging goes, this town goes too."
