30 Days Down Under - Part 6 - Hobart Tasmania

Seals?

Have you ever had your luggage delivered by a seal?
Thanks to one of the lesser of the many unique and curious things about Tasmania, I have (sort of).

Melbourne is on the north shore of  Bass Strait, which separates mainland Australia from Tasmania.
Bass Strait was famous from 1798 into the 1810's and a very little beyond for its sealing industry (is "industry" the right word?). Huge amounts of fur seals lived on Bass Strait's shores and islands - a great resource for the seal and whale oil industry and hat makers of the UK and China.  The predation on both adults and pups was quick and lethal - within 10 or 15 years few were left.  Harvests are bound to collapse when little seed is planted  (a very short summary here). It was repeated a short time later on Macquarie Island, a remote Tasmanian island off towards Antarctica (see here).


Mind you, a few of the seals' descendents have found ways to retaliate, like this seal squashing a car.
But their population's recovery hasn't been quick, so Tasmania protects them (see here).

A ferry runs between Melbourne and Tasmania, but since our trip covered a lot of ground (and water), and since the ferry takes 11 hours and lands at Devonport on Tasmania's north coast - a long way from Hobart on the southwest coast, we flew to Hobart.

Upon landing at Hobart, we walked down the stairs from the plane, crossed the tarmac, walked through a (temporary?) shelter/corridor offering protection from wind and rain, entered the small but sparkling modern terminal, and went to the baggage area.  And there we met our seal, announcing the arrival of a new planeload of bags.

Sleeping, Eating, Drinking

We caught a taxi into our hotel, the RACV Hobart.  The RACV is Australia's equivalent of the AAA (American Automobile Association) - and the RACV has hotels and resorts in a few places around Australia.  Because Ginny is a member of the AAA we qualified for their rate discount.  It was the nicest hotel we stayed in on our trip, and one of the least costly ones. (Though to help you match expectations, 3 star is about the best we usually go - we're not 4 star people ... we'd rather spend more on experiences than comfort or things.  When I walk by a backpacker hostel I often feel a pang of envy)

A few things we really enjoyed at the RACV Hobart:
The large windows in the room didn't have drapes.  Rather, they had folding doors ... a great idea that we hadn't seen before ... much easier to keep clean and longer lasting.

The included breakfasts were great. Ahh. Bircher. Everywhere in Australia that we ate breakfast, one of the selections always included Bircher. We'd never heard of it before. We loved it. It seemed to be a mixture of muesli, a bit of fruit, and a very runny yoghurt and/or very milky cream. It became our favorite part of breakfast.  (We also tried marmite. Sorry Australians. Never again.)

The third thing I liked about the hotel: its restaurant and its bar introduced me to Tasmanian whiskey.  Tasmania seems to have raised a good crop of local distillers - no need to afford Glenfiddich here.  I don't drink much; it's rare when I have a beer or anything harder. But when we go out to eat I'll usually have one drink of something: a glass of wine, or a glass of dark beer (Australia didn't seem to have much dark beer), or a cocktail, or rarely, a double shot of whiskey neat. Tasmanian whiskey.

Hobart


Hobart is comfortable.
It's only a little bigger than Eugene Oregon where I went to university, and like Eugene, it's very laid back. Lots of denim. Lots of wool. Lots of foul weather gear. Lots of art.  Lots of crafts.

It has an old feel about it, with block after block of gracious old sandstone buildings, some dating back to the  sealing & whaling days, mixed in with newer buildings of every era.

Bike racks: Artistic & functional

Me in Salamanca Place

Hobart is in large part a workingman's town with a large nickle mine, a port and all of the muscular industry that goes with, including many working fishing boats.

Click on any photo in the blog to enlarge it

When we were walking along the docks we came to this two-masted sailing ship with its accompanying sign. Sponsored by a number of civic organizations it enables refugee youths in Tasmania to join experienced Tasmanian youths as mentors to sail the vessel.  Later in our trip we talked with someone who was in Hobart only a couple of days after we were. He had taken a photo of the ship out in the harbor with the youths up in the rigging.

What a great way to welcome and integrate refugees into a country.

Antarctica

 Hobart is one of the major supply points for Antarctica, the three major supply points for it being the southern tip of South America  (Punta Arenas, Chile and Ushuaia, Argentina), New Zealand (Christchurch), and Australia (Hobart)

Aurora Australis, an Antarctica supply vessel

Australia deserves lots of credit regarding Antarctica.

After lengthy multi-national negotiations, an international treaty was signed in 1959 regulating and formalizing activities in Antarctica, the "1959 Antarctic Treaty".  It created a loose structure that has since periodically been supplemented and modified by additional agreements. (See a summary here)

In 1988 representatives of 33 nations agreed on a framework permitting and regulating mining and mineral extraction in Antarctica, the Antarctic Minerals Convention (also known as the Wellington Convention). In 1989, Prime Minister Hawke of Australia announced Australia's objection.  As a result the agreement was never ratified.

In its place, after another set of lengthy negotiations another international agreement was enacted, the "1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty", also called "the Madrid Protocol".  It prohibits mining  and "... provides that protection of the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems and the intrinsic value of Antarctica must be fundamental considerations in the planning and conduct of all human activities in Antarctica."  http://www.antarctica.gov.au/law-and-treaty/the-madrid-protocol

But ... it's important to keep watch.

Not all nations have agreed to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and its subsequent annexes. A treaty is only as strong as the good faith and willingness of its signatories to abide by it. And the Madrid Protocol has a provision to revisit the provision about mining in 50 years, in 2041.

Salamanca Market

Absolutely, if you are in Tasmania, be in Hobart on Saturday to attend the Salamanca Market.

It's huge (and it's crowded). The largest market I've ever been to (and I've been to a lot). It was full of everything ... the full gamut of any market ... it brought back memories of when in college in the late 60's and early 70's I used to sell lemonade and with an ex, her pottery, in what were then called "Renaissance Faires" in Oregon.  One thing that particularly caught my eye ... even though I didn't need it I almost bought one: a beautiful thick heavy hand-tooled leather belt for about 1/3 the cost of an equally heavy but untooled belt I got earlier this year from Filson's in Seattle.

And one thing there caught both my eye and my billfold: Jamie Maslin was selling his book "The Long Hitch Home, Tasmania to London on a Thumb and a Prayer." The subject alone would have enticed me to buy it. But when I saw the extreme opposites praising it (Noam Chomsky: "Very well done. Arouses many poignant memories" and Roger Stone: "Travel writing as it should be") I couldn't resist. I got him to sign it for both me and my long-time best buddy from college days - we never got it together to take a trip of our dreams like that.  I was going to read it and give it to him when we skied together this winter in Oregon. But I stupidly texted him about the book and the f-er bought himself a copy before I got home.

MONA - Museum of Old and New Art

MONA has become one of the major attractions in Tasmania. Don't miss it (even though some may be offended by parts of it). Link to MONA here

Click on the photo to enlarge it

MONA is a collection as untamed as much of Tasmania is said to be. A collection of everything.  As its name says, both old and new art, but also far beyond art. Things from everyday life.  Things that have meaning. Things representing the full range of human life: the spoken and the unspoken: passion, thought, fear, suffering, hopes, visions.

The New Yorker  magazine ran a review of it "... mona begins to feel like a mashup of the lost city of Petra and a late night out in Berlin. Everything about it is disorienting and yet somehow familiar, from the high-tech tropes, the low-culture babble, the black humor about so much that is so serious, the attention to aesthetics in a museum unsure if beauty exists or, if it does, if it matters." (See the review here)

You get to it most easily by boat. (Warning: if you can't handle the seriously long flight of stairs up from the boat landing consider taking an auto or bus to it.)

MONA is carved deep into sandstone which is left raw and exposed throughout much of it.

One of the first things you'll see inside is this impossibly long table set for a banquet that never happens. To get a sense of scale, see the two attendants setting the flower centerpieces that are periodically changed. (They're near the back to the left of the table.) And compare them to the height of the magnificent sandstone wall.

One of the pictures below is a sculpture of shards of metal and glass - nearby are some cobbles from the passenger's platform from the Hiroshima railroad station and a large collection of hand-rubbings from it.

The entire human experience is fair game here at MONA, like it or not.
(I probably shouldn't show on here a few of the x-rated exhibits ... including two of my favorite pics)

National flag of Angelina

Why We Came to Tasmania

"In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia.

"Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied. There had been no reconnaissance. In 1770 Captain James Cook had made landfall on the unexplored east coast of this utterly enigmatic continent, stopped for a short while at a place named Botany Bay and gone north again. Since then, no ship had called: not a word, not an observation, for seventeen years, each one of which was exactly like the thousands that had preceded it, locked in its historical immensity of blue heat, bush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy Pacific rollers.

"Now this coast was to witness a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since. An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very air and sea, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific would become a wall 14,000 miles thick."

Thus begins The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. The epic of Australia's founding. It brings to life the lives and interactions of the convicts, the aboriginals, the governors and their soldiers, the settlers and landowners. It's a vivid read, leaving untouched no facet of their public lives and those things that would be unspoken..

We came to Tasmania because of this dude.

Robert Lockwood was a "currency lad" ... a mid 1800's term for a convict's son. He was my great, great grandpa. He emigrated from Tasmania to the U.S. - to Oregon's outback, the gold mining town of Canyon City. Eventually, as a deputy sheriff, he became the first lawman killed in Oregon.

His dad had been transported from England to Van Diemen's Land in 1835 for, according to records, stealing seven turkeys. (They're big unwieldy birds. How in the hell did he do that?)

Although he wasn't jailed in Port Arthur (he was assigned as indentured farm help to settlers north of Hobart), we decided to visit Port Arthur because of its importance to convict history.

Usually we travel independently.  But travelling independently you often don't get the backstory to the place, and often miss some real gems.  A good person to guide can really help, and is usually more valuable than those awful crowded and timed bus tours. After some research a couple of months before our trip we contacted Heather Henri of "Lets Show You Tasmania Tours" http://www.showyoutasmania.com.au/

She was a great choice and planned a very full, interesting and informative day for us. She's a native of, and still lives on, the Tasman Peninsula relatively close to Port Arthur, so was the perfect selection as our guide. As we passed various bays, beaches, and farms she described events on them wh she was growing up. It was like having a relative guide you around their hometown.

She picked us up in her van at our hotel and on our way out of Hobart told us backstories to many of the buildings that we had walked past - it made all the difference between just passively seeing something and knowing a little depth about it.

At an inlet called Blackman Bay, near Tasman Bay, down a nondescript road in Dunalley (Imlay Street) we visited an unimpressive monument to an important moment: the discovery of Tasmania and, in this case, exploration by Abel Tasman's crew.

^ This eventually becomes this ^

The Tasman Peninsula reminds me of the Oregon coast when I was a kid in the late 1950's with only small amounts of development and crescent beaches stretching between rocky headlands.
There are two places where it's almost cut into two islands by narrow isthmuses: at Dunalley (the location of the above-mentioned monument to Tasman) where there a hand-dug canal dating from 1905 shortens the trading route to Hobart from the east coast, and at Eaglehawk Neck.

Click on the image to enlarge it

In the 1830's and 1840's Port Arthur was a prison with walls, within a prison walled by dogs staked at Eaglehawk Neck, within the prison of Tasmania walled by water, within a prison of Australia walled by oceans. The end of the earth.

(What will happen when we eventually discover a life-capable planet?)

Within those prisons rapid communication was important to the guards. A system of semaphores was constructed to flag messages quickly between Hobart, Port Arthur, and outposts such as Eaglehawk Neck.

The dogs, the sentries, the semaphores all were in support of the Port Arthur prison.  For the most part, it was used for the worst offenders.  It was a convict site from 1830 to 1877, growing from a crude lumbering workcamp to a large industrial prison complex with mills, workshops, and shipbuilding. An excellent history is at http://portarthur.org.au/history/



No self-respecting prison would be without a church; a small village of houses for the families of its commandant, doctor, and such; a guest house for visiting officials; and of course, a proper english garden. And where better than on a hill overlooking the prison.  The barracks for the soldier guards, probably for good reason, were on another, very separate, hill.



Port Arthur has another claim to notoriety: In 1996 35 people were killed and 23 wounded here in a deadly mass shooting. Immediately afterwards, that very year, Australia instituted, with bi-partisan support, strict gun control, with fast-fire and high-capacity guns restricted from the general population, strict and uniform licensing to own any gun, and the government bought back all restricted guns.

Compare that to the US - how many mass shootings occur, killing how many each month? The states and federal governments don't even have an agreed system to track it - is it that they are afraid to know?

The US is a violent country .... both outside and inside its borders.

The most recent statistics I've come across show:

• The US has a gun-death rate 25 times higher than the 22 other high-income countries, and Americans are 10 times as likely to be killed by guns than citizens of those other countries (Ref: American Journal of Medicine and here)
• The statistics aren't better when comparing the US to ALL other countries.
  Murder rates in the US are 4.88 per 100,000 people, while the median of all countries is 3.74 per 100,000 - and that median is raised by notoriously violent countries, or countries one would expect to be violent, like Honduras, Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan (military/war deaths are excluded)
  The murder rate in Australia is only  0.98 per 100,000 (Ref: from UN Office on Drugs and Crime as reported on Wikipedia

The End (of Native Tasmanians)

Unfortunately we didn't have time to explore much of Tasmania.  We would have liked to explore more, especially the craggy and windswept mountains in the interior and the rugged western coastline.

But at least we explored the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. It was quite good - you should be sure to visit it. There we learned about the Black War.

Between 1824 and 1832 the indigenous peoples in Tasmania were decimated.  The Europeans were encroaching on their land, leading to conflict. European diseases were felling the aboriginals. With white males outnumbering white females 6 to 1, many took aboriginal women by force.  That triggered more violence. The aboriginals fought and raided, burned and killed. The Europeans fought back, killing too. Bounties were placed for the capture or killing of aboriginals. In 1830 Governor George Arthur had every able bodied man form a line which swept the indigenous Tasmanians from settled areas to the Tasman Peninsula.

Eventually, by 1832 all the remaining aboriginals has been transported to Flinders Island in the Bass Strait between the mainland and Tasmania . By 1847 only 47 Tasmanian aboriginals had survived; they were transferred to near Hobart. The last of the full-blooded original Tasmanians died in 1876. Good summary accounts are at Indigenous Australia here and at The Conversation here.

Exhibits in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart:

Click to enlarge

And so, on that happy note, we boarded a plane to Sydney and stayed a night at the Ibis Sydney Airport. It was modern, clean, convenient with (not free) shuttles to/from the nearby airport, but it was like staying in a boat's (not ship's) cabin - a fly/sleep/fly place.  Early the next morning we flew to Queenstown, New Zealand, the next to last stop on our way back to our comfortable home.