On the road…
In Tasmania
A collection of stories and photographs of journeys and places.
Market by the bay
We had been cruising along the winding Nicholls Rivulet Road after leaving the Channel Highway, weaving through forested hills and green farmland under sky grey with the threat of rain. Still a few kilometres from town, the rain decided to make its grand entrance. It stuck around for the rest of the drive but kindly called it quits just after we pulled up and parked.
The whole point of this little adventure? The market. A couple of weeks back, Fiona had been looking for a particular seed supplier at the Franklin market, but they were not there. Maybe they’d be here in Cygnet?
Now, some towns have that postcard-perfect appeal with tree-lined streets and restored old buildings. Not Cygnet. Well, it has renovated buildings scattered along Mary Street, the main thoroughfare, but not leafy street trees. It’s not ‘pretty’ in that conventional sense, but there’s something about it — the solid old buildings scattered along the main street and the lush forested ridges framing the town give Cygnet its own unique vibe.
The town sits at the head of Kangaroo Bay, a narrow inlet off the Huon River estuary. Around 55km southwest of Hobart, it is home to roughly 4800 people and still plays its part as a service hub for the apple and cherry orchards dotting the surrounding countryside. But, walk down the main street and you’ll catch this artsy energy — craft shops, cozy cafes, an art gallery — all thanks to a wave of creative types who’ve moved in over recent decades. And then there’s the annual Cygnet Folk Festival that seals the deal on its artsy reputation.
By now, the rain had packed up and left although low clouds still hung around like an uninvited guest as we strolled past the Cygnet Mushroom Farm stall and stepped into the market inside the old town hall. It was your classic rural market setup — local crafts, people munching on food at the tables — but one thing stood out: this long bench piled with apples and the two farmers who were chatting with people about them.
One of the things I like about going to places and events are the mini-conversations you get to have with people. One of those conversations was how I learned the story of the apple farmers.
A grey beard that matched his thinning hair, he wore a blue shirt under a vest made, appropriately, of an apple print cloth. He wasn’t exactly slim, but he sure knew his apples. His farm is home to a collection of around 500 apple varieties — yes, 500! His story is that when a research station shut down about 15 years ago, they obtained enough cuttings to grow two trees of every type that station had cultivated.
Another of those mini-conversations happened after we walked into an arts and craft shop when I noticed a range of Opinel knives on the counter. As we have several Opinel folding and kitchen knives, I mentioned to the woman behind the counter how surprising it was to find these knives here in Cygnet. She was somewhere in middle age, I would put it though I am no judge of age, slim, her red hair just blow ear length and judging by her appearance and clothes, she was someone with a sense of style. When she answered my comment with a French accent I figured I had an explanation for the Opinel, as they are a traditional French knife.
We were leaving the market when Fiona nudged me — “Isn’t that Robyn?” she asked, pointing toward someone heading out the door. “Looks like her,” I said. And yes — it was. She was with Annette, her sister. Coincidence: I’d met Robyn here in Cygnet a couple of years ago after she’d moved to Tasmania. That was at an event tied to the Cygnet Folk festival — the first time I’d seen her since… what… 1969? Same goes for Annette. There’s something special about reconnecting with people after all those years. It’s like there’s this huge gap between then and now that is filled with all the stories of how life unfolded for each of us, and we want to fill that gap to discover how our friend have fared in life and to learn what has happened to all those people who were around us at the time.
Robyn and Annette were in town on family stuff, so there wasn’t time for a proper catch-up. As they walked out the door, I couldn’t help but think how good it is to reconnect with people after so long.
That earlier meeting with Robyn two years back? It happened at the Red Velvet Lounge during a performance poetry event tied to the folk festival that was organised by another friend I’ve known as long as I’ve known Robyn, Yvonne. So we decided to head back there for lunch this time around. Red Velvet is in a renovated building on the main street that in a circle above the entrance houses its year of construction — 1912. Our coffee and babaghanouj with olive oil and bread for dipping was good.
The atmosphere of Cygnet can best be described as a blend of rural town and creative energy. Nestled on the shore of the bay, it retains its roots as a service town for the surrounding apple and cherry orchards, giving it a grounded, rural feel, while at the same time there’s an undeniable artsy vibe that permeates the town, thanks to its craft shops, cafes, its park, art gallery, and the influence of the annual Cygnet Folk Festival.
Cygnet’s story is like that of some other rural towns. They continue through the decades as service centres for their surrounding farming industry, then, starting maybe 40 years ago, new people begin to move in. They are city people, not farm workers. Their interests are different, and over the years those interests become apparent in the new businesses that open in town, business like cafes and craft shops that cater mainly for the passing tourist trade that has also developed over those recent decades. Looking at the people in the market and on the street, I realise that many of them could well be people who moved in earlier in those decades and made a home here. That might be a superficial conclusion based on appearance and clothing style, but it accords with what I know from other towns.
Autumn: the time of year when Cygnet’s foliage changes from the green of summer to the yellow that presages the cold season. Cygnet lacks the picture-perfect prettiness of tree-lined streets, however its heritage buildings and the shops and cafes of the main street that cater for the needs and wants of both local people and visitors, and the forested ridges that frame the town create a sense of place that feels authentic and inviting.
Finding Lucaston
I won’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of Lucaston, but, sometimes, the best of things are local. Like food. That is something to which we can look to local sources, for some of it anyway. Like fresh fruit juice directly from the farm.
Our ending up there was thanks to our friend, Louise, who has now left Huonville (‘Hoonville’ to unkind locals) to return to her mainland home in the bush inland of the NSW Mid-North Coast town of Bellingen. It started when she took a bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator. “You’ll like this”, she tells us as she pours the cloudy liquid into glasses. “It’s from an orchard a few minutes along the road. It’s really good. Just apples. That’s all.”
And it was. Good, that is. So why not get a bottle on our way home? “You pick it up from the refrigerator beside the road”, Louise tells us. “It’s just a couple kilometres down the side road from the highway.”
Lucaston. The sign points down a side road along which we wind our way, cross a little bridge and pass extensive apple orchards. In the background, the blue-green of the Wellington Range. The road goes on and eventually fades away among the forested hills in the distance.
“There it is”, Fiona says as I drive past. We turn around and stop beside the glass doors of a refrigerator standing in the shade of a tree.
We drop our $4 for a two litre bottle of fresh, local apple juice from the farm into the coin container along with $3 for a two kilo bag of crunchy fresh apples, and drive back to the highway where we turn north and head over to our home on the coast.
Lucaston is just south of Crabtree and a little southwest of Mountain River. If you take the Lucaston turnoff from the highway just north of Huonville in search of a bottle of fresh apple juice or a bag of juicy Tasmanian apples, don’t bother driving on in search of the village of Lucaston. Like Crabtree and Mountain River, it doesn’t exist. Lucaston is nothing more than a scattering of farm houses and apple orchards in the shadow of the kunanyi-Wellington Range. But there, down the side road, stands a lonely refrigerator in the shade of a spreading tree canopy with what is surely some of the tastiest fresh apple juice to be found in this land of green farm fields and rolling orchards.
City parks
Autumn will soon be done for another year here in Launceston where, in the parks, leaves of red and bright yellow are falling from trees alien to us in this country. Alien, because these are northern hemisphere trees, deciduous trees that drop their leaves in autumn to reveal the skeletonised fractal framework of their bare structure.
I was in this northern city for a few days, so I took a walk though Princes Square and City Park. They are parks on opposite sides of the CBD and both feature the traditional design of early Twentieth Century parkland.
You notice the coming of the seasons in Tasmania. As summer segues into autumn there is not much of a change, but as the weeks become months there is a noticeable cooling of the air. Daylight hours shorten, nights become chilly, the trees take on autumn’s colour. There is now a crispness to the air.
You notice it in the people on the streets too. Gone is the light summer clothing, replaced with winter woollens and puff jackets. Beanies replace bare heads and caps. The scent of wood heaters permeates the air and smoke issues from chimneys. The shorter daylight hours, the autumn foliage, the bare limbs of deciduous trees and the coolness brings a different, more sombre ambiance to the city.
The Square
Decades ago, I used to work just down the road from Princes Square but seldom if ever did I visit it. Sure, I would walk through the park but I don’t recall it being a place I would spend time in. City Park, at the far end of Brisbane Street where it starts to climb the hill to East Launceston was different. I did spend time there wandering its pathways among the mature trees.
Princes Square, though. It is an old-fashioned park on the southern edge of the CBD, a formal symmetrical arrangement of paths that meet at a central fountain. Think of the landscape design as an X with the fountain at centre, paths around the perimeter and mature deciduous trees with lawn below between the paths onto which the afternoon sun cast patterns of light and shade.
The design of Princes Square is that of Nineteenth Century parks. It has the ambience of a manicured woodland and tells us of how people integrated nature in the urban environment at that time. It is also an example of the creative reuse of urban land, the rehabilitation of an old industrial site. How many local people know that in 1858 it was created from a disused brickfield.
There were few people in the park that day, just a couple sitting on a seat by the fountain, a homeless man making a bit of noise over on the far side and one or two who, wandering into this peaceful square, slowed their pace as surrounding nature let them know that here, below its trees, there was no need to hurry at all.
City Park
It started at the base of Windmill Hill with the construction of the government cottage in 1807. By the 1820s, the Launceston Horticultural Society had acquired the neighbouring allotment for use as a botanical garden. They handed it to Launceston City Council in 1863. The government cottage eventually fell into disuse and was passed on to the city council in 1885 and demolished. Thus, City Park was born.
The park is a Launceston landmark, a place for quiet family days on the lawn, for viewing plants in the arboretum, for taking children to the playground, for watching ducks in the pond, for games with the giant chess set, watching snow monkeys in their enclosure and for events as well. People wander the network of paths past the memorials to times now distant and past the ornate bandstand, long devoid of bands this past hundred years or so.
Like Princes Square, this is a woodland landscape of mostly deciduous northern hemisphere trees. Not as formal in its layout as Princes Square, the park is like it in colour when autumn sees the foliage shed its summer green in favour of yellow, red and brown that harmonise with the green of the lawn in the park’s colour pallet.
I remember the story of a wealthy man who overnighted for some time below the protective foliage of one to the trees. The low branches of the particular evergreen tree he called home protected him from the view of passers-by and wind, but what of rain? His story came out when he decamped for, I think it was, Western Australia. How many more stories does City Park conceal?
Parks
The landscapes of these two parks speak silently to us of times past and of nature tamed. Still, we can walk through them and experience little elements of wild nature in the detail — season’s change of foliage colour, the bare framework of winter’s leafless limbs, the shade of summer, the colour splashes of fallen leaves in the ponds.
Parks are oases of stillness and refuge in our cities, places where people find solitude or enjoy the company of family and friends, places where children can run around, places where city workers switch off the turmoil of the day and where their minds are stilled by tree and water. Parks are little patches of managed nature that in their own modest way rewild the urban landscape and the minds of those who sit in their quietness.
A rewilding moment…
A winter morning. The Tasmanian sun rises late at this time of year. I rise, put on warm clothes and step out. It’s frosty, the temperature here at the end of this rough track dipped into the minus range overnight. Breath condenses into mist. Let’s go check out the river, I say to myself, and walk off across the grassy slope beyond the end of the track to the edge of the cliffs.
It had been a cold night but we were warm in the van. Fiona had the good sense to bring her old -10°C rated sleeping bag and we unzipped it to use as a doona.
Standing here on top of the sheer dolerite cliffs that drop vertically into the gorge, I can feel the cold of the river that cascades far below. It is already 09.27 and there is a greyness to the morning, the landscape a scene cast in the half-light of a Tasmanian winter day.
I step carefully near the edge of the cliffs. The rock is slicked with the white rime of frost. So are the rocks of the streambed below. A wooly cloud cover blocks the morning sun. I hear the South Esk in the gorge where it flows and gurgles as rapids between dark pools, around rocks and over cascades. Steep slopes clad in forest fall to the rocky bed of the river where they abruptly stop at the flood level.
I have stood here before and the view is always different, sometimes drenched in the warming light of a summer’s morning, other times wrapped in the greyness of misty drizzle.
Some of us, when we stand before a sweeping view like this, experience a sense of awe at how nature’s processes shape the land over a timespan that is hard to imagine. It lifts our minds above the concerns of the everyday and we momentarily glimpse that vast span of deep time from which our kind emerged.
Revival on the river
It is a story of industrial decline and revival in a new time.
The shipbuilding industry in Franklin started in the 1830s. Local boatbuilders used Tasmanian timbers to make fishing boats, yachts and bigger ships. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Franklin’s shipyards were a busy asset to the local economy, providing jobs and employing skilled craftsmen.
Everything was going well until the mid-20th century when changes in transportation led to a decline in traditional shipbuilding. Then, people realised what they were losing. As the century came to an end there was a revival of traditional wooden boatbuilding that would end with the creation of the Wooden Boat Centre. Now, these traditional wooden boatbuilding skills are being revived. The Centre has become a training venue that trains apprentice boatbuilders and a master wooden boatbuilder.
While I was there I walked over to the wharf to photograph the old and now partially-submerged, wooden Hobart ferry, the Cartela. I got to speaking to a man who was likewise looking as the ship only to discover he was the last captain of its life as a commercial vessel. Plans are afoot to raise the ferry and land it for restoration.
Walking to the other end of the ship, I noticed something large on the wharf nearby and walked over to discover a seal taking a break where it had hauled itself out of the river. I’m wary around these creatures and kept my distance as I photographed the animal, which kept its eye on me.
Franklin is a centre for Tasmanian maritime culture. The Wooden Boat Centre offers courses, workshops and exhibitions in its wooden boat museum that show traditional boat-building techniques and skills, attracting wooden boat lovers and tourists who are interested in the art of boatbuilding and Tasmania’s rich maritime heritage.
Gone now, the railworks
Like the leaves of the deciduous trees, the rail works here on the banks of the Tamar are long gone. When the flatbed was left here, that was its final journey. Here it will stay over the years, a memorial to an industry that was.
The abandoned flatbed is now part of the museum that was the one-time rail works. Once, locomotives and rolling stock were manufactured there in the days when Tasmania made such things. The works left town decades ago.
To visit the works at the museum is to walk into an industry alien to today’s economy. Forges and metal working tools litter the workshop, itself a large structure in the most common and practical of industrial building materials, galvanised iron. Stand there and let your mind wander and you will hear the BANG BANG BANG of heavy hammer on metal as a blacksmith shapes it, red with heat, into some component that, with all of the others, will become an imposing and powerful steam train. Here, men laboured through the years to create the engines that powered and moved an industrial civilisation.
There is only the hint of that as you stand here beside the flatbed at the end of the rails. Whether generations born after the rail works shut down know of those days is questionable. For them, these are just old rail cars at the end of old rail lines. But stand here awhile and look at these ageing artefacts of an earlier industrial time, and in your mind step back into the days when great puffing engines plied the metal rails that spanned the state to carry goods and people from one place to another.
