The market has become something of a tourist attraction but this has not deterred local people from shopping here. Walk the alleys between the stalls and you find local food, local arts and crafts including photography, seeds and more. There’s fresh fruit and vegetables, soft and sweet Bruny Island fudge, Gillespie’s fizzy ginger beer — another local product — and the products of local craftspeople who specialise in working with Tasmanian timbers, as well as sellers of unique clothing and second hand books.

Development with authenticity

The Tasmanians have taken advantage of one of Australia’s still-intact heritage streetscapes. Three to four storey stone buildings, once warehouses where goods from the nearby wharfs were stored, have been repurposed as art galleries, cafes, bookshops and other enterprises specialising in Tasmanian-made. For the bibliophile, there’s The Hobart Bookshop situated in Salamance Square, behind Salamanca Place. It’s a crammed place with narrow aisles selling new and second hand books where the staff shelter behind a counter so encroached by books that it seems more like a barricade.

Gillespie's Ginger Beer, a local beverage.

The alleys, streets and Salamance Square behind Salamanca Place are a labyrinth populate by small shops with intriguing products. Strangers to the city might find them a somewhat confusing network to navigate, however this merely adds to their charm and interest.

Although the link is not made, the old warehouses stand as testament to the prominence of the sea in Tasmania’s history. As an island and as the second place to be settled in Australia’s European history (Hobart is a mere few years younger than Sydney), the sea and shipping have been crucial to the development of the state. Take a short walk from Salamanca over to the docks to see some vintage ships, including tall ships and a few engine-powered. There are even operating fishing boats that tie up at Constitution Dock, something unique for most city centres.

Best of all, Salamanca Place’s repurposing has been accomplished without making it tacky. All too often, historic precincts are ruined by being overdone and by selling low-grade, low-quality junky products. They become charactertures of themselves and, in doing so, lose any authenticity they might once have had. Not Salamance Place.

Salamanca's old warehouses, with Mt Wellington dominating the city in the background.

Finding local foods

Having an interest in the way that cities can increase their resiliency through developing an industry based on foods that can be grown, processed and marketed locally, I naturally gravitated to the food sellers. At the Salamanca Market, market gardeners are grouped together although food sellers are found throughout the marketplace.

One of the market garden stalls at Salamance Market, loaded with vegetables and culinary herbs.

Here, like the Evandale market near Launceston in the north of Tasmania, the dominance of Asian faces suggests that the market gardens that feed the city are dominated by immigrant families or their descendants. This accords closely with the Sydney experience where not only Asians, but Lebanese and others feed the city with much of its fresh produce.

Let’s hope that the Hobartians don’t follow the example of the NSW government and plan to pave and build over the gardens that feed its people.

Exploration by foot

Despite being promoted in tourism literature, Salamance Place is worth a few of your hours or more when you’re next in Hobart. Find it adjacent to the city centre and just to the west of the city’s watefront.

Travel by foot remains the best way to explore a city and Salamanca Market can form the starting point for a walk that takes you into the nearby residential precinct of Battery Point.

For those with an interest in architecture, the Georgian buildings are sure to be an attraction, however there are buildings from other periods too. It’s not a long walk and there are side streets to explore as well as Arthur’s Circus, a ring of Georgian houses around a village green. Continue through Battery Point to the shores of the broad Derwent for the long view down the estuary and, when the weather is right, to feel the wind and to see, in your imagination, those nineteenth century clipper ships tacking their way upriver to the docks, then, after unloading, sailing north to China to load up with tea for the English market all of a world away. Battery Point’s main street has a number of cafes clustered at the Salamanca end.

A seller of seed of vegetables and flowers at Salamance Market.

Standing again in Salamanca Place’s busy Saturday market, you look up to the ramparts of Mt Wellington that so dominates this southern city, then your gaze returns to the line of old stone buildings and the busy scene surrounding you. Then you realaise that one of the ideas will take away with you is that the Hobart local foods scene is an active and innovative one that, even by itself, it is an asset to the people who are fortunate enough to live here.

Fresh produce on a stall. Many of the products at the market are labeled as 'local food', 'hone grown' or 'no sprays'.

A rare find these days — milk in glass bottles.

TO JUDGE BY THE SIGNS on farmer’s market stalls, food grown locally seems to be something of a specialty at Evandale market. A recent visit disclosed sign after sign on a number of stalls advertising the localism of fresh vegetables, herbs and fruit.

Some stallholders sell organic fruit and vegetables although these are not certified organic, leaving it to the buyer to decide whether or not to trust the seller. Like Sydney’s urban fringe farmers, most of those selling at Evandale are from non-English speaking backgrounds, mainly people from Asia.

If you come here at the right time of year, look for the stallholder selling heaped, overloaded punnets of Tasmanian berry fruits, including delicious redcurrants, strawberries and raspberries. At any time of year there are jams made from local fruits, Tasmanian honey and other bottled preserves.

An island set up for locally produced food

Tasmania, as an island with a decentralised population (approximately half, around 200,000, live in the capital, Hobart; around 70,000 occupy Tasmania’s second city, Launceston; the remainder are scattered through Penguin, Burnie, Huonville and lesser centres), is ideally suited to the development of small, family owned farms that could feed its population centres with perishables, dairy and other foods. In comparison with the mainland (the rest of Australia, that is) the soils are fertile and the island is well-watered. Occupying a cool temperate climatic zone, a wide variety of culinary herbs, fruit and vegetables can be produced, as well as dairying and fisheries including the fish farms that are already established. The good news for orchardists is that there is no fruit fly in Tasmania.

Evandale market features several fresh food stalls.

Evandale is not the only source of fresh foods available from weekly markets. Tasmania’s renowned leatherwood honey, so-called for the leatherwood tree that the bees harvest and that grows in the cool temperate rainforest, is readily available. A local apiarist was found enthusiastically selling his product at Exeter market in the Tamar valley, approximately 20 minutes drive north of Launceston, not far from the popular Exeter Bakery.

In Hobart, too, food localism is a selling feature with stallholders at the Saturday Salamanca Place markets having notices advertising ‘local grown’. ‘No Spray’ was also noticed on products.

Finding Evandale

Evandale markets are open every Sunday morning. A charge of 20 cents is made for entry.

Evandale is about a 20 minute drive south of Launceston. Follow the highway past the airport and watch for the turnoff sign.

It is an old town and those with an interest in history and architecture might like to walk its streets to view the Georgian buildings, both domestic and commercial. The town also has a number of antique shops, art galleries and, for the hungry, cafes.

Tasmania's soils grow tremendous potatoes. Here's some freshly dug.

Evandale is no the only market near Launceston. Here, Fiona buys localy made jam at Exeter market, north of Launceston in the Tamar Valley.

How Tasmanians buy potatoes.

Local product for local eating. All cities and towns should be able to feed themselves with perishables and other foods grown locally.

IT’S PERVERSE, REALLY. To walk  these mountains you start by descending rather than climbing.

The reason is that the Blue Mountains do not rise from a plain to culminate in high ridges and peaks. They are a plateau formed when the earth here uplifted millions of years ago. The Blue Mountains are a dissected plateau and the most interesting country lies deep within the folds of their heavily forested valleys.

Looking across the valley to the ridge of Mt Solitary.

Memories come while sitting quietly in the fading light of a winter’s day. Once again, I see the girl in the blue shirt, blue jeans, long blonde hair spilling from a cotton cap. She stands there on that high track, looking out at the massif that is our destination. Mt Solitary is our first walk into the wilderness. It was also our first venture into another life, had we known it.

The pack on her back is a basic affair of dark green canvas. I heft something similar loaded with the things we imagine we need for a weekend in the Blue Mountains — sleeping bag, warm parka, tent and a little food. Sure, those packs didn’t carry our load all that well, but we were young and things like that didn’t matter all that much. What does matter is that we are far, far from the dingy streets of the city.

We had talked of doing this for some weeks, months perhaps. Whenever the idea came up it gained strength until we decided — hey, enough talk… let’s just go next weekend.

The Golden Staircase was our route from the top to the track that runs along the base of vertical cliffs of yellow sandstone. On the other side of the track the land continued to fall, though less precipitously, through a dense eucalypt forest. We knew that somewhere out there, some kilometres to the south, flowed the Cox’s River. We don’t know if was a big river of one of those narrow, fast flowing streams that are sometimes graced with the name of ‘river’ when ‘creek’ would be more apt. We felt its allure while pouring over a map of our route and felt that sensation that comes when you gaze at maps and wonder… what it is like out there?

Not all that far…

Mt Solitary is not all that far from Katoomba’s Echo Point lookout, the place where tourists gawk at this marvelous landcape and, if they are sensitive enough, hear its quietness. This is the silence of wild places and it’s an audible silence. Stand apart from the crowd and, when conditions are right, you notice it as an almost subaural tone, an aggregation of all the sounds out there.

We stand looking over a deep valley towards our mountain. The map indicates a trail ascending the northern end of the ridge and this we trace by eye and wonder how long it will take to reach it. Our route follows the popular track in a broad arc that clings to the base of the cliffs, past what appears to be a recent landslide —- big, fresh-coloured rocks that have not yet weathered to the ochre yellow of those longer exposed. Further around now, near the side track that ascends a sandstone spire, we stop to look at a number of old coal mines. These date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The entrances are barricaded but we find we can get into one where we notice just how low these tunnels are. Who mined them and how did they get the coal up to the plateau? Via a vertical trolley like that back in Katoomba that now hauls tourists?

Malaita a long way, but Solitary close by

Further on and high above us the plateau juts into the valley to end at Malaita Point. Malaita is a long, mountainous island in the Solomons archipelago and a long way from here. The point was named for a man from that far, tropical island who lived out here in a shack in the early years of the twentieth century, a time when doing that was possible. But why? Why so far from home? His story remains just a series of questions and I wonder whether he sat out on that point high above the broad valley and, in his solitude, felt that deep tug inside that is the yearning for home.

It’s not far to the start of the climbing ridge and this, for novice mountain walkers, we find an exhilarating experience. The track to the climbing ridge was easy walking, progress along it simply a matter of one foot in front of the other, over and over. The ridge, as we start to ascend it, is rough and narrow and as we climb the vast valley of the Cox opens to view. Looking back, we see the grand curve of the cliff face below which the track runs. And, below that track, the land falling to the forest-congested depths of the valley and on to the unseen river.

The day has moved into early afternoon. Some of those yellow cliffs are now in shadow. We stop frequently to catch our breath and to look at the unfolding views until we eventually run out of ridge and stand on the narrow plateau that is the Mt Solitary summit ridge. It is late afternoon but, being summer, there is still plenty of light left in the day. Near a low cliff we drop our packs and pitch our cheap nylon tent on the sand. We find water, just a trickle in a small, nearly dry creek. Tomorrow we retrace out steps to make the arduous, vertical climb out of the valley and onto the plateau.

This, our first ’serious’ venture into the mountains, would lead to further treks and, sooner rather than later, to a place with an abundance of mountains. Tasmania was far from the Blue Mountains, but there, at least, you started off by climbing, not by descending into a valley.

And the Cox’s River that appeared so far away and so intriguing on that map? One day, I would stand on its banks and ford its shallow waters. But that was years in the future and it was to be without that girl in the blue shirt with her long blonde hair that spilled over her shoulders as we stood and looked to the blue bulk of Mt Solitary that summer day long ago.

And there it is. A big bird, white head and chest, black wings, in a big blue seascape edged by the golden sands of a coastline that stretches all the way north towards the Gold Coast.

An iconic image of the the far north coast of NSW — Mt Warning on the horizon, the bay and a sea eagle.

On my morning walks from town to Cape Byron and back I got to know that big grey bird that the walker told me about. It was often there on that broken branch of that grayed, dead tree. One day, I was lucky enough to watch it feeding on some silvery fish it had scooped from the ocean surface. Other times it would sit passively, only the occasional and barely perceptible movement of its head giving away the fact that it was awake.

I saw that walker who had told me about the bird again, too. He was one of the early morning regulars, people who walk by themselves or with a friend or two to to get some exercise before the heat of the day made such activities sweaty and uncomfortable. They start from somewhere in town and walk up the road that takes you to the lighthouse, then down the track along the edge of the cliffline, down to Wattegos Beach. Or, sometimes, they — and I — might go other way with the steeper climb up the cliffline track making a tougher route.

When you start early enough you made the walk in the cooler light of early morning. Leave the same time in winter and you started by streetlight, the sun still well below the horizon. There’s a delicious strangeness to starting then and you arrived on Cape Byron in time to watch the sun rise from the eastern ocean.

On those winter mornings, when you to look to the northern horizon and see the pale glow there, you realise just how close is the Gold Coast. Look hard enough when the air is clear — binoculars help — and you see the top of of some of those Gold Coast high-rise spires. Closer at hand, though still a great many kilometres across the bay, are the scattered lights of the Pottsville area and, looking out, I wonder if there is some early riser at the same time looking towards the strobing beacon of Cape Byron on which I stood.

The lighthouse on Cape Byron seen on an early morning walk to the Cape

Sometimes, there’s the visual treat of watching a pod of dolphins close to the shore or, in the right season, of watching a humpback whale leap from the sea to splash down into it with a great spray of foam. This is a special place and it was fortunate to live here.

Seen from Cape Byron, the sun emerges from the Pacific. The sculpture was one of a number along the Cape Byron walking track during the annual sculpture festival.

Less a town than a landscape

Some say that Byron isn’t much of a town… that it doesn’t have the visual cohesiveness of Noosa’s town centre, up on the Sunshine Coast, that it is overpopulated by transients… but that’s not what matters. What matters is not the town itself but its setting, for the best thing about this nook of the north coast is the landscape. Where else do you find visions of long beaches and hills and distant mountains framing your northern horizon?

That’s why I always stop on those early morning hikes to sit and gaze from Cape Byron, to see the landscape in the grays of an early winter morning with the lights of town and farmstead still twinkling in the folds of the hills and along the stretch of the coastline, just before the sun comes over the horizon; to see the that vast bay and those mountains painted in the blues of early morning; then to descend the cliffline track, enter the low forest and emerge at the end of Wattegos.

The Border ranges and others closer frame the view from Cape Byron over Byron Bay to the north. Mt Warning, the plug of an ancient shield volcano, stands above the ranges to be the first point of the Australian mainland to receive the sun.

Those critics are right about Bryon — it isn’t much of a town. Just an ad-hoc collection of buildings, old and new, clinging to the bay at the southern end of its long, curving sweep where it takes a turn to culminate at the Cape.

But Byron is mare than a town. It’s a landscape where sea, mountain, coastal plain and beach come together in a geographic juxtaposition that pleases the eye and the mind, and in doing so made those early morning treks to the Cape so worthwhile, and the sight of that sea eagle perched on its dead branch a reminder that, here, geological history has created something truly inspiring and beautiful.

I’VE WALKED THESE STREETS BEFORE, a long time ago… through Prince’s Square, along Charles Street, turn into The Quadrant then into Brisbane Street and up to City Park. To walk these streets now seems little different to walking them 30 years ago. So little has changed. Sure, the people look different than they were then, but that’s just a new generation and new styles of clothing and hair… and the cafes have spilled out their doors and onto the footpath, which is something new. But the streets those people walk are not different in any significant sense, nor are the buildings that line them. How little the city has changed.

We inhabit our own geographies in the cities in which we dwell. These are geographies formed by patterns of movement from home to work, from home to our recreational haunts or to the homes of friends. Much of the rest of the city goes unexplored. Then, my geography extended from Waverley, on the eastern edge of the city’s suburbs, to the city centre, from the city to Cataract Gorge and through the city centre all the way to Gravely Beach further up the Tamar valley, a small township where friends lived.

It is when we return to a city after some time away that we might discover some of these unknown geographies. So it was that, in the late summer of 2007 I stood atop the high ridge of West Launceston and looked out over the curved bowl of land that this modest little city occupies… over to the eastern ridges that mark its outer boundary and up to where the broad grey strip of the Tamar separates the business district from the suburbs that follow the river northwards. Look carefully, I recalled from my early years in the city, and you might see over there, down to the south east, the heights of Ben Lomond, the mountainous plateau that hosts ski fields very modest by mainland standard but which are the winter weekend playground for many city residents.

Loking east along the Tamar reveals a low cityscape with distant ridges culminating in Mt Barrow.

West Launceston hadn’t been part of my geography when I lived in the city. I ended up here, high above the city, because I was visiting a friend who had moved from Sydney to set up house atop this ridge, once the home of apple orchards. Apple orchards? That I know because the remnants of one occupies the parcel of land where my friend built her house… twisted, gnarled trees that produce a small fruit and that extend downslope into the neighbouring property.

Walking through the city, I find it hard to imagine that I lived here once. Sure, I have memory of that, but the place feels so… so different… familiar for sure, but also alien. It’s as if a section of my life had somehow been extracted and placed to the side where it was still visible but no longer to be experienced. Maybe it’s because my life since leaving had been so different and my leaving so sudden that it produced a sense of separation that had mentally isolated my experience here.

I walked around, experiencing sights both familiar and new, yet it wasn’t so much the sights that were different but my experience of living here. I realised that the city might still look the same, but the times as experienced then was quite different.

City in decline

That was at the end of the city’s industrial past, a time when economic change was starting to sweep the Western world to bring creative destruction to old economies and to kick start the new. It is only the passage of time and the long view of history that allows us to think in these terms today; back then, there was no such perspective.

Then, there was a wool mill that turned Tasmanian wool into those checked shirts once favoured by bushwalkers, loggers and outdoor types. That mill’s long gone now, a victim of the economic forces unleashed by the changes of the times.

When the decline started there was a palpable apprehension about the city’s future. It looked as though the drift of post-secondary school youth to the mainland, what has been a normal feature of this island state, would accelerate. People blamed the federal government for the decline but what the plaintiffs didn’t know was that what they were experiencing was a global phenomenon that would result in both the destruction and the reconstruction of national economies. It was an inflection point in history.

Over the years that followed this has been a small city in search of a new economic heart. It has been a search that has ended, for the present, in the salvation in tourism. Partial salvation, at least, for jobs and livelihoods continue to be a challenge for the island state.

I played tourist on my next visit to the city, driving north along the west bank of the Tamar to Greens Beach. I had driven up here all those years ago to where the river empties into the grey-green waters of Bass Strait. Absent then were the Exeter bakery, seemingly a popular break-of-journey for coffee and cake or pie, and the Exeter markets. Restored, now, are the old gold mine buildings in Beaconsfield, then just brick ruins in the long grass that I had photographed.

The low, estuarine landscape of Greens Beach, where the Tamar joins Bass Strait.

But Greens Beach? This narrow strip of weekenders and retirement houses was not my recollection. Nor the rocky shoreline with its encroaching vegetation. What had happened to the sandy beach we walked along all that time ago and where we found plovers’ eggs?

The beach was still there, just further down the road. There were no eggs to find now, though there were plovers about, but the beach was here, sloping gently into the cool waters of the Strait. This is where the Tamar mixes its waters with Bass Strait, and across the broad estuary was the red and white spire of the Low Head lighthouse. Once, I had stood over there, too.

It’s natural to reflect on visits to places made long ago and on the people we made those visits with. What of my friend who had accompanied me along this same beach all that time ago, I wondered?  What had become of her? Where was she now? What about my friends who lived in their timber house at Gravelly Beach on the banks of the Tamar? I had learned where one had ended up, but the fate of his then-wife remains unclear.

Memory and the city

It’s strange to return to a city you haven’t visited these past 25 years. You quickly learn that memory does not always represent actuality. On that first of my return visits it took me a full morning to properly orient myself as memory and geographic reality clashed.

Details seldom revisited become vague in memory as if they have started to slowly dissolve into some greater plane of existence, an absorption into some generalised field or remembering as if a mist had stated to descend over them to make them vague of form and content. The Crescent, for example, wasn’t quite where I remembered it to be. Not that that’s important, for this curved pedestrian precinct of turn of the century, two to three level stone buildings offers a respite from the rush of the business district, minor though that might be in this city. Here you find outdoor cafes shaded by big umbrellas and small trees, little shops and freedom from the presence of the motor vehicle. The Crescent is a successful public place and shows what Sydney could have done with some of its narrow side streets, had the vision been there.

The Crescent is not the only successful public place in a city that you might call ‘quaint’ because of the dominance of low, turn of the Twentieth Century architecture. Prince’s Square, which I remember more or less clearly from my time in the city, is a fine example of Nineteenth Century park design. Its focus is a classical fountain at the intersection of wide paths that cross the park diagonally. Large swaths of lawn long ago planted to widely spaced, northern hemisphere cold climate trees, long since mature, provide summer shade and the landscaping effect of a cultivated forest. This is a classic park of the period.

I walk into town and diverge into The Mall. A car-free pedestrian refuge in the city centre, The Mall is something of a disappointment, a mere simularcum of malls elsewhere with the same shops and coffee franchises and the same design. It is something of a carbon copy of town centre malls in any other city and is marked by a sameness and a lack of design stemming from any unique sense of place. The Mall has less to recommend it than other public places in the city.

City Park is a mere seven minutes walk and I set out, past the modest Art Deco splendour of the Holyman House building and the adjacent Princess Theatre and past those vaguely familiar Victorian era buildings to City Park. Surely this city’s is the only Australian council to keep monkeys. You find them not in the council chambers but here in the park. This is another public place in which mature, cold climate trees create a classical ambiance. There’s the old rotunda where once brass bands played. Unlike Prince’s Park, City Park has a children’s playground and it is a place for family recreation, as it has been for more than a century.

Holyman House is a fine example of the commercial Art Deco style and the most significant example of its type in Launceston.

Public places are what visitors remember about a city, and to make visitors’ stays memorable it is up to the city authorities to seek authenticity in design and to avoid kitchy, period themes that quickly become dated and tacky.

Launceston's Princess Theatre, one of the Art Deco buildings found among older structures.

Authenticity is based on the successful interpretation of the geographic, historic and cultural characteristics of a place. You find authenticity in landscape along the Manly Beach to Queenscliff promenade in Sydney, where you walk through an expansive beachscape of distant views. Authenticity is innovative at Federation Square in Melbourne, a bold architectural and public place befitting the modernism of a major city. Authenticity incorporates traditional parkland and natural landscapes and it is this that makes the walkway from Kings Bridge to The Basin authentically Launceston. From the cafes by the city waterfront at Seaport, you set out on the walk of an hour or less that took through the open, riverside parkland of Royal and Kings parks and under Kings Bridge, then onto the foot track that traverses the steep walls of The Gorge. There, I ended end up at early twentieth century building housing the cafe and restaurant at The Basin.

On my first return to the city, back in 2001, I encountered a Cataract Gorge that differed significantly from memory. Although this place had been part of my urban geography when I lived here, the reality I was faced with was disconcerting. My memory had been well out of kilter with reality.

I recalled Kings Bridge as an industrial-looking structure of ironwork and in this recollection, at least, my memory was true. I also recalled the choice of tracks from Kings Bridge to The Basin and followed the steeper track along the southern shore of the South Esk where it flows through Cataract Gorge, but the landscape was different. Nature hadn’t changed, just my mind, yet here was the familiar too… there, that high, smooth face of rough rock… that’s where we went rock climbing.

A rustic shelter on the footpath along Cataract gorge.

The Basin was as I recalled – a wide body of water held back by a weir over which the water cascades, with the high suspension footbridge at the far end that takes you from one bank to the other. How many times had I crossed that?

And there, still, was the cafe building which houses both an informal outdoor café and a more upmarket restaurant. Located amid the cold climate trees and lawns high above the waters of Cataract Gorge, this time I found the coffee to be quite ordinary and the edibles of limited selection. Still here were those stately peacocks patrolling the grounds. They can be as aggressive as Sydney seagulls in coming up and taking your food, but are they long lived enough to be the same birds I knew when I lived her or are they descendents?

Looking across First Basin to the suspension bridge.

Back in town, and I note the sign in the window of the coffee shop advising hippies to use the side entrance, a relic seemingly souvenired long ago and far away.

My friend up on the ridge in West Launceston told me that this part of Charles Street, a ten minute walk from the city centre, is mockingly referred to as the ‘Paris end of Charles Street’. The reality is a minor cluster of cafes, two or three perhaps, with streetside tables. Nearby is a corner pub of Nineteenth Century architectural vintage. All this is new… for me at least.

The old toll collectors' house at Cataract Gorge. Here, the South Esk flows beneath Kings Bridge into the Tamar.

Then, unexpectedly, I stumble into a living link with my past. It’s a small, second hand bookshop across from Prince’s Square and is owned by a one-time journalist with the Launceston Examiner. He told me that his initial stock came from his private book collection and that his wife was pleased to see it leave home, but then I discover who his wife is — the ex-partner of a person I knew during my time here. He had made off with some other female but, I know, such events were a not uncommon thing in this small city. The town might not have changed all that much, but partnership arrangements certainly did.

Now this city is faced with the prospect of an industry that is purely Twentieth Century, if not in technology then certainly in mindset. The pulp mill is the current controversy that vexes this fair town.

Let’s realise something: a pulp mill is not a tourist attraction. Vineyards and wineries are. So are townscapes. To build a pulp mill adjacent to vineyards is to put the state’s industrial past before its industrial future. And they are — or should be — two very different things.

Crossing the weir at First Basin in Cataract gorge.

Given the Nineteenth/early Twentieth century architectural heritage of the city, I wonder whether the city government could do what Napier, on New Zealand’s North Island, has done with its Art Deco architectural heritage? There, the council and Art Deco Society have made the city’s architecture a real tourist attraction.

This small city’s would be a far more modest initiative of the type because its buildings do not have the cultural baggage that Art Deco carries. Yet, there are streets of Victorian era and later buildings that may possibly be interpreted to visitors through guided tours and printed information. Legislation to preserve those old streetscapes would be needed and a clear economic and cultural rationale articulated to the public to gain their support. The city’s architecture could become a greater part of the city’s culture and economy and the past would start to serve the needs of the present as an alternative to out-of-date industrial thinking that suffers from such a colossal collapse of imagination as to see a polluting pulp mill as the city’s future.

Launceston deserves better.

THERE’S A MAN SITTING ON THE WHARF, a man perhaps in his seventies, hair grey, shirtless, tanned. Every so often he sips from a longneck… he’s a man who likes a quiet drink by himself on a warm, summer evening.

I stand atop the hill that spills grassy and steep down to the riverbank with its little wharf. Down there, the man has tied his terrier to a rope long enough to allow it to range freely over the lawn but short enough that it can’t wander too far.

Something gives me the impression that he is a long-time resident of this town…  there’s some indefinable quality about him that suggests this. I imagine him coming here frequently during the warmer months to sit on the wharf and, perhaps, reflect on his life and how he came to end up in Wauchope.

A quiet contentment... solitude by the Hastings.

What vessels make use of this little wharf I have no idea. Just private motor boats, most likely. The river has seen little commercial navigation this past 70 years. It is a big, broad, grey river that flows past the farmland on the opposite bank. On the upstream horizon there’s a high, rounded mountain blued by distance. Just a few hundred metres downstream there’s a railway bridge, and over this speeds a northbound train. Its destination? Brisbane, perhaps? The man on the wharf watches it too and I think — does the sight of the train make him wonder where it is taking its passengers? Does it kindle imaginings of other places in him as it does in me?

The river – it’s the Hastings – is part of the town but it doesn’t seem to be a constant presence in the minds of the inhabitants in the way that the Manning River that flows through Kempsey, a little further north, is. Out of sight from the town centre, perhaps it is not a geographical anchor point in the minds of the residents.

It’s hard to say what is here. I imagine the town centre itself fills that role, yet when you look into the commercial centre from the little park on its western edge, what you see is an unremarkable Australian country town. Wide streets lined with one and two storey buildings, almost all the artefact of past decades. Wauchope makes little concession to modernity in architecture, probably because of the proximity of Port Macquarie, just 30 minutes down he road.

Wauchope — an authentic Australian country town that serves its surroundings rather than tourism.

Bain Park has a modern landscape that you enter thorough an open set of gates. Raised planters around trees, seating and a garden along the mural painted on the wall of the neighbouring shop make a quiet refuge from the street. But, I wonder, is that really needed in this town? Walk through this corner of the park, with its carvings and grass trees, to come to Watermans Café where you find outdoor dining on a wide, covered veranda. This is a good place to meet with friends, to enjoy lunch or a coffee on a sunny afternoon.

Wauchope is not a tourist town. It’s a town you visit on the way to somewhere else. Touristwise, it exists in the shadow cast by Port Macquarie, down on the coast, and its main function seems to be to service the surrounding rural area. The main tourist feature is Timbertown, a theme park that draws on the town’s forestry past.

Pass through Wauchope on the way to Comboyne, a small town high up on its own plateau where the rolling country of the coastal plain meets the Great Divide. For connoisseurs of Australian rural towns, Comboyne is worth a visit. It’s quite a small place set amid undulating, green farmland. There is a café where you can get lunch. Notice how the climate up here is cooler, more temperate, than that down the escarpment in Wauchope. The view from the big water tank just out of town reveals the village in its rural surroundings.

To those who notice it, Wauchope is just a direction sign on the Pacific Highway where most traffic turns in the opposite direction towards Port Macquarie. Few visiting Port would bother to make Wauchope a destination. Yet, during daylight hours the town has a quiet vitality, one perhaps more authentic of this country’s past that the bustle of Port.

So, why not make the detour and instead of turning east off the Pacific Highway, turn west and follow the undulating road for 20 minutes or so, even if its just for a coffee break at Watermans Café. And, when you get to Port, sit by the water like that man does by the Hastings and reflect on life and the way that tourism changes towns.

a

Sunny morning by the river

A flotilla of small craft opposing the pulp mill

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU, happy birthday to you…”, sings the crowd after it is announced that the speaker was three weeks short of his eightieth birthday. It was a touching moment.

You would think a man of his years would be taking life easy, but not him. He is as vigorous as a fifty year old and looks that age too. His full head of hair, suntanned face, tough build and lively, alert manner belie his calendar years.

Pulp mill opponents

His voice gives this impression, too. That came as a surprise that warm Saturday morning in early autumn when a mild Tasmanian sun beat down upon that grassy park on the banks of the Tamar, that same river on whose shore Gunns wants to build a pulp mill.

That was the proposal which brought out this crowd of 2000 to 3000 – not a bad number for a town the size of Launceston – to rally in opposition to what most regard as a potentially polluting proposal. The mill is just the latest in a long line of development that the forces of the old industrialisation has foisted upon this otherwise idyllic island. The company has the support of the state government, of ‘old Labor’ it might be called because it pits heavy industrialisation against the new, emerging industries such as wine production which require clean, safe natural resources unpolluted by heavy industry.

Bob McMahon

Tourism, another economic mainstay of the island, also requires clean environments because visitors come to this state for its natural attractions and its picturesque towns, not to see big industry. There’s plenty of that where most of them come from.

Pollution of the river and questions over the sourcing of the timber resource to supply the mill are the focus of the crowd’s ire. Looking around, it’s easy to imagine that many of those present are veterans of similar battles that punctuate the history of this state, but there’s also many who don’t quite fit that stereotype as well as many young people for whom the pulp mill proposal may well be their blooding in Tasmania’s resource and development wars. They are the next generation of warrior.

A pulp mill? Sure. But put it elsewhere. And when a speaker mentions the company’s threat of locate the mill in some other place, cries of ‘good riddance’ and cheering rise from the crowd.

Ex-ABC Gardening Australia presenter, Peter Cundall, expresses his displeasure with the pulp mill

Open kayaks, sea kayaks, kayaks and canoes of all types, dinghys and the occasional yellow, inflatable ‘rubber duckie’ dot the waters of the Tamar adjacent to the rally. There’s a fishing boat and there’s a tourist boat bedecked with banners opposing the mill. This small navy has even paddled into the narrow confines of The Gorge, that rocky split in the hill carved by the South Esk where it flows into the Tamar. And this, despite warning signs to avoid contact with the water because of a blue-green algal bloom.

Face from the past

Bob McMahon is a tanned, weathered man and like the other speaker, he doesn’t look his age. Trim beard below short cropped, greying hair, Bob I know from the now-distant time when I managed an adventure equipment shop in Launceston. Then, he was a serious rock climber who tackled the isolated and difficult routes on Tasmania’s dolerite crags.

Bob informs me that he still is a climber, but something in that intervening gap of years has changed the man and turned him into an environmental campaigner, an angry campaigner. This you can tell by his tone of voice that carries more than a hint of anger and strongly suggests an impatience with the industrial and political powers of this state. This was a different Bob McMahon to that which I knew all those decades ago.

Oh yes – that other speaker, the one of the eightieth birthday. That sunny, mild morning in the park he was not the gentle gardener who appeared on the ABC TV’s Gardening Australia. The Peter Cundall the crowd saw that day was a fiery and passionate man whose gesticulations gave emphasis to his strong words of criticism and anger at this latest impost of industrial civilisation in the name of profit.

……………………………………………..

Walking to town

DOWN THE LONG HILL that leads from the high ridge that is West Launceston. Down towards the grid of the city laid out below. A fine walk on a fine autumn day, I think.

The view. Yes, it was partly for the view over the city and over to the eastern hills that I chose to walk. I could have got a lift to town later, but you see more when you’re on foot than you do speeding through the landscape in a car. You hear the sounds and smell the smells. When you’ve got the time, when it’s not blisteringly hot in summer or the freezing winds of winter are not blowing, walking is by far the best way to see a place.

Launceston and its eastern hills seen from the ridge of West Launceston with the plateau of Ben Lomond on the high horizon.

On foot

I’ve walked around cities and never tire of doing so.

Old Sydney is intriguing and stirs imaginings about those unknown generations that inhabited the old sandstone houses around Argyle Place and The Rocks.

Melbourne is interesting for its juxtaposition of architecture old and new, and its inner reaches are a walkable city, something discovered on a ramble from Collingwood to Carlton. Downtown, in the heart of the CBD, there’s those narrow lanes lined with eateries and tiny shops that give to the city a welcome uniqueness.

Adelaide basks in the summer sun and the city has a feeling of openness and light lacking in other southern capitals. Brisbane… you have to start your walk early in the day to avoid the city’s sticky heat, but the view in all directions from a little park on Highgate Hill is revealing of the city’s geography, and the city had thoughtfully made walkways along its winding river. Then there’s the ups and downs of Paddington and adjoining hill suburbs with their traditional weatherboard Queenslander houses with their galvanised iron roofs and the little cafes you stop at for refreshment and respite from the heat of the day.

Hobart, like parts of Brisbane, is a hilly city that falls to the Derwent at Constitution Dock. Newcastle by foot reveals an old industrial city trying to change. Byron Bay — there’s little that can beat an early morning walk from town up to the light house to greet the dawn.

……………………………………………..

Sights, memories, landscapes

Over there… away in the blue-grey distance beyond the eastern hills… a craggy bluff, steep sided and flat topped… isn’t that Ben Lomond? I stop and gaze and my mind goes back and I hear again the sharp click! as I step into the bindings of my touring skis and the hiss of a downslope shuss and in my mind I feel the cool air rushing past. Long time ago up there on that snowy plateau. Exhileration… in mind rather than in reality now, but the feeling is still there… sounds, sights and sensations drawn from memory all triggered by the view of that mountain on the horizon.

The eastern hills — an overlap of low, rolling slopes — are the geographic counterpart of this high ridge of West Launceston. These parallel hills hold this small city of 65,000 between them and from them the city spills southward and northward along the banks of the Tamar. The river is visible from up here as a wide, serpentine stream of grey water. Hill and river dominate this city.

The river, seen from above, is a dominant feature in the landscape but the city has not really taken advantage of it. Like Ballina in Northern NSW, it seems that those who built the place didn’t much care for the stream, siting the main streets of town away from it rather than making it the focus.

The town itself is a grid of streets whose business district abuts the Tamar. An unexceptional city in a mildly spectacular landscape, the best parts are not visible from West Launceston’s ridge – you have to walk into town centre to find them.

This I do, coming first of all to what Yvonne has warned me was now the ‘Paris end’ of Charles Street. A ridiculous concept, the reality is… modest, shall we say. It consists of a small cluster of cafes — I counted around three — with footpath dining and an old corner hotel with the same. There’s a Thai take away and, across the road, a music store selling CDs. The Paris end, hmmm….

The view over the old industrial heart of the city reveals the eastern ranges enveloped in cloud.

It’s more interesting further down Charles Street, on the edge of town. Here there are one or two modest little coffee lounges and an interesting second hand bookstore. Wandering in, I make conversation with the proprieter who, it turns out, has recently retired from his job as journalist with the Launceston Examiner, the town’s only newspaper.

Later, I learn from others that the books he stocks are largely part of his own collection that he has decided to divest himself of. I understand his wife was happy to see them go, but if most of those I see arranged along the shelves represent only a third of what he has, then there are many titles remaining with which to restock his shop. Getting rid of your books by opening a shop is a unique was to turn them into cash.

Across the road is Princes Park. It’s a small, old world patch studded with spreading, mature trees of European origin. Here, people sit and talk, read and enjoy their solitude. Centre piece is a large fountain complete with statues in the classical style. It adds to the ambience of peace and quiet.

Prince’s is reminiscent of City Park, a long rectangular space on the other side of town. Here, you find something that sets Launceston City Council apart from other councils. The monkey pen. Yes, council keeps monkeys – there’s a mob of them in a specially built enclosure and they’ve been there for years. Like Princes, City Park features large, cold climate trees that make for a most un-Australian feel to the place. There’s a bandstand, too, that suggests a more genteel age when a weekend afternoon in the park was a family outing.

Launceston, a modest city in a rolling landscape, a city beloved by some because of its scale, its liveability and turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture. It is still a quiet, small city, much as it was when I lived here. It hasn’t changed all that much and I can’t imagine it changing much in future.

……………………………………………..

The woofer

IT WAS A WWOOFer who made it, she said.

The woofer — it stands for ‘Willing Workers on Organic Farms’ and is a placement service for travellers who exchange their keep for work — had been gone some months, back in the summer now past. Not that this suburban house was anything like a farm. The woofers that passed through found themselves painting walls and doing minor construction jobs, for Yvonne was completing her new house.

This woofer, though —– he was a New Zealander and a landscape designer— had made the vegetable garden that stands among the old apple and pear trees in the garden. A small but very well made garden, a rectangle with a narrow path at the top that separates it from the narrow bed growing the climbers that scramble up the paling fence.

Those old apples and pears were all that remained of the orchard that once occupied this steep slope above the city. The yard immediately below held even more and one was in full fruit with small, pinkish-red spheres hanging from branches that would never be picked. Later, someone who knew about such things suggested they might be crab apples.

It is late-autumn now and the crops that thrived in this little garden have been picked. The few remaining have gone to seed. All that the garden yields now is the odd tomato. Yvonne boasts to me of her organic tomato’s, something I have difficulty with because Yvonne is anything but an organic girl, though I may have to change my opinion on that, difficult though it will be.

……………………………………………..

Rising sun… view unnoted

ACROSS THE MISTY VALLEY the sun rises over the eastern hills. Invisible still are the suburbs sprawling south of the city centre; the morning mist conceals them within its grey cottony cloud.

I’ve looked out over that valley these past days thinking about the town and the people I know who make their lives here. This is the sort of town in which you have to know people to avoid the isolation of being a newcomer in a strange place. Social connections are important to forming friendships anywhere but no more so in a small city like this.

I notice Yvonne does not stand and look into the view and I wonder whether it’s a case of familiarity breeding indifference. I’ve seen it before — homes with spectacular outlooks all but ignored by their occupants. The spectacular soon become commonplace.

To me, this view over cityscape and ridge contributes to a sense of place that I find so necessary to living in and appreciating a city or town. A sense of place is not something you pick up by visiting the sorts of places listed in the tourist literature. You have to get out on foot and walk around a place, you need some sense of its geography, of how people live, a sense of the ambience of the place and of what the people produce and, also, the feel of the city centre.

Modern life homogenises places that should be different, just as it commoditises the everyday. Only by wandering and looking do you discover the uniqueness in a place and avoid the commoditisation that comes with tourism that fetishises what might otherwise be unremarkable or completely inauthentic locations.

And what of the people that live here? Yvonne goes off to work just as I remember her doing all those years ago in Sydney. She still works just as hard, too, but she is a stubborn woman and moulds her job into something she has a sense of control over.

There is a regularity to her life, a pattern that is as close to routine that Yvonne gets. Regular, yes, but she is no creature of habit and her life contains moments of spontaneity that are so essential to its enjoyment. She makes sure of that.

Below, the mist is lifting and a hint of the town starts to appear.

……………………………………………..

Wooden boats

You have to wonder. With what extraordinary courage did those men, all those hundreds of years ago, set out from Europe to sail the seas on small, fragile wooden craft to find shores still unknown?

This I silently ask myself as I stand looking at a replica of an old Dutch ship the original of which explored parts of the unknown Australian coastline hundreds of years ago.

Launceston's wooden boat expo — and the replica of the Dutch vessel of exploration.

It’s a small ship to set out onto the wide seas. How alone the crew must have felt out on the ocean, months out from their homeland with still longer months to go before they could entertain hope of ever seeing it again. Small, yes, but this ship with its high stern is the largest vessel tied up at this wharf on the Tamar.

Steam powered wooden vessel at the wooden boat expo.

An eclectic mix of vessels are tied up around it. There’s a fishing boat, an open, steam powered vessel that shines with the yellow of Huon pine, a timber native to Tasmania’s west coast, and there’s clinker built dinghies, one with a mast for a small sail.

The wooden boat festival is one of Tasmania’s more modest annual events, one for the nautical enthusiast with a liking for the hand built, for boat as craft product. It’s more an event for locals, a celebration of a seldom acknowledged part of local culture. Small, yes, but a link that, without being made explicit, acknowledges the historic importance of the sea and the ships that sail on it to this island state.

The photographs and story are offered as a memorial to Simon Flynn. Thanks Simon.

…………

APPROACH from the Manly side and you encounter a steep, uphill climb. Alternatively, you can descend the path from the road above. Either way, you are likely to miss the turnoff because it is not signposted and the track looks more like a wombat trail than a walking trail. That may be deliberate.

Simon Flynn outside his Crater Cove home, 1987. Note the solar electric panels on the roof.

Visitors to Crater Cove have to be either adventurous, curious or in-the-know to realise that the unmaintained, narrow path through the bush leads them to a deserted settlement.

You take the plunge and head off between walls of shrubs and small trees on a track that can be slippery after rain. You move from side to side because the centre of the trail has been worn into a shallow  gully by generations of feet. Enclosed by the bush, you cannot see far ahead, but after ten minutes or so the trail turns into a gully and then, a few metres on, you stand above the flat roofs of the two clifftop huts at the eastern end of the cove. Before you opens a broad view over Sydney Harbour and the open sea beyond the heads. Welcome to Crater Cove, one of Sydney’s hidden heritage gems.

An unwelcome welcome

“Can I help you”, the woman asked. She was in her thirties, solidly built with long, dark brown hair and a friendly but assertive presence. There was something in her manner that did not make me feel welcome and her offer of help was something strange to hear in the bush on the Sydney Harbour foreshore.

“I’m just having a look at the huts… taking photographs… I used to know someone who lived here”, I replied.

Name long forgotten, this man occupied the small shack immeditely east of the Mens' Hut in 1987. He was tentatively identified (see comments below) as Stuart, who was a juggler, by someone with a long association with the Crater Cove hut settlement.

We talked for a few minutes. I discovered that the woman was an unofficial ‘caretaker’ of the old huts that line the south-facing, lower slope of Crater Cove. This caretaker group, I learned, is sanctioned by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and consists of people with some past association with the huts or with an interest in them. They act as unofficial guides, guides for all but the media, it turned out. Somewhere in our brief conversation she learned that I was a journalist. “We have a policy of not speaking to the media”, she said.

Apparently, they thought that any publicity was bad publicity and might bring more people into the cove. It’s a strange attitude for a group not employed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service but operating with the service’s approval and, apparently, making decisions about media policy in a national park. National parks, after all, are supposed to be open to the public, yet here I had encountered a group who would rather keep the existence of the old settlement — what some people regard as a heritage site — a secret and a place that they, but as few others as possible, get to enjoy.

The social history of common people

The view south over Sydney Harbour shows the Men's Hut, built in the late 1920s, in the foreground.

The stone huts at the eastern end of the Crater Cove settlement are substantial buildings high above the rock platform and waters of the cove.

The social history of Crater Cove settlement came to an abrupt halt in the late 1980s when the NPWS decided that people should not live in the newly-declared park. That decision was made despite a history of prior recreational and, since the 1970s, permanent occupation of the huts.

The residents lost the subsequent court case and had to pack up and leave, despite evidence that they had cared for the Crater Cove environment. National parks were to be places devoid of human life, apart from the temporary presence of visitors. In the case of the Crater Cove huts, evidence of human occupancy was to be obliterated because the huts were to be demolished. After the court case and the eviction of the residents, the parks service boarded up the huts, turning what had been structures made of salvaged materials in the best tradition of the Australian shack-building into ugly, deserted structures.

One of Simon Flynn's small vegetable gardens adjacent to his shack.

This attitude, this belief, that national parks should be free of human habitation seems to be a notion that permeates both the national parks service and the environment movement. It certainly did at the time, anyway. Jeff Angel, spokesperson for Sydney’s influential Total Environment Centre, said that the huts should go. Against the combined forces of the NPWS and the green movement, what chance did a bunch of squatters have, even when their squatting was a residency of many year’s duration?

The notion of parks-without-people seems to have been imported into this country from the wilderness movement in the US. It is a historic nonsense — what is called wilderness today was usually someone’s home territory in centuries past, and home to miners and timber-getters since European occupation of the land.

I had hoped for a different attitude from the environment movement, but its decision to oppose the residents had cache within the sandstone walls of state parliament. I was also aware that, whenever the choice has been between nature and people, the green movement has chosen nature.

In opposing the continued occupation of the Crater Cove huts, they were not alone. A few Sydneysiders with no association and probably limited sympathy for the environment movement voiced their outrage in the city’s press at people living with expansive harbour views, rent free, while they paid millions for the privilege. I found it strange that the environment movement should agree with such a sentiment. I also thought it strange they would agree with that demographic until I realised that most environmentlaists come from the saftey and comfort of middle class homes. Those were their people.

A long-term resident

The hut above the Mens' Hut, western side. Late-1980s.

My encounter with the woman of the cove was still quite some years in the future the day I made my way from Manly wharf — I took the long way to make a walk of it — to interview some of the residents facing eviction for a radio current affairs piece.

At the cove, I met Simon Flynn, a man in his early thirties. As I sat on a rock opposite Simon with my tape recorder running, he told me that he was now in his eighteenth year at the cove and was the settlement’s longest-term resident. I was a little incredulous at learning this because it implied that he had moved into the cove in his late teens. But now, his residency was about to end. The court case pitting the residents against the NPWS was in progress and the proposal that they be permitted to stay on in a caretaker role was to gain no sympathy.

Opponents of the residents had warned of damage to the Cove’s natural bushland if they stayed.

Looking eastwards over shack in bush, Crater Cove.

I found the opposite to be the truth. When I visited Simon to conduct that first interview, he showed me where the residents had removed plants exotic to the bushland using methods developed by two Sydney women — the Bradley sisters — methods which would later be adopted by the city’s bush regenerators. I also learned that the residents kept a dinghy and had helped in the rescue of fishermen in the Cove’s waters.

Simon occupied a small but comfortable one-room hut. Built of local stone, driftwood and salvaged roofing iron, it was a simple home. In one corned was a bed. Against the opposite wall was a rustic shelf with cooking gear stacked on it. Below a window with one of those million-dollar views over the harbour was a desk and musical instruments. He showed me his hot water system — a long piece of black-painted steel pipe with a shower rose attached to one end. It was placed on the roof where it was heated by the sun. Nearby, poultry wire formed a small enclosure for a few chooks and vegetables grew in a compact, well-maintained garden.

Crater Cove hut.

The place was obviously cared for. Looking around, I could see how innovation played a role in providing the few luxuries that elsewhere were taken for granted. Far from the environmental vandals some would depict them as, these people were practical environmentlaists who were improving the place where they lived.

Simon’s hut stood a little above those lining the forsehore and was sheltered by a large flame tree. The large, bright red blossoms provided food for flocks of rainbow-coloured lorikeets.

I visited a secluded hut and its occupant at the western end of the cove that had been cleverly built into an overhang at the base of a cliff. Set back from the foreshore, it was more concealed than were the others. The most spectacularly-sited huts, though, were at the cove’s eastern end. Here, two adjoining structures had been built of local stone right on the edge of the cliff, about ten metres above the cove. The view over the outer harbour and the southern shoreline would be

The cliffs of the South Head of Sydney harbour are seen in this view over the stone huts at the eastern end of the Crater Cove settlement.

the envy of property speculators.

I made further visits to Crater Cove a number of times, some in the company of others from the radio station that had broadcast the interview with Simon where we had supported the Cove’s unofficial residents in their confrontation with the national parks bureaucracy.

On my last visit at that time, the court case had finished and the huts were empty. In place of a tiny community that welcomed visitors, the NPWS had given the people of Sydney huts whose doors and windows had been hastily covered with sheets of unsightly galvanised iron.

I felt sad and disappointed to return to the deserted settlement, although on a later visit I felt better in knowing that the NPWS would not demolish the buildings.

Later, I learned that Simon had left for Darwin soon after the evictions. Years later, I was told that he had returned to Sydney.

An Australian past

Occupancy of Crater Cove started around 60 years ago when weekend fishermen built the first of the huts. During the depression of the 1930s, some of the huts may have been occupied full time.

Interior of shack, Crater Cove, Late-1980s.

Forty years after construction started at Crater Cove, the huts were again occupied, this time by what were described as ‘hippies’. In reality, they were people inspired by the ideology of the late ’60s and the ’70s to search for a simpler way of living. For a time they found this at the cove, but sooner or later they drifted away. By the start of the ’80s only a few buildings were occupied on a full-time basis.

Years before I visited Crater Cove I had seen a photograph taken through the window of one of the huts. It was taken when the hut was permanently occupied in the 1970s and it appeared in a book about home-made buildings. The photograph showed a grand view over the blue waters of the harbour and out through the heads. What a place to live, I recall thinking, what a great view to see every day. Years later, I remembered that photograph and on one of my visits felt privileged to stand at the same window the photo had been taken through, to look out at a view unchanged and to take a similar photograph myself.

The view eastward along the rocky shorline of Crater Cove reveals the Men's hut.

Like the huts at Bonnie Vale, Burning Palms and Era in Royal National Park, the Crater Cove huts were built for recreational purposes, as accommodation for fishermen who visited the place on weekends. The NPWS says that the seven huts scattered along the narrow sandstone shelf between the harbour waters and the steep, scrub-covered slope behind were built between 1923 and 1963. Like all such huts, they were constructed of available materials — rocks and driftwood found on site, fibro sheets and galvanised iron roofing carried in. They were not meant to be permanently occupied, nor was it anticipated they would become of historic interest. That is something that happens only with time.

A better approach needed

I missed the turnoff on my first visit to the Cove and ascended almost to the top of the escarpment before I realised I had passed it. Backtracking, I found the trail and, wondering where it would lead, plunged in.

The Men's Hut, built in the late-1920s

Now I knew where it led and I had come back, standing on the rock shelf above the green waters, recalling past visits and talking with the woman caretaker of the cove. She expressed her annoyance at people crashing their way straight down the slope from the road above. This, she said, damaged the bush. I’m sure it does, but, without a sign indicating where the track starts and without proper maintenance, can you really blame those who take a direct approach to the huts, most of which are clearly visible from the road?

I’m sure that the caretaker group provides a useful service in maintaining the historic buildings, and I understand their motivation in wishing the preserve the place, but I was a little annoyed at the woman-of-the-cove’s presumption that she could enquire as to the reason for anyone’s presence in a national park that is open to the public. I thought it was too little too late because the settlement had been here more than 60 years and is already known to walkers. Photographs

Men's Hut, eastern end.

of the huts are found in books and online, and anyone wanting to visit them can find a fine satellite photo of the cove and the huts on Google Maps. Tying to keep the settlement a secret is futile. It seems a poor subsitute for a proper management policy and the provision of interpretive signage so that all can enjoy the Cove and its huts,  so they can come to understand its place in the social history of the Sydney region.

The Crater Cove settlement is an example of the building heritage of ordinary people. It is a reminder of the priorities, the way of life and the simple pleasures of earlier decades. It reminds us of the freer, unregulated access the people of those years had to natural areas and shows that people could occupy a such a place, modify it to suit their modest needs yet not destroy it.

Surely that could be the message were the NPWS to repair and signpost the track into the cove. They could provide a proper interpretive service, perhaps through the voluntary caretakers, that informs the people of Sydney about the huts and their occupants and about the role that unpretentious, seemingly temporary and roughly-built architecture has played in our history.

Somewhere to sleep, somewhere to cook, something to play music on... a life's needs so few and simple as to envoke envy. Interior, Simon Flynn's shack, Crater Cove, 1987.

The simple needs of life are demonstrated in this interior image of Simon Flynn's shack in 1987. Note the artwork depicting a view over the harbour.

I cross a narrow bridge then, cresting the top of a bare hill I catch a distant glimpse of the ocean. A sharp turn and it‘s up a hill then into a long, sweeping curve that brings me to the road along the edge of the escarpment that forms the backdrop to the narrow coastal plain.

Seen from Cape Byron, the long beach to the north seems to go on and on.

Here on the edge of the escarpment a farmer has retained a big patch of subtropical rainforest of the type that once covered this rolling country. I slow to take a closer look. “Tall trees, dark forest”, comes the thought as my eyes traverse the trees and their shady interstices. “Looks mysterious, primeval even” comes a thought unbidden.

The dense, green wall blocks the view over the coast but in a few minutes I clear this remnant and approach the sharp turn that precedes the plunge to the plain. Brake, change down, into the sharp turn… and I come to a stop a little way down the hill where I pull over, pull on the handbrake, turn off the motor, get out and look on country new to me.

…………………………

It is the closing years of the 1960s and I am on the first of my solo road trips along the great highway that goes north from Sydney all the way to Queensland. It’s a long line of asphalt that takes travellers to destinations planned and unplanned, to those imagined and to others discovered only by chance. To set out on the highway without any firm idea of destination is to accept serendipity. I know that it is a type of aimlessness but doing it makes me happy.

I resist the urge to move on… I resist that senseless pull that I experience all to often, that seeks to keep me moving for no good reason at all. “Pointless urgency”, I think.

But there is some impetus that keeps me going as long as the direction is north, and I have to admit to finding happiness in traversing this ribbon of grey that links town and city, farm and coast. This is something I don’t talk about with friends in Sydney for I fear that they would not identify with such sentiment and think me strange. No matter, really.

Road signs bearing the names of towns encourage turning off the highway and this I cannot resist. I know it makes the journey long but I am in no hurry. Obediently I turn to follow minor roads to minor towns that cling to the coast… places of old fibro houses with rusty galvanised iron roofs… of men and women standing patently on piers with lines curving into the water, their gaze and minds elsewhere… of people taking the morning sun on long yellow beaches. These are towns the images of which assume a sameness in mind and, given only a little time, blend together into some composite of Australian coastal existence.

This is all part of the joy of movement over long distances… it is refreshing, it is exhilarating, it is freedom.

…………………………

I close the door and look out over the little patchwork of roofs down there, where the coast turns abruptly to climb as a headland atop which stands a tall white lighthouse. Stretching north, a long way north from that cape all the way to a horizon concealed by sea mist is a beach that seemingly goes on and on.

“Something special about this place”, I think, looking out over it for the first time. I stay here awhile, propped on the bonnet of my small grey car. Then I drive into town.

…………………………

“Bit like other towns on the coast”, comes the thought as I drive slowly past houses, some old, some newer but most of them older structures of painted weatherboard. Here and there are people — families on their annual holiday from the city; older people, presumably retirees and not particularly wealthy looking, the type you might find around the bar of an RSL or a football club; and younger folk in couples or walking along in small groups.

A sharp left then a sharp right and soon I realise I’m on the main street. It’s a town of low buildings, Byron Bay. Old timber houses turned into shops, cafes and milk bars. There’s an intersection where the road turns north, towards Queensland, but I keep straight ahead and come to a large car park behind the beach. To my left is the town’s swimming pool and I wonder why people would swim in its chlorinated waters when there’s this beautiful beach a few metres away. And there’s that headland with the lighthouse I saw from the escarpment above.

“So, this I Byron Bay”, I think as I get out and lock the car before walking into town.

There’s a temporariness about this place. Is it the buildings of wood and iron? The way the town sits on the very edge of the land as if about to topple into the sea? Is it something about the ambience of the place? Yes, it’s like other coastal towns, insubstantial in some way. There are a couple solid-looking buildings, both hotels, and there’s that old two story timber place on the intersection where the road takes you north. A bit run down perhaps, it appears to have been here awhile. As for the town centre, there’s nothing of great substance there.

I had seen other places on this journey north. Earlier today there had seen Lismore, a sprawling, sleepy place with a lazy feel about it basking in the heat of the summer sun. If you stop and listen, I imagine, you would hear the crack of iron roof expanding.

It was a more substantial a place than Byron Bay and had a feel of having been there longer, especially those old houses whose timbers have greyed with the years, having become a stranger to paint. Its city centre, too, I found a spread out, slow place completely lacking any sense of bustle or urgency. Different way of living here, I thought.

It — Lismore —  wasn’t an unpleasant place but I didn’t say long, taking the road to the east up into the hills. But once up there a glimpse to the west quickly convinced me that I must stop. This I did to spend more than a few minutes gazing over rolling country to a horizon of blue mountains that formed a barrier to the sight of anything beyond. What are they? What’s out there among them? Where are they? What do people do out there? Thoughts come and go unanswered. Maybe, one day, I will go out there and find answers to these questions.

Then there was Bangalow, a town that spills down a steep hill. It occupies a bowl in the landscape that opens to the east and driving into town from Lismore the steepness of the main road is such that you need to apply your brakes lest you zap through town so rapidly that you find yourself in open country again before you know it.

Byron Bay — town by the sea. I drive up to the lighthouse and see that long beach that seems to go on and on. I look south over bush and beach to a distant headland.

I stay, but not all that long. The road continues and I must get back onto it.

…………………………

It’s a decade later and I am a long way from Byron Bay when I pick up a book of short stories by Australian author, Craig McGregor. I’ve encountered his writing before, quite by accident, and I liked it because it appeared to have been written from lived experience. Life translated into stories… there’s something appealing about that and I realise that I would like to be able to write this way myself, some day.

I start to read, then I encounter something familiar, something I feel that I’ve experienced some years ago. The realisation comes as a sense of familiarity that starts as a vague tingling feeling then grows into a dawning of realisation.

It was this. McGregor, too, followed that winding strip of grey asphalt that joins Lismore to Byron Bay and he, too, stopped at that same place on the winding downhill run, just past that patch of rainforest, and looked over that same view of coast, cape and lighthouse.

This must have been some years before me but what was pleasing to find was that he, too, experienced some sense of place on that road where it descends the escarpment to the narrow coastal plain below.

…………………………

More years pass… many of them. I drive that long road north again and, turning eastward at Lismore, eventually come to that bare hill atop the escarpment. I brake and curve into the sharp turn… and come to a stop a little way down the hill where I pull over, pull on the handbrake, turn off the motor, get out and look on country now better known to me.

Below is that town that I first saw from the escarpment all those years ago as a patchwork of roofs amid trees. And here, on the headland, is that white lighthouse. The difference is that, this time, I have come to stay.

Many times I drive that same winding road that descends the escarpment but only occasionally now do I stop to look. When I do, memory takes me back and I again feel that same sense of being there I did on that first visit.

Yes, it is still the same view, the same long beach stretching far to the north, a view largely unchanged from when I first looked upon it. Yet, it is always a new experience, a landscape seemingly unchanged but a mindscape that sees the familiar as if for the first time. The difference is that this landscape is now home.

Byron Bay. Discovered and rediscovered.

I REMEMBER SOMETHING a man told me. Move up here, he said, and you will soon find a job.

He was an optimistic type, extroverted, healthy and prosperous looking. For a real estate agent that was probably a good image to project. And he might be have been right about finding work – if you are a real estate agent. Byron Bay has a disproportionate number of such businesses for so small a town and it’s probably no coincidence that this coastal town of 9000 is second only to Sydney in housing prices.

An inspiring natural environment is what draws many to Byron Bay, but so is the opportunity to party in somebody else's town.

The estate agent’s advice about jobs seemed a little off as I got to know the place. The New South Wales North Coast region — despite a substantial population gain since surfers started to move in during the 1970s to be followed in successive decades by alternatives, seachangers, retirees and assorted refugees from the city — retains a high level of unemployment and underemployment. The Lismore employment office, so I was informed, serves the most highly educated unemployed demographic in the country. Talk to local people and you quickly discover the lack of employment is a theme. Locals take what work they can find.

The surfing industry is a local success story. Board manufacturers and retailers found their niche when surfers became the first of the city crowd to reinhabit the place decades ago. In more recent years, a number of surfing schools have opened for business and they live off the summer tourist influx, in particular the backpacking end of the tourism market. The prominence of the surfing industry explains why locals reacted negatively to recent criticism by a government minister of the local high school for offering a subject in surfing studies. He was speaking to highlight his own political agenda, whatever that was— point scoring by ridiculing the work of others —  but he had spoken without knowledge of the local economy, locals charged. Better that he had kept his mouth shut, some suggested.

The Byron employment situation is exemplified by the experience of a middle aged resident who found he couldn’t find work in his usual field. So he applied for administrative jobs with Byron Shire Council, jobs he could easily do, but failed to even get shortlisted. As someone explained to him later, there are more than enough people in the region who do those jobs as their usual work.

It is because of lack of work that people who move to the area sometimes sell up and move out again, disappointed that there is no livelihood for them – when you talk to people in town this is the story you hear. They arrive full of hope, perhaps having spoken to people like that optimistic real estate agent, but find the reality different.

Demographer Bernard Salt identified the trend in moving to coastal areas. But as people move in, how do they find a livelihood? Many new residents are retirees but others are potential first home owners, young families unable to afford Sydney’s sky-high housing prices. On discovering the lack of work, some keep on keep going through Byron to Brisbane, just two hours up the highway. There, the prospects appear brighter.

Tourism – plague or opportunity?

If employment is an ongoing issue in town, then so is tourism. Tourism, in fact, is the source of controversy both on account of the town’s history of experience with proposed big developments and because of its impact on the town itself.

For visitors, everyday is shopping day in Byron, but locals say that at the height of the tourist season they can't even find a seat in a cafe.

Townspeople defeated proposals for an ‘educational facility’ near Broken Head in the late 1980s and, in the 1990s, blocked Club Med’s plans for a big resort. The most recent fight has been against the Becton proposal for the Cape Byron Resort, though the state minister responsible has now given the go-ahead for a modified plan that would be acceptable to many. However, the intervention of Macquarie Street will not go down well. Before that, the Harvey Norman development near Suffolk Park caused local enmity, especially the millionaire’s criticism of Byron Shire Council.

The year 2005 brought resentment of tourism to a head, ironic as this seems for a town that relies for its livelihood on the spending of visitors. That resentment, however, had been fermenting under the surface of Byron society for some time and can be traced back to those earlier struggles against big tourism development. Locals find themselves in the bind of knowing that livelihoods and local economy depend on the influx of visitors while, at the same time, that influx changes the town around them.

Talk to Byron residents and you hear comments about the town not being the place they moved to years ago, that it has changed and is now a “town for visitors, not locals”. Change has been visible these last 15 years. Lawson Street has been rebuilt as a strip of cafes, coffee lounges, real estate agencies, surf shops and clothing stores and backpacker tourism has co-opted Jonson Street, the main thoroughfare, down towards the post office.

Byron’s reputation as a party town is partly to blame for this, however the town itself surely has to take some responsibility. Last New Year, council was forced to act on local resentment of the New Year’s Eve street party, with its tourist drunkenness and the way visitors left the town resembling a trash heap.

Council banned the party in a move that had considerable resident support and, led by Greens mayor Jan Barnham, council put on a family-oriented event and banned the drinking and carrying of alcohol — even unopened —  in the town centre on the evening of the event. It will not be easy to change the town’s reputation but some locals are trying.

Tourists — too many, too often

Local Greens state Upper House MP, Ian Cohen is a surfer who moved to Broken Head, 10 minutes drive south of Byron, in the 1970s. He was elected to the Senate after making several close runs at local government.

Cohen is a tall, imposing and athletic figure who, since becoming a politician, has lost the hard, argumentative edge he once had. That confrontational anger was exemplified by a story of how, in the late-80s, he was driving to town when he encountered local surfing identity, Rusty Miller, standing by his broken down car. Miller, who now produces a Byron tourism guide and gives private surfing lessons, featured in George Greenough’s surfing movies and was a champion US surfer in days gone by.

The story goes that Cohen stopped his car and got out not to assist Miller but to abuse him for supposedly supporting a proposed Broken Head educational-tourism development, where he was said to have been going to teach surfing. That done, Cohen got into his van and drove off, leaving Miller stranded. That story may be apocryphal but it shows how controversy over tourism has split opinion in town.

Cohen recently acknowledged the impact of tourism and its sometimes negative consequences when he referred to Byron’s “annual tourist invasion”. So too has Miller who, in an editorial on his website refers to tourism and the stresses it imposes on the town. “If you read the local papers you will see that much of the copy and dialogue concern our situation of overinundation. Too many, too often”, he concludes.

Business caters to visitors, not locals

There’s a cluster of travel service agencies on Jonson Street caters more or less solely to Byron’s burgeoning backpacker tourist population. Inside these agencies are banks of Internet terminals packed with backpackers catching up on their email while, outside, staff hand out advertising leaflets and corner potential customers for the adventure activity businesses in town – skydiving, surfing schools, trips to the rainforest in the hills, bus trips to Nimbin.

It is interesting to observe how they discriminate — they are usually backpackers themselves — in whom they approach and who they avoid. If you look local then you are ignored — they look past you as if you don’t exist. Likewise, if you look over 30 you are similarly disregarded.

Some locals see these businesses as a type of opportunistic overlay on the authentic matrix of the town, their market an ephemeral one just like the backpackers they serve. It is as if two cultures are overlaid — the authentic local one and the backpacker demimonde — two cultures that have little by way of mutual interest, little by way of communication and even less in common.

It is true that this part of town has been transformed by the backpacker industry, and you can understand how some locals believe that this has made Byron a town that caters mainly for tourists, not residents. It was in response to charges of late night noise by these tourists, to their littering, their rowdy and violent behaviour that the backpacker industry, particularly the owners of the plentiful backpacker accommodation in town, last year made known their own efforts to curb behavioural problems. They also drew attention to the income the industry brings Byron.

At the same time, the issue of tourist noise in residential properties let out for short term holiday accommodation came to a head and council proposed intervention. Yet another controversy in a small town which, this time, stimulated efforts by the holiday letting industry to regulate the behaviour of its clients more thoroughly. There now exists an industry hotline to curb rowdy visitors.

Exacerbating the backpacker controversy is their sheer visibility. Backpackers, whether welcomed, criticised or simply accepted and ignored by locals are in such numbers that they are a dominant visible presence, adding to the perception that Byron is being overrun by outsiders.

Noise an issue too

There are other issues that trouble this supposedly idyllic town. Noise is one of them.

The annual Roots & Blues and Splendour in the Grass multi-day concerts are the target of local angst over the noise they create, particularly for those living nearby (their venues abutt residential areas).

This is another issue. It divides Byron between those who would like to see the concerts move on and those who want to retain them for cultural and economic reasons. A recent council proposal to move them to a new venue away from residential areas met with opposition from people living in the vicinity. It seems the issue is in stalemate.

What future?

It is said that Byron Bay suffers from a ‘locals and outsiders’, an ‘us and them’ complex. There is some truth to this and it may be more pronounced than in other seaside tourist towns. The sheer number of visitors almost doubles the population in holiday season and backpacker tourism, as has already been said, is highly visible.

So, what’s the future for this town with all its controversies? How will residents negotiate a détente between the economic need for tourism and the equally valid need for quality of life and a sense of control of the town they live in? And what about those jobs that real estate agent spoke of? Where are they? Well, for the most part, they aren’t.

The benefit of Byron Bay’s occasionally torrid experience is that it gives coastal towns undergoing population growth a glimpse of the sorts of challenges they may face.