Author: Russ Grayson 2008

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.