I t’s a savage day in the Tasmanian midlands but the spine-chilling cold goes deeper than the shallow, worn flagstones in The Commissariat Store.
“I see this place very differently now,” confides weather-beaten Jon McCure, sheltering from a howling gale in the lime-washed fortress that squats above the heritage village of Oatlands. For a long time, Oatlands was a working town forgotten by the outside world, and people liked it that way. It’s a time capsule without neon lights or billboards or telegraph poles, and when the IGA closes at night, the town feels deserted but for a handful of patrons warming themselves by the fire at Imbibers wine bar.
When Jon first came to work as a builder here, his thoughts were about saving “a nice bit of colonial history”, but the wall markings told a more sombre tale. “Some really significant events in Tasmania’s history happened here,” he says, with a sharp intake of breath. “This was the staging post for the dispossession of Aboriginal people.”
There is sudden, visceral silence. The cold, hard reality of winding the clock back 200 years thrums close to the surface in a building that represents unimaginable hardship and yet, until this moment, was much admired through my kitchen window at the artist residency on High Street. Life was nasty, brutish and short at the colonial frontier
