Hobart

By Peter Timms

In this updated edition, Peter Timms leads us on a journey through his adopted city of Hobart, Australia's smallest, most southerly, least prosperous, but arguably most beautiful state capital. He reveals a city in transition, shaking off its dark and troubled past to claim its special place in the post-modern world: 'going boutique, nice and slow', as one overseas visitor notes. From Hobart's convict legacy, its spectacular natural setting, heritage architecture and climate, to crime rates, economic hardship, the recent disfigurements of the developers, and the opening of MONA (the Museum of Old and New Art) Hobart's newest tourist attraction. Timms brings a wealth of fresh insights. He explores the city with a mixture of affection, admiration, frustration and sadness, interviewing a wide range of residents along the way. Those who have experienced Hobart as tourists will be surprised and intrigued by the lively, complex society this book reveals. Those who live here will surely discover their city anew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781742245010

Peter Timms

Peter Timms has held various curatorial positions in Australian public art galleries and museums since the early 1970s. During the 1990s he was art critic for The Age and the editor of Art Monthly Australia. He has lived in Hobart for the past ten years where he is Tasmanian art critic for The Australian. Peter is the author of several books, including Private Lives: Australians at Home Since Federation (2008) and In Search of Hobart (2009).

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interviewed.

The fabric of the city

In Christopher Koch’s The Boys in the Island, Hobart is described as ‘a city, but only just’. That novel is set in the 1950s and Hobart has grown a lot since then. Other capitals have grown proportionately more, however, so maybe the epithet still applies. But only just.

While, so far at least, it has been spared the worst modern urban problems (pollution, traffic gridlock, high stress levels and astronomical property prices), federalism guarantees Hobart the cultural attributes of a capital: as the seat of state government, it attracts and controls wealth and has a university, symphony orchestra, library, archive and museum along with some reasonably sophisticated leisure and entertainment facilities. Thus it is often said that Hobart is a big country town with capital-city infrastructure: the best of both worlds, manageable yet civilised.

It is probably fair to say that the majority of Hobart’s citizens would once have leaned towards a less charitable view, suspecting that they had ended up with the worst of both worlds: the insularity of the country town with its intrinsic limits on association and choice, yet without the informal support networks or traditional forms of community they might have expected in compensation.

‘We expend a large amount of money annually in advertising Tasmania as a tourist resort’, complained one frustrated Mercury correspondent in 1938, ‘and when tourists visit our shores we welcome them with closed doors and deserted streets! Wake up, Tasmania! … or we shall certainly merit the old, jeering epithet of Slobart!’¹

In these days of slow food, a slow city doesn’t seem such a bad idea. Former disadvantages are increasingly looking like attributes, and Hobartians are casting off anxieties about their runt-of-the-litter status. After watching SBS news and seeing what is going on elsewhere in the world, they might reasonably decide that it’s not so bad to be living in a little city at its southernmost extremity, in touch but out of the line of fire. People here know where they stand: they have few illusions. So while it may be more provincial than Sydney or Melbourne, you could claim, without too much of a stretch, that it is less parochial, because more outward-looking and not so self-absorbed.

Perhaps the most significant physical difference between this and other capitals is that, thanks to its size and topography, it is graspable. You can take in Hobart all at once from a number of high natural vantage points. You can see how everything fits together. ‘It is not necessary to abstract a plan of its space in order to negotiate it’, as the architect and planner Leigh Woolley puts it.²

When you do abstract a plan of it, you see that it snakes along the shores of the River Derwent, following the accessible contours. Hobart is very long and narrow: in places no more than a few blocks of suburban streets squeezed between the water and forested hillsides.

You can appreciate this best from the top of Mount Wellington. It will take you just half an hour or so by car or bus to be rewarded with a spectacular panorama stretching from the northern highlands all the way to Bruny Island in the south. Should the summit be fog-bound or the road closed by snow, you can enjoy a less awe-inspiring but more engaging view from Mount Nelson. Rosny Lookout on the Eastern Shore, although it lacks the altitude, offers the most picturesque perspective, with the city buildings reflected in the placid Derwent Estuary and the mountain rising dramatically behind. The view from the Eastern Shore has always been a favourite with artists because it can be organised into foreground, middle distance and background. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery displays dozens of nineteenth-century paintings of Hobart from this side of the river, many of which exaggerate the height of the mountain for dramatic effect (as if that were necessary).

In Australia, it is not usually possible to take in a city this way, with one sweep of the eye. Other capitals are too large and lack the natural vantage points. Perth from Kings Park is probably the closest comparison.

For a bird’s-eye view of Melbourne or Sydney, you must take a lift to the top of the Rialto or Sydney Tower to peer through brown haze out towards the suburbs. The customary view of Hobart, by contrast, is from outside looking in: a fairly minor difference on the face of it, but one that entirely alters your perception of the place. Seeing a city from a tall building has a definite element of triumphalism about it. It confirms the city’s power and extent, and your place at the centre of it. Hobart from the mountain, in contrast, looks comfortingly toylike and vulnerable.

But not to everyone: a recent visitor from Holland, accustomed to the compactness of Amsterdam, was amazed at how vast Hobart looked from the mountain. And so it is when you consider that it supports only a little over 200 000 people. It is our love of big backyards that makes it sprawl. As early as the 1820s, less than two decades after it was founded, the diarist George Boyes noted that Hobart was spread over ‘three times the space of ground’ of a similarly sized English village.³

The surrounding hillsides mean that Hobart is a city with nowhere much to go. Although not an immediate problem to the 260-odd foreigners who set up their tents at Sullivans Cove in 1804, the steep slopes with their almost impenetrable bush would quickly prove a barrier to expansion.

One of the main things that decided them on this spot was the fresh water flowing down the rivulet off the mountain. (The Derwent is a mighty river but its navigable reaches are tidal, so fresh water was obtainable only from its tributaries.) It was, wrote surveyor George Prideaux Harris, ‘… a capital spot with a fine freshwater river running into a snug bay with good anchorage & a small Island in it, admirably calculated for Storehouse & Battery.’⁴

To call it a river is a bit of a stretch, but nor was it merely a creek, which, in the Australian vernacular, suggests drying up in summer. The old English term ‘rivulet’, widely adopted in Tasmania, seems just right. Harris, who dismissed Mount Wellington as ‘a hill’, appears to have had some trouble with the relative scales of things. Nor, apparently, was he thinking too far ahead, although this site was undoubtedly preferable to Risdon Cove a few miles upriver, where an abortive initial attempt at settlement had been made a few months earlier.

Given that the Hobart Rivulet was so important in sustaining the new settlers – and, of course, the Mouheneenner people for centuries before them – it seems extraordinary that they managed to sabotage it so quickly and so comprehensively. Within a few years Harris’s ‘fine freshwater river’ had been reduced to a dirty little drain, strangled by dams and weirs upstream and lined on both sides by windmills, factories and shanties. In 1843 it was officially declared a sewer, accepting ‘the contents of water closets, fluids from the hospital, refuse and dead animals, all remaining there to stagnate …’⁵ While there has been a significant improvement in the water quality since then, the rivulet remains a sorry sight, at least that part of it within the city’s limits.

From time to time, after heavy rain, the rivulet took its revenge by flooding low-lying parts of the city, and each time it was beaten further into submission by culverts, weirs and tunnels until eventually it was all but obliterated from the city centre. Once the settlement’s lifeline – its very reason for existing – it was now a pest to be exterminated. Its treatment is depressingly emblematic of attitudes to the natural environment that have persisted in Tasmania for more than two centuries.

You can peer down on the rivulet today, skulking in its concrete culvert, from an overpass in Barrack Street. You can even enter the cavernous tunnel constraining it and walk its length beneath the city streets (although officially you are not allowed to). If claustrophobia isn’t a problem, you can crawl on your belly with a torch into one of its tributary tunnels to admire the excellent convict brickwork. As you walk down Liverpool or Collins Street you can, with a little effort, still imagine yourself following the stream’s lush forested valley as it rushed towards Sullivans Cove, where land reclamation has since created one of Hobart’s few substantial flat areas.

So long as the tiny settlement grew naturally, it followed the line of least resistance, but the military mind of the New South Wales Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, was outraged by such chaos. During a visit to his southern outpost in 1811, he whisked up a grid plan (slightly out of alignment in grudging deference to reality), which resulted in some streets too steep for a horse and cart and others that ran straight onto the cliff-face above the beach. Yet somehow Macquarie’s obdurate layout survived and, with much convict labour, the topography was, in time, forced to submit. Even today, however, there are streets at the western edge of the city, such as Molle, Barrack and the aptly named Hill Street, precipitous enough to terrify the learner driver.

It took a mere forty or fifty years for the struggling convict encampment to transform itself into a respectable little town, at least on the surface. By mid-century, Macquarie’s grid of streets was lined with neat timber shops, although behind them were large internal courtyards where tradesmen and shop assistants lived in hovels. Historian Peter Bolger quotes an English visitor, who saw only the handsome street-frontages, as saying that, ‘For a city of but fifty years growth … none ever equalled Hobarton in beauty’.⁶ No less a person than the botanist Joseph Hooker declared Hobart’s shops to be every bit as good as Sydney’s.

Wharves, slipways, warehouses and a smattering of small manufactories were clustered around the cove, a grubby no-go zone constantly alive with the din of heavy labour. On the surrounding low ground workmen and their families eked out their existences amid the clamour of pubs, boarding houses and brothels. Above them, on the rise, some handsome official buildings of dressed stone gloried in their own importance – buildings such as Government House, the Treasury, the courts and the offices of police – their pretensions undermined somewhat by the great grim wall of the gaol that dominated the block between Davey, Murray and Macquarie Streets. From their office windows, demure government clerks in starched white shirts and tailored waistcoats enjoyed a clear view of executed criminals swinging from the