Hobart is Australia’s second oldest city, and this heritage is one of its main attractions for tourists. To get my bearings on a recent trip to Hobart, I joined a morning tour of some of the sites of this city scalloped around the Derwent River, beneath the magnificent Mount Wellington.
The tour departed from the waterfront, along Sullivans Cove. Harbour cruises and trips to MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, leave from here. Hobart is still a working harbour, and there were plenty of fishing boats as well as the huge Antarctic icebreaker Aurora Australis in dock. We passed through the sandstone glory of Salamanca Place, a very popular tourist destination with lots of cafes and restaurants as well as artisans selling their wares. You can wander through and see artists at work whilst admiring the old sandstone warehouses and stairways and pubs. On Saturdays there is a huge outdoor market, selling all sorts of fresh produce and locally made goods.
Battery Point offers views of the river, and one of the warehouses has a large chimney which was for the fire that was kept going all day and night to ensure that gunpowder was kept dry. We wound our way past the official finish line for the Sydney to Hobart yacht race and through narrow, winding streets that clutch to the hills behind. We paused at St George’s Anglican Church which had been a landmark for sailors for decades. Along the way there were scores of cottages and grand houses with neat gardens, some with drawn curtains offering glimpses of stylish and antique furnishings inside.
Anglesea Barracks was the next stop, one of the oldest continually operating barracks in Australia – as the second oldest city, and one with a tighter grip on its history than some, there are many ‘oldest’ tags. There were a few memorials including headstones patched into a wall, a memorial arch and a column commemorating Regiment 99, which served during the New Zealand Maori wars in the 1850s. This was the first war memorial in Australia, and was erected by a British regiment serving in Australia. Nearby there is a striking statue of a peacekeeper, bearing aloft a child, which was carved from a single piece of wood and knocked into rough shape with a chainsaw before the finer carving was done.
Cascade Gardens is a pleasant spot with a winding path towards Cascade Brewery, a magnificent old industrial building set against the backdrop of Mount Wellington. The beer, cider and soft drinks are made using water that cascades from the mountain. Just a little further down the hill are the remains of the Cascades Female Factory. This predates the Port Arthur Historic site, and was erected to keep female convicts separate. There isn’t much left in the way of buildings, although yards and areas such as laundry and crib rooms are marked out and snatches of official reports attest to the conditions. Even on a day of winter sunshine it is hard not to feel a taste of the despair that would have cloaked any new arrival, trapped within the walls with extremely basic living conditions. The nearby rivulet often flooded the prison. It is a quietly devastating place.
Across the mighty Derwent River to Rosny Hill Lookout to marvel at the city from afar. The Tasman Bridge was a talking point, not least of all due to the bridge collapse in 1975 when a ship ploughed into the arch at night. The falling concrete sank the ship and killed seven crew, and cars crossing the bridge at night could not see the collapsed arch and drove into the gap with five further fatalities. Traffic is still stopped when large vessels are heading up the river with pilot boats guiding the vessels safely under the bridge.
The final stop was the beautiful Royal Tasmanian Botanic Gardens, set to celebrate 200 years next year. It was lovely to have a wander about and see the lovely lakes and some of the many huge trees and varieties of camellias and rhododendrons throughout the gardens.
The tour was on a repurposed 1973 Bedford bus, a fitting way to see some of the sites of a beautiful city with much heritage to enjoy.
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