TasmaniaBy RICHARD FLANAGANI was going to head up the dreamlike Gordon River, rain forest all around me, with old Denny Hamill on his fishing boat, and we would sit around fires of a night and talk of the power and magic of the river country through which we were journeying. But Denny was ill in the hospital, and so instead I began my journey around Tasmania by walking outside my front door in Hobart on a cold winter's night, and heading down a hillside of 100-year-old clapboard houses toward the Georgian warehouses of Salamanca, a district down by the wharves where Antarctic icebreakers and crayfish and squid and tuna boats berth and where pubs and people have always come together. Suspended between melancholy and dreaming, Hobart, Tasmania's capital and Australia's second-oldest city, unravels like a fraying ribbon between the foothills of Mount Wellington and the banks of the River Derwent. A beautiful colonial town in summer, with people spilling out around the port bars, restaurants and cafes, it is a more moody city in winter, as life retreats into the pubs. I am undertaking an unusual thing, going traveling in my own country at a time of year almost unknown to tourists: the heart of winter. In the warm pub, standing around a log fire, my friends are skeptical. The weather forecast is bad: rain, cold, snow. Summer on the island is variable, but Mediterranean. Winter though, unlike the benign season that passes under the same name in Australia, is decidedly wintry. But then Tasmania is not so much a state of Australia as another country, an island the size of Ireland separated by hundreds of miles of ocean and a vastly different history, culture and natural world from what Tasmanians call the mainland. etc, etc,
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