Hobart Wandering

Not having arrived at my hotel in Hobart until about 9:30 last evening after flying in from Adelaide, I consider this to be my first day in Hobart. I started it by doing some wandering around the city.

Some of that wandering lacked all but a vague direction. But some was roughly map-guided (with deviations if something looked interesting) to two specific spots: Battery Point and the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens.

I’ll start with general comments that ramble on about my rambling and then move on to talk more specifically about those two destinations. I’ve chosen to organize this post that way because this is my damned journal and I’ll bloody well make whatever literary choices I like based on my chaotic whims of the moment. If you don’t like it, take it up with the management. See how far that gets you.

(Management, here. Joel is right. His journal. His choice. Now, bugger off, finish reading this post, and enjoy it. Dammit.)

Hobart is situated near the mouth of the River Derwent, which spills out into the South Pacific (or it may already be the Southern Ocean by that point; I don’t know), providing it with a large, protected harbour. Before you ask, no, I don’t know who Der was or where he went, but the river apparently celebrates his leaving. I guess he was a ne’er-do-well.

The Australian cities I’ve been to so far, Brisbane and Adelaide, are river cities. Technically, so is Hobart. But it is so close to the mouth of the river that the river is wide enough at that point and, I assume, its water is probably salty enough that you wouldn’t be blamed for considering it a part of the ocean. I’d be blamed for it because I’m a magnet for blame, but you probably wouldn’t be.

The point I was trying to get to is that I was ready to see me some big water. So I headed for the harbour, which is only two or three blocks from my hotel. Wanting to do only semi-directed wandering at that time, I didn’t use a map to find the harbour. Much to my shock and amazement, I got there directly.

I didn’t see any ships in the harbour that looked like they make major journeys on the sea, but I imagine the fishing vessels do venture out there.

I said “in the harbour” above because, on my walk to the botanical gardens, I saw a ship that almost certainly does make some ocean voyages docked beside the shore farther upstream from the main harbour. It was emblazoned with “ANTARCTICA GOV AU.” That provided a reminder that Tasmania contains the closest point entirely in the south Pacific/Southern Ocean¹ to Antarctica other than Antarctica itself. And Hobart isn’t far from that point.

My impression of Hobart based on my wandering this morning is that it is much more of a workaday city than my previous stops in Australia, Brisbane and Adelaide. I don’t mean that as a pejorative.

The architecture is nice enough, if on the milquetoast side. But, apart from some structures by the harbour that looked like they once served as inexpensive warehouses that haven’t yet undergone gentrification, I didn’t see any buildings that I’d consider particularly ugly and none that I’d consider spectacularly ugly.

It’s just that there aren’t any that are flamboyantly dazzling, begging you to devote considerable attention to them. Nor did I see any structures that exuded or even trickled old-world grandeur or charm. To me, it’s a city built primarily for function, not style. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the architecture probably won’t win any tourism awards.

The scenery, however, does Hobart a good turn. It doesn’t have the scenic grandeur of, say, Vancouver, but it is quite attractive.

As I said above, the city faces the wide mouth of the Derwent River, so it has that water feature. High hills/low mountains line the other side of the river. And what I think are residences climb partway up the hills.

Hobart itself is hilly and kunyanyi/Mt. Wellington serves as a backdrop to it. (I’ve seen the name of the mountain written as just “Mt. Wellington,” but “kunyanyi/Mt. Wellington,” with a lowercase “k,” is the official name for it. “Kunyani” is what Aboriginals called it before the British came along.)

Hobart’s Battery Point

After wandering around the area by the harbour a bit, I headed up to Battery Point. It’s a residential area built on a hill that my guidebooks tell me has 19th-century cottages. I don’t know, maybe it’s just because I’m a lifelong Canadian, but to me, a cottage is a summer residence, usually made of wood, that’s plunked down among some trees and usually beside a lake or river. Preferably, the trees prevent you from seeing your neighbours even if they aren’t particularly distant.

That’s not what the residences in Battery Point are. I recognize them as the sort of thing that non-Canadians do indeed call cottages. And there are even some in Toronto, Canada, my hometown, that are called cottages. But they aren’t what most Canadians think of as cottages.

Think of a low-rise, semi-urban area, with single-family homes in a British television show or film. You’ll probably get the right idea for Battery Point. They are mostly small homes with no more than a narrow driveway between them, and sometimes not even that. Most are bungalows, but some have two storeys.

They make for a very charming neighbourhood. But they aren’t cottages, dammit.

At the pinnacle of Battery Point’s hill is a pleasant park, Princes Park. That’s the official name as noted on signs and in my guidebook. There is no apostrophe, so the princes don’t own it, nor is it of the princes. And it’s plural, so it honours multiple princes.

But there is no indication of which princes it honours. I think that’s clever. By not naming the princes, they don’t have to change the name of the park should one of the princes be found to have engaged in or is currently engaged in immoral behaviour. (Looking at you, Prince Andrew.)

Princes Park has a large lawn area surrounded by trees and some flowers. At its lowest point, there’s a nice little playground.

Battery Point also contains a small, but handsome Anglican Church, St. George’s.

Derivation of “Battery Point”

The name “Battery Point” has an interesting history. It wasn’t always called that, but I can’t find its original name. Despite the lead-acid battery being invented in France in 1859 by Gaston Planté, in 1864 two entrepreneurs in Hobart, the Woolsmith brothers, Henry and Francis, built the first mass-production lead-acid battery factory in the world on the land where Princes Park now sits.

Business people from around the world came to Hobart to try to copy the Woolsmith brothers’ highly productive production techniques. But it was years before any other plants managed to come close to the success of the Woolsmith brothers.

The still-standing cottages around the park housed the workers at the factory.

Unfortunately, in 1902, an explosion of unknown origin burst the factory’s large tank of acid during working hours, spewing acid on the workers. The accident killed 19 people, some suffering an excruciating death, and severely injuring dozens of others. The factory never reopened. It was soon torn down and turned into the park we see today.

To honour the workers who died at the battery factory, the neighbourhood was renamed Battery Point.

If you know anyone or meet anyone from Hobart, or know or meet anyone who knows anything about the history of lead-acid batteries, please don’t tell them this story. They’ll think you’re crazy. Except for the part about the invention of lead-acid batteries (I looked that up), I made it all up.

In reality, Battery Point got its name because there used to be a gun battery up there to protect Hobart against any naval threats. I think my story is more interesting, even if it’s not true. And isn’t that all that matters in the internet age?

The Walk to the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, my next destination, is on the other side of town and more than a 45-minute walk from Battery Point. So walking there involved seeing more of the city, but I’ve already talked about most of that.

But here’s one thing that I didn’t talk about above.

On the way, I passed a field with two animals in it. From a distance, I thought they were deer nibbling on the grass. When I got closer, I became reasonably certain that they were cows. However, they were thinner than the cows of my imagination. (I’m a lifelong city person, so cows are more in my imagination than my reality.)

Maybe their thinness was intentional on their part. “Hey, Fred. Cut back on that grass. If we bulk up too much they’ll send us off to be slaughtered and then they’ll eat us. You wouldn’t want that, would you? A svelte look becomes us and keeps us alive.”

Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens (Hobart)

When I talked about Adelaide’s botanic gardens in this journal, I said that if Brisbane and Adelaide are representative, Australian cities know how to do botanical gardens. Add another data point. Hobart has a spectacular one.

The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens is built on a hill. So in some of the higher sections, you get great views of some of the lower sections.

And those sections are quite diverse. There’s a Japanese garden with a pond and a stereotypical red wood bridge over a narrow point in it. There’s also a small Chinese section with two stone lion statues. Another section is labelled as “French Explorers Garden,” but don’t ask me what makes it a French explorers or explorers’ garden. (The signage doesn’t have an apostrophe. There is also a native plants section. A floral clock sits in one section, but when I was there its flowers were mostly seedlings.)

There is also a conservatory housing plants requiring a warmer environment and a subantarctic plant house. At the entrance to the latter is a sign warning that you’ll experience a sudden drop in temperature when you enter the room. The sign did not lie.

To my taste, the star of the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens is its lily pond. It was in bloom and beautiful. Many clusters of lily pads occupied much of the pond. Flowers liberally dotted the lily pad clusters. The flowers’ colours ranged from white, to light yellow, to various shades of pink, including one set of lilies with such a shade of pink so dark that I’m tempted to call it red. All of the lilies that I was able to look down on from the provided perch (see next paragraph) had dark yellow centres that appeared to be quite good at attracting pollinators.

At one end, a wooden circular observation deck juts out into the pond. Two other smaller semicircular wood decks attached to the first jut out a little farther. That provides a close-up view of the spectacular lilies.

Lunch

After spending considerable time in the gardens, I got hungry. I had lunch at the restaurant there. I chose an Egg Benedict, but with smoked salmon rather than ham, and a glass of wine. The singular form of “egg” was the menu’s usage, not mine. There were two eggs.

After lunch, it was time to move on, but that’s for a subsequent post. See you then.

1. I said “entirely in the South Pacific” because I think there’s a point in Chile in South America that is closer to Antarctica. But the border between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is somewhere around there. I’ve always found it weird that one ocean becomes another across an invisible line. But there you have it. This is probably a strong indication that I rarely have the foggiest of ideas as to what I’m talking about. ↩︎