The Tasman Bridge

The Tasman Bridge crosses the Derwent near Hobart’s CBD (Central Business District) and is the main link between the river’s east and west shores. It has five lanes, the centre one of which alternates directions (the way Jarvis Street does in Toronto)—into downtown in the morning, out to the eastern shore in the evening. It's a lovely bridge and catches the morning light when seen from Poets Road.

The Tasman Bridge from Poets Road

When I head downtown or to the Express Shop or the Hill Street Grocery—three cardinal points of my life here—if I bother to lift my head from the descent and look I see it. 

Tasman Bridge from the Queen's Domain

The bridge is also a lovely sight from many other points in the city. The Domain where I photographed the Eastern Rosellas, for instance.

And at night, with its reflections. 

Tasman Bridge at night

Before the Tasman Bridge there was the Hobart Bridge, a lift bridge that became too great a disruption to traffic as the city and its eastern suburbs developed through the 1950s. Work on a new bridge began in 1960 and was completed in 1964, with its official opening (by Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester) in March 1965.

On January 5, 1975, the bulk ore carrier Lake Illawarra was heading upriver to the zinc plant when it went off-course and collided with two of the bridge’s piers, bringing a substantial length of the bridge down onto its own deck, and into the river. The Derwent is a deep-water river and within minutes the ship had sunk, drowning seven crewmen. Four cars drove off the bridge’s broken edges, drowning another five people. Two cars stopped, front wheels over the gap, and their passengers managed to get out. The remains of the ship are still 35 metres deep on the river’s bottom.

The new memorial to the Tasman Bridge Disaster

Several people from the eastern shore were the first to respond to the emergency, taking their own boats out and rescuing crew from the ship.

The eastern suburbs, now administratively gathered as the City of Clarence, were largely residential. People drove across the river into the city to work, to go to school, for medical appointments, for shopping, for cultural events. With the bridge gone the disruption to daily life was great. A temporary Bailey Bridge of two lanes was put in place roughly a year after the disaster, but it took nearly three years for the bridge to reopen completely. Among the results of the disaster were changes to movements of ships in the river and the development of services and community activities in the suburbs. 

In October 2013 a memorial for the victims of the disaster was unveiled at Montagu Bay Park on the eastern shore. Designed by Kelly Eijdenberg and Travis Tiddy of Poco People and made from concerete and steel, it’s placed to draw the viewer’s eye to the span of the bridge that collapsed.

Memorial to the Disaster

The sculpture’s three rings represent disaster, resilience, and recovery. We look first through the broken ring of disaster and end with the whole one of recovery. The memorial witnesses beautifully, not only to the disaster, but to the community’s growth, renewal, and recovery.

Memorial to the Tasman Bridge Disaster

Thursday was pretty good, too

When we got up to a sunny morning on Thursday we put our beach walk back on the agenda. Before long we were on the road to Carlton Beach. We crossed Orielton Lagoon on the way and decided to stop for a few moments. Orielton is a Ramsar site, protected for both nesting and migratory shorebirds. As we’d driven along the causeway we’d seen crested grebes—my first sighting of them. From the trail that goes round the water we could see shorebirds but for the most part they were too distant or backlit to identify—

except for the omnipresent masked lapwings and a couple of muskducks that have unique silhouettes. The backlit shorebirds made lovely if unidentifiable silhouettes.

Pine nuts of some sort, I believe

On the ground at Orielton I found this clump of pine nuts of some sort. Native pines are not much like northern hemisphere pines. I can’t identify them, except for the celerytop pine—not, strictly speaking, a pine but a Podocarpaceae—I grew to recognize when I was at Lake St. Clair in 2009.

When we reached Carlton Beach we puttered along the sand picking up bits of shell and feathers, tuning over the small tangles of seaweed. It's a lovely long stretch of sand, with eucalyptus forest on one side and she oak on the other. 

Pied oystercatchers feeding at Carlton Beach, eucalypts behind

Surf rolling in at Carlton Beach

We walked towards the mouth of the Carlton River. Pied oystercatchers fed, keeping a certain distance from us. 

When we reached their point of tolerance they took off in groups to land further along or behind us. A large patch of the beach was pockmarked with a mix of little holes and little balls of sand. I wondered if the oystercatchers had made the holes,  plunging those orange beaks into the sand as they fed. But then we saw hundreds of tiny crabs (the biggest no bigger than a thumbnail) scuttling about in that patch. The crabs looked like tiny jewels. Perhaps the holes and sand balls were theirs.

Tiny crab

Other birds than oystercatchers use this beach and its banks, as this sign reveals, but we didn’t see any of them.
I do like the new landforms, 'mudf lats' and 'sand lats' -- who knew a font could have such an effect? 









Jellyfish have been in the news here this summer—a kind of plague of small ones, along with some enormous and until now unknown species have washed up on beaches all over the state. We saw two jellyfish as we walked, one perfectly round one partly covered by sand, and this bright red one.

Unidentified jellyfish

We walked for an hour or so, our ears filled with the sounds of the surf and the wind. The sun grew hot and we got hungry—a sure sign it was time to head home for lunch and a breather before heading out to the Hobart Book Shop for the launch of Peter Timms’s novel Asking for Trouble. After the launch we went to Flippers, a  boat at Constitution Dock that sells excellent fish and chips, and bought take-away supper. We brought the steaming boxes home and ate our trevalla at the dining room table while we watched the light grow dim along the Derwent, one of the continual pleasures of being here.

A Perfect Wednesday

Wednesday last dawned overcast and soft. 

River Derwent under clouds
Tuesday evening we’d been at the Hobart Jazz Club for dinner and an evening of fine jazz with the Dave Sikk quartette (harmonica, double bass, guitar, drums, vocals) and had stayed up later than usual. It was good to have a soft slow morning—

Cloud on Mount Nelson

We lingered at the table, talking about books we’d read as children. Irene remembered the Dana Girls. I’d never heard of them, but my best Christmas ever was the year I was 8 when I got 8 books, 4 of them about the Bobbsy Twins. As we talked rain fell. Our plans for a beach walk went on hold.

The pleasures of the desk

The sound of the rain was pleasing. I wasn’t unhappy to hunker down at my desk. Waiting on it was a MS I wanted to read, a collection of poems by my friend Liz McQuilkin. I met Liz in 2009 when I was last in Hobart and we’ve kept in intermittent touch. She had retired from a career of teaching high school English, brilliantly I’m told, and started writing poems. The MS is for her first book, "The Nonchalant Garden", due out from Walleah Press later this year.

In 2009 I’d heard Liz read some of her poems. In fact I’d gone on a lovely jaunt with her to watch black swans so she could write about them. She’d been invited to respond to an exhibition of (mostly) bird paintings at the then Salamanca Collection (now the Colville Street Gallery). Liz wanted a close look at living black swans before she wrote a poem for the painted ones. We drove to Bridgewater and watched swans, some on the river, some with heads poking watchfully from nests in the long grasses.

Here, with Liz's permission is her poem:

Rara Avis

As rare on earth as a black swan, wrote Juvenal, 
consigning this bird to myth
for a thousand years.

Yet they’ve always been in southern waters. 
They dot the upper Derwent, each an oval islet 
with a slender line that rises in an S,
a contrary question-mark. Look.
Banks of birds are floating, necks looped back, 
beaks tucked into feathers more grey than black, 
more downy soft than sleekly smooth,
for nesting time is also moulting time.

There, on shore, a solitary swan is sitting.
It turns a ruby beak towards its mate 
carving a path through head-high sedge
to take its place on the life-long nest.
And there, a pen and cob dabble in shallows, 
disturb the surface, dive for richer pickings. 
Cygnets dart before, behind, between;
little feet fly up in comic mimicry.

In a flash of dazzling white, a cob rears up,
displays its dramatic wings, quickly regains composure. 
Another lifts off with frantic feet and wingbeats,
levels its outstretched neck and skims the river.
Mated birds sail downstream, profiles arched
in parallel, each a pas-de-deux
danced to distant, water-carried swan song. 

But back to my perfect Wednesday. As I was about to read the MS the post man dropped letters in the box. Two were for me—a long letter from Dorothy in Stratford (ON) and a card from Ruth in Toronto. Ruth is rereading Barbara Pym—I checked my impulse to rush downstairs to Irene’s shelves and look for Pym, I can read her at home. Dorothy reminded me we had tickets to see “Alice Through the Looking Glass” next May. How lucky I am to have  friends who write letters! 

The lulling sound of the rain continued as I turned to Liz's MS. When I surfaced from her lovely poems I stared out the window for a while and thought about them. Then I turned to an essay that needed revising. Next it was time for lunch. The rain let up, I walked to the Express Shop to mail letters. When I got back to the house I made decaf lattes for Irene and me, we sat and talked, then  back to the essay and before I knew it was wine o’clock—and soon after, supper time.  

As usual we had a delicious meal. Irene made a salad of lettuce, bacon, onion, tomato, and avocado, and we christened it BLOAT for short. The evening had grown brighter, the rain had stayed away. After eating we walked Poets Road and then up Knocklofty.

Walk up Knocklofty

There are picnic tables at the viewpoint that overlooks the city. We perched at them to watch twilight come in. A few birds called, ravens of course, and some small one that buzzed. A New Holland honeyeater flew into the banksia marginata and began feeding on its blossoms.

New Holland Honeyeater on Banksia marginata

The viewpoint faces more or less east (the western horizon is hidden behind the Mountain) and the sky over the river grew pale mauve, then pink. The moon, on the verge of full, hung high over the eucalyptus trees.

Derwent, late twilight (looking east)

Moon rising

Darkness was rising, time to head down hill while we could see the trail—it’s sandy, dry, steep. As we stood up a large bird flashed past. Kevin saw it land on a branch about forty feet away: a kookaburra, silent. I reached for my camera and it flew. We walked downhill.   

Home again, we settled to ice cream and biscuits as we reviewed our walk and then picked up our books and read  till bedtime.  

A whole day had unfolded without rushing--I would like more days like that. 

Book Play

In my experience books are not only good to read, they can be an occasion to play. One of my favourite games is, when I visit someone, to find an excuse to make my way to their bookshelves and start scanning spines. I'm curious to see what they read, of course, but I'm also on the lookout for the surprises that I'm bound to find. 

This game dates back to childhood visits to family and friends when grown-ups were immediately immersed in conversations that didn’t interest me in the slightest. But books did interest me, and my parents were happy to have me quietly occupied pulling books off shelves, so long as I asked if I could, and so long as I put them back.

Mostly I looked for books with pictures of other countries, or stories about animals and/or cowboys. Once at an uncle’s I found a book in a tattered blue binding with a cover image (in gold!) of a coyote howling at the moon. I’d like to find that book again. If I remember correctly the coyote was called Songdog, and his story was a horrifying one about hunters and bounties and poisons and the likelihood that all coyotes would be killed, now the wild west was settled.

Imagine the richness then, and the temptation, of visiting a friend who has been a bookseller, and is the most dedicated and assiduous reader I know: here in Hobart I’m living in a house filled with bookcases filled with books. Many days it’s hard to know just what shelf to look, at let alone what book to pull out and read.

The living room bookshelf

In fact it’s hard to avoid reading book spines here because,  wherever I look, there they are. In the living room—where we sit for wine o’clock, for conversation or to watch the Australian open and the news, or simply to read—are shelves of books on birds and nature, many of them familiar, many of them new. 

Alongside them are books about New York City, where Irene grew up, and a gathering of books about Joseph Cornell and Agnes Martin. That, of course, is the charm of other people’s shelves, the way they mix things up, familiar books alongside the unknown, both old and new. How genial to move from bird books to those about Joseph Cornell and his boxes, so many of which include birds.

Among the unknown books on someone else’s shelves chances are there will be exactly the book that I'm looking for--whether I knew it or not. I always knew I’d find books here that would serve my writing and indeed, when I arrived, three small shelves of books about Tasmania and Hobart were in my bedroom. In the office that has been generously turned over to me the bookshelf holds a substantial collection of writings on Zen and Buddhism. 

The Buddha Library

Reading even their titles is satisfying: The Morning Star, The Gateless Barrier, Nothing Is Hidden, Sounds of Valley Streams, Golden Wind, Don’t Know Mind… Some days I imagine myself reading all these books and beginning to lead a more contemplative life. When the page or screen in front of me gets too much to bear I pull one or another off the shelf for solace. 

In the basement Irene has her studio. Its large window looks across the valley to the Derwent. The walls are lined with bookshelves—fiction, poetry, books on books and reading, miscellanies, anthologies, works on fine art and decorative arts, needlework, Japanese culture—and odd things that don’t belong in any particular grouping. If I had a lifetime here I’d still never finish reading what’s on hand.

The fiction section in their gorgeous built-in bookcases

Elsewhere in the basement: Seven basic plots ...

Close-up: The definition of a new book ...

Among the seven basic plots of a life surely one concerns retirement. When Irene decided to give up her work at Fullers Bookshop here in Hobart, the shop manager, Catherine Schultz, commissioned a gift for her: the little bag shown in the photograph. It was made by Tasmanian textile artist, Tara Badcock, an apt choice, for Irene's other major interest and pastime is textiles. 

That defining statement on the bag originated with one of Irene's dearest Canadian friends and colleagues, bookseller Richard Bachmann (A Different Drummer Books, Burlington, now retired from the trade himself). 


It’s not only the spines of books, or comments from booksellers, that can be material for serious book play. A week or so ago Irene and I went on a gallery walk in downtown Hobart. At the Penny Contemporary Gallery on Liverpool Street we saw a show called Flotilla, work by Joanna Gair. A couple of years ago now Gair’s home, on Tasmania’s Don River (it flows into Bass Strait on the north coast) was flooded. When she returned to the house after the water receded she found plant debris everywhere. She took the debris and combined it with plants harvested from the river’s banks to make paper. From the paper she made the works in this show. (An image of the work can be found here: http://pennycontemporary.com.au)

In some pieces paper was folded and framed, edges out, so it looked like pages in books. When we came home from the gallery Irene rearranged a shelf of her poetry so their pages instead of their spines faced out. 'You can call it "Poetry: Amy Clampitt to Allan Ginsberg"' she said.

Poetry: Amy Clampitt to Allan Ginsberg