tasmanian home in the bush

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' my home in the bush'

'paintings'

family photos

Hello family,friends and welcome strangers.

This is a letter to all my family and friends in UK,Canada,Usa,India and other people I know in other countries and some that I don't.

Some time in late 1981 I and my family arrived in Australia from England via Papua New Guinea. At that time we found the climate of Brisbane cool enough for our taste and settled in Queensland for the duration. A decade and more later, the family half grown and the parent getting older, we moved to a more congenial environment.

We found a place that could be the setting for the

'last homely house in the west'.

Hobart
is a state capital that is hard to believe could exist.
Curling around the foot and up the lower slopes of Mount Wellington Tasmania with some roads almost as precipitous as San Francisco and views to take your breath away, Hobart is an active circus of interesting happenings. Little is on a grand scale as the population is tiny compared with most western state capitals.
When the QE 2 arrived for a visit early in 1998 she dwarfed the town, as she lay docked almost in the heart of the city.
Visitors set down on the wharfs are within minutes walk of Salamanca, the Hobart city center and a short hop of the botanical gardens.
Hobart is slowly becoming known as a cruise ship destination. The arrivals of these huge pleasure boats are becoming more frequent as are American naval ships. The docks are a series of basins which hold a floating and mobile population. More and more, these smaller sailing craft use Hobart as a destination on world cruises and as a home port.

I am still getting used to the view down Elizabeth street to the docks which are spectacularly crowded with tall masts, especially just after Christmas when the Sydney Hobart race contingent arrives, at the end of a lively and often difficult crossing of Bass Strait.

In November this year the biannual wooden boat festival is held. Visitors in restored and renovated wooden sailing ships arrive to take up favorable positions at the waters edge. There are several sailing clubs on the Derwent River which divides Hobart.
Thousands of craft, from dinghies to maxies are moored in the bays and inlets for hundreds of kilometers up and down the Derwent and the D'Entrecasteaux Channel.

Dover
85 kilometers south of Hobart within a three quarters of an hour of the end of the road system to the south and with only one other community in a southerly direction is Dover. The climate is wet and cool.Cool climate rainforest areas are all around - manferns, and other ferns and mosses can be discovered. The Esperence River and the bays and inlets further south make magnificent sailing and fishing and there are plenty of walking trails for the hardy and for those just out for a ramble. White water rafting and sea kayaking are exciting activities for the young at heart. Caving for tourists at Hastings caves and swimming in the thermal pool not far away - both these sites are in deep rainforest areas. Anyone interested in serious bushwalking and speleological exploration can find guides locally, and caves not normally open to the public would be available this way.

Here I live
Surrounded by young and mature trees and fascinating plants, many I have still to find a name for. The land is rocky and slopes to the sunny side.( Here in the southern hemisphere that means to the north). A previous owner seemed to have spent all his time planting trees and moving rocks, some into piles and others to make rockeries and rough walls. The house could well have been the one that 'Jack built' - it is home and has a dry roof, and enough room and stimulation for a

studio to paint in.
That's all I care about presently.
Here are some photographs of

Stewart's shed being put up by Stewart and Kevin Woods. Other images show a little of the work he is doing there. Stewart is 16 and will be completing grade 11 and 12 these next two years. There are hopes that he will be assessed for his woodwork at year 12 level without having to do any further studies. Janice has just completed her first year at LaTrobe University Bendigo campus where she is studying out-door education. She seems to spend half her life anywhere but the university and has thoroughly enjoyed this year. Further down the track I hope to show what she gets up to as well.


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(* )strangers are just friends i have never met - anon.

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