TIM MARTAIN
was there were still other towns he had not had the time to include. So, on the back of the first book’s success he has written a second, which since being launched in August has sold more than 2000 copies.
Titled Tasmania’s Vanishing Towns: Not What They Used to Be, this second volume contains the stories of a further 347 Tasmanian places and communities.
Holmes has broadened his definition slightly to include shrinking towns, places that are too small to even be considered towns, places that are in population decline and some that have all but disappeared.
“I remember thinking Avoca and Fingal probably should have been in the first book, and it all went from there,” he says.
“I was surprised by the overall number I found around the state that I’d missed previously, especially a lot along the North West Coast.
“Some are vanishing physically, in terms of people, some are vanishing in terms of their original character, such as Beaconsfield, which is no longer a gold-mining town, it’s a small tourism satellite town.”
Given the roaring success of both volumes, Holmes hopes the books can contribute to a new tourism boom, allowing people to roadtrip around the state to search for the vanished towns.
“People are interested in ghost towns, and we already know the majority of tourists who come here are here for the heritage and history,” he says. “Many visitors are interested in finding these places, and lots of Tasmanians want to find those old towns where their ancestors once lived.
“And if I can encourage someone to go to, say, Queenstown, and stay an extra night there in order to visit the surrounding ghost towns, instead of just staying one night and doing the usual tourist things, then that is creating jobs in those regional parts of Tassie.” Tasmania’s Vanishing Towns: Not What They Used to Be, $49.99, is available at tasmaniasghosttowns.com.au, as well as in bookstores statewide, some newsagents and visitor centres. Limited copies of the first volume, Vanishing Towns, are also available in some locations In his second Miles Franklin winner, That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott had us look at what might have been had early white settlers been less rapacious, more curious and more inclusive. Here, he takes us towards the beginning of a future. The book opens and closes with a kind of resurrection: a symbolic figure conjured by an old man and a teenage girl, haloed in golden dust and rising out of a truckload of spilled wheat. The girl, Tilly, is at the centre of the story, reunited with her extended Wirlomin family and also the Hortons, white farmers who fostered her in babyhood. The gathering point is the Horton property, which has long been taboo as the site of a massacre perpetrated in revenge for the execution of a white man who raped an Aboriginal. Now, reconciliation is being attempted by descendants on both sides of the conflict. Sara Donati has broken through the genre of historical fiction with this tale of love and adventure. Elizabeth Middleton, an unwed 29-year-old, leaves England for the US with her brother to join their father in the rugged mountain wilderness. While Elizabeth is naively determined to set up a local school, she has been promised in matrimony in return for financial gain and stability for her father and brother. She has no interest in marriage but does have an interest in the abolition of slavery and the Bonner family, white men raised in the traditions of Native Americans. Get your discounted copy of Sara Donati’s Into the Wilderness using the coupon below.