CHARLES WOOLEY
When I quit my town I certainly won’t be coming back more than once a week. Well maybe twice
I ’m in the process of becoming an out-oftowner. Of all Australia’s capital cities, only in River City would moving to the beach 44 minutes away be considered a major upheaval rather than merely a change of suburb. Plenty of my Sydney colleagues travel much further than that and on a daily basis.
But when I quit my town I certainly won’t be coming back more than once a week. Well maybe twice. Well certainly no more than three or four times. Which I suppose raises the question: Will I miss the joint? My kids worry that I might. They think I will miss my friends and so do my friends. They all wonder, will the Dodges Ferry cafe replace the old colonial sandstone and caffeinated charms of Maldini in Salamanca? And can the Lewisham Pub or the Carlton Surf Club replace the inner-city social engagement of the Shipwright’s Arms in Battery Point?
Shall I desperately pace the beach like Gulliver looking for a sail or might the sounds of the sea actually smooth off the sharp edge of worldly care?
What will I write about? On the beach will I still worry about defending our democratic freedoms, will I really still care who gets to vote in the Hobart City Council elections or will I be diverted by the running tide? Will it bother me that some of our Liberal senators didn’t oppose moving our weather forecasting to Melbourne and Brisbane or will I just look out the window to the watery swell and work out the weather for myself? Or ask a local?
The mountain distantly frames my new view to the northwest but will the arguments about the advantages and horrors of the cable car be drowned in the foaming crash of waves?
The terrible towering architectural monstrosities planned for my (soon to be) former home will be – happily – completely out of view until I reach the top of the Tasman Bridge.
The worst cliche in journalism is “only time will tell” but in the meantime, perhaps physical and mental relocation will give me something new to write about.
I only hope you can all bear to read about coastal vegetation on the sand dunes at Carlton Beach. Unlike me, the plants there have specially evolved to live in a dry, salty, sandy, nutrient-starved environment.
I will have to adapt. Like Pigface, (such an ugly name for the lovely dune stabilising Disphyma crassifolia) I will just have to toughen up to avoid dehydration. Or like Banksia marginata, I will have to become spiky and even pricklier while I endure the winds and the wonderful coastal views atop the dunes. I’d like to think I might even flower there though probably less gloriously than the bright yellow bottlebrushes of the silver banksia.
(Now the kids will be convinced that the old man really has flipped out).
“Shitty old Hobart”, one of Richard Flanagan’s characters calls our town in his most recent novel First Person. I think I know what he means. When you’re young you can’t wait to leave and then, somehow later it draws you back. It’s happening with my older kids, now that they’ve got kids of their own, they’re coming home remembering the good things from their own childhood and want that life for the next generation.
I’ve been away from this island and this city many times but whether in London or Sydney, inevitably I’ve always fallen back down to this little scrap of land at the end of the world and to ‘shitty old Hobart’. And then when you’re back, you soon remember why you left and so off you go again. I’ve done that a few times but in mitigation, work was always the big factor. There’s not a lot going for journalists in River City beyond the lifestyle, so for good or bad I sacrificed the lifestyle for the job and for a Qantas platinum card.
But recently my wife Donna, with summery childhood memories of beach holidays south of Sydney, has found the house and the location of her dreams and (sensibly I have realised it) of my dreams too. A beach house with salt spray on the windows overlooking kilometres of surf and flooded with that particular slanting Mediterranean light you find in the world only around the 42-degree bands of latitude.
In Europe or California you’d need to be a millionaire but not here in my hemisphere where I certainly don’t intend to cause a land rush nor a sand rush. The locals should not be alarmed. Their secret is safe. This column doesn’t really travel beyond River City and of course the people there would never think of moving to Carlton Beach. It’s just too bloody far away!