Tassie is the common and affectionate term used by many Australians to refer to Tasmania. A contemporary Australian dictionary (Macquarie's) defines the colloquial waltzing as 'to wander about as a tramp with a swag.' Further attention to that dictionary suggests that a tramp is someone who travels from place to place in a circular pattern, and that a swag is his baggage. In September and October, 1996, I spent several weeks waltzing about both Tasmania and Papua New Guinea (PNG). Tasmania is the only island state of Australia, located south of the continent; PNG is an independent country at the eastern end of a large island on the north side of Australia.
Tasmania is shaped, roughly, like an equilateral triangle, with each side being about 200 miles long. The top side is parallel to the south side of the Australian mainland, and about 200 miles south. The opposite corner of the triangle points toward the South Pole, and is about 1,500 miles from Antarctica. The main transportation corridor, and population belt, runs from a bit west of the center of the top side of the triangle in a southeasterly direction toward the lower right of the island. Public transportation (buses only -- no passenger train service in recent decades) is good, with several buses a day along that route. To see the rest of the island, however, is very difficult using public transportation. Public transportation does not go everywhere, and many places are served by only one or two buses a week. I chose not to rent a car, because of my fear that my instinctive reactions in a traffic emergency would be just the opposite of those required, since I am not accustomed to driving on the left side of the road as is done in Tasmania. Therefore, hitchhiking was almost a necessity, not just an adventurous luxury.
Mainland Australians tend, good-naturedly but mildly deprecatingly, to regard people from Tasmania the way many coastal/urban Americans view residents of the rural south and midwest. My impression is that there remains in Tasmania a certain honest respect for others that has given way in the more 'sophisticated' population centers of the world to cynical selfishness. I had rides with 12 different drivers, including two park rangers, three students, a high school teacher, two businessmen, a garbage man, a railroad worker, and two others who did not disclose their occupation. I obtained rides from men, women, and families with small children. All were extremely friendly. Getting rides was even easier in some ways than New Zealand had been two years earlier. (For details, see my TRAMPING NEW ZEALAND dated May 9, 1994.) In New Zealand I would generally get a ride after no more than 300 cars had passed, whereas in Tasmania I don't think I was ever passed by more than 50. Offsetting that, however, was the fact that cars didn't come by as often in Tasmania, so I had some 2-3 hour waits, much longer than the maximum of 30 minutes I had waited for a ride in New Zealand.
I made a clockwise trip around the island, starting and ending at Hobart, the state capital. I arrived at, and left, Hobart by modern jet airplane. A century earlier, Mark Twain had also arrived and left Tasmania via Hobart, and he used the equivalent high-tech mode of transportation for that time -- a steamship. He was on a round-the-world lecture tour, and later had this to say, in MORE TRAMPS ABROAD (1898), about Tasmania:
In due course our ship entered the estuary called the Derwent, at whose head stands Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. ... It is an attractive town. It sits on low hills that slope to the harbour -- a harbour that looks like a river, and is as smooth as one. Its still surface is pictured with dainty reflections of boats and grassy banks and luxuriant foliage. Back of the town rise highlands that are clothed in woodland loveliness, and over the way is that noble mountain, Wellington, a stately bulk, a most majestic pile. How beautiful is the whole region, for form, and grouping, and opulence and freshness of foliage, and variety of colour, and grace and shapeliness of the hills, the capes, the promontories; and then, the splendour of the sunlight, the dim rich distances, the charm of the water- glimpses! ... Hobart has a peculiarity. It is the neatest town that the sun shines on; and I incline to believe that it is also the cleanest. However that may be, its supremacy in neatness is not to be questioned. There cannot be another town in the world that has no shabby exteriors, no rickety gates and fences, no neglected houses crumbling to ruin, no crazy and unsightly sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no back-yards littered with tin cans and old boots and empty bottles, no rubbish in the gutters, no clutter on the side-walks, no outer borders fraying out into dirty lanes and tin-patched huts. No, in Hobart all the aspects are tidy, and all a comfort to the eye; the modestest cottage looks combed and brushed, and has its vines, its flowers, its neat fence, its neat gate, its comely cat asleep on the window-ledge.
Certainly Hobart has changed since Twain was there, but I continue to marvel at how much it is the same as he described. I'm sure that somewhere in Hobart today there are shabby exteriors, rickety gates and fences, neglected houses crumbling to ruin, crazy and unsightly sheds, etc. -- but I never saw them. I walked miles and miles each day around the city, and rode buses and hitchhiked to outlying parts, and saw nothing to refute Twain's hundred-year-old statement. Hobart is truly a clean and neat city. It is also a very quiet city in the evenings; if one waits until 8 p.m. to dine, one's options are very few and generally in a pub whose main business is serving beer.
As on mainland Australia, smoking is widespread, and there is little consideration for non-smokers in most public places. Smoking is not allowed on buses, and the rule is enforced. Some restaurants have designated non-smoking areas, but smokers ignore the signs and owners/managers do not enforce the rules. The only exceptions I noted were in the American style fast-food restaurants (McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken) which did not allow any smoking, and where the staff was very quick to react if someone did try to smoke.
I stayed in youth hostels and budget accommodations associated with pubs, and an occasional hotel. These were all clean, modest, and Spartan; a Motel 6 room would seem luxurious by comparison. I alternated between eating at fast-food outlets, and working-class restaurants and pubs. I wandered around quiet residential neighborhoods, as well as in busy commercial districts. I visited railroad yards and repair facilities, hobby shops, model railroad clubs, rolling stock displays, and transportation museums. I also enjoyed an outstanding mining museum, lavishly outfitted in the long-gone boom days of mining in the Zeehan area, and now one of the few remaining institutions in that ghost town left behind when the mines played out.
The high point of my time in Tasmania was 12 hours spent in the cab of a locomotive, hauling empty ore cars from the dump site at a seaport to the loading dock near the mine (about 75 miles away in the mountains) and then returning with loaded ore cars back down the mountains to the starting point. This unusual experience, as well as an extended tour of the railroad shops and facilities, was a fortuitous and unexpected result of my hitchhiking around the island. One of the drivers who picked me up one day worked for the nearby mining railroad, and as we drove I pumped him with questions about the operation of the mine and railroad. When we arrived at his destination he took me down to the railroad headquarters, introduced me to the senior manager on duty, and from then on I was treated royally by everyone I met at the railroad.
I was able to access the Internet and my email account in both public libraries (for free) and 'on-line' cafes (for an hourly fee of about $5) in all of the larger cities in Tasmania. The generation gap was even more pronounced in Tasmania than in America with respect to computer comfort. Almost everyone I saw using computers for on-line chat or research was under 30. In some libraries the staff was obviously embarrassed about its minimal computer knowledge, and regularly referred computer related questions to nearby teenage patrons for technical assistance.
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A year earlier I had spent a month bushwalking in PNG, and this shorter stay was again part of a visit to my daughter who lives there as a missionary. (For details, see my BUSHWALKING PAPUA NEW GUINEA dated January 26, 1996.) Accompanying me was my 90-year-old first mother-in-law who wanted to see where and how her granddaughter was planning to spend the rest of her life. While those two were visiting comfortably together at the mission compound, I 'waltzed' parts of PNG I had not visited previously. I traveled with my backpack, including my own food, water purification equipment, and other necessities for living on my own in a third-world country. On this trip, however, I spent more time on fairly level paths around and between villages, and on dirt roads that were accessible (at least part of the time) by four-wheel-drive vehicles. This was a much easier trek than a year earlier when I spent my time in very remote jungle areas accessible only by foot over very rugged terrain. I did relatively little to prepare myself physically for this trip, since I was already able to walk several hours a day with a 30-pound backpack on relatively level ground. As it turned out I had no physical problems, and all of my medical aid supplies went unused.
On this trip I attended several tribal festivals (called 'sing-sings') and took many photographs of natives in traditional ceremonial dress. The largest of these festivals (held in even numbered years near my daughter's location) included perhaps 50 different tribes from various parts of the country. Some of the tribes were hostile to each other, but the police arranged the layout so that fighting tribes were not located adjacent to each other on the festival grounds. Mostly the groups just stayed in their assigned areas, and sang, danced, and chanted while a few whiteskins, like myself, wandered around taking pictures, and a multitude of western dressed natives from the local villages watched.
On one occasion I traveled for about 12 hours with a convoy of heavy-duty trucks, hauling rice, sugar, and canned goods to interior trading centers, and bringing coffee beans back on the return trip to a seaport. The driver in whose cab I rode spoke a little English, and had with him his 'wife #2' who did not speak any English. She was extremely curious about me, and the driver was hard pressed to translate her questions into English, and my responses back into her native language. When we started at midday she was very shy, and rode in the back of the cab. By the time I was dropped off, at 3 a.m., she was sitting up front, snuggling between the driver and myself, falling asleep now and then with her head on my shoulder. After the convoy of trucks moved on, I found myself in the second most dangerous town in PNG (Mt. Hagen) and not sure where I could wait safely until daylight to continue my journey. The business district consisted of perhaps 40 businesses, including used-clothing stores, food shops, two gas stations, a few bars, and other places. These were all closed, and, fortunately, before I was found by a roving band of thugs I located some private security guards watching over a workers motel. They allowed me to wait in a doorway near their fire, and I felt quite safe with them just a shout away. They stopped by every 30 minutes or so to make sure I was OK. At dawn, about 6 a.m. |
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| Copyright © - "C. W. Lee" |
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