Hobart, So Much to See

On Saturdays, the Salamanca Market takes place in Hobart.  It’s just south of the wharf and hosts over 300 open-air stalls every Saturday.  While scrubbed and appealingly bunched fruits and vegetables are on display for sale in several stalls, the real attraction is the vast collection of artisan products and produce.  Tasmania, it seems has a penchant for homegrown, home-crafted goods and fresh cool-weather produce.  Along the long lines of stalls are artisan cheeses, chocolates, fudge, peanut butter (the best in the world they claim), roasted and herbed almonds, flavored popcorn, and gourmet dates stuffed with candied a Persian honeyed-pistachio spread on a toothpick spear topped with a tiny square of cheese – talk about delicious!!!   Oh, but there is more tantalizing food — how about trying grilled sausages with caramelized onions and mustard on a chewy homemade bun, or better yet, a traditional scallop or steak pie?  There are foods from the Middle East, Paella from Spain, Tasmanian ice creams, and stalls with cakes, scones, candies, and colorful fruit leathers, enough to make choosing just one or two somethings almost impossible to do.  I wanted to taste everything!  Other stalls have cool collections of hats from a rainbow of colors and materials.  Want a colorful dress or skirt?  You can get an original design right here on Saturday morning.   There are only 500,000 people in all of Tasmania.  The crowd last Saturday morning made me think that a good number of them show up at the market each Saturday morning – it’s a must-do Hobart event and a destination.

That afternoon, we meandered through the Royal Tasman Botanical Gardens.  What a beautiful, restful place to visit.  Besides being beautifully designed in gardens and beds, the gardens were immaculately well-kept and most plants and trees were tagged with their name and home country.  What a state treasure!  The designers laid out the gardens using plants of differing colors, textures, and other characteristics to complement each other as well as to ensure ideal growing conditions. In the food garden, I could hardly keep my fingers from pulling a bunch of swiss chard or picking a pumpkin, a yellow pear tomato, or one of the gorgeous black bell peppers.  How delicious!  Late in the evening, the park representatives said, wallabies come out from the forests to forage for food.  I’d love to see them bounce about!  Overhead though, we watched a flock of screeching snowy white cockatiels race one another from point to point in the garden.   These gorgeous birds are beautiful to see but irritating to hear!!  Later a flock of twenty or thirty cockatiels caught out attention as they soared this way and that showing their brilliant white feathers in one turn and their shadowed-gray underbellies in the other.  They looked like white papers fluttering loosely in a strong updraft.

On Sunday, we returned to Mt. Wellington to do a longer hike.  We chose the Organ Pipes Track.  The starting point is called The Chalet, located on the upper part of the drive up the mountain.  It ends at a spot called The Springs farther down the mountain.  We entered the trailhead and followed the well-marked track through the mossy, eucalyptus forest for about a mile until the trees gave way to a clear sky.  Looming up over our right shoulders stood the Organ Pipes, a 400-foot tall wall of dolerite stone in towering columns.  What a sight!  We followed the Pipes until they ran out about a half mile onward.  We spotted two climbers making their climb up the vertical wall.  We became dizzy as we watched, imagining the feeling of hanging on sheer rock walls hundreds of feet above the ground below.  Why do they do it???

We finished the track at The Springs but our car was parked at The Chalet.  We had two choices, reverse the two-and-a-half-mile rocky track or walk back along the road.  We chose the road.  Oh, my!  We had driven to the road twice before but it never registered the actual distance between The Springs and The Chalet and it certainly never occurred to us how steep and steady the incline might be.  It’s been a while since our last vigorous hike.  Toward the end of the walk, we felt every step.  I kept my mind occupied by repeating as in a march, left, left, left, right, left.

And to bring us up to date, we made a day trip to Port Arthur, where Australia’s convict past had its beginning.  On the drive there, we stopped every so often at beautiful look-outs over the sea and to walk around famous points like Blow Hole, the Devil’s Kitchen, and the Tessellated Pavement—all breath-taking spots made by time, water, and mother nature.  By the time we arrived at Port Arthur, we had no time to tour it.  We think it may be worth a return trip in the next few days but our earlier stops were gorgeous, mind-blowing, and well worth our time.

Because that beautiful weather I mentioned earlier showed its other side today with high winds and rain, we elected to do indoor exploring.  When I say high winds, I mean gusts at 40 mph in the city  At the top of Mt. Wellington, the wind there was raging at just 5 miles less than hurricane force. 

The Cascades Women’s Factory circa 1825, a World Heritage Site, was not a factory at all but a workhouse where women “transports” were confined in small stone rooms with limited sunlight where they earned their keep sewing and reworking old sailing rope to make fodder for “chinking” gaps in ship boards, or washing clothes and linens by hand in an open yard not only for the factory but the towns folk as well.  All income went to the prison and all work was done in silence.  As part of their punishment, no talking was allowed.  This sad, horrible place is where for twenty-five years, 7,000 women aged 10 to 35, were “transported” (forced immigration) from England and Ireland as convicts, most of which were convicted of survival crimes like pilfering or theft of food items and served their sentence in this workhouse.  While convicts in male gaols learned a trade or skill that could be useful as settlers once the prison sentence was served, women convicts were treated much more harshly.  Each day was spent in hard labor or those with lesser offenses might be assigned to perform household and farm duties for a colonist family who provided her room and board.  If a woman became pregnant while serving her sentence (by a guard, or someone on the outside in work assignments), after the birth, she was given six more months of hard labor for her indiscretion.  Any children that arrived in the compound with a convict were sent to an orphanage by age of three and any child born in the compound was taken away at the age of 6 months to be cared for by another inmate while the mother did her additional six months of hard labor. Babies in the nursery, it is said made no sounds.  The mothers and caretakers were not allowed to talk to them and also, both the mothers and the babes were so malnourished, they probably did not have the energy to cry.  The latest research performed during the Covid-19 pandemic showed that over 70% of babes in the factory died before the age of three. Once separated from their baby, most mothers never saw their child again.

Women convicts were near the bottom of the English class system in Australia.  Aboriginal Australians were considered the lowest.  This women’s gaol operated from 1828 to 1856.