Getting to Tasmania is too easy
Victorian prophets and modern loss
Written by J William Browne
“If it wasn’t for seasickness, all the world would be sailors.” – Charles Darwin
As I type I’m flying above the Tasmanian peninsula. To the left of me the sun is washing the sky in burnt orange as it sets. To my right, dark islands float past between the clouds where an inky night has already descended. I am on my way back to Brisbane to start a road trip along the east coast of Australia, the third and final act of a three week adventure. But it feels like the last day of a long holiday. Perhaps it is leaving family after an overdue visit, perhaps it is the unfulfilled longing of the trip that is now past. Or the contrast with home to which soon I must return. There is a melancholy to leaving the island behind.
As a Londoner fresh from a week on the Australian mainland, Tasmania felt at times like a forgotten place. But forgotten in a way that is all the better for it. The residential streets of the small capital Hobart have a drowsy Sunday afternoon feel to them, reminiscent of a late English summer with its rich blue skies that give way to long shadows. In the suburbs that form most of the city, almost all of the houses are unique and single storey, so are rarely too big. Pastel coloured cottages with metal roofs and verandas with steel lace patterns adorning the very edges which, it would seem, are built to look old. Some are like beach huts, but with adornments which almost overcompensate for their simplicity, finished in the southern gothic or art deco style. The steep roads lined by these cottages can also give the sense of a bygone era. With no requirement for an MOT on the island, old American cars from the 50s and 60s slowly rumble by, like a Western Havana where the vintage car is a labour of love rather than a necessity. And like their old cars, the locals never seem to be in a rush.
Despite all of this, I had heard from both Tasmanians and outsiders alike that Australians from the mainland hadn’t thought the island was worth a visit until recently. It was too cold, too far away. The bohemian cousin to the sleek city dwellers in Sydney and Brisbane. But tastes are changing along with the climate. In response to the warming planet, Aussies from New South Wales and the Sunshine Coast are moving south to cooler climes, along with the world class vineyards that are migrating away from the northern heat that is turning fine grapes into raisins. This sudden popularity isn’t welcomed without reservation by locals, however. Particularly those that remember a time when the main road through the island was a single track and the provincial isolation that this ensured. A mere thirty years ago. Before the regular arrivals of likes of me, or the cruise ship that dwarfed an Australian Navy Destroyer in the harbour one evening, and which plays an annoying little tune for the whole coast every time it leaves. Tasmanians content with the old impression outsiders had of their cooler, quieter home are fond of a grassroots advertising campaign you see on t-shirts and tea towels around Hobart, ‘Tasmania is awful. Don’t come here.’ The locals want to keep this quiet little world for themselves.
But quiet little worlds are ripe for tourism. Made all the more so by the speed and comfort that can deliver hundreds and thousands of people at a time, be it by plane or by oversized cruise ship. After three flights and 31 hours of travelling from London, I stepped onto the tarmac at Hobart airport feeling less like I had travelled an immense distance than that I had travelled in time. 31 hours is more comprehensible than 11,000 miles, but both passed with relative ease as tracked on the screen of a Boeing 777. Even in the slum of Economy class, which didn’t come cheap, entire continents can be slept through or missed while watching Gladiator or Dune.
Shouldn’t it be harder to get to the other side of the world?
For this ease does not come without a price. I speak not of the cost of a ticket, nor the cost paid by locals in the commercialisation of their home, though of course there is that. The true price the tourist pays in the era of modern travel is the devaluation of wonder.
The writer and critic John Ruskin was already bemoaning the ease of travel for this very reason back in 1851. When the land was knitted together by a tangle of byways rather than efficient highways; when a bird’s eye view was achieved by climbing a mountain or taking a trip in a hot air balloon that would take you wherever the wind was blowing. Even steam trains were relatively new in the mid 19th century, with the first railway open to the British public having made its first journey a mere 26 years before. It was in this age that Ruskin sensed the magic of travel being lost in a hurried journey, summed up in a sentence which is worth quoting at near-full length:
‘In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent,—in those days, I say, when there was something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder, there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which… brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre.’
The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin
Ruskin demonstrates his point through the length of the sentence as much as its content. The modern reader along with the modern traveller cries out for brevity; easily digestible sentences, familiar words and full stops instead of commas; the literary equivalents of the quickest journey, the well-reviewed ‘must sees’, a destination that gets straight to the point. If it was possible to transport ourselves around the world in an instant, as opposed to suffering the indignities of mass air travel, we would obviously do so. You could get away from your home in London or New York for a weekend in Aukland, Vladivostok or Kathmandu. Perhaps all three. Take a detour on your instant commute into the office for a Parisian croissant, then nip home for lunch, or to a Vietnamese street food market in Hanoi. A pilgrimage to Mecca, Canterbury or the Santiago de Compostela could be done in an afternoon. If this improbable technology was affordable, as the once improbable miracle of air travel is for billions today, the impact would be devastating both globally and locally.
For if we could flit across the globe with no more effort than it takes to step through a doorway, would we still feel that same sense of awe upon arrival? Would the croissants in Paris taste as rich if we hadn't got lost in the winding streets trying to find that perfect boulangerie, before perhaps discovering another on the way? Would we spoil our appetite for authenticity if the new flavours of Hanoi became too recognisable? Would the quiet majesty of Canterbury Cathedral or the soaring spires of Santiago de Compostela inspire the same reverence if pilgrims could visit them on their lunch break and be back at their desks an hour later? I fear not. And no doubt, the ‘paradox of choice’ would undermine whichever destination we arrived at with devilish irony.
But even if we are mindful of Ruskin’s caution on the importance of the journey, too many journeys, even those that are hard won, can produce the same numbing effect. One of Ruskin’s contemporaries, Charles Darwin, docked at Hobart’s small harbour almost 200 years before I touched down in its small domestic airport last week. He was five years in to what was meant to be a three year voyage on the HMS Beagle, which had already stopped in Brazil, Uruguay and Cape Verde, and would eventually go on to the Galápagos Islands where he made his magnificent discoveries about natural selection. But as with the paradox of choice, as anyone who indulges almost any vice knows, too much of a good thing dulls the senses. An early victim of romanticised art, Darwin was unimpressed by the Hobart that met him upon arrival in 1836, which did not match the magnificent panorama he had seen as a painting in London. Even the majestic Mt. Wellington / Kunanyi that dwarfed the then port town struck him as being "of no picturesque beauty." Darwin, it seems, had begun to grown weary of wonders.
The view from the top of the unpicturesque Mt. Wellington / Kunanyi
It is a sobering reflection in the age of mass consumer travel. Global connectivity brings near countless benefits that are now shared beyond elites like Ruskin and Darwin, both for individuals and societies to bring home the riches of experience from almost anywhere on earth. But there is a danger that the easier it is to get to the wonders on the other side of the world, the easier it will be to forget the noble ideal that some of us may seek in travel. Something akin to the development of the soul. Both thinkers remind us of how quickly the novel can become the superficial.
Tasmania is now behind me in the dark of night. But as I fly northwards the twilight is briefly prolonged, as if the plane is chasing the last light of the day. The time difference between the the island and the mainland makes a brief journey seem even briefer and, in truth, I am very thankful. Thankful this short hop of a thousand miles isn’t the long and difficult journey that it once was. Thankful I can spend a week with family in Hobart and be back in the office on Monday. Thankful that one day I may well come back for good, before Tasmania is even easier to get to.
