Veronika Wild

The John Glover Track - Knocklofty, above Hobart I have been running in my new walking boots on the hills around Hobart.   Knocklofty is the one nearest to me and overlooks the town rather nicely. Were it not for the great bulk of Mt. Wellington/Kunanyi (1271 m) stealing the limelight, it would be an important feature in its own right. The upside is that it is easily accessible and offers pleasant views of the river and the city from a less Godlike perspective – you can make out the detail of individual houses, a gorgeously flowering magnolia, a man on a bicycle, as well as the blue ribbon of river curling away to the south. One of several old quarries   In the earliest years of white settlement in 1804 it was known as “Woodman’s Hill” and was a kind of wild commons where people gathered firewood, hunted possums and grazed a few cattle.   Much of the sandstone for the colony’s early buildings and even those in Melbourne was also cut from here. In 194...

Ruins of the Lisdillon Saltworks There was one other place I wanted to see on the way home. It’s the Lisdillon Saltworks which lie about twenty minutes to the south of Swansea.  Its substantial ruins stand proudly and forlornly on a headland as if gazing out to sea waiting for the owner who never returned. It is rumoured that his was the headless corpse found in a carpet bag near Waterloo Bridge, while he was in London on a short visit in 1856, though this was never proven.  You can just see Freycinet Peninsula and Shouten Island in the background James Radcliff, an Irish immigrant, built the saltworks in the 1830’s as an adjunct to his farming activities. He was also the district's coroner and a Justice of the Peace. Although the saltworks were innovative in design and salt was in high demand in the colony for preserving meat and tanning, the saltworks were never really profitable. It is thought that this may have been partly due to its location -to...

McCubbinesque landscape - early morning sunshine filters through the trees   I should have looked at Lost Falls last year when there had been so much rain on the East Coast. I’m within 27 km of it on the Great Eastern Drive, so I give it another try now. The main road to Campbell Town has greatly improved since my last visit. The chicanes are still there, much to the delight of motorcyclists, but the road is wide and smooth. It's mean of me to say it, but I wonder if the improvement has more to do with enabling wealthy pastoralists to get to their beachside holiday homes than “connecting communities” as the signage says, or they would have finished the Midlands Highway by now or even the Lakes Highway years ago. The road into the Falls however, hasn’t changed since I was giving my son driving lessons there a decade ago, though the signage is better. Last time the alternator failed and we had to hitchhike home from Campbell Town. Lost Falls is only four kilometres ...