Murals in Sheffield

Deloraine embroidery

41 Degrees South salmon and ginseng

Sheffield with murals everywhere, Deloraine community embroidery project, salmon and ginseng farm.

David runs the Inglis River track in the other direction this morning, toward Bass Highway (named after George, first circumnavigator of Tassie), and meets the same good-lookin gal with her 50-pound white lab that he met yesterday. “Hooligan,” she commanded yesterday as her dog jumped all over me, “Stay down. … He just loves everybody.”

Today, she breezes by with not a word. I understand this. Many morning runners tend to be loners, needing the solitude to get right with the world, with ourselves. Anyway … the track to Bass is more heavily forested and about a dozen pademelons bounce over wood bridges and along the trail.

We set off in the Volvo for another long day’s drive. First stop: Sheffield (aborigine name Tar Neem Er Ra — “Open Grassy Plains”) — under the shadow of Mt. Roland. A “midlands” farming town, its leaders became concerned in 1980 that it was in decline, that the surrounding farms and local industry were entering a depression that needed to be managed proactively. So the town council formed the Kentish Association for Tourism (Kentish is the local region). This group cast its research far and wide and discovered that a town in Canada — Chemainus, an 1850s logging town on the east coast of southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia — previously had overcome the same problem. The solution? Murals.

The town is covered in them: large, small, primitive, sophisticated, landscapes, psychedelic birds, portraits, good, bad, ugly, all kinds, some new and others faded on most building walls and doorways. More than 50 of them now. Since 2002, the town has had an annual contest in which it picks a poem as a theme that nine selected artists may interpret as they wish but must paint as a mural in a single week, the winner to get a reward and his or her mural permanent status for a year.

We motor on a nice, wide two-lane through the outskirts of Sheffield. Both sides of the highway are dotted with topiary: a horse and rider about to take a jump, a fisherman wearing a cap and with rod in hand, cows, soldiers at a memorial, a kangaroo, Dumbo the elephant, many, many others. Too many to keep a count or remember their shapes.

We motor on to Deloraine and park in front of the town’s Oddfellows Hall, which has been converted to a laundromat. No comment necessary. The silk museum is right across the street. Inside it are exhibits and historical paraphernalia including the town’s original bar (the whole room), a complete two-story 1880s house with all its furnishings (including clothing, draperies, everything that a well-to-do home might have). Outside are a series of old barns and sheds that contain all the tools local farmers had (a seed spreader that’s worn on your chest looks more like a device to torture convicts), a fur trapper’s hut complete with skins, tools and kitchen pots, a settler’s house (circa 1800), and several gardens (English, herb, medicinal, etc.).

Deloraine is fairly wealthy because, a recording explains as we view the four huge silk quilts displayed in a small auditorium, the town’s surrounding farms produce more than half the world’s legal supply of morphine. This nugget of info is imparted because one of the panels —they represent scenes of the town and its surrounding valley and mountains — has a poppy field in which each tiny red flower was stitched by hand. The quilts are about 20 feet wide and 10 feet high, each representing the town and environs in a season. So, four seasons. You’ll never guess what the background music playing softly is…. When the voice over ends, we’re told we have 10 minutes to examine the quilts before the lights will go off to protect the fabric.

Outside is a bronze statue of Malua, a racehorse in the 1880s to which even current Australian champions are compared. Think Pharlap and Secretariat rolled into one. Bought by his third owner, J.O. Inglis — name of the river behind Maureen’s house — in 1882, he raced and stood stud until he died in 1896. His best year … though perhaps not the most wonderous … was 1884 when he won all four of the main races: the Newmarket Handicap (1,200 meters), Oakleigh H’cap (1,000m), Adelaide Cup (2,600m) and Melbourne Cup (3,200m). The most wonderous was winning the Australian Grand National Hurdle (4,800m) as a nine-year old … or maybe winning the Geelong Gold Cup at 10.

We motor on past a truffle farm — oak trees planted like an orchard and “seeded” at the base of their trunks … there’s an interesting job — to a salmon and ginseng farm named 41 South established, owned and operated by a forty-ish expat German named Ziggy (short for Siegfried) Pyka. He offers free tastings of his smoked salmon and salmon rillette. He does NOT offer the secret ingredients of the brine he uses to flavor his smoked salmon. It does include some of the ginseng he grows.

“I started the ginseng first, before the salmon because I became interested in ginseng during my travels in China and Korea,” he tells us. “Ginseng has two properties that are very important. One: It can give you great health; you can feel it in your brain and it helps you to grow old. I am one hundred years old but you do not believe that as you look at me. The other property is that it makes you lie and I am very good at that, too.”

The proof is in the … salmon? Cynthia buys 175 semolians worth of salmon and his signature bottles of spice. 41 South does not export to America. “Why would I want to do that. I would have to be a big business. I want a small business. I like my life.” Amen.

We motor finally into our destination, the inland city of Launceston, the second-largest in Tasmania. Some buildings on the outskirts have the distinctive sawtooth roof shape and we ask why. Without hesitation Stephen points out that the vertical flat parts, if you look closely, are glass covered with louvres. The roofs are shaped to let in light in the most low-tech and efficient way.

Stephen, incidentally, can answer just about any question you might ask. “Stephen, what kind of tree is that?” “It’s a peppermint tree, often confused with a shaggybark eucalyptus but it has thinner channels in the bark.” “Stephen, what’s that bird?” “Stephen, what’s the name of that mountain over there?” “Stephen, why did the Labor government do that?” Why does he put up with us? A mystery. He’s lovely.

He and Maureen drop us at the Auldington Hotel, a converted novitiate near Cataract Gorge, which we will see tomorrow, our last day in Tasmania. They pick us up later and we go to the Royal Oak Pub next to the city’s main park where monkeys roam. We have dinner and skeddadle after the punk rock group, The Saxons, opens their set with a head banger.

Another day of unexpected pleasures in Tasmania.