Launceston Art Museum

Cataract Gorge

Launceston house

Exploring Launceston.

Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Cynthia, happy birthday to you. I love being married to a fifty-year old who looks forty.

Cynthia and I walk down the hill, past the old Catholic Church and a towering stone windmill painted white. The streets are nearly empty except for the families parking and hurrying to Easter Sunday services. Our destination, the Stillwater restaurant for breakfast, looks over part of Launceston’s harbor. David: cappuccino, spiced Mary, Eggs Benedict; Cynthia: tea, poached with salmon.

We walk through a park that has a statue of Edward VII and a war memorial with bronze dates on one side: 1914-1918, and 1941-1945. We understand them. On the other side are three sets, from top to bottom: 1950-1953, Korea, we think. 1960-1973, Vietnam, we guess. 1948-1960, we are clueless; the last set is out of chronological order, yet the three sets are perfectly placed, so that last date wasn’t an afterthought. Turns out to be the Malayan Emergency, Australia’s longest war, which began when three station managers were murdered by the Malayan Communist Party.

The Victoria Museum next to the park has an excellent exhibit about Tasmania’s geologic and cultural past: An interactive map lets us change the display of Tasmania’s separation from Australia in thousand-year increments. So, 44,000 years ago, when the two lands were connected to the east of a large lake now called the Bass Basin, aborigines lived mostly in caves and ranged over a large dusty plain called the Bass Bridge. About 20,000 years later, the last glacial maximum has extended its ice almost across the Basin to where Melbourne is today, and several glaciers cover the land until 18,000 years ago when the climate warms and sea level rises 130 meters. Yes, 130 meters, flooding the Bass Bridge and cutting off Tasmania once and for all from “the mainland.”

We learn about some of the symbols the aborigines carved into stone and we realize that the man giving information in the video is Jim Everett, the man whose poem we read in Strahan. He’s an archeologist, an aborigine, and explains in the video how the aborigines of Tasmania lived for the past 40,000 years with a special relationship to nature and the land. He says, “Philosophy is the cause; culture is the product.”

We might have thought that is backwards, but the harshness of the land, the efforts needed for survival created unusual and intimate bonds between man and land in ways that might very well have created vision before structure. An interesting fulcrum, a delicate balance, a fascinating debate?

The aborigines burned land very carefully, almost scientifically in order to survive. Near a single village, they might burn most — but, importantly, not all — trees in one section so the area became good for grazing wallabies as sources of food and hides. They would burn other parts of the forest only every seven to 10 years, leaving the forest intact as a place to hunt and creating places to ambush animals. Finally, they would burn yet other parts of the forest only every 10 or more years, leaving it as a source of wood and supplies. Simple and sophisticated forest husbandry.

The top floors of the museum have picture frames and sewing boxes of complex, intricate, three-dimensional marquetry that signage says “is simple, produced by a skilled amateur.” We would like to see what a professional might have done. Talk about understatement! There are oil paintings on eucalyptus leaves.

Stephen and Maureen join us and we go to the Design Center — all manner of products from wood and reed weaving, and walk into the City Park beside it, which has a large plexiglass enclosure of about 30 Japanese Macaques, one of which suckles its baby. The monkeys are incredibly cute and pick lice from each other and fight for dominance and generally play with each other and everything in the enclosure. The baby clings upside-down to its mother’s chest and she cups its head in her hands and pats its back reassuringly.

We load into the Volvo and drive to the top of the Cataract Gorge, climb up a very steep and rocky path to a place called the eagle’s nest, where you cannot see the gorge at all, and climb back down. We separate from Stephen and Maureen so we can walk down the gorge path to town. We’ll meet them and their friend, Ian Thomas, at the Cataract Restaurant for Cynthia’s birthday dinner.

Dinner’s fun. David has TWO Negronis and Ian, a fanatic former rock climber and archeologist and telescope builder and writer and master of several other avocations, allows that he was hired to design and write the signage for the whole Reflections museum in Strahan. Ian’s depth and breadth of knowledge is truly entertaining: Joseph Conrad’s last command was the good ship Otago, which sits in Hobart’s harbor. Jonathan Swift’s land of the Houyhnhnm in Gulliver’s Travels is Tasmania.

Ian and Maureen and Stephen have been friends for some time. It’s just amazing how everything is Tasmania is connected; there’s no seven degrees of separation here; it’s two or three at the most.

Dinner is served on hot volcanic stones set into wooden platters, the stones easily hot enough to burn the skin off your fingers. They stay hot through the entire meal. Desserts are served on chilled stones, of course.

We fall into bed exhausted and happy.

Another typically fascinating, educational and fun day in Tasmania.