Taste of the Tasman
My two weeks on the Tasman Peninsula over Christmas was the longest I’d spent there in years, particularly in the southern summer. It yielded twice the usual number of photos, which means it’s time for not one but three new galleries at Detail.
The first, Tasman VIII, features White Beach (where my parents live), an outing to the nearby McHenry Distillery, and a stop at Stewarts Bay near Port Arthur, where we spotted the Lady Nelson sailing out in the bay. Photos of summertime wildflowers (and a few introduced ones) also feature, including the Christmas bush blossoms that give Tasmania one of its distinctive honeys. I bought a tin to give to a friend in Melbourne on the way home.
There were no distilleries in Tassie when I was growing up there, the industry having been banned in Van Diemen’s Land by Sir John Franklin under the influence of his temperance-promoting wife. The year after I moved away, Bill Lark was granted the first distilling licence in Tasmania in 154 years; his founding Lark Distillery has since been followed by around fifty more. Despite having acquired a taste for whisky after moving to Scotland twenty years ago, I’d never had any from my home state. That changed this trip, when my brother and I went along to a tasting at McHenry’s. The whisky was as good as a particularly fine Scottish single malt; but at the equivalent of two hundred quid a litre I couldn’t justify buying a whole bottle.
The second gallery, Tasman IX, features a visit to Roaring Beach out past Nubeena, which has featured in many of my previous ones. It was busy with surfers when we arrived, but they all left by the time we did. The second half of the gallery features a spot along the road out to Roaring, Stinking Creek, which is much more appealing—especially at low tide—than its name suggests. It was probably named for the rotting kelp that used to wash up regularly on Tasmania’s beaches but is now disappearing from them.
Finally, there’s a third gallery of Tasman Panoramas from the locations mentioned above, most of which were taken on my new iPhone, but a few of which were stitched together from photos taken on my old-skool Lumix. Quite a few photos in the first gallery above are from the iPhone; for non-zoom images it’s as good a camera as any, and it’s always there.
For example, it was handy for taking photos of a five-dollar tray of home-made lamingtons from the Nubeena op shop.
Delicious.
I only got up to Hobart once for some last-minute Christmas shopping, and didn’t take any photos there worth posting; but I took a few in Melbourne, so might put up a few of those next.