Today was one of those days that are more about everyday life than travel: attending to vehicle and wife maintenance; perhaps I am high maintenance after all, having treated myself to a visit to the beauty salon and acquired a new pair of shoes.
We travelled just less than twenty kilometres east to Burnie, calling in first to the Information Centre, a rather
unattractive new building on the waterfront on the western edge of the town.
The interior is a contrast to those initial impressions; the town has
rebranded itself as a “City of Makers” and the building is a shrine to this
concept. There are nine studios here, at any one time showcasing the work and
workings of a violin maker, a painter, a hat-maker, fibre artist, print maker,
paper artists, glass artist, jeweller and wood turner to name but a few of the
thirty artisans who frequent the workshop. Aside from chatting with the
volunteers while sourcing a town map, we admired some of the finished work;
fabulous paper mâché sculptures, roo-poo paper and origami.
We also learned here in the Centre that Tasmania produces around 50% of
the world’s legal poppy crop, providing the raw materials for the production of
medicines such as morphine and codeine, and that the operation here has been
underway for more than thirty years. I thought that very interesting.
Apart from attending to our chores, we did manage to fit in a visit to
both Burnie’s Art Gallery and Museum, both worth the time and effort. The
Regional Art Gallery, the third purpose built gallery in Tasmania, opened in
1978, had all three galleries with special
exhibitions open to the public today and all their permanent collection tucked
away out from view. Often we read about wonderful works held by galleries and
end up disappointed when we find they are not on current display. Today we had
no such expectations so were suitably impressed with what we saw.
The exhibitions currently showing are Dreamlands by Katy Woodruffe, an artist originally from Derby in
the North East of Tasmania, who has worked in, travelled through and been
influenced by Europe, a collection of work by Rylton Viney titled The Sorrow of Black/the Silence of White,
which must have been done when he was deeply depressed and the last, an unusual
collection of crafted boxes, Landscape
Boxes, by artist and cabinetmaker Toby Muir-Wilson. All impressed us and as
I took in Viney’s work, I decided that my art appreciation had evolved over the
period we have been travelling, for better or worse I am not sure. But does it
matter? I think not.
The museum is a modest affair, currently complimented by a special
exhibition about the surfing history of Tasmania. Here the stand-out was the description
of the swimwear of the early surfers, even in this last century; knitted woollen
cozzies that hung heavy and
shapeless, sometimes dangerously or immodestly so, when wet. That I also
thought interesting, if not hilarious.
Half of the museum is an excellent mock-up of Federation Street, Burnie,
circa 1900. Like all pioneer villages in similar displays, each shop or
establishment is full of period bric-a-brac, but more interesting still is the
personal history of those who lived in the establishment at the time. For
instance, in the boarding-house, is the transcribed visitors’ book of the time,
which makes for entertaining reading.
Beyond the “street” is a well curated history of Burnie, which I also found
particularly interesting. Our impressions of this fourth largest city in
Tasmania were confused by that knowledge and what we could see. In 2011 the
local government area recorded a population of 19,329. The town is strung out
along the shore, although we have in reality, only seen that from the centre
westwards. The port area, evident from the stacks of containers, cranes and
massive concrete seawall is within spitting distance of the CBD, which is
squeezed into a couple of streets, and yet seems to offer most of the shopping
and services you would expect of a town of this size.
Burnie was founded in 1827, originally named Emu Bay, but later renamed for
William Burnie, a director of the Van Diemen’s land Company in the early 1840s.
The first European pioneers were drawn to the area when the surveyor,
and unofficial “Father of Burnie”, Henry Hellyer, he of the gorge where we
lunched a few days ago, reported in 1827 that the agriculturally rich
tablelands of the north west of the state. The Van Diemen’s Land Company bought
up 100,000 acres of land only to find that the high rainfall and dense forests
made farming virtually impossible, coupled with the fact that the grass of the
‘grasslands’ was in fact button grass and sub-alpine tussock, which proved to
not only lack nutrition for the 5,500 merino sheep introduced on the land, but
in fact, their death knell. By 1834, the experiment was abandoned amid
financial ruin.
When tin ore was discovered at Mount Bischoff in 1871, Burnie’s future
was secured, or at least for the next century or so; it became the main port
for the west coast mines after the opening of the Emu Bay Railway in 1897, and
has remained so, however the output of the mines has diminished over the years,
a fact I have alluded to over the past week or so.
The port does however remain the fifth largest container port in
Australia, and along with the forestry industry, provides the main source of
revenue for the city. However employment prospects for the locals is not good;
in 2010 the Burnie Paper Mill closed after failing to secure a buyer, and just
in the past couple of days, Caterpillar have announced they are moving part of
their operations to Thailand which will result in the loss of a further 200
jobs. Alas this general depressed economic situation is indicative of Tasmania
as a whole, although just this evening, we have learned the unemployment rate
here in Tasmania, the highest in the nation, has fallen to 8.2%; still nothing
to write home about.
It was mid-afternoon by the time we headed westwards back along the coast to Wynyard; the rain was still threatening, the
sea still and brooding under cloudy skies.
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