mt wellington

So we went up Mount Wellington on a whim – actually in Natalie’s parents’ car – and got to the top just as it started snowing. Then Mia discovered she couldn’t start the car. Get this: the top of Mt W has a communications tower that radiates so prolifically it disables car security devices. We called the RACT and went a long way into discussions before I revealed we were atop Mt W and was told (by the warmly reassuring Mary) that this happens all the time, and that there were some instructions in the visitors’ centre about how to get around it. I didn’t want to go to the visitors’ centre because there were dim outlines of teenage boys there yelling ‘Yaaaaa! I hate the mountain and everyone on it!’ and throwing things. But then they left so I went and looked. It had a lot of weird instructions like a metallic windshield cover would block out the rays, and that the driver should put the unlocking device on their left knee. Anyway, somehow Mia got it working just by trying 50 different permutations and noticing that the little irritating red light once flashed three times instead of two and quickly trying the initiative. It wasn’t life or death anymore than anything normally is, because we’d already called the RACT and they were on their way, but it was still as my late grandmother would say, something in our lives.

This was on top of having recently visited the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery which has an extensive exhibition about Antarctic exploration and photos of the Shackleton ‘death tent’ etc.

I guess my take on Hobart June 2010 is it’s a stoic little city getting on trying to keep up and on some occasions making its own way creatively. I love it when little cities make their own fun in the knowledge that it’s not going to set the world on fire, and that they are a little city and they don’t need to care what other people think. I hate it when people in little cities adopt mannerisms and tropes of global culture(s) like some kind of Esperanto. I hate that.