Mount Wellington

Mount Wellington seems to inspire a lot of things, hey. There was a course I could've gone on to do last year called writing poetry and short fiction advanced (I did the standard writing poetry and short fiction course, which was awesome) and the focus was writing about place.. which is the only kind of writing I do, so that would've been perfect. But I couldn't really fit it in.. anyway, the field trip was to Mount Wellington, which they had to write some short fiction about. How would you be original about it though, every metaphor for that mountain has already been used! But there is something cool about it. Not every city sits in between a river and a mountain. I mean when you think of Hobart, you think of the stinky docks with the fish punts and sails on the Derwent river and the casino lit up yellow at night, and the bridge reflecting colours on the water, but you can't really forget the mountain sitting quietly up there.

If you bother to read the interpretation panels up on the mountain, they talk about how significant it was/is to the Aboriginal people of the area and how it has inspired so many writers from Tasmania and elsewhere. I remember when I was studying that writing poetry and short fiction course, we looked at this quote from I think David Malouf or someone, and (I can't remember exactly) he said something like the only thing writers have real authority to write about is the first place they knew, because it's sort of impressed on who you are. So he writes about Brisbane I think it is. He might've also said something about that first place being the thing we should write about, or something. So yeah, I love reading stuff by Tasmanian writers, cos that's what they're doing, writing about that first place. And it's cool 'cos you can see the place for yourself. There's a Tamanian lady who wrote a poem called Walking to Cape Raoul (which is on the Tasman Peninsula) and it's so vivid, maybe because I know the place, or maybe because it's that first place for her. Interesting.

The first place for me would be where I grew up, which was our farm, in Henrietta, in the north-west. To me, that was such a cool place to grow up.. you have the house just off the highway, up on the hill, then down the road is the shearing shed, which is pretty patchy cos it was rusty red but had new iron put on about half of it.. then the rest of the farm stretches below the house, down the hill, and there's gullies down there which are filled with manferns and bracken and blackberries and sinking mud.. and there's four main dams, only one of which is the famous swimming dam, but this is kinda being overgrown with reeds and bullrushes so is quite difficult to get to.. and in the summer they cut the hay, so some of the paddocks are left closed and the grass grows really long, and then when they cut it the whole farm smells like honey and it is oh so nice. Then down the back of the farm is the flat, and the creek with the bridge over it. And behind that the hills slopes up again and it's the back boundary. Only 52 acres in size but there are parts of it you can go to and it would take quite an effort to find you! I lived there from the ages of 5 to 18 so that's a fair bit of living to do in one place! And I love writing pieces about that place, and sort of recreating it, and it's so easy to do, and it can really send you back there when you re-read what you've written! But I couldn't do quite the same with Hobart.

Anyway, Mount Wellington. There was a dvd in the Sandy Bay bookshop about the mountain and its meaning for Hobartians. And I guess it does dictate part of how we do stuff, I mean how cool is it that so many people get up in the morning and go outside to see what the mountain's doing in terms of cloud and stuff, so they know what to wear and do with their day! Ok, maybe just some of us do that..

So I don't know how you'd write about it unless you'd lived here when you were a kid, cos then you'd really know what it was to you. Cos I don't really, I mean it's that big chunk of rock that sits up there behind everything we do here, but other than that, I don't feel compelled to arrange words and phrases to recreate it like I might about other places I know..