If you have a yen to go to Tasmania, here’s three key pieces of advice. Go in spring or autumn, take clothing and footwear for all seasons and, most importantly, allow more time than we had (18 days). I’m taking up the travelogue as we arrived for three days in Hobart (having arranged to drop our car into the dealers to troubleshoot a faulty sensor). We checked in to the Hobart showgrounds, a spacious complex…
As promised, the new few weeks will recap our month-long sojourn from Warwick to Melbourne then Tasmania and the return trip. Enjoy the respite from the hostilities of the election campaign. This is a special edition (longer than usual – a 5-minute read). Before the memory of our lovely trip fades, we thought it would be good to jot down some of the highlights. Not that we’re superstitious or anything, but we left it until…
Now there’s a headline that could come back to bite me on the bum – election polling being the unreliable artifice it always has been. Polling is a mainstay of Australian electioneering. Various polls take the social temperature of a broad cross-section of the community. From this, they distil the information into numbers which they hope will predict who will win the election. Before we get into that, I consulted my preferred pollster, on-line bookmaker…
Our whistle-stop tour of Tasmania (18 days) reminded me much of my teenage years in New Zealand as a fledgling Tree Hugger. Tasmania itself reminds Kiwis of the home country, with its hilly roads, sparse population and evidence of man’s attempts to harness the wilderness. Tassie’s north-west coast in particular looks like the rugged beech forests of the South Island’s west coast. (Photo: tall timbers at Heritage Point on the Gordon River.) There are other…