Evening stroll above South Hobart

I really love South Hobart. I worked from home today, knocked off before it got too dark and went for a walk. Up on Huon Rd you get different perspective on everything.

Earliest memories

Post-Publication Contextual Note: I was born in in March 1968.

In August 1970 Sally was born; I certainly don't remember that. But I remember the smells of baby formula and rubber Nuk nipples for milk bottles. I remember trips to the Clinic for check ups on The Baby; they put The Baby in a big bowl on a set of scales and calculated the weight by sliding different metal weights up and down. I thought it was very strange. I think this was the Clinic, in lower Alexander St.

1971 We had a concrete slab in our backyard in Burnie, behind the garage. I must ask why we had a concrete slab. I don't remember it being poured but I remember it being new. I was riding a blue Dinky tricycle around it while dad stacked firewood. For some reason I have always remembered this and being 3.

Mine was something like this.

The slab behind the garage.

This is mum and I years later, probably 1978 as I have a World Series Cricket shirt on. I think I got glasses in 1976 but I'm not wearing them, I was not a fan.

1972 I went to Child Minding which was in Charles Street close to Burnie Primary School. I guess Jacki was enrolled in Grade 1 there so it was convenient. I remember a girl named Stacey, I remember having a favourite quiet corner of the verandah, and I remember eating playdoh there.

1973 I went to West Park Kindergarten, next to West Park football ground and the Burnie bowls club on one side; and the train line and West Beach on the other. I remember many things about kinder.

This was the original Burnie High School, built in 1929. West Park Kinder operated out here in my day. It burned down in 2007.

• Flavoured milk in translucent white plastic sachets. Banana, chocolate, strawberry.
• Doing maths on a slate with chalk. The slate was green, in a wooden frame. I don't remember doing writing on slates, just maths.
• My teacher was Mrs Ingram and she was oldish and very kind.
• Excursions to Burnie Park over the highway. Mrs Ingram and another teacher would hold up traffic for us to cross which sounds mad but possibly there were no traffic lights then? Like everything when you are little, it just was.
• There was a (disconnected) olde tyme phone on the wall, the kind with a separate talking tube and listening piece.
• There was a collection of bikes with training wheels and scooters and we would parade around the path on these.
• I remember "painting the shed" - there was a playhouse in the yard and we would paint it with pots of water and big brushes.
• Car pooling. There were five kids, and our parents would take turns to collect us all and drop us off. There was me, Andrew McLaren and Julie Docker, Elizabeth from Paraka St and someone else. Julie's mother had a blue 2-door sedan and I often tripped over the seat belt when clambering out of the back. I think Macca's mum had a yellow Beetle.
• There's a photo of Macca and I and about ten other kids bouncing on a big tractor inner tube; and that has kept alive my memory of some of the kids who were there. Within a few years of starting primary school it was hard to remember wh0 you'd known before and who was new.

Some early things that I can't really put a date on

• We also went to a sort of family daycare, just around the corner from home at the top of Bay Street. It might have been called Auntie Pat's or something like that.
• Baby Sally fell one storey onto concrete at the Health Glo squash centre, but she wasn't seriously injured. She was upstairs with other kids, a lady was supposed to be minding them while mum and dad played squash downstairs. There was a gate at the top of the spiral stairs and Sally just crawled under it and straight down through the central space. It must have been so dreadful for anyone who saw it.
• I also did a plummet and got away with it; off the steam train in Burnie Park onto the concrete surrounds.
• Hanging around the grass tennis courts when they were down in Avon St just off Burnie Park, while mum and dad were playing.
• Making friends with Andrea Viney while our fathers played for the Burnie High teachers' cricket team. There was a big ditch around the outside of the boundary and we were ditch pals. As we are to this day!

MND Animations

I have been making animations and illustrations for the Wicking Institute’s health education MOOCs (massive open online courses) since 2016.

This animation is a background for a clip I completed in January 2025 and I was really pleased with how it came out. Adobe After Effects has "fake 3d" in that you can take a flat item and rotate it any way in space that you like; but it’s still flat. And you can move a "camera" in three dimensions through a space. So this is a series of flat items arranged in the most complex way I can manage, and then a camera moves through them to suggest the interior of the motor cortex of the human brain.

It’s very satisfying to work on freelance jobs like this because it is at the other end of technical and design complexity to most of my day job, which is producing signage for Woolworths and BIG W. I do love my day job, but it's technically very straightforward.

Nicola Gower-Wallis

I just went to see this show at Bett Gallery, tremendous.

The most beautiful cows in Premaydena

The Night Shift

Recent animations

 

Dream Burnie by Justin Heazlewood

Justin Heazlewood and I have a bit in common. It's tempting to make more of this than there really is; because he's talented, witty, poetic, musical, courageous, quite successful and he is really rowing his own boat, artistically. 

The similarities? We're both from Burnie. I also enjoy writing, I am an artist, and I also did not know what a souvlaki was until I left Burnie. 

The differences are;

• I am twelve years older
• I do not have the degree of drive or courage to be original and fully myself that Justin has
• I grew up with two parents who had it together; he was caring for his single mum who had schizophrenia.
• and I went to Burnie Primary/Burnie High while he was Montello Primary/Parklands High. Primaries in Burnie were pretty much similar I reckon but PHS was a much tougher proposition than BHS. I bumped along without ever working anything much out at high school while I feel that across town you had to have a strategy to survive those four years.

If you don't know anything about Burnie it's an industrial town and port on the north west coast of Burnie. It's surrounded by dairy farms and forestry. Burnie's full-employment commodity-exporting days are in the past now, and it is trying to survive on tourism, like everywhere. But… I am not an expert on 2025 Burnie at all. I lived there for 18 years until moving to Hobart for uni in 1986.

I first became aware of Justin around 2005 as a muso and personality on Triple J called The Bedroom Philosopher. He was witty and sophisticated, but employed a genuine understanding of his (our) daggy regional background which he deployed as both a weapon and a shield. I subscribed to his email newsletter and over the years we've corresponded just a bit.

Justin has now written a book called Dream Burnie which is really a physical souvenir of a whole Dream Burnie project. I would describe it as a thorough excavation of the surprising artistic life of Burnie and it's people over the last several decades. 

You can buy a copy here

There are about 30 interviews here with people who grew up or worked in Burnie or were even inspired by Burnie to create art, music, games, films, animations, sculpture and indescribable hybrids of same. There's an anthology of Justin's own work in here. And a scrapbook of great Burnie ephemera that captures that time at the Dawn of Desktop Publishing.

I have only dipped into it until this week (my sister Sally and her husband Matt are featured subjects so I started there). But now I am reading it front to back and it's taken my breath away a couple of times. Nostalgia is a corrosive drug etc yadda yadda but I think a lot of what’s in here should resonate with anyone who feels like the time and place they're in is stifling their voice or clipping their wings.

What Justin demonstrates through his careful sifting of these stories is that our DUMB TOWN, our PAPER MILL PAINT FACTORY WOODCHIP PILE 7BU FOOTBALL town, was and is full of creative and original young thinkers, who could have connected, and sometimes did, to feel like they weren't alone.

There was the Coastal Art Group and rock bands and brass bands and the Musical Society and the Jazz Club and so on – I'm not saying it was a cultural desert. Like Sally, I went to art school in Hobart and so did a dozen of my contemporaries from Burnie and the coast. But it's honestly surprising to me to see the talent and really the word I keep thinking is courage of so many souls who sprang from the chocolatey brown soil of this town. The art pedigree of the joint outdoes the football pedigree to be honest.

If you are Tasmanian you will have likely encountered the Dream Burnie roadshow by now. He's been pretty brash and he's not just quietly hoping the books sell themselves. I may have thought "Come on mate give it a rest" once or twice. But it's a bloody good book, I am very glad to have got my hands on one and I might even write a part 2 to this rave review rave once I have read it entirely.

Now I have to drop him a line and ask if he pinched my Cooee Cordials logo artwork because I am pretty sure he did.

On a bus in Sydney

I'm on my way to visit Marcus in Hong Kong. I got up at 3.50am, and mum kindly drove me to the airport. Just as I alighted from her car a text came from Qantas announcing my 6am flight was cancelled. 

I hung around for a while in the very quiet arrivals area until they announced a replacement flight. Which for me turned out to be at 11.25am... a 5 hour wait. 

I checked my big bag, and tossed up a few options. I decided to do just what I felt like doing, which was go for a walk in the cool early morning, out of the airport, through the adjoining pine forest to Seven Mile Beach. 

It's honestly not a lovely walk. No airport that I have ever seen provides pleasant pedestrian environs.

But i knew it wasn't far. After about half an hour I was on the beach and there was even a great little bench to sit on, breathe deep and read my book.

By about 9 I was on the road back. I found some marsupial jawbones which I can never resist. They're in my pocket now, hopefully will survive the flight to Hong Kong.

My flight to Sydney was uneventful until we landed and the door was stuck. Luckily I'm not a jump-to-your-feet merchant when planes land so I just sat it out for 15 to 20 mins. At least the air con was on. 

It's 29° and 70% humidity here. 

I've now got through security and I'm at the gate which is a semi-renovated no-air con shemozzle. Very familiar vibes to the Tullamarine departure lounge for Tasmania (although that's a little better now, complete with toilets and snacks).

Rows 59+ are all standing and waiting, rows 1-58 have been expelled from the area. I'm 70. A recorded  announcement just started "Please remain seated..." and there was sniggering.

South Hobart news c1986

I've recently started as deputy-and-future editor of the South Hobart community newsletter. I've just been given a ton of back issues as PDFs.

Nº 9, April 1986 has a report on the family fun day, an ad for an electrician that's still advertising 39 years on, and an appeal for witnesses to a murder.

I remember the murder case well, I knew people who knew the three involved. This is from The Age, 15 Aug 1986.

"…on or about 24 February this year, Maurice Huish was involved in a fight with Leigh Turner in which Turner died. Huish had gone to the dead man’s Macquarie Street flat dressed as a woman."

Joey

I was on my way to the airport on Sunday morning, to see my uncle Peter arrive from Sydney. I wasn't responsible for picking him up but I was keen to add to the welcoming party.

Just down the road from home was a recently road-killed pademelon (small wallaby), in the middle of the road. I pulled over to drag her to the kerb to avoid swerving accidents and just awful mess, really. As I got out told myself "check the pouch". 

I hardly ever see such obviously fresh roadkill, and I've never hit anything myself.  I know it;s something you should do but I have never had to do it. On Sunday I had to do it.

And there was a joey clearly in the pouch and clearly still alive; so I had to get him out. Hairless, quite young. I rang Bonorong Park but it was too early Sunday for them so I left a message. He was not as hard to get out as I had thought; the pouch stretched enough.

I walked home and got an old dog-hairy blanket to wrap him up. Amazingly a woman from Bonorong called back very soon after. I sent her a photo of Joey and she confirmed that he was old enough to have a chance of survival. She told me to wrap him in a beanie, woollen things, keep him warm.

I went home again and got Elf to hold him briefly while I put on a pouched hoodie, then I put him in there, lightly wrapped in cotton, thinking my body warmth would do the trick. Over my hoodie I put the woollen blanket. I chatted to Joey as we drove to the 24 hour vet in Moonah; Bonorong Lady had rung ahead so they were expecting him.

The nurse at reception took him and said wait and I'll bring back your cloth (old undies from the rag bag, I didn't really need it back). Then I asked would he survive – she said "Probably not, he’s just too cold". 

I went away feeling I should have got a hot water bottle, done more for him. The short time out on the road on a pretty sharp morning could been enough to push him beyond recovery, I know that. But next time. We get a lot of roadkill along Cascade Road so very likely there will be a next time.

But please slow down, from dusk to dawn.