‘Wooley, you are selfish … you just want to keep the place to yourself …’

Charles Wooley

My friend, Simon Currant, the tourism developer, has a string of wonderful projects to his name. His latest is the ingenious Lake St. Clair Pumphouse Point hotel conversion. He has transformed an abandoned, swallow-haunted piece of mid-twentieth century hydro-technology into the micro resort that has everyone talking. And he’s done it without overtly changing anything. I like the minimalism and I like retro-fitting old buildings rather than replacing them with something new and usually, less pleasing to the eye.

Indeed you could walk past Pumphouse Point today and not even see the changes until you noticed the people.

And that’s the nub of Simon’s long standing irritation with me. I like things pretty much the way they were. The appearance of a surveyor’s tripod in my favorite places or a local politician using the word ‘progress’, fills me with dread.

“Wooley,” Simon says, “You are like so many Tasmanians. You are selfish and you just want to keep the place to yourself.”

Simon is right. I am a fully subscribed member of the Tasmanian Regress Association. I like my patch the way it is. More particularly I like it the way it was. I like yesterday. I like my roads winding and un-crowded. I like my bridges un-passably narrow and quaint and my gardens deep, lush and slightly neglected.

I like my Capital City sleepy and serene, quite unlike everyone else’s capitals.

Meanwhile my mate Simon thinks you could add another half million people to our quiet little state and aside from the economic activity, you would probably never notice them. Well, I am sure this spectacularly successful tourist season we have added at least half a million people to my patch. And I have certainly noticed them! They are everywhere.

I had to wait for oysters at Muir’s fishmongers last Sunday because there had been a plague of mollusk-scoffing tourists. I had to wait while the friendly oyster shucker opened up a couple of dozen in front of me. A full seven minutes!

“Heads on them like mice,” an old Sydney uncle of mine used to say when he thought Pitt Street was as busy as, well, Pitt Street. That’s precisely why I live in Tasmania. It’s so Far from the Madding Crowd. When I drive up to my fishing shack in the Central Plateau, I drive through country that hasn’t much changed since I was a kid. I always ring my wife when I get there. “Hi, I’m here already. Guess how many cars I saw between New Norfolk and Bronte Park. Only three!” I crow.

My wife … thinks I’m mad …

My wife is involved in commercial enterprise and thinks I’m mad. But I bet I’m not alone. I reckon the inaugural meeting of the Tasmanian Regress Association could fill, say, the Hamilton Town Hall. Half the people would be tourists who want to move there, but want the place to stay just like it is.

Speaking of beautiful, somnolent, old, sandstone Hamilton; one of the reasons my trip these days is quicker than usual is that my favourite pie shop, in the main street, has closed its doors. I guess those three cars didn’t generate enough business.

Yes, I miss those marvelous pies, though it’s really a small price to pay, to keep the long and winding road to the shack, traffic free. And, fortunately, I’m off the carbs, for a while anyway.

I still can’t believe my mate Simon Currant thinks I’m a selfish Tasmanian. That really hurts.

So let us consider our pocket-sized Capital City of Hobart. You know the sleepy town where the bridge closes down whenever a ship sails under it, because forty years ago an errant skipper knocked it over. The odds of it happening again are a million to one, but we live in a quaint place, more concerned with the past than the future. And rightly so.

Now the Ancient Greeks knew a thing or two about development and not letting things get out of balance. Apart from giving the world the corner store and the idea of unfunded public debt, the Greeks also gave us the City. They invented it and they called it the Polis. They were very careful not to let it grow too big.

Socrates, an early member of the Regress Association, reckoned that the city should only be big enough that you could go to town and always meet someone new. But on the other hand not so big that you wouldn’t meet an old friend or two. The wise old philosopher was exactly describing my mornings at Maldini in Hobart’s Salamanca, where, fuelled with too much caffeine, I write this column.

All of my life, and yours so far, the population of our lucky island has been around half a million people, who just seem to disappear into the landscape. In the eighties in London I met one of the Royals, the English photographer, Lord Snowden, who had just produced a book on Tasmania. He told me that he found Tasmania to be more than merely beautiful. “It is a landscape almost devoid of people and in this overcrowded world that is a priceless and a most unusual thing.”

All jokes about the Tasmanian Regress Association aside (though maybe it’s not such a bad idea) the difficult task we now face is, how to take advantage of our new found international celebrity, without killing the thing that everyone loves.

First published in Mercury’s Tasweekend (which under Amanda Ducker, is quite wonderful …)