idle and aimless wandering

In Battery Point Hobart, a history walk gives impressions of houses and homes then and now

While I was in Hobart I went on a self-guided walk called In Bobby’s Footsteps around Battery Point and the land granted to Reverend Robert ‘Bobby’ Knopwood in 1805. He built his home and a garden here. It’s now some of the most high value real estate in Tasmania.

Arthur’s Circus

When you go on holiday with children you’re always thinking of how to keep them occupied. When I’m holidaying alone, I do ‘idle and aimless wandering.’ Gazing at the textures of the different building materials as they butt up against each other. Wondering about the family life or the trading businesses they must have contained and what it must have been like living there. Cold and laden with risk, probably.

The walking guide is available as an app and tells you about what you’re looking at. It starts on Salamanca Place and heads up Montpelier Retreat to Hampden Road, the main trading street in Battery Point when it was first occupied by us entitled colonialists.  

The app shows you old black and white photos of the buildings as they were and it’s fascinating to pick them out now. Portsea Terrace is the same with different cars parked outside.

Narryna is an old house preserved as a museum. A humble ten dollars allows you through the door to see the silver in the dining room, the musical instruments in the drawing room, the gloomy breakfast room where the family actually lived when nobody was visiting, and the bedrooms. These are probably much more enticing now than when people lived, died, gave birth and slept in them.  

At the back of the house is the kitchen and above that the room where serving people were housed. A school party was visiting, and the guide gave the numbers of servant girls who were supplied to the house from the female convict factory. It was a revolving door, the young women arriving, serving and then being shipped back into the gruelling convict factory system as they laboured, offended, fell pregnant (also an offence) and were probably used and abused in myriad ways.

The stuff the colony is built on is sometimes portrayed as tales of derring-do by roguish Irish lads who meant no harm, and merchants who thrived once they’d got their ticket of leave. But it’s the women on whose backs this place is built, in my book.

On a more cheerful note, there is also a lovely garden at Narryna, which replicates what settler families might have grown, and a decent toilet - important when you’re out wandering.

Along Hampden Road there are pubs and a hospital where more privileged women went for their confinements, and the famous Jackman & Ross bakery, where a bakery has stood for at least a century.

One compact house was being worked on by builders. It stood proudly unmoving on the outside as they churned away with their sanders and grinders on the inside and there was something poignant about its stalwart lasting the distance.

Stowell, on Stowell Street, is one of the first houses built in the colony and is now ritzy apartments. In the driveway a Porsche jostled for space with supplies of straw mulch and a tiny garden bordering the pavement was being used for vegetables. No matter how grand we live, we rely on the same basics and experience the same urge to grow things.

South Street and Arthur’s Circus were once lived in by families and the app has accounts of how the streets were full of children. Now they’re full of cars and bins. The app calls it ‘a wonderful example of a working class neighbourhood in the Georgian style’ and says little has changed since the cottages were built in the 1840s. Then, they provided cheap rental accommodation for wharf labourers. Barrel makers and knife sharpeners and the rabbit lady used to work these streets and supply the people that lived here.

Nothing and everything has changed, as the cottages now provide expensive rental accommodation for visitors. It still feels like a bustling place and no doubt we’re all healthier with better welfare systems. But where people used to have places to live, now they often do not. Tasmania’s housing crisis has built exponentially over the past decade and we have the highest percentage of homes standing empty of the whole of Australia – one thousand in 2023.

Places like this make me think about how we live and where we stay when we go on holiday. When AirBnB first started it was about sharing your home and offering visitors a room. Now investors buy houses specifically to do them up and rent them out, leaving a shortage of homes for the real people of the state to live in. I’ve stayed in such places in the past but now I try and stay in hotels or cabins.

I walked round the garden of one hotel I aspire to staying in. Lenna is the grand house built by a whaling merchant Alexander McGregor in the 1870s, up on the hill so that he could see his sailing ships in the harbour and watch the movements of his competitors.

I cut short my walk to meet a friend at Jackman & Ross and ordered a Cornish pasty in tribute to the working people of the suburb. Cornish tin miners used to tuck a pasty into their coat pocket for lunch. I also had a decaf latte. Time moves on.

If you’re in central Hobart I recommend the history walk. I’ll go back myself and do more, if I can shed my teenagers. The packed-in nature of the area means there is always more to see and reflect on. I’ve grumbled here about how we’ve depleted Battery Point as a place where ordinary people once lived. Ordinary people still live here, they just have better cars and jobs and more money. But the food is also better and the buildings are still there to admire. So go, walk and enjoy. I’ll see you on the pavements.