writer and photographer FIONA STOCKER
Years ago, when my Other Half and I first visited Tasmania on reconnaissance, we considered making Evandale home because of its pub, the Clarendon Arms, and specifically because of its beer garden. We’re English and pubs matter. The Clarendon’s garden, with its red-brick walls and shade-giving plane trees, drew us in for a cooling shandy, and made us think of pubs we knew in Suffolk with ales on tap and dogs by the fireside.
then, Evandale was a village that bristled with life on Sundays when the famous market took place, but whose main street was whisper-quiet on weekdays. Now, it has the Glover prize exhibition, shops and cafes, a Balcony Music Festival and penny farthing races. It has also been discovered by visitors who throng to the Evandale Village Store for exquisite linen, basketry, woolens and books.
The Clarendon Arms towers over the main street like the prow of a ship. Little wonder as it was built in the 1840s by Thomas Fall who had arrived on a barque, the Portland, which was shipwrecked at Fourteen Mile Reef at the head of the kanamaluka/River Tamar. Accounts of the event make for alarming reading, with an infant washed out of her mother’s arms and the ship’s carpenter drowning while swimming ashore with 50 sovereigns in his pockets. After saving a fellow passenger from a watery grave and losing everything he owned, Thomas Fall settled in Evandale, married a Miss Russell, built the pub and held the licence for 40 years. He lived to 89 and was mourned as only publicans can be.
I have dined in his handsome pub many times, and each occasion has been joyfully different. Its rooms have been artfully conserved and are now an Alicean wonderland of exquisite, intimate dining salons on ground and upper floor, each with its own unique ambience.
This is the work of Tasmanian food supremo Lydia Nettlefold, late of the Red Feather Inn cookery school, who bought the Clarendon in 2017 and has brought about an opulent transformation. The Clarendon is now a pub with the ambience of a country manor, ripe for fireside chats in cosy corners.
Deer are a theme. The stained glass window downstairs depicts a deer head and was created by a member of Lydia Nettlefold’s family in the 1980s. Images of deer grace the menus and dove-grey walls, as do taxidermy deer head trophies. In the past, the region was a prolific hunting ground, and with introduced deer numbers at plague proportions.
Dining as four adults, we are escorted up the pleasingly creaky stairs and through a grand front corner room which must surely have been the Falls’ bed chamber. What might have been an adjoining dressing room is now a long space with timber dining table dressed with cut glass and lit by a sash window which has thrown the same light into the room since Miss Russell was laced into her corsetry.
Lunch is upmarket and adventurous pub food: pies, platters, steaks, cassoulets and more, reflecting the diaspora which has come to these shores. What emerges now from the pub kitchens is a mix of what might be recognisable to Mr Fall and Miss Russell and what would not be.
My Other Half cannot pass on a pie, and is lured by a fish curry version of Tasmanian salmon, prawns and whitefish with a buttered herb sourdough crumb. Our companions choose a slow-cooked Tasmanian lamb flatbread with tzatziki and salads, and a fromage platter with cheeses, arancini, fruits and nuts, sourdough and crackers. I look to the east with a spicy Thai chicken salad with satay dressing. Some of us can resist pudding and some cannot, and thus a warm chocolate brownie with raspberry sorbet and artfully mussed-up Miss Piggy fairy floss is later welcomed to the table.
English style pubs are more about the fireside conversations than Australian pubs, and the Clarendon Arms continues that tradition. Visiting Evandale alone one morning, I partake of eggs Benedict in the bar room. Two gentlemen sit below a window with their backs to the sun, leaning over laptops and discussing military history. A sprightly woman at the bar orders a takeaway coffee and has a yarn to the men while waiting. Her clothes speak of foreign travel – French linen and seamanlike stripes. Exiting the pub simultaneously, we fall into lively conversation and she regales me with the story of her career in fashion and textiles. The pub and the village shop have been central to her recovery from illness, she says, as end points for slow walks and a warm welcome on arrival. Thus the Clarendon continues the tradition of the country pub, a grand outpost for its community.
Fiona Stocker is a writer based in the Tamar Valley. She has published the books A Place in the Stockyard (2016) and Apple Island Wife (2018). For more information, see fionastockerwriter.com.
