It’s a hard-working city, Devonport. Signs of industry jostle around the Mersey as it flows through town: grain silos perch on the river banks, the freight railway skims the foreshore, and that most iconic flagship, the Spirit of Tasmania docks in the heart of town. Many of us have wondered what the multi-million dollar Living City plan would bring and whether the pressure of development could make diamonds in Devonport.
writer and photographer FIONA STOCKER
My Significant Other and I are taking a weekend break in a posh-for-us hotel. Ordinarily we’re camping folk. Extravagance is a new tarpaulin. But this weekend we are in multiple-starred opulence at the new hotel on Devonport’s promenade, and we are standing, mesmerized, on the balcony of our top-floor room.
Laid out before us are the heads of the Mersey River estuary and the rippled sheet of the Bass Strait, the red brick and rooves of the old town, and the foreshore’s grassy spaces. What’s pleasing is that from this new vantage point, the old and true Devonport is still very much present. Mature trees add three-dimensional beauty to this lovely, elevated scene. Directly below us, workaday vehicles pass through town with signs of rural life laid out on their flat beds: fishing rods, loads of firewood, barking dogs. A swimmer splashes in the estuary, and when the Spirit arrives later that evening, it passes within cooee as we stand on the balcony clutching our artisanal gin.
When we’re done hanging out in our lofty lair, we head downstairs to the real reason we’ve come, the “bar and Asian kitchen” named Mr Good Guy. There we find diners from this hardworking town and its surrounds thronging in the same direction.
All the people I know who live near Devonport are farmers, and this is where they’re congregating. Plaid shirts and flouncy blouses crowd convivially around large tables, ordering multiple trays of cocktails and spicy, tasty food.
Mr Good Guy has established itself as a staple on the Hobart dining scene and has arrived in the north in expansive style. The food is Asian but the suppliers are Tasmanian. The drinks list is a map of the great and good in Tasmanian wine and spirits, and there’s a cocktail list. Anticipating the usual wait for my Significant One to make a menu decision, I order an Oren Spritz – two parts Aperol to three parts bubbly – to keep the mood aerated.
On the menu I find an old favourite from my days in that other city of Asian dining, London. It’s a Borneo-style beef rendang with glutinous rice cakes and acar, a vegetable pickle. Finally Significant One selects a Thai green curry with snake beans, eggplant, mushroom, tofu and anise basil with jasmine rice, asking for chicken to be thrown into the mix too. Not a problem, we’re assured.
The dishes may harken of elsewhere, but the ingredients will be mostly regional. I’ve read the scoop on the restaurant earlier, courtesy of my hotel wifi. You don’t get that in a tent. The beef in my rendang will come courtesy of Ziggy’s, supreme Tasmanian-made continental small-goods and butchery. As a former purveyor of small-goods myself, it pleases me to know that my meat is sourced from our island’s growers, the animal husbandry ethical and the food-miles low. I’m betting the farmers at the next table over are similarly content in this knowledge.
Our mains are spicy and distinct in their flavours and, carried away by the Nocton Vineyard pinot noir, we order dessert: an “ice kacang” of shaved coconut ice with black jelly, adzuki beans, Pandan tapioca, lychee, coco de nata and toasted peanuts drizzled with rose syrup and condensed milk. It’s possibly the most colourful dish I have ever eaten and the most mysterious – black cubes and green baubles swimming in a bowl of pink.
Optimistic as well as middle-aged, we attempt to walk off dinner, taking the cycle and walking track to the stone jetty and navigational lighthouse, then circling back past the city’s new Paranaple Arts Centre. The glassy angular centre houses library and river-view function rooms, and connects to the historic regional art gallery and old town hall theatre through a glass atrium. Opposite this, our hotel and the new skyline walkway form an elongated v-shape pointing riverwards, the glass and concrete somehow discreet against the lowering sky.
Up on the fifth floor again, rear-facing windows offer the inland view, across the city centre ripple-iron rooftops to the Great Western Tiers, which surge upwards from the farming heartland. Old meets new meets rural and wild in the new Devonport, and the Living City is lifted.
Mr Good Guy, Devonport:
2 Best St
Open daily for lunch and dinner
Tel: 6420 5555
Reservations: mrgoodguy.com.au/devonport
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 fionastocker.com.