photo PETER GRANT
If you go up down to the woods today …
On kunanyi’s slopes, less than five kilometres from the centre of Hobart, is what looks like a fairy garden. It looked that way for millennia, until the 1820s when was cleared and became the site of a water-driven timber mill. Some time later, the mill owners converted the plant to trial pyrolignite production, but they produced more pollution than profit, and the site closed in the 1860s.
It sat quietly for a few decades until the early 1900s, when it was found by the Boy Scouts, who built a camp. Then the Scouts, too, departed, leaving the site to the original tenant, nature. Which is why, today, less than five kilometres from the centre of Hobart, we have what looks like a fairy garden.
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See more of Peter Grant’s writing here.
