writer and photographer PETER GRANT
Midday. A bright spring day in Hobart’s bushland fringe. Birds and blooms abound, the air is full of scented light and a faintly fluttering hope. Could the worst of a fickle winter finally be over? Ha! I’ve been fooled by that before. Tasmania’s spring does fickle better than any season. Whilever the Roaring Forties have a say, cold, wet weather in The Patch, and snow on kunanyi, are possibilities.
I pause in an open section of woodland and squat on a sun-soaked slab of sandstone to enjoy the sun – and to ponder the conundrum that is our weather. By rights, today’s weather isn’t supposed to be as it is. The forecast said “mostly cloudy”, yet I can’t see a single cloud. I wonder if part of the problem is that Tasmania’s weather just can’t be contained in the one or two words that are the template for Australian forecasts. I think about the Irish style of forecast, where words are not kept to a minimum. “Sunny spells and scattered showers, with the chance of fresh winds and rain later,” might be just the start of it. You sense they’d keep going if they were given the slightest encouragement.
What is it with the Australian drive to abbreviate forecasts to one or two words? Do we fear flies entering our mouths if we’re even a little loquacious? Whatever the reason, we persist in trying to convey the weather with these next-to-meaningless one or two words. Or worse, we leave it to a single pictogram.
It’s not only the national forecasts that fail to encapsulate our weather, or else just get it wrong. The common perception of Tasmania’s weather among those who don’t live here is also often awry. Earlier in the year the SBS show Alone Australia, filmed in the west of Tasmania, set the bar of errant perception very high. The opening voice-over dramatically told us that Tasmania is “halfway to the South Pole”.
I was indignant enough about this to fact check it. I work out that The Patch, just south of Hobart, is close to 43 degrees south latitude. For this to be halfway to the South Pole, you’d have to be starting in North Sumatra, Indonesia, about four degrees north of the Equator. If you started a little further north, you could declare Sydney to be halfway to the South Pole.
Of course, I understand SBS was employing dramatic licence, just as it used poetic licence to describe the shores of an inundated hydro-electric lake as “wilderness”. Nonetheless, such things feed into a wider perception that, in weather terms, Tasmania is nothing more than Australia’s fridge. People put it in a variety of ways, but their opinions add up to much the same thing. We poor Tasmanians live in a cold, cloudy, miserable place; a frozen, windswept island. Next stop, Antarctica.
I studied climatology at university, and can provide some less “colourful” climatic data about Tasmania’s weather. I could point out, for instance, that we actually have a mild maritime climate, seldom too hot in summer, and rarely below freezing in winter. Just for comparison, places of similar latitude in the northern hemisphere, like Ontario (Canada) and Hokkaido (Japan), have dozens of snow days per year. Snow in Hobart is so rare that some people take the day off work in sheer excitement. I could expand here, however the climate change debate discourages me from thinking scientific data will convince the sceptics.
Something else stops me from bothering to garner more weather data. I realise I don’t actually want to convince anyone how good it is to live here, how wonderfully invigorating this climate is. Even if I did want to, how do you convey what it’s like to accept and then embrace the weather here, with its vigour, its rapid changes: beautiful one hour, differently-beautiful the next? Maybe it’s a sweet secret we Taswegians just have to keep to ourselves.
On my walk home I pass a scatter of wet feathers, the ghost of some small bird whose springtime hopes have been shattered by a bird of prey. Certainly spring isn’t sweet for everyone. As if to prove the point, there’s a vigorous cold change a few days later. From the warmth of home I stare up at kunanyi in admiration. It is draped in snow, and cold air streams down the dolerite Organ Pipes. Geologically, this same dolerite was born out of the break up of Gondwana, when Tasmania and Antarctica were attached. I’ve even heard one geologist hypothesise, on the basis of geochemical “DNA” from both places, that the Organ Pipes may represent one of the places where Tasmania and Antarctica tore apart.
Imagining that drama, I suddenly feel a fierce personal thrill that I can call this wild and illustrious mountain my neighbour. I might even have to admit that between its geology and today’s slathering of snow, our mountain really does appear to be halfway to the South Pole.
Peter Grant lives in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington with his wife. He worked with the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service for 24 years as manager of interpretation and education. His passion for the natural world led him to write Habitat Garden (ABC Books) and found the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. More of his writing can be seen at naturescribe.com.