20th January 2010
Hobart is a small city and quite easy to walk around, so this was what we decided to do this morning. Hobart is Australia’s second-oldest city after Sydney, but has managed to escape the worst excesses of development and so it’s many early buildings are remarkably well-preserved. In fact most of the buildings in the centre feature colonial Georgian architecture which gives it a quaint, slightly old-fashioned air. The more ‘modern’ developments seem to date from the sixties and seventies, with lots of concrete and only serve to increase this feeling.
We started in Salamanca Place, which is a pleasant area with many well-preserved waterfront stone warehouses (and also the place of the famous Saturday market). The area is now full of art galleries and cafes. We climbed the steep Kelly’s Steps to Battery Point. Then, we walked down to Battery Point which is a village of workers’ cottages and grand homes set in narrow, irregular streets and has hardly changed in the last 150 years.
We continued around the bottom of Battery Point alongside the sea and towards the waterfront area. At Consititution Dock we stopped at one of the several fish punts selling fresh and cooked seafood for a spot of very fresh lunch.
Our next port of call was the Tasmanian Museum and Arts Gallery. This was an odd collection of Tasmania’s natural and social history, but had an excellent exhibition on the Aboriginal people with cultural artifacts and information regarding the land-rights campaigns.
We wound our way back up through the streets and the hills to our hotel where we collected the car and headed for Rosny Hill lookout to enjoy the views of Hobart with the Wellington range as a majestic backdrop. Then we continued onto the Kangaroo Bluff Historic Site which was errected in response to a Russian scare in the nineteenth century but never saw active service.
A long, but enjoyable day exploring Hobart.