From the Foothills of Mount Wellington
As a child to a young man my life was mainly that of living in an industrial country town, the oldest town in Australia. Or, rather, after grade 2 and when my living memory takes up in earnest we lived 3 miles further on at the mouth fo the Tamar River - a nine hole golf course (not ours but accessible), several high quality beaches and miles of bush and paddocks to include in our adventures. Nostalgia is kicking in but I’ll get this post back on track…
Nowdays my partner (a Queensland girl who lived 20 years on the Tasman Peninsula) and I live in a leafy suburb in the foothills of Mount Wellington. Its pretty here. My grandmother used to come to Lenah Valley as a child when it was all farming land, so there’s a small tie back to family which adds to the story.
We’ve got half hourly buses that only take 20 minutes to reach the city centre, and less if you drive. My partner’s oldest sons can walk each way in 20 minutes but for me its an hour. So we’ve got the best of both worlds. Schools are 5 or 10 minutes walk away at the most and we’re a 2 minute drive to supermarkets, gourmet food and butchers.
It often amazes me that I work so long in a closed room looking at the rest of the world when much of that world wishes they could stand in my doorway and look at that mountain. I’m very lucky. We are only a few hundred metres from the start of the hiking tracks up into that wilderness. People die there occasionally and its a lot harsher and more dangerous than it looks from a distance.
I thought I’d just share that part of my story today [we live a bit closer to the mountain than the photo suggests].
