In July 2011 my family and I went for a winter holiday in Tasmania. We were there for a week, spending four days in Hobart before driving north to Launceston to spend a further three days there. During the holiday we discovered that 7 days was nowhere near long enough to explore Tassie, and vowed [...]
Hobart

As you will probably remember from Monday’s post, we’ve had Extremely Wild Weather Smashing Australia’s South-East Coast this week. At the time, Sydney had taken the brunt of it, but I did also mention that it had moved on to Tasmania. Tasmania is one of Australia’s most beautiful, green and lush states. I went there about [...]

Dark MOFO. Image courtesy of Paris B-A Doesn’t sound very pleasant, does it? It even sounds a little scary. It’s not though, here’s what it is. MONA FOMA is an acronym, it stands for Museum of Old and New Art: Festival of Music and Art. Of course, MONA FOMA is still too long, so that [...]

For the last six weeks or so we’ve been cycling around Australia’s major cities on bikes without using the obligatory cycle helmets. That’s because we’ve been cycling ‘virtually’ from our armchairs via the wonder that is YouTube. We’ve enjoyed bike riding in Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and last week Brisbane, so now there are [...]

A clever title really, but I didn’t think of it. Every time I send an article through to Australia and New Zealand magazine I give it a very boring title. For the article that appeared in their July 2013 issue, I gave it the un-extraordinary title of “Tasmania”. When it appeared in the print version [...]

Continuing on with my short series of Friday videos about Australia’s most liveable cities, this week it is the turn of Hobart. Hobart, of course, is in Tasmania, an island about the size of, er, Ireland. Well, Ireland is about 25% bigger, but that’s near enough. Hobart is the island’s capital city, and Errol Flynn [...]

Time for another reprint of one of my articles from Australia and New Zealand magazine, this one from their February edition. It was an enormous coincidence, of course, that the heading on the magazine cover for that month was “Stunning Sydney“, because my article was about nipping into the city. Which city? I’ll give you [...]

Yes, exactly! What is the point of moving all the way to Australia and then going to Tasmania? Those were the shockingly short-sighted numbskull thoughts that went through my head when considering emigrating to Oz. Why move all the way to go from one cold place to another, I would wonder. I now eat my [...]