hobart city hall indigenous city celebration

John Latham 26/2/2015 Frogmore Peninsula near Hobart Indigenous City

1

Let’s Celebrate.

Hobart City Hall

Part 1

It is said that ‘originally’ the site was part of Crown land designated for market. The Hobart

Corporation Amendment Act 1913 vested the market site in Council to erect buildings, markets and

accommodation and to improve every square foot Wapping. City Hall has been owned always by

Hobart City Council and is largely historically intact as original inside & out.


2

Its site is of most significance; being substantial in a very special nub of Hobart’s public realm and

natural geography; a place that likely had value to the indigenous people as it did, differently, to the

colonisers.

Not to make small of this: there ‘was’ the sheltered fresh water brook outlet from mountain into significant

harbour. There flowed another brook nearby, a small island, tidal beach and a huge depth of water, all dressed

with seafood, birdlife, meat, snakes, lizards and huge and small trees. In this became a trodden quadrangular

precinct as the landfill of the brook-island-beach served as a market place adjacent the wharves, amid government

& humble commercial enterprises. It was graced with the traffic from sailing ship to both convict and governors

quarters; which became essentially a Macquarie Street. The precinct grew of governor’s stores, residence,

waterfront trade; and ocean’s conqueror meeting land’s native. The intimate geomorphic & indigenous heritage

& ‘settler’ shanties were broken like eggs for a colony omelette. The ‘feng-shui’ powered waterflow once ran

where the City Hall sits. The site holds highest ranking in Sullivans Cove Archaeological Zoning Plan.

The building with its various interconnections, ancillaries has functioned as public hall with interior

market, shops, commercial and community centre. It speaks much to history that such a forthright all

round peoples building sits here having supported immense trade, social culture and community

variables. It was a natural course of events – a mistake maybe but not an accident.

Most are unaware that it straddles the original Rivulet and so sits at the path of least inclined walk to

the city centre where-through the rivulet still kind of flows. The Hall fronts Hobart’s ‘Macquaried’

umbilicus with the British ocean, i.e. the tar-topped rubble causeway built over the rocky sandspit to

the first ships dock at Hunter Island. Counter to this, waterfront buildings created the ‘Wall of the

Cove’(so dubbed in the ’90s). Forced by social and geomorphic dignities the City Hall is set back from

the ‘Wall’ so as to leave a loud echo of native place with colonial social event; call it the ‘Hole in the

Wall’. Through the ‘Hole’ runs an aspect of the cove, identified in urban architecture as the ‘City Hall

Axis’.

Pragmatics put the city Hall there, to be kind, ephemeral colonial urgency largely digested the

geomorphic intimacy as landfill. Equally, one may guess, pragmatics won’t see restored the heritage

fabric of the natural coastal intimacy and the native people place nor the shanties.

The City Hall is a truth, a record and a partly lovely substantial building coinciding with a key part of

geographic, historic and modern Hobart. It is challenging in its underpinning and rich in it’s simple

giving to everyday urban growth and community heritage. This depth is not readily apparent in its

appearance so let it be said that ‘originally’ the City Hall site was not part of Crown land.

Part 2


3

IIInnndddiiigggeeennnooouuusss

CCCiiitttyyy Well … here we are … and there we were. Among it are a pair of feet

tuned like unto eardrums to the ground listening

and feeling the ephemeral familiars and the new events heralding.

The feet unclad, well travelled callous and easily reflexed to stealth health

and fun above the soils and leaf crunch of a well-watered territory of

awesome multiseason dynamics jeweled with living intrinsic, wafting in

air, currents, rustles, bubbles and nothing missing. Nothing missing.

Maybe another abalone shellfish … yes, that would make the family

happier after a long journey back south. The tall island walker, eyes lofty


4

above an ant scurrying over a mountainous big toe, not only standing but

being at a stage of his motion and sweaty from pursuit of a furred food, is

present on sloping land at the edge of a swathe of tea-tree scrub beside a

pure brook that was far wider than his leap potential. To the side, glassy

flowed reflections of tall tall trees lightly swaying at the tips way up there

in the breeze bearing prahna from vast ocean westage carrying through to

the much loved east. His eyes are seeing currently north-east across the

tidal brook estuary - which is shared by another small brook entering

from the far side - past well rooted aged deep blue green brown trees

casuarinas fronded. An eagle bird settles talons into a salmon fish near a

shore distant even by canoe, across a respectable river flowing

increasingly deep and itself engrossed in the salty flavor of the sea. Close

in his gaze is a small island by which the bracken brook waters joined that

salted deep. He could shimmy across the brook bank, along the wet

flattish sandspit and rock-hop across there to join the family, old and

young breasted and chested smiled and disgruntled, at the treasured fire

brought by ember stick from immemorial intergenerational elsewhere.


5

Being here is beautiful, relating it to other parts, a day, five days, a moon

away around and back; all of which he knows well. He feels it, he doesn’t

think it – not at all … he doesn’t read – words … no idea. He stood firm a

moment unaware to interpret the vast amount of what his feet could hear,

enlivened through elder, brother and neighbour stories of huge canoes

with pale people of other tongues at the ocean edges - behind the local

worms, minerals and mountain echoes - emanating from an antipodean

activity where two numbed leather-clad feet stood dead deaf on a

squashed cockroach. These feet’s ears up on their hatted head hear the

rhythmic lapping of brine indeed on ocean-ready planked hull. There are

gull birds there too, but additionally on shore is immense peopled activity

and among it his family is swaddled in and among many small

townhouses allowing only smaller squares of sunlight and one-sided fire.

The eyes everywhere in these vaguely title-boundaried built ownerships

are absorbed in skyblocked constructed cupboards, hot plates, pump taps,

oil lamps, constructed seats and beds and tables – all secured by shelters

of cooked clay and sawn nailed wood. The earth here at the other side is

further stifled under the leathered feet by constructed floor, required

against the soil exposed, with its domestic issues, by trampling on virgin

grass a generation ago. Stifled and missing here; as the pavement grows

the consensus view notices nothing missing. A molecule of smoke blown


6

up down and round from the southern ocean finds thunderstruck

company with that belching from coalfired chimneys among thousands of

houses and tooled workplaces stores and market places all of fixed abode.

And clothes; seeking washing machines to free them from smelly sweat

and washboard wear. There they were …. well on their way … ahoot and

hey hey. Something has made them well on the way to solar cells,

extended leisure, reading screens and optic conduits …. all will spring

from an earthy heart, continent or island. But not all earthy beginnings

find attention to such things. Maybe it’s King Billy’s cousin by marriage

standing firm a while longer on the brookbank near this tiny island off an

island.

Through his feet came no comprehension that the hand of the land of the

bustling city was about to clasp his own - we trust so and as it should - in

this raw natural territory of firm notional boundaries securing hunting,

people & personal effects among and across an unowned common land.

The hand arrived, several moons later in a gripping of crew assistance in

crossing a plank of English oak from a boggling huge canoe with white

flapping wings of recent, he’d heard, moored upflow in the salty river,

onto that island, as it conveniently rose steep & deep – the family camp,

now elsewhere up the little brook but only two minutes by worn track


7

and mouheneennan (the people) swiftfeet and in sight of the old little

island-camp’s biodegrading coals and shells. There was no

comprehension but his feet always remembered that spot on that bank in

their nibberloone country. The spot was and remains locally pivotal

between the big river, the two little ones, the little island (little toe of

kananyi, the mountain) and the nape in which he later camped; there

were fossils gondwanian and they remain there now. There were shells

and bone, stone shaped on the far east ocean edge and brought home and

the ground’s all but invisible patina of pattering listening feet large and

small, busy and leisurely – mostly all still there resting all covered and

changed and shifted.

This teller knows you know the story of how if he, our man, was still

standing in that spot, the hand that should and may well have extended

eventually would have buried him to his thighs with stone fill drawn

from his nearby echoing patina-ladened playground, capped with cream

coloured macadam rock from elsewhere and more eventually again with

a hands depth of bitumen layered hardstand from God knows where and

on top of that a grotty black soot from automotive brake shoes. In there

too came an exciting moment when an imported working elephant let go

a faecal pat, opening thought and freshening the broader nature. There


8

he’d be standing in the shiftings of time, no idea of the sign ‘Campbell

Street’ in front of a huge high face of biscuit-coloured brick casting

shadow and blocking blue clouded birdways. The biscuit brick was

broken by the elephants tailed stern as it penetrated its way along the

causeway. Our man’s spine shivered a little as he stood there clinging to

his home and the rock-hop across to the little island – it had grown, the

rockhop, or rather it had been sat upon with relocated local rocks to make

easy walk and carriage from that flapping planked vessel to the flapping

canvassed humpies up on the rise; all under the name of some key person,

antipodean and not even anywhere near here – and under the captains

hat felty and folded. Nothing at all like mudded dreadlock, wallaby skin

or sea salted black curls. At his left the sparkling brook was grotted and

buried to become a bustling delighted market place and then a city hall

(with capitals ha) … and snappy little domes on the corners. Over his

shoulder a colorful little pub and over the other, ‘the’ new ‘government’

built their port waterside interiors – leaving a little patch of the actual

original brookbank shining through gasping for air; for it lived down

there. Directly behind him and aligned to the rockhop runs a bitumen

ribbon named macquarie street, with capitals and with white

thermoplastic markings, traffic lights and concrete edging and trucks and

mind warping coloured car forms running through him and onward by


9

the biscuit coloured morning-sky-blocking bricked interiors. That big box

full of rooms where people would go and then come and go to other

interiors and cars and buses all blinkered, at least three quarters

blinkered, conditioned and even blinded by the trap of interior that has

grown, being rooted in the discovery of ironsteel, in old London town

stamped like an ink stamp cloning an odd phenomenon over the natural

awe here in unviolated unsullied gondwanian raw. His spine shivered

and his feet never forgot that spot and never listened to the woolen rugs

in the govenor’s office though he’d heard of tribal elsewheres where his

kind had supped with the like, only to be painfully ruffled by the mutual

spook in life. The governor’s advisor never thought to heritage list the

Rock Hop sandspit as the umbilical of the pretty city of hobart. That

umbilical, stomped across by deaf feet in bitumen soles hearing a

drummer who originally wants mostly to make a more horrible interior to

hold lots of London people in prison, bound by that ironsteel that shaped

the axes saws and room boom. No these people were not like that – they

heritage listed the city hall but; the city hall of course, they heritage listed

the city hall and thankyou. But no not the Rock Hop nor kananyi’s little

toe. Dam the little redback spiders and pretty little native orchids and

sleek sunned blue tongues all in an indigenous urban heart right there -

an indigenous urban heart … right there. There’re plenty more elsewhere,


10

for their wilderness was always just a barrel roll away, and then another

barrel roll, and then a can’s throw - but now land and ocean are drudge

dry underpinned by that aforeto unheard ironsteel. They brought on their

beautiful boats all this interior, the internalised (even on the wild ocean)

and too the horrible bacterial sully of sniffle cough fever and die and their

grotty fermented fester of cholera, sewage and sullage. The beginnings of

the dirty armpitted city that enabled the perfect flexing sturdy of a ballet

floor, the metal technical of saxophone, the huge glass window, the sleek

liquid display, dimmer switch, little black box of music and the awesome

high end of peopled society and economy the alfresco coffee.

The teller knows you may be conditioned and blinkered. The Firsts of

kananyi’s land scratch their heads; certainly they know rudimentary lintel

frames of sticks and bark, fully naturally earthy nurtured – complete with

webs but only if left too long. But this new sharply arrised, gabled box

sealed, light-painted interior, eight crisp three-planed-corners at floor and

ceiling awash with novelty and sitting in rich natural context; squares,

prisms, right angles, doors, window rectangles and a cupboard drawer

holding a match-box - something fallen to Earth. So many people, for so

many hours of so many days for so many years, are subject to the quiet

bombardment of so many three-planed-corners. The corners counterplace


11

the circular belt of sky that blends with the horizon below it and the dome

of the heavens above. That belt remains there, thank God. Maybe it’s

shrouded by depleted over-head forest leaves and life, distant it mooches

warmly present, bombarding orgone glow, behind the flat white ceiling,

walls and that skewed corrugated roof of unknowing. It is very

significant: increasingly many people, for so very many hours of so many

days for so many years, are subject to the quiet bombardment of so many

three-planed-corners. The roombooming corners rather counterplace the

powerfully sweeping belt of sky that blends with the horizon below and

the awesome dome of the fabled heavens above. That belt remains there,

thank God. Depending on where you are it may be shrouded by over-

head bushland leaves and life, distant it mooches warmly present,

bombarding orgone glow, behind the shade of the flat white ceiling, walls

and that skewed corrugated roof of unknowing. The tight little boxes

were cracking like egg shells and surprised lizards were too slow for the

hawks. The interior with the three-planed-corners moulds our attention

habits; into forms that differ to those habits made from wholesome

embrace of the dome of the horizon. Closing the door may bring a touch

of adversity. We need the solid tactile mooch of a hand-polished huon-

pine bannister spokeshaved tree limb flow through the windows of the


12

eight cornered white box interior but we often have to drive many miles

to properly find it – and then we must return.

He never felt the governors carpet nor saw the captain‘s cabin and never

inkled an understanding of the nuances of those antipodean vibrations.

He dreamed that night of a thick sandstone box crowding two men; it was

hovering and buffeted clang and tear trickle in ocean cloud arcing across

the world and was supplied in the meanest of ways by uniformly clad key

jangling owners of land and things. It bought death to his and sprouted

anew; an island urbia - from such a distressing concerning gene pool

comes a new era Tasmanian who would starve before discovering the

bushland berries while realising to love what they destroyed and to fight

for truly just politics void of blindness and greed. If we can believe in

primeval slime and a bolt of lightning, here we have it again. If we don’t

we are quickened by the truth itself and culture on; discovering the

idiosyncrasies of natural peopled place - the very same that the british

bulldog, dutch, french and who knows else came upon. More treasure

now missing than what they brought; if we count life, local wisdom and

the hindsight of valuing for a city centre the soul of what was already

here. An authentic identity of place supplanted by a synthetically

propped exotic.


13

That place, where that ant ran where this First’s footprints may be seen,

by hyper sensitive detective technology – that place could well do with a

small reminder more powerful than the local cenotaph. One of those ever

over-riding cynics, swoop landing above that reminder, grasping with

one claw a blood red lamp-pole arm, the temporal winner in the warped

humour of a tharking black crowbird, a capital M on the oil patched white

paper bag in its other claw, watched atop an acrylic cultural colour

banner, a living latte at a table. It looked around for peace enough, then

both eyes and face into the bag to beak one of the potatofries sneak-stolen

from that nearby innocent afflicted living latte. Afflicted; with any of

many social disease and new environmental chemistries - greeds,

cholesterols, social, mental and sexual maladjustments, tumours, blinkers,

blindness, mind noise; throwing off the balance needed for a humming

mental electric dynamic burgeoning beauty city enjoying the happy

acknowledgement of all of all creatures in a wonderful wonderful world.

In this context our man with hearing feet in a small city with foreign

antennae is remembered via culturally established funds - a life size huon

pine laser cut figure, feet on his homeground standing thigh deep in a set

bitumen river mid macquarie and mid market place gazing north-east

through the misplaced grand chancellor hotel wondering why. Why ever


14

didn’t they design the hotel lobby to value the kananyi water, the Rock

Hop and the little island - at least. Surely oh surely can be seen even

commercial value in this. The cultural funders followed through with a

big glazed arch where the brook flow penetrates the macquarie façade,

interpreted water flow to an internal natural water-featured expanse,

muraled, written and grown imagery through rocks to bitumen, café and

boutique dining and hotel bookings and through the other side to the

docks. The traffic can just slow, just bloody-well slow down … to go

around the lasercut pine memory of a presence there today. Let it slow

and go around; ‘it’ the traffic, the drivers and passengers ay. Give them a

chance to break the humdrum and breath the air to realise how close they

are to the little cove and that local geographic pivot to which they no

longer drive by blind and traffic blinkered. Break the traffic chain saw.

Throw up four prominent supportive markers one on each the far

campbell/macquarie corners, one behind him by the old pub and one

across macquarie there aside the port buildings and the original bank still

exposed and treed because it lived down there. This will mark a rectangle

place for generations to feel the soul of the meeting of two peoples, of

land meeting sea, of vast ocean powers, of bio-geomorphic nurture of

their little growing city. It will mark that under there is the Rock Hop far

more important to this local place than the sweet old lady city hall; she


15

will grow new use from this memory. It will mark the buried brook once

oar navigable to wellington-court upstream and down, a wet link to the

wetter out there and the silver flow back up the mountain. The pole

markers are high to be seen from franklin square and central cove. They

will caricature the characters of their place – one pole huge felt hatted for

the ship’s captain, one woollied for our man, the other two for water and

land far and here. The cultural kneejerk of the impassioned carried the

day to a healing hey hey, hey hey … ay.

Another created synthetic prop but this: to authentic people and place at

the heart of city settlement in indigenous land; the same in cities the

world-over where the pompous have perched and traded soul of place for

trinkets or else. That place where cities are born, flowering synthetic

constructions with places within, blooms to become islands of types and

servers for the lands between, lands which indeed spread to the places

between the flowers – all looking to rosiness and identity where the

agonies dare not fly.

Fin (edited 13/7/15)

Part 3


16

Let’s celebrate.

hobart city hall indigenous city celebration

Design