Hobart can forget the bush. It is a city, but only just; the fragrant foreign breath of the country can move in summer down Elizabeth Street, catching at the people on the pavements of midday. The country’s yellow grass reaches stray fingers into the suburbs; and standing in almost any street, you can glance up and see the near rusty-green and farther dream-blue ranges, their tree-serrated tops poignant against the sky: a reminder of farness.
So the island has two horizons, two barriers against the world: there are the ranges of hills, and there is the coast: in the north and east, green-laced beaches, facing the world; and in the south, black primeval capes of rock: final walls facing the Antarctic, pitted and rowelled by the wild southern storms of winter.
The little city of Hobart, like all cities, is divided into two worlds: the old districts, and the new districts. And the boy very early named the old districts as bad, and the new districts as good.
The bad districts were North and South Hobart: inner suburbs of poverty-smelling old colonial cottages and tenements, whose front doors and stone steps hollow from scrubbing stood almost on the street, or behind a few feet of dying front garden. Bad too were the square, nude sandstone warehouses along the docks, built by the convicts a hundred years ago, when the island was a sea-bound gaol.
The good districts, in the boy’s private geography were the new outer suburbs like Gooree and Lutana, which lay beyond his own suburb of Elimatta. These were on the eastern side of town near the river, where the train passed through on its way to the north: the direction of the world. They were the final suburbs before the country: places of small factories and vacant paddocks between bungalows of yellow and brown weatherboard, with easy, untidy back yards. Many of these were Works houses, and the Works lay nearby, on the river. The shift whistle answered the train’s long cry there, regular yet always surprising, and the city got rickety and casual, impermanent as the sun-bright weatherboards.
He lived in East Elimatta, the district between old and new, where as well as weatherboard bungalows there were rambling Edwardian homes of brick, with orange-tiled roofs and coloured leadlight glass in their front doors. His father was a clerk at the Works, and went out there every day on the train. His grandfather Cullen, a successful lawyer who lived in one of the big old houses in West Elimatta, was sad about his father being a clerk, Francis learned: but jobs were hard to get, and his father became angry about this.
A Depression child, the boy grew up on the edge of the new districts, where all was good; and the country’s breath which stirred through their streets, the hills that slept like creatures in the east, the sleepy hum of power, and the always-surprising cry of the Works, all wove together in his mind: a web of horizons.