I’m staying in a little town in the Central Tasmanian Highlands called Bothwell. It’s not pronounced BothDashWell. It’s pronounced like one might say “Brothel” but without the R. I’m staying in the BoHo, short for Bothwell Hotel while I spend time at several distilleries and wait out a week to attend Maltstock, a unique whisky festival, in collaboration with a festival by the same name in Holland.
This will be the first such event here in Australia, and it’s going to be at the Ratho Farm, just a kilometer from the hotel and the town.
Greg Ramsay owns both the farm and the hotel and invited me to dinner at the farm with a choice of proteins, wallaby included, so of course, I had the wallaby. Not that they aren’t cute as hopping buttons, but because they’re everywhere and I can’t get it in Texas. When in Rome… Dine like a Roman.
I arrived at the farm and wandered around aimlessly through buildings built in the 1800s, stone and old wood. The Clyde River meandered through the farm, and I eventually found myself at The Homestead and went in. There was a glowing fire in a fireplace and three gentlemen who’d ridden motorcycles there. So of course, we talked about motorcycles and had pints by the fire.
Tasmania borrowed some great things from the Old Country. Cold pints and comfortable rooms with fireplaces.
Old furniture, dark rugs, and a warm fire. If one can’t feel at home in a room like this, one is incapable of feeling at home anywhere.
I’m in a similar room now, having a cappuccino at the Sealey Café, across the street from the hotel. Cast-iron stove glowing away, many windows with the morning Tasmanian sun, and scones and toasties, and my trusty Viking War Mug full of savory cappuccino.
I never get fancy coffee, but it seemed to fit this morning.
I’ve always adhered to George Carlin’s statement that if you need more than two syllables to order coffee, you’re an asshole. He’s right. But this morning, I’m guilty.
There are two cafes in Bothwell, and they were both closed a couple of days ago because the town lost power, so I lived on bread and hard-boiled eggs. I’m tempted to find some mayo and mustard to turn my hard-boiled eggs into egg salad and upgrade my life a bit.
But I wander. Back to dinner.
I find conversations with Australians always pleasant. The four biker gents were funny and obviously old friends. One was the son of another, and we talked about the great roads in Tasmania.
Then three gents came in to be by the fire. One was fascinated with Australian post offices. Apparently, post offices in the British Empire were always monumental. They were a reminder of the empire: no matter where you were in it, you were in the empire, and that beautiful post office told you that you were home.
Makes sense.
And this 80+ guy wanted to chronicle them all. He spoke of one post office in one small town that was lost to time. Ironic that nobody knows the address of a post office.
Another of the trio was a retired pharmacist, and he collected apothecary bottles. White enameled bottles with blue writing telling you what’s in the bottle.
He was fascinated by them and hit every antique shop in search of them.
“Do you display them?”
“I don’t have enough of them yet…”
Sounds like a lifelong challenge.
Invariably, since I’m obviously a foreigner in very foreign places, people ask about why I’m here. I tell them about The Still Life Stories and my quest to find remarkable stories in and around distilleries. And now that I repeat that to myself, it sounds rather absurd. But it’s as good a reason as any to go someplace and collect stories. Much like finding post offices or apothecary bottles.
Stories are good to share and don’t take up room on shelves or need dusting. So I’ll keep collecting them. And I learned some great stories at Ratho Farm over dinner.
The original inhabitants came by sailing ship in the early 1800’s and were excellent record keepers. All their family papers, letters, receipts, and notes were saved and became a series of books that tell their stories from deciding to give up their lives in Wales, board a sailing ship, and spend six months at sea to make their way to Tasmania and a new life. Upon landing, they were given land and convicts to work and build out their new farm.
Our hostess read us a letter that the family’s daughter wrote about coming to Tasmania when she was seven. The letter was written when she was an adult and contained many well-remembered details of the journey and moving into a mud hut, which had been replaced by the room where we were sitting at the time.
What a wonderful appetizer. To listen to the real history of a place, when you’re actually in the place, means a great deal.
The food was wonderful, but the real sustenance came from the conversation, which went on for hours both before, during, and after the meal.
My wallaby was delicious with vegetables spiced with a spice I’d not had outside of Tasmania. There are tastes and scents here that are unique to this place, which I don’t have the linguistic skills to adequately describe. I’ll just say there are flavors in Tasmania that are Tasmanian and stop there for fear of becoming too mediocre in my writing. Forgive me. If you really want to understand, come here and indulge all your senses in the place. It’s worth the overnight flight and imagine spending six months in the hold of an old sailing vessel.
Bothwell is a quiet little town. The traffic is just as likely to be a tractor as an automobile. There are rabbits dashing about, and if someone is out walking their dog, they invariably stop for a chat with whoever is dining on the tables outside the Sealey Café, across from my hotel.
I dashed back to the Sealey a few minutes before their 3:00 closing time for a bowl of chicken vegetable soup. It was life-sustaining and delicious. I ran into Gordon, a lifelong resident whom I’d met at the Clyde Mill Distillery last week. Gordon has a 1930s Harley-Davidson with a sidecar that I’m hoping to get a ride in this week, because the odds of getting a ride in a hundred-year-old Harley-Davidson in a little town in the Central Tasmanian Highlands are low, but apparently not zero.
More kismet.
Because maybe it was meant to be.
