Hobart
— — a working harbour the mountain looks down on.
Not only on a wall.
“The southernmost capital in Australia, on the Derwent River where it opens toward the Southern Ocean. The sandstone warehouses of Salamanca Place still face the harbour as they did when whalers used them. Above the town, kunanyi / Mount Wellington holds its weather; below, the Saturday market runs in any weather, and the boats come in from Bruny Island with oysters.
Hobart, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hobart is the capital of Tasmania and the second-oldest capital city in Australia, founded as a British settlement in 1804. The city sits on the western shore of the Derwent River estuary in the island's southeast, under the eastern face of kunanyi / Mount Wellington at 1,271 metres. Greater Hobart holds about 250,000 residents. The Derwent opens to Storm Bay and the Tasman Sea below the city. Ferries cross daily to Bellerive on the eastern shore and to MONA at Berriedale, eleven kilometres upriver from the city centre.
Salamanca Place is the row of sandstone warehouses on the harbour's southern edge, built between 1835 and 1860 to serve whalers and merchants. The stone is local Tasmanian sandstone, quarried at Battery Point and elsewhere on the Derwent. Most warehouses now hold galleries, bookshops, and an open-air market that has run every Saturday since 1972. Behind Salamanca, the smaller Georgian streets of Battery Point preserve the cottages of nineteenth-century shipwrights and pilots. The precinct is protected under the Tasmanian Heritage Register and the National Trust.
The Derwent estuary opens past Hobart to Storm Bay and the Southern Ocean, the same water that runs unbroken to Antarctica. The Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, first sailed in 1945, finishes at Constitution Dock each December after 628 nautical miles. Working fishing vessels still come in from Bruny Island and the D'Entrecasteaux Channel; the Hobart waterfront supplies much of Tasmania's wild oyster and abalone catch. The Tasman Bridge crosses the river upstream of the docks at a height of 50 metres above the water.