Kunanyi / Mount Wellington
— — the dolerite wall that holds the weather.
Not only on a wall.
“The mountain that stands behind Hobart, dolerite-capped and often snow-dusted, 1,271 metres above the Derwent. Locals call it kunanyi, the Palawa name made official alongside Mount Wellington in 2013. The summit road climbs through gum forest to a windswept boardwalk where four seasons of weather can pass in an afternoon. The Organ Pipes, a wall of vertical dolerite columns, face the city head-on. From the studio, a place we know by the way it makes the harbour below look smaller than it is. from the studio
Kunanyi / Mount Wellington, 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.
Kunanyi / Mount Wellington rises 1,271 metres above the Derwent estuary on the southwestern edge of Hobart, the Tasmanian capital. The mountain sits within Wellington Park, a 18,250-hectare reserve managed under a dedicated trust since 1993. Its summit is reached by Pinnacle Road, a sealed road that climbs roughly 22 kilometres from the city through wet eucalypt forest into sub-alpine heath. The Palawa name kunanyi was officially restored as a dual name alongside the European name Mount Wellington in 2013, recognising the mountain's significance to the muwinina people who lived on its lower slopes before European settlement.
The summit and upper cliffs are Jurassic dolerite, a coarse-grained igneous rock that intruded the Tasmanian crust around 180 million years ago and weathered into the vertical columns called the Organ Pipes. The cliff faces the city directly and is one of Australia's classic traditional climbing walls, with named routes followed since the 1960s. Above the cliffs the summit plateau is scattered with frost-shattered dolerite boulders and the windswept observation shelter built in the 1980s. The stone holds the cold; even in summer the summit is often a dozen degrees below the city below.
Snow falls on the summit in every month of the year on record. The mountain is high enough and far enough south, at 42 degrees latitude, that polar fronts can bring sleet and rime ice across the boardwalk even in January. Hobart locals check the mountain webcam the way northern hemisphere cities check a weather radar; if the dolerite has gone white, the city below has probably gone grey. Visitors driving the Pinnacle Road in shorts often turn back at the lower car park rather than face the wind chill at the summit shelter.