The Best Things About Tasmania

I was just in Tasmania for ten days.

It might well be the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen.  Between the Freycinet Peninsula, Cradle Mountain, Bicheno and Hobart, there is at least two month’s worth of genuine discovery.

We walked a lot during the days and ate and drank like kings at night.

Here are some of the best things I discovered in Tasmania and some associated thoughts about music and marketing.

1 - When you’re in Launceston, eat at Stillwater River Cafe.

The location is amazing, in the heart of the city, just a few minutes walk to a gorge, overlooking the water.  The building itself is striking, the staff are good and the food is genuine.

Stillwater inside.

Three points to make:

* They were playing St. Germain’s ‘Tourist’.  That CD came out in 2000.  I loved it at the time but it’s been flogged to death.  Every cafe in the world plays it incessantly.  It’s over.

If you own a cafe, or go to one, and that CD is playing, please complain.  Recommend instead that they purchase Katalyst’s ‘Dusted’ which might just be the best mix-CD I’ve ever heard.

* Stillwater is clearly a savvy organisation.  But two things need to happen to their website: optional music (with the the default setting being no music) and removal of the site intro.

The future of email marketing.

* Hollandaise sauce is awesome.  I only tried it for the first time in August.  Now I’m hooked.

2 - Freycinet National Park is incredible.

The track down to Wineglass Bay

It’s also very minimally signed.  And by minimally, I mean you spend a lot of time hoping you’re on the right track.

My desire to see more signs got me thinking.

Freycinet is an amazing place.  That was the pull that got me there.  Once I was there, and walking through the rain, I started wishing for a sign that would tell me how much further I had to go.  But none came.  A sign for bushwalkers in a national park is a perfect example of that anticipated, personal, relevant and desired communication that marketers strive to achieve.

How this applies to the real world I’m still not sure but I don’t think the metaphor is too far off the mark.

Also, the signs, when they did come about, were a great example of expectation management.  If it said 30 minutes, you were there in 20.  Under-promise, over-deliver.

3 - Tourism in Tasmania is best embodied by the Dove Lake walk at Cradle Mountain.

Cradle Mountain combines once in a lifetime natural beauty and options for everyone from ages 8-80.  10 day walks for hikers, all day walks for the less bold, boardwalk tours for the frail and everything in between.

The view over Crater Lake to Dove Lake.

4 - The food is good.

I particulary enjoyed Ebb at Swansea, Chado: Way of The Tea in Hobart (where the waitresses where Isogawa dresses) and Madge Malloys in Coles Bay.

Tea at Chado

5 - Paul Kelly is the perfect soundtrack to driving through Australian countryside.

Paul Kelly’s songs feel so much a part of Australia and such a clear reflection of what it feels like to be Australian.

‘From St. Kilda to Kings Cross’, ‘Everything’s Turing to White’, ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ and the classic, unfathomably good ‘How to Make Gravy’ are some of the standouts in a back catalogue that should be considered one of the great achievements in modern Australian music.

I bought his Greatest Hits collection ‘Songs From The South’ from Sanity in Launceston and listened to it constantly. (Side note: Sanity can surely no longer be considered a CD store so much as a DVD/Merchandise store - rack space for CDs must have reduced by half since I last was in one of those).

I also bought the Josh Pyke EP Feeding The Wolves.

If there was a song that anchored that whole trip for me though, it was Nina Simone’s ‘Baltimore’.

You can download a copy of it here.

If you go to Tasmania, I hope you listen to Paul, Josh and Nina too.