FEATURE | PYRAMIDISLAND.COM | 10.2016

 GOING SOUTH: HOW TO MOVE TO TASMANIA AND NOT LOSE YOUR MIND.

“Why ya fuckin’ movin’ to Tassie? People got two heads mate. Fuck their cousins down that way AY.” The parting words from my last cab driver in Sydney confirmed the suspicions I’d held for the duration of the trip, I’d watched his fingers swoosh around in concert with his sweaty combover and conceded it was possible he may not have had my best interests at heart. Admittedly he was getting off on his own manic vitriol and there was a 60/40 chance he was an entirely raging psychopath. At this stage I was halfway through year three of the living in Sydney game and feeling mostly depleted from living in a town that constantly seemed to be vomiting out its own sense of choice. It insisted on defining itself by what it rejected and after all, this was the place whose people were religiously manicuring everything from their colour blocking designer dog poo baggies to their sustainable bamboo eyelash extensions… they had sweat that came with its own micro-beads and their postcodes were huge Stargate vortexes worm-holing them to the status positions of their futures.

Informing my Sydney workmates of my interstate plans caused them to go all weird and quiet for the remainder of my going away dinner party, with the exception of one who figured it’d be an apt time to tell the ditty about how she and a friend took a holiday on Tassies’ east coast and were unable to “hack the spooky energy” on the bush drive to their eco-accommodation because they thought a cheese board wielding rapist might try and get them. They turned the car around and booked a motel in the tiny town which was apparently so much less spooky? I do understand that the majority of Australians can’t help but visualise massacres and inbreeding when thinking of their southern most state, but Jesus people it’d be refreshing if everyone could start shifting their Nightmare on Elm Street associations with the place.

I will admit though when I first visited Tasmania I typically chose the warmest and most culturally effervescent times of the year. Of course I was excited about the potentialities ripe in the state, after all the Gourmet Farmer had given me powerful notions. I was seeing gaps in the market all over the place so it was inevitable that while I packed my Sydney house and figured out whether there was an efficient way to move my cat across the Bass Strait without scarring it for life, I allowed anticipation build about the Taswegian opportunities about to befall me. I could start my own music label (low rents!) Or open a micro brewery (cold climes for hops!) I could invest in a whiskey still (whiskey!) Notions of peach orchards attached to vintage- furniture- stores- come- music- venues- with- bespoke- cat- scarf- boutiques out back were now REAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR ME. I knew that I must come up with the business idea of the century or casually reach the apex of my career immediately because shit it’s Hobart how hard could it be? That afternoon I bid adieu to bad attitude cabbie and a week later, the city.

I’m not gonna lie, some people do appear to be inbred in Tasmania and yes it is a rich and fertile land with an ailing and ageing population. But less commonly broadcast and more important to me is the fact that Tasmania’s creative entrepreneurial opportunities are massive. Compared to other small towns, Hobart boasts an abundance of creative champions, low rents in close proximity to the CBD and a lack of real business competition across the city. If you pick an industry, know your stuff, corner a market and work really hard you’ll probably get somewhere in Tasmania, the tricky part is keeping it serviced with such a tiny population. The place is not economic goliath by anyones standards but it offers a beautifully clean canvas on which to experiment with creative business ideas without huge financial risks, something most people of my generation will probably never have the chance to experience in any other Australian State. Fortunately for me, it’s also the last place left in the country that’s actually desirable to inhabit whilst being affordable to buy a home in even if you are not a baby boomer! When I say affordable I mean it’s actually possible for someone who is a *creative* (on minimum hospitality wage) to buy a lovely house with an orchard, a dam and room for some chickens.

When I arrived in Hobart of course I also planned on landing the job in the arts, because this would naturally lead to meeting heaps of awesome creative kindred spirits because everything was gonna be totally amazing while I settled down to get married and live with my offspring like the A-line whiskey suosed version of Laura from Little House on the Prairie. I should have been a big puffy experienced Sydney dick with my bamboo lash extensions and all this glistening global experience that I would generously scatter over the crowds of culturally needy in Tasmania. After all, these bumpkin surfs were gagging for some real leadership and inspiration yes?

Being a childhood weirdo who’d morphed from a musician into a journalist, scoring a job in the music industry that married both in the state of Tasmania seemed like a fantasy fully realised. Yes, the universe was waving the prospect under my nose just long enough for me to imagine each mouth watering detail of career vindication and joy. What I hadn’t anticipated was that I would feel completely terrified at the prospect of being offered my dream job because apparently, I’d become totally comfortable with struggling for my creative and financial opportunities during my 20’s. It was strangely stifling when the ultimate arts role was suddenly presented to me on a platter like a perfectly cured selection of cold meats at a 70’s baby shower.

Lesson number one: In Tasmania you will find that it’s extremely common to work solo in a role that would usually be delegated to five to ten people in any other Australian employment situation. Obviously this can be seen as an opportunity or an inconvenience depending on your stress levels or mood on any given day. The upside is that the decidedly constrained budgets and lack of on the job training will force you to expand your skill set and probably teach you plenty of useful stuff you didn’t know about yourself as well as initiating you into the rather stunningly immediate world of Tasmanian networking.

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of experiencing a whacky decline in their mental health while on the job, depersonalisation disorder is a bizzaro phenomena where you feel a heightened sense of panic that spikes upwards at the prospect of any verbal interaction with an actual human. This happens while you watch from outside yourself as a trespasser in your own body. Only years later have I learned that I was experiencing symptoms of quantifiable mental health problem. (Other fun diagnoses included: disassociation and imposter syndrome.)

Newsflash: my first job became an unwieldy beast that even with her mighty battle sword Shera herself would have been at pains to conquer. Representing Tasmania at a national conference proved to be the catalyst for the most profound anxiety attack I’d ever seen. One part of my brain began eating the other in a tragi-comedia style mime performance that saw me struggle to understand my entire sense of identity for an alarmingly extended period. MY LIFE WAS GOING REALLY WELL! I had the dream job. What the fuck was wrong with me? My brain had decided I was not good enough and that every time I spoke I would sound stupid. And like a self fulfilling prophecy, I guess I did. From this day on for a number of years I couldn’t stand to hear the sound of my own voice and there was very little verbal meaning coming out of me. It was fucked up. You might think “You could just stop doing this at any time, you were self sabotaging.” But I’d convinced myself that I couldn’t stop, so I didn’t.

I’m certainly not alone in being a strong, proud woman who feels compelled to project positivity and strength at all times but the tendency doesn’t lend one to asking for help or support from relatively new acquaintances, let alone your long term friends who are now living on a whole other island. I probably should have admitted that I wasn’t coping and that I needed support but instead I thrashed it out in a vacuum of isolation while my understanding of my identity became more and more fractured.

Which leads me to lesson two: If you move to Tasmania and begin to lament that all your closest friends live in a different state, change the channel and go even further out of your comfort zone. I learned that you’re a hell of a lot better leaving the house even though you might feel disinterested by absolutely every stranger in town. Read: “No person or band could POSSIBLY entertain me or change anything in me EVER again!” etc et al. When you stop allowing yourself to go out and meet new people because you don’t feel at your most emotionally and aesthetically attractive, it becomes a risk to your mental health. Sometimes you just have to do things that completely counter your instincts. Play the game for long enough you realise you’ve not only come out on the other side happy but that you’re achieving a shit load of cool stuff. Tasmania’s very land mass has a magnetic effect on its populace, an effect which is equal parts seductive and maddening so you really must manually remind yourself that the rest of the planet exists at regular intervals or risk going totally cuckoos nest. Every six months people. I was actually boosted into the realms of recovery by jumping on a plane to Europe for my honeymoon. I realised the whole world was out there and that I could choose to take part in it whenever I damn well wanted. I relished getting lost in foreign crowds, drank litres of Beaujolais and found myself joyously struck down with the realisation that I could potentially pick up dozens of French men if I wanted to. (You just got married bitch, CALM DOWN!) No the moral of the story is that I had fun. FUN?! God yes, I remembered how to have fun.

Lesson number three: It’s imperative to always be graceful, hard working and positive in this formidable little town. Especially when people are dicks to you. The upside of the micro community is that it also allows you to stand out if you’re really good at something. This rule applies to work, peddling your creative talents to the masses or even ensnaring an attractive mate. N.B. I wouldn’t recommend moving to Tasmania solely for the singles nights or the diverse and varied genetic pool. The dating scene appears grim, not just because the cross section of interesting people is weensy but because if you say anything dumb on a date you’re guaranteed the story will filter out to the far reaches of the Tassiesphere within hours of your jilted suitor’s social media update. Also, I learned the hard way that Hobart’s proximity issues will guarantee that you run into all of your most stunning burlesque babe acquaintances while wearing your Kmart track pants and hair dye shirt down at Coles, so don’t do that.

Lesson four: Unless you’re training for the next instalment of Survivor Australia (“Disaster on Van Dieman: Couples Under Duress” ) I would advise that you do not rely on your partner other for all your emotional support if things start getting a bit dicey after the move. Rather than inviting couples to skip down a rose laden path to the land of everlasting erotic seduction and caress, a move to Tassie tends to basically pound a couples romantic mettle with the punishing intensity of an automated IKEA couch testing machine. And while I can laugh about some of the more ridiculous situations now, my relationship did take on shades of Austin-esque desperation as we both worked so hard that we didn’t see one another, but in passing for the first few years. Then we inverted it entirely and worked from home together during the chapter I refer to as the ‘Lord of the Van Diemen Flies’. This is where you spend so much time with your partner that you’re practically erecting booby trapped forts in the lounge room to mark out our own emotional territory.

Some of the frustration we experienced was also informed by a local phenomenon I’ve now christened ‘Tassie tall poppy syndrome’ which seems to be a sobering reality for many of those native to the state. I’ve noticed a number of Taswegians’ recapitulating their families cultural and financial aspirations which, in the worst cases amount to “Your ancestors were convicts and your grandparents were skint so don’t get any big ideas about changing anything here cause if you do you’re either a poof or a cunt.” Lesson five: You must ignore the chorus of locals telling you “But no one’s ever done it that way before”. Otherwise you might forget why you moved in the first place and like me, develop a nasty case of anxiety or worse, inexplicably develop a penchant for drinking Bundy mixers from the can and start collecting rusted out car bodies in your front yard.

I’ll break it down further for you city dwelling thirty somethings who might be flirting with the idea of moving to Tassie after sculling a few mulled wines in front of the fire drum on your inaugural trip to Dark MOFO. Tassie’s population grew by 0.4% in 2014-15. Yes, the number of people actually packing up and investing in moving here annually is miniscule. Indeed most of those cool people you see when you visit during the summer festival season are also from Thornbury and they go back in March to leave the handful of resident creatives and hospitality pros carrying the flame on through till the next festival season. This affects number of things, the first of which is the standard of business acumen outside of food and arts tourism. With such a small pool of talent we’re still trying to nail the basics down here and the subtle nuances in terms of end goal aren’t always fully realised. But it also means slow and steady community based growth, something that’s truly privilege to be a part of. (Also, there are at least 80% less top knotted wankers in Tasmania because the subculture petri dishes don’t exist for them to thrive in. Boon!)

Alas though mysteries darlings, you will not get to genre hop your creative identity, nor will you be grinding the night away in a sweaty mess or globetrotting your ass through an array of niche worthy creative and culinary subcultures each Saturday. Shock horror! There are four noodle places, not forty. Outside of the festival season there aren’t enough people to service a goth night, indie night and electronic night on the same Saturday in this town. (N.B. further subcultures do not exist in Tasmania.) What it does harbour is a talented, luminous and increasingly sprawling group of troubadours and artists who mesh a delicate thread through the states cultural veins. They are almost like a secret kept quietly from those on the mainland, despite many of us being invested in changing that. Still, one of the biggest issues for our young creative contingent is that they inevitably want to leave Tassie for the lights of Melbourne as soon as they begin to thrive.

Lesson six: Be prepared for local change to happen in slow yawns and unexpected fits.

Clearly I had some naive ideas about low life would unfold for me in Tasmania, the most powerful of which was that the very clarity of air and virginal geography would guide me to new peaks of creative prowess, magically lifting me above life’s regular experiences of self doubt and stress. Despite being entirely misguided about this, moving to Tassie has given me some incredible opportunities albeit a little further down the track than I’d anticipated. I’m about to hit the five year mark as an import and I’m back on track with phase one of my Little House on the Prairie business plan. Various members of my family have also started migrating down and I have the pleasure to know and love some rare and exceptional locals who actually appreciate my broken sense of humour.

The state’s isolated cultural renaissance continues to thrive and the resulting opportunities are evolving at an almost exponential rate. Testament to my dedication is my loyalty to Tassie over these years without destroying my relationship, moving back to ‘the mainland’ or starting an active war on Bogans. The festivals are, indeed world class and the constant supply of organic dutch cream potatoes is quite hard to beat. If you do decide to move here you’ll discover that much like the vast, wild ocean that surrounds her; Tasmania spews your reflection back at you in the most unnerving and powerful of ways. She’s taught me that taking risks and trusting people you don’t know makes you tougher, boosts business, opens your heart and even helps grow the local economy. Despite the paces she’s put me through I really do love the many faces of this seductive, fierce little land mass and I suspect she has won me over for life.

-Amanda Laver.