Whenever I return to my home state of Tasmania, I am struck by two things: how bitter is the breeze that screams across the tarmac as I am ushered towards the terminal by lock-jawed flight attendants; and how much red wine my parents & I manage to put away of an evening. There’s not a lot of land between Hobart and Antarctica, as the fluorescent orange hull of the Aurora Australis regularly attests. Creaking morosely against the restraints of Constitution Dock, she’s a subtle reminder of the colour ice isn’t. Such subtlety is hardly necessary, of course, with the omnipresent Southerly biting the heads of beers in waterfront bars, ruffling the feathers of the hardened, piratical seagulls and, most importantly, cooling the fruit of the temperamental pinot noir vines.

To be Tasmanian is to be a foreigner in your own country. The first time I travelled overseas, my response to the standard ‘Where are you from?’ question was not, as it was for my fellow travellers, ‘Australia’. No, I was resident of a small southern island best know to world citizens as home of the Warner Bros character ‘Taz’, whose resemblance to the real Tasmanian Devil is about as close as Mickey is to mouse*.  In reality, they are a malodorous, oversized, spotted rat. The only accurately represented facet of their cartoon alter-ego is their intractable fury. Devils kept in captivity have to be sexually segregated, lest the males eat the females, with the kids thrown in for dessert. And now, largely due to their belligerent natures, the devils are dying out. Some sort of highly contagious, extremely aggressive mouth cancer - spread via the friendly mouth-to-mouth combat  they so favour - is attacking their detachable jaws, rendering them incapable of devouring even their own spouses.

Of course, one could be forgiven for thinking that talk of devil extinction is nothing more than alarmist propaganda, if the number of dead devils on the side of the road is anything to go by. To the extent that a fatal collision with a speeding vehicle can leave one looking healthy, the roadkill devils appear to be both healthy and healthily represented in the general menagerie of roadside carnage. It’s a little known fact – one that is curiously not promoted by the state’s tourist bureau – that Tasmania is the roadkill capital of the world. On a recent 50km bike ride south of Hobart, where I was in a position to catalogue the various formerly animate animals now closely acquainted with the tarmac, I encountered the following: A tiger snake, a spotted quoll, two devils, several dozen assorted wallabies and possums, and, just as I was rounding the final bend in preparation for the hellish ascent to my parents’ house, a rooster. 

Luckily, it wasn’t their rooster. That magnificent bird was still available for early morning ear-splitting cock-a-doodles, rousing us from our red-wine hangovers and reminding me, once again, of the perils of combining a rural idyll with a well stocked wine cellar.

 *It should be noted that these days, when anyone asks me where I am from (or more frequently, what part of England I am from) I answer 'I'm from Australia,' generally adding 'Melbourne' as a qualifier. So there you go - I am more ex-Melbournite these days than ex-Tasmanian.