Ross, Tasmania

Our second stop on our Tasmanian holiday/honeymoon (following Launceston, site of The Wedding) was the town of Ross. Although a spot worth visiting for its charm and historic sites alone, our visit was also prompted by my desire to wallow in a bit of nostalgia.  The last time I had dropped in there was some thirty seven years ago.

 Not much has changed, almost it seems since the 19^th Century, let alone since I was there.  Even so, it took a while for me to re-orient myself.  At first although I’d lived in it for a time, I didn’t recognise the handsome house in the photo above, not remembering it as white and also thinking it was at the other end of the street.  It had been a while.  However there it still was, “The Scotch Thistle Inn”, originally a Georgian coaching inn, later a restaurant and now a private residence. 

 When I lived there, the ground floor was the restaurant where I slaved over a hot stove nightly as the chef.  Upstairs were the living quarters, where I cohabited with the owner of the establishment.  Not so much a case of mixing business with pleasure, as a relocation of a relationship already begun in Adelaide.  He had bought the place on impulse while we were on holiday in Tasmania and gallantly invited me to move over and help him run it.  Holiday impulse buys for most people usually consist of scarves, stuffed wombats and the like, but not this chap.  He bought a lifestyle and a livelihood in one. 

Despite flying by the seat of my pants I somehow managed to satisfactorily feed whoever wandered in.  On busy days this could be as many as fifty people, on slow days as few as one or two.  Life being what it is, you could be sure the multitudes would descend on just those days when I least cared to welcome them, but in the hospitality game you just keep smiling.  Challenging though the cooking was, it was nothing compared to scraping grease off the monster of a coal fired grill at midnight, cleaning the toilets on a freezing cold Tasmanian morning, or retrieving our slightly mad red setter from his wild rampages through the local handicraft shops. 

Still, it was, as they say an experience and no doubt character building.  On our recent visit, David and I stayed in a very quaint but cramped cottage, the best features of which were the very efficient combustion heater and the port.  With the demise of the Scotch Thistle Inn as an eating place, there are not many alternatives for diners these days.  We ended up at what seemed to be the only place, apart from a takeaway food joint, which was the Man O’ Ross Hotel, a worthy establishment which has graced the town since it was first built.  The dining area was big on local colour in the form of corpulent blokes in Hi Vis attire devouring mountains of chips, but lacking in historic quaintness and charm, which was a shame.  Despite its venerable history and gracious exterior, inside it is just your basic no frills Aussie pub.  Room for some entrepreneurialism there.

We visited the famous convict built bridge of course which is beautiful, and the wool centre, where thankfully the proprietors have changed since the mad dog and I were last there.  The streets were mellow and glowing with autumnal colours and old sandstone wherever you looked.  We sampled the bakery’s wares and were most impressed, and in my case splattered with sauce when my plastic cube of Heinz malfunctioned.  God I hate those things.  Then we went on our way, leaving behind us a delightful little place that time seems to have forgotten, but not I, having now some newer memories to enrich the older ones.