Sunday, August 14th …..

Friday was a beautiful day. I had an appointment in Burnie which is about 165Km away so we decided Marilyn would come with me for the drive and we would have lunch out.

Our friend Greg Leong is Director of the Burnie Art Gallery and I wanted to ask him to be a judge in the Hoffman Challenge Quilting Competition which has now become part of the Craft Fair. Greg has a long involvement with the Arts and is an internationally-recognised Textile Artist. He’s been involved with the Craft Fair, on and off, for years but the first time I met Greg was in 2007 when I arranged for him to have a retrospective display of some of his extraordinary Chinese-inspired and Australian-influenced costumes and quilts. If you look more closely at a seemingly-Chinese dress, you will see tiny embroidered kangaroos. The attached picture is a Carmen dress made of flannelette.

Burnie is a funny town. When we first lived in Tasmania in the 1970s and 80s, Burnie was the wild west. It was most famous for The Pulp, a dirty, smelly pulp mill. The pollution around the town, especially on the foreshore was appalling and in the 1990s, I think, there was a real push to clean up their act. By 2000, the Pulp was essentially closed down and the environmental cleanup was completed. Burnie still thrives although there is very little industry now. Woodchip is exported from the wharf and it is still a major container port, but you are just as likely to see a cruise ship tied up than a cargo ship.

Marilyn and I sailed in there on the Volendam in January 2008. Hordes of people got off the ship to have rushed trips to Cradle Mountain, local wineries, Gunns Plains Zoo, or just to wander down the main street. The big tourist attraction of the town is Creative Paper, a paper-making concern famous for its Roo Paper, made from Kangaroo droppings. Another friend, Joanna Gair, developed this when she was Director of Creative Paper but I prefer the Whisky paper she made for a Scottish Distillery. Apparently you can make paper from any old fibre.

Nowadays, paper-making workshops are held in the new Visitors’Centre. For lunch we went to Fish Frenzy, which is right on the waterfront. Being such a beautiful day, we bought takeaway – two flake fillets and large chips, beautifully cooked and served in paper pokes (heavy paper cones).

It was a great day out. Greg agreed to be a judge and it was worth the drive just to enjoy the lunch.