I Think I’ll Stay Right Here
BY EMMA AZON-JACOMETTI
On the many places I left, and the one that hasn’t let me go.
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First, there was Adelaide. The city of my birth, my childhood, my education, my attachment to an unrealised dream of making it as a ballerina. The leafy eastern suburbs with which I will always associate my maternal grandmother, and after which I yearn because it’s there where I feel her nearness most keenly.
At 19, it was Port Douglas. An emancipation. From the family home, and from the invisible shackles of the private girls’ school microcosm that I secretly despised. During a holiday in my early teens, I’d seen on a cruise to the Great Barrier Reef how hospitality - already my chosen career pathway - could open up into the wholly new-to-me world of tourism. I wanted in on the opportunity to make 400 passengers’ days with a smile, some compassion, and several plates of tropical fruit.
A short stint in Darwin followed, in my early 20s. The semi-conscious decision to avoid making any friends resulted in a loneliness that I lived with quite comfortably for six months.
Until the Gold Coast. With its requisite social life and late nights. I was ready for it. After seven gap years, I finally went to university, treating a degree as my side hustle while I doggedly pursued the hospo pathway. I was happiest where there was food, coffee, wine, and customers to serve. The study was okay, too.
And then, finally. Tasmania. A “three-month visit” in 2012, before heading back to Queensland to graduate and get on with life. When people ask why I came here in the first place, my response is sheepish: “For a boy”. And, while that didn’t work out (I married a different one many years later), the lasting positive collateral of that doomed relationship is that I’m still here, almost 15 years later. By the end of those first planned three months, I’d forged friendships that I couldn’t imagine giving the long-distance treatment, landed a dreamy job at a South Hobart café, settled into a church community, and - most significantly - fallen deeply in love with the Tasmanian lifestyle.
The open spaces and accessibility of Adelaide, the total passion for tourism and hospitality of Port Douglas, the peace and solitude that those few months in Darwin gave me, and even the social ease of the Gold Coast. All dialled up to eleven. Here at the bottom of the world.
Truth is, it’s too cold for me down here. My body belongs back in Queensland, where it took me precisely three seconds to acclimatise from Adelaide’s four seasons to year-round heat and humidity. In Tassie, I’m still waiting to get used to winter, which is always long and often bone-chilling. So ideally, I’d move back to the sunshine state, or even further afield. The Mediterranean coast, for instance, doesn’t seem to record too many temperatures below my ideal thermostat.
But, apart from my total maladaptation to the climate every April through October (the winter really is that long), there is simply no other thing about Tasmania that entices me to leave. And a bit of cold weather alone isn’t enough. Not when everything else about this place anchors me right in it.
Easy.
Life here is easy. Gloriously so. And that’s from a girl who has - intentionally or otherwise - tended to gravitate towards the hard stuff for the last four decades. Maybe Tasmania is a quiet antidote; maybe that easiness was always going to be my gateway drug to sticking around 56 times (and counting) as long as I originally intended.
Here, you can find a carpark. You can live on rural acreage and get to your CBD office in 17 minutes flat. Start a small business. Know your barista by name, along with their origin story and the breed of their dog. Smile at a runner in the dark hours of the morning. Wear your ugg boots to the supermarket. Buy a membership to a footy club that doesn’t exist yet.
Just easy.
All these years after that intended three-month sabbatical, I’m not saying that I’ll never leave Tassie. But the value proposition of any alternative would need to incorporate more than just a higher average air temperature. Amongst my other requirements: an affordable home, front-door access to nature, world-class food and wine, a job that fuels my passion for storytelling while encouraging (actual) work-life balance, and a generously appointed cohort of best friends, each of them remarkable humans in their own right.
In other words, any other place would first need to match the life I get to enjoy in Tasmania, before it could even begin to start setting up its competitive advantage.
So far, nowhere else has come close.
Which is to say that somewhere along the way - bloody cold weather aside - Tassie became less a place I came to, and more a place I stayed. I guess that means I’m home.
