01
Stop one
Mersey Bluff Lighthouse
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Check Track Jacket: Put something warm on before we go out on that headland, sweetheart, the wind comes straight off the strait. This lighthouse has guarded the mouth of the Mersey River since 1889, built to guide the growing shipping trade of the twin ports of Formby and Torquay, which amalgamated as Devonport the following year. Sixteen metres of brick painted white with vertical red stripes, rare among Australian lights and quite the outfit. It marked the dangerous bar entrance for the steamers carrying Tasmanian produce and passengers across Bass Strait, and the Spirit of Tasmania ferries pass beneath it doing that same work today. Automated in the twentieth century and still operating. The headland is a site of deep significance to the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
02
Stop two
Tiagarra Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Rock Carvings
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Check Track Jacket: Stand quietly with me a moment, my loves. This headland preserves one of Tasmania's most important collections of Aboriginal rock carvings: geometric circles, animal tracks and other motifs pecked into the stone by the ancestors of the Palawa people over many centuries. The Bluff was known as a meeting and ceremonial place of the coastal bands who harvested the estuary's shellfish, and their middens layer the dunes. It was among the first places in Tasmania where such petroglyphs were formally recognised, and in 1976 the Tiagarra Aboriginal Cultural Centre opened here, one of Australia's earliest Aboriginal-run keeping places, to interpret the carvings and hold cultural material. Tens of thousands of years of people, long before any of the Victorian shopfronts down the hill.
03
Stop three
Home Hill
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Check Track Jacket: Oh, this house. Twelve children, dear. Twelve. And the woman who raised them largely here became, in 1943, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and later the first woman in federal cabinet: Dame Enid Lyons. Her husband Joseph was Tasmanian premier and then prime minister of Australia from 1932 until his death in office in 1939, the only Tasmanian to hold the post and the first to die in it. The house was built for the couple in 1916. The National Trust keeps it with the family's own furnishings, portraits and mementoes, so you walk through the actual rooms. Depression-era leadership, with the washing still waiting to be done.
04
Stop four
Don River Railway
Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Check Track Jacket: A steam engine and a cup of tea, which is my idea of a lovely afternoon. The line follows the alignment of one of the island's earliest railways: the original Don company tramway of the 1850s and 60s carried timber and limestone from the Don valley down to the coast, part of the network that opened the fertile northwest to farming and gave Devonport its role as export port for potatoes, timber and produce. Since 1971 a volunteer preservation society has run it as a heritage railway, restoring steam and diesel locomotives, historic carriages and station buildings, and running passenger trips along the river to Coles Beach. Its workshops and collection make up Tasmania's largest railway museum. Volunteers, mind. Every one of them somebody's grandfather.
Come up slow, mind the rail. While I trim the light, have a look: the Sergio Tacchini Damarindo Check Track Jacket. A keeper's kind of garment: wrinkle-resistant polyester twill, a sturdy 220 grams to the square metre — cloth that stands a watch without complaint.
Full zip against the weather, a stand-up collar carrying the brand's signature double-stripe across chest and sleeves, rib-knit trims sealing the cuffs and hem, welt handwarmer pockets for the long cold hours, and the ST monogram embroidered at the chest. Machine washable, thank heaven — a keeper has enough chores.
Sergio Tacchini himself was an Italian tennis professional who founded the house in 1966, and his heritage check styling has guided players through changeovers for decades.
My station is Devonport, Tasmania, at the mouth of the Mersey River, and this coast is honest but it doesn't forgive. That's why they raised the Mersey Bluff Lighthouse in 1889 — sixteen metres of brick, white with rare vertical red stripes — to guide the Bass Strait steamers over the bar. Still working. So am I.
You'll wear this jacket everywhere from brisk cardio tennis to the walk along the Bluff as the Spirit of Tasmania passes beneath the light, and by the way, it is also perfect for a run out to the northwest's berry farms, which — keeper's tip — are worth coming ashore for. Now stand here. Watch the beam swing. That's the whole job, and it's enough.
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