Green Christine

As I stroll across the Hobart waterfront towards Greens Senator Christine Milne's dockside office, I can't help but reflect on changes in the area. I grew up just a street away at a time when Hobart was a thriving port that sustained 1300 wharfies instead of the handful of casuals employed today. You could walk alongside the handsome sandstone warehouses of Salamanca Place and smell the hops, or the sickly sweet aroma given off by vats of boiling fruit in the jam factory that was IXL Jones & Co.

Today the Hobart waterfront, like that of Baltimore, Liverpool and Glasgow, has become gentrified. Jones & Co. has been converted into the University of Tasmania's art school, and the grain warehouses are galleries and boutiques. This playground waterfront is an image of postmodern Western economies: the decline of mass manufacturing, the rise of service industries.