The island to the North – rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic

It’s not known widely enough but at the point that Australia finally ceased to be a rabble of competing colonies and instead became a nation comprising a rabble of competing states and territories, New Zealand was almost there at the party.

Travelling eastwards from the Bay of Fires in Tasmania would lead you directly to New Zealand

In 1912, when Walter Burley Griffin was designing Canberra, it still seemed possible that New Zealand might join the new Federation. Reflecting this Griffin envisaged a series of eight major avenues spreading out from Capital Hill, each named after a State capital, the capital of the Northern Territory and the capital of New Zealand.

Each avenue was to end in a park named after a distinctive native plant of the relevant state. After it became clear that New Zealand was not joining after all, the avenue to be called Wellington Avenue was renamed at the last minute as Canberra Avenue. It was an afterthought but someone forgot to tidy up and the area at the end of that forlorn avenue remained as Manuka, named after the New Zealand tree noteworthy for its superior honey.

The island to the North – the islands to the North East

The awkward relationship between Tasmania and the island to the North is not the only clumsy relationship between islands in this part of the world. The history of the ties between the island to the North and the islands of the Pacific is even more troubled. It’s a tale of disappointments and neglect, misunderstandings and myopia, of big and small stumbling into each other.

When I moved to Sydney from Melbourne over two decades ago, after a youth growing up in Tasmania, I was impressed because the house next door had a Tahitian lime tree in the yard. That was my sole connection to Tahiti. Then by a mixture of chance and choice, in September this year I found myself travelling to Tahiti and her islands, as greater Tahiti is described.

I had to keep reminding myself that the photos I took were not something I had picked up from a post card rack.

Getting ready to travel there by way of Auckland I checked some Australian equivalents for climate. Tahiti and Cairns were natural matches while Auckland introduced a chill into the air by matching a location slightly north of Melbourne.