Week 15/2024: Davey street

Week of 8 April 2024

This week was back to normal after a couple of short weeks for Easter.  Well, normal in the sense that I had my regular five days of work and my weekend family visit. Cool non-normal stuff happened too!

Wandering in Davey Street

Hobart street corners

One of my photography projects is documenting street corners within Hobart’s CBD and around the waterfront, which I started in 2018. 

I don’t have a particularly systematic approach to this. This means a lot of my photos are of the same corners in the CBD just because I walk past them regularly. I also take photos more or less randomly if I see something that’s interesting or about to change (like on this corner).

As a result, there are corners I’ve never documented and some that I’ve over-photographed.

I had this vague idea about being more systematic about it. I thought I could take a couple of hours for each street and photograph every corner. This would create a sort of ‘baseline’. From that, I’d be able to go back to the corners where things were more dynamic and photograph them more often and not worry as much about the ones that don’t change much.

Choosing which lens to use for this is a bit of a dilemma. The project started on my iPhone and most of the photos still are, but there are limitations with that camera. So I’ve started to use my big camera as well, and this week wandered around Davey and Molle Streets with my 24mm lens to see what results I got.

To be continued . . .

Davey Street

The top end of Davey Street just before it joins the Southern Outlet is an area I only go to when I have to go to the radiology place (once the Wheatsheaf Hotel). 

This week, after my street corner experiments, I went for a walk.

I’m always fascinated by Last Bite, which was apparently established in 1962, and I wonder what this part of the block looked like back then.

This yard is interesting. 

And something happened to the house at the other end of Wheatsheaf Lane.

Week 15 summary

Habit tracker

• 9.30 shutdown: 6/7 days
• 8,000 steps: 7/7 days

What was the best thing about this week?

Kramstable’s school held its Performing Arts launch this week. The cast of the musical, which he’s got a role in, performed one of the songs. It was great and I’m so excited about seeing it in August.

What did I notice this week?

Walking up Davey Street on Thursday night, I noticed these houses and was curious about what’s going on with them.

I recognised one of them, number 4, as featuring in Miranda Morris’s book 100 Hobart Houses.

It was designed in 1934 by Eric Round (who also designed the Jet Service Station in Sandy Bay). In the book, Miranda notes that the building has suffered some “unfortunate renovations”, and it’s looking worse than it did in 2001 when the book was published.

It’s actually two flats, and was the only residence built in Hobart in 1934, due to the Depression. While its main style is Spanish Mission, Miranda observes that Eric Round added two features that were used at the time to make houses more ‘Olde Worlde’. This is the stepped ‘crooked’ chimney and the unevenly picked out bricks on the corners.

What did I learn this week?

If you take your camera battery out to charge it, when you take it off the charger, put it back in the camera right away. Otherwise, you’ll pick up your camera when you go out and will have a very frustrating walk carrying a camera you can’t actually use.

I also learned that you’re supposed to let indoor plants dry out and only then water them. A tip from Amanda, the owner of our local indoor plant shop, who I met this week.

And bought a plant from.

What am I reading?

• Fierce Self Compassion by Kristin Neff.