Week 45/2025: Open House Hobart
Week of 3 November 2025
November is great because we have Open House Hobart and it’s a great opportunity to explore some buildings, often with people who know a lot about them.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
Open House Hobart
This week my Open House activities started on Wednesday with a presentation at the State Library.
Who lived in my house?
Who’s Been Living in My House? was a presentation by Dr Imogen Wegman, who, among other things, coordinates the Family History program at the University of Tasmania.
The presentation was about, as you might imagine, researching the history of your house. Or any other house for that matter.
Imogen talked about how to go about planning your research. Figure out what you want to find out because different questions will have different starting points. She recommended pulling out everything you already know and creating a timeline so you can see what you have already, where the gaps are and where you might start to dig a bit more.
She also said—and this is something I am really bad at doing—to keep detailed records of where you search and what you found because if you don’t, you’ll end up going back to the same source over and over and not find anything new. It’s especially important to record places where you find nothing, for that exact reason. (I would ever do that . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .)
You may also go back to sources you’ve already looked at with different search terms to look for different things, so she recommended recording what search terms you use each time.
There are so many resources available and you may need to look in multiple places in order to connect a name to a place and a time. Libraries Tasmania is a great starting point, as you can access the Tasmanian Archives and the Tasmanian Names Index. You can also access things like Ancestry.com through the library. There’s also the National Library of Australia, The LIST, which has the old land records, maps and land titles, TROVE for old newspapers, old phone directories and post office directories . . . and the list goes on.
It was great to be guided through these resources by someone who knows what they’re doing rather than my own haphazard searching that jumps from one rabbit hole to another (and frequently back to the same one because I’ve forgotten I’ve been there). I’ve now been able to find the exact locations of my great grandfather and great great grandfather’s homes in Zeehan dating back to 1898 after they left Hobart, so that’s rather exciting.
The Saturday tour
Saturday was the start of the weekend of open buildings.
Lil Sis and I began our weekend with a 90-minute tour of Hobart’s major waterfront buildings with architect Robert Morris-Nunn and his team from Circa Morris-Nunn Chua. Circa has had a huge impact on shaping this part of the city so it was great to have this opportunity to hear from one of the leaders of this work.
I put some photos on my other blog if you want to see more.
Our second tour was the Riverfront Motel in Berriedale where we’d been in 2019.
We had lunch here before the tour and had a wonderful time exploring this mid-century wonderland.
Here’s some more photos from that tour.
We followed that up with a visit to the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in North Hobart. (I haven’t done the blog post for that yet.) This was designed by the convict architect James Blackburn in 1841.
Its final service as an Anglican Church was held in 2007 and it has since been sold to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia.
It’s an interesting mix.
Sunday photo play
The event I’d planned on going to on Sunday was cancelled so I stayed home and played with my photos.
In particular, I wanted to play with the colours. Here’s one I liked.
Habit tracker
Existing habits
- Go outside first thing (7 days): 7/7
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 7/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 5/5
- Walk (7 days): 7/7
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (7 days): 5/7
- Thinking time (4 days): 4/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 2/7
- 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 4/6
- Evening routine (6 days): 6/6
New habits
- Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 0/5
- Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5
Summary of the week
Some positive things
My status as “the legendary straightlinesgirl”.
This week I learned
The Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Ross building was originally a store, converted to a church in the 1920s.
According to Churches of Tasmania, it was built in 1920 in ‘Federation Freestyle’ on an old Colonial Georgian base that had previously housed a residence, store and bakery belonging to the Bacon family.
Duncan says, “soon after the church was completed in 1920, the Sullivan family of Deloraine donated a statue of the Sacred Heart which was placed on top of the spire. [. . . ] By 1944 the statue had become unstable and because it was in danger of falling, it had to be removed. It was subsequently placed in the grounds of the Catholic School (Our Lady of Mercy) in Deloraine. The weight of the statue probably weakened the spire which had to be rebuilt in the early 1980s.”
Unrelated . . .
I learned about how Tim Curry developed the accent for Dr Frank’N’Furter in The Rocky Horror Show. He said he had tried a German accent, which he felt was too obnoxious, and a middle-European one, which felt too trite. He felt an American accent was too brash. Then, he says, he heard a woman on a bus talking to her friend.
She belonged to a particular social group of women, generally from Knightsbridge, who tended to wear headscarves knotted under the chin. I overheard her ask, ‘Do you have a hice in the town or a hice in the country?’
Without hesitation, I knew I had found Frank’s trademark tone: the woman on the bus who was doing her very best to sound like the Queen.
This week I noticed
A stuffed toy axolotl at Plato’s.
What’s making me think?
I watched an interesting video of an acting coach comparing four pairs of actors doing a scene from La La Land, from beginners, through 2-3 years training, through professional actors, to the actors who were actually in the movie, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, and it was really fascinating to see how different they were and the things the acting coach pointed out about each performance.
It made me think about the scene I have to do in my upcoming class play and how to make sure I play that in response to the other actor, not in response to myself.
Reading
- Vagabond by Tim Curry
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Watching
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Terminus’
- Frankenstein (2025)
About The Author
