Week 13/2026: Things I know to be true
Week of 23 March 2026
I had a long but wonderful day on Thursday.
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.
Things I Know To Be True
But first, the gym
I started the day at the gym with a complementary personal training session they’d given me for my birthday, which was about to expire.
I’ve fallen off the gym wagon lately apart from two regular Pilates classes each week, which I go to because both classes work in well with other commitments so I don’t have to go massively out of my way to do them. I also don’t have to think about it. They are on and I go.
Unlike the gym.
I’ve gone from two to three times a week last year to none this year. I think I stopped because of my sore hip/gluteal tendinopathy. It actually probably would have been better for that condition if I’d kept going. But missing one session became missing a week, and that became missing two weeks, and that became a month, and six months . . . . and now I am here in March having not been to the gym for months.
Anyway, the message that my free PT session was about to expire motivated me to arrange to do it, which I did. I also organised to go back next week and get a new program written for me that I can then go in and do a couple of times a week.
I’m not sure how I’m going to make that happen, but going in was a good first step.
Things I Know To Be True
That night I went to the Studio Theatre to see the opening night performance of Things I Know To Be True, a production by Tasmanian Theatre Company and Mudlark Theatre.
I was particularly interested in this show because the author, Andrew Bovell, wrote the play my acting class performed at the end of 2024, Uncensored, and I wanted to see his other works.
This is the description from the Theatre Royal website:
Every rose has its thorns.
The Prices are a typical Australian family. Bob and Fran have worked hard to raise their four kids with strong working class ethics even as their circumstances have improved. Honesty, hard work, respect and family values are the lessons handed down in the Price household. With the kids growing up, Bob should have more time to tend to his precious roses, but over the course of a year, a series of family revelations shakes the Price home to its foundations.
Things I Know To Be True is a tender portrait of the fragility and strength of familial bonds. As Bob’s garden changes with the seasons each Price faces personal upheaval. Buried truths emerge and identities are questioned as the family searches for the source of their love for one another.
Unlike last week’s show, I had booked this one well in advance and got a front row seat, which was perfect.
Turns out I was sitting next to a former Minister for Education, so there was much laughter at this exchange early on in the play:
She’s running the whole department . . . a whole government department.
No, I’m not.
It’s incredible what she does.
I’m overseeing curriculum development. It’s temporary I’m filling in for someone.
She’s reporting to the Minister for Education.
Just to his advisers, actually.
But you’ve met the Minister.
Once.
Well, there you go.
I know. You had to be there.
This play was . . . amazing. It’s one of the most moving pieces of theatre I’ve ever been to. I could see my own experiences from different life stages coming to life in so many of the characters. It felt authentic and I was captivated from the beginning to the end. The set was great, and Michael Power’s piano was enchanting.
The end of Act 1 left the audience stunned at the scene that had just unfolded and the intensity of it all. And the end of the play was heartbreaking.
It made me laugh and made me cry and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to see it.
(What was really cool was the next week in my acting class, at least four of my classmates had also been to see it on different nights, and they all loved it too.)
The Tasmanian Theatre Company
What I hadn’t known until Thursday was that Things I Know To Be True was the final production of the Tasmanian Theatre Company, which closed in 2025. There was a display in the foyer of the theatre to commemorate this.
In February, I watched the 1962 movie They Found A Cave with my mother. This was based on the Nan Chauncy book of the same name and starred Barbara Manning.
I wondered who Barbara Manning was so I did a bit of digging and learned that she was a Tasmanian actor and ABC presenter, who was passionate about theatre in education. She founded the Salamanca Theatre Company in 1972, which had a focus on theatre for young people and in education. I think it may have been the company responsible for the performance of Macbeth that I know I saw in high school. I had thought it was at the Peacock Theatre but finding out the STC performed regularly at the Theatre Royal’s Backspace Theatre, it’s more likely to have been there. (If anyone knows about this show please let me know! I have been trying for years to remember where I saw it and when. It would have been late 1980s and I’m sure it was in Hobart. The actor who played Macbeth had red hair and seemed much younger than Lady Macbeth, who had a severe dark bob, and that’s all I can remember!)
STC merged with, or somehow otherwise became, the Tasmanian Theatre Company, whose closure means that Hobart is the only Australian capital city without a full-time professional adult theatre company. Charles Parkinson, former Director of TTC and producer of this show, says this is “something to both mourn but also something to aspire to fix”. He notes that we are fortunate to have Mudlark Theatre in Launceston, which partnered with TTC to present this show.
I love it when things I’ve been doing connect like this.
Habit tracker
I’m not taking these seriously, am I?
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 5/7
- Hip or shoulder sequence exercises (5 days): 1/7
- Walk (7 days): 6/6
- Thinking time (4 days): 2/4
- Morning planning routine (4 days): 0/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 0/7
- Work shutdown (4 days): 0/4
- 9.30 shutdown (6 days): 2/5
- Evening routine (7 days): 5/7
Summary of the week
Some positive things
Clouds!
This week I learned
Sadly, the Hobart Council announced this week that there’s nothing more they can do for the two giant sequoias in St David’s Park. The council’s announcement said that the trees have “gone into terminal decline”, which is I suppose a fancy way of saying they’re doomed, and they’ll be removed from the park in April.
Here they are less than six months ago.
And in December 2025, the change was becoming obvious.
It’s sad news.
Unrelated, I also learned that there is a creature called the Greenland shark, which is the longest-lived vertebrate on earth. Scientists believe that there could be Greenland sharks in the water that are over 500 years old. They are slow moving, flesh-eating creatures that live as far as 2200 metres deep.
And thanks to contestant Paula on Hard Quiz, I learned chickens’ combs are red because of all the blood vessels in them, and they help the chickens regulate their temperature.
This week I noticed
Coloured glass bottle display in the window of a house in West Hobart.
A question in the quiz in the Mercury:
What is the only African country ending in the letter L?
I should have known this given that the story we’re reading in my uni class this week is about slaves taken from Senegal . . .
A cool beetle on a leaf when I went for my walk on Saturday afternoon.
What’s making me think?
According to my mother’s New Scientist magazine, exercise can help stave off frailty.
The article features a picture of Julia Hawkins, who, it said, took up running at age 100, setting world records in the 100-metre sprint. (She passed away in 2024, aged 108.)
Life goals.
Go to the gym, Barb!
Reading
- Let Them by Mel Robbins
- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
Watching
- Things I Know To Be True (Mudlark Theatre & Tasmanian Theatre Company)
- Doctor Who ‘The Abominable Snowmen’
Listening
- Bohemia by Van Diemen’s Band
- PBS Radio
About The Author
