Veronika Wild

"Yes Mountain" Street Art by Bonsai and David Booth aka Ghost Patrol,  in Victoria Street Yes, I know big cities such as London, New York, Paris, Berlin, from Reykjavik to Buenos Aries, even Melbourne, have had Street Art forever, but now Hobart is getting in on the act. After years of spending around $300,000 a year trying to get rid of it, the Council has discovered that nothing keeps unwanted graffiti away as much as well executed public art. Until now it has been a furtive kind of thing -done after dark, in unlit alleys, deserted carparks or the subterranean world of the Rivulet, and always under threat of prosecution and heavy fines if caught. "Teraform" -Tom O'Hern's delightful jungle in Mather's Place   Not so long ago, the Council removed the work of Peter Drew , whose posters promoting tolerance of asylum seekers were put up all around Australia. Now under its Urban Art Walls Project, they are back, along with several other co...

Theme for this year's Fashion Revolution Week Hello Possums, Did you know that there was a revolution in progress? Although Fashion Revolution Week ends today, its work is ongoing and its aims are far reaching. Originally begun in memory of the thousands of people -1138 to be precise and most of them young women, who were killed in the Rana Plaza Garment Factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, it asks us to consider who makes our clothes – the farmers who grow the cotton, the weavers and spinners, the dyers and the sewers and to consider the conditions under which they work. Most are poorly paid, work long hours and are often exploited. Last year Fashion Revolution put up a vending machine in Berlin which offered t-shirts for 2 Euros, the catch being that buyers had to watch a video on how they were made. After seeing the video only one in ten prospective buyers bought the t-shirt. The rest made a donation. This year The Fashion Revolution is urging us to ask com...

I suspect that this is a statue of Errol Flynn, Tasmania's most famous 'pirate' having starred in no less than five pirate films - seen in the Hope and Anchor - Tasmania's oldest pub Argh me hearties! Perhaps it was passing the smuggler's pub in Sandy Bay today, but for some reason I am moved to write about pirates – no, not those who rip videos or those who attack pleasure craft or even oil rigs in the South China Sea, but the old fashioned swashbuckling kind. Though the Tasmanian ones may not have worn cocked hats or had parrots on their shoulders, they were nevertheless a big item in Old Hobart Town. As curator of the Australian Maritime Museum Dr Stephen Gapps wrote in his “ Pirate Tales ”  “If there was ever a scourge of piracy in Australian history, it was in Tasmania during the 1820s to 1850s, when Van Diemen’s Land was the repository of the largest number, and many of the most hardened and desperate, of convicts in the colonies. ‘Piratical seizure’ was ...