Zulus in Tasmania - Passage to an Island

“Do you have any idea of just how good the fly-fishing is in Tasmania?” I gurgled through my cornflakes as the dream job leapt at me like a startled Springbok from the pages of our local Sunday rag. “I don’t want to live in Tanzania and we’ve just bought this house for God’s sake, just forget it!” was Jackie’s geographically challenged riposte.

It was all over one month later. The company advised that they no longer intended filling the position so it was back to bolted doors, burglar guards and biltong for the two of us, or so we thought. No sooner had we accepted our fate, the company advised of new opportunities in the offing and what was to follow proved a roller coaster year of hope, dread, tears, anguish and finally bon voyage. We were off to a little island, a blob sitting just below Australia, a place neither of us would ever have dreamed of visiting, let alone one day call home.

“Tasmania, the weather’s atrocious my boy, always raining and the sun never shines, it’s nothing like Zululand you know.” Glaring in Jackie’s direction for support, the wizened farmer was in full flight, conjuring up every trick in the book to keep his son on African soil. Dlamini, the farm Sangoma (Witch Doctor) expressed grave misgivings of our impending departure, clucking on about the bones not falling right and that now was not the time to be deserting the farm. I couldn’t help but notice a bottle of my fathers finest single malt whiskey snugly ensconced in the old man’s grog cabinet as we left his kraal. We were set, not even the strongest team of Zulu oxen were going to stop our passage to Tasmania.

Temporary residence visas in hand and a hastily arranged Saturday garage sale saw us standing on the driveway at dusk with three boxes. Two were filled to the brim with fly fishing paraphernalia, the third only half full of arbitrary family heirlooms that ‘management’ insisted we couldn’t sell, and two suitcases. Jackie’s supressed tears proved that the sight of our worldly belongings trussed into no more than five receptacles was just too much for some. A penchant for travelling light, my lust for adventure refuelled, the whole episode left me hugely satisfied that we had managed to dispose of a whole heap of crap so expeditiously. I kept asking, much to Jackie’s disgust, why we hadn’t done it all before.

Duchess, our Staffordshire Terrier carried a repertoire of barks which over time I had learnt to decipher. They ranged across the spectrum from a relaxed, ‘watch your step and don’t come any closer dude’ to ‘Mate, one step closer and I’ll have your nuts for hors d’oeuvres’. A version of the latter had me sprinting around the side of the house, grazing the full length of my left shin on a picket fence in the process, fully expecting to see the last of our boxed belongings carted off on the shoulders of some needy local. An angry Mfezi, the deadly Black Necked Spitting Cobra was the last thing I expected to encounter.

Otto, our “fearless” Dachshund on hearing the Staffordshire’s alarm, promptly joined in the fray leaving me pulling the Staffordshire from the snake, fending the Sausage Dog off with a bloodied left leg and shielding my own eyes from the blinding venom of the Cobra with spare hand. Dlamini’s repetitive cries of “I foresaw all of this in the bones” did nought to calm the chaos. All of this one day before our departure, we could barely wait to get out of Africa.

Teary farewells, Dlamini conceding to the bones finally falling correctly and we were on our way. Arriving in Hobart on the 3rd of January 2001, a champagne day of wall to wall sunshine, 30° temperatures and not a breath of wind, we scoffed at the weather sceptics, only to bow deeply to their superior knowledge on the 3rd of July, the genuine onset of Tasmania’s winter that year.

Our first impressions of Hobart, the last day of the Taste of Tasmania 2001 will be with us for ever. On that first evening as we weaved our way home on foot through Battery Point we marvelled at how people, many lone women were able to walk the city in safety. It’s a feature of Hobart that we should cherish and do everything to maintain. We haven’t missed a ‘Taste’ since, in fact so strong is our commitment to this Hobart icon that yours truly, in 2003 was frog marched from the venue by two burly constables following a fanatical display of support for Tasmanian Pinot Noir and an adamant refusal on my part to leave the venue at the request of the local constabulary.


As for the fishing, many a fly, blue Zulu included has been dislodged from the nape of my neck and even one from the lobe of my right ear. In eight years of plying the lakes of the central highlands, I’ve yet to remove one from the kype of a monster brown. Guidance from the bones of Zululand has it that we are still paying homage to our new waters, patience will eventually yield the desired result and success should not be expected in the near future.

We do miss Zululand, the wildlife, the people and while the guttural squawk of the Yellow Wattlebird has replaced the haunting call of the Burchell’s Coucal, we wouldn’t swap the flute-like carolling of the Magpie or the cacophony of the laughing Kookaburra for anything.