Tag: Hobart-7000

Eight Things I Hate About Living In Hobart




You might also want to read my follow up to this post, Eight Things I Hate About Living In Hobart – Six Years On

Following on from my post about things I love about living in Hobart, here are eight things I hate:

  1. The public transport system. It sucks badly. If you want to go anywhere by bus after 6pm or on a weekend, forget it.
  2. People complaining about the public transport system. People love complaining about Metro (I’m one of them). It smells. It’s always late. It goes nowhere near where you want to go. All this complaining is really bad; what we need to do is all get on the busses and give them the money they need to fix it. At the moment I can (and regularly do) catch a bus and be the only person on it.
  3. Bogans. Individually Bogans are fine. I know quite a few, and they’re lovely people (mostly). It’s just when they get into groups; you start to get the feeling deep inside you that it’s no longer safe and you should leave. It’s not a good thing that The Powers That Be decided to build entire suburbs of public housing, which have now become ghettos.
  4. There’s not very much to do. Assuming you don’t drink alcohol (which I don’t), there’s very few things of great excitement in Hobart (if you have ideas, leave comments please!).
  5. Rubbish TV stations. People on the mainland get Channel 7, Channel 9 and Channel 10, as well as digital radio. We get Southern Cross, WIN TV, and TDT, which are bad impersonations of the mainland stations. I know Tasmania is a small market, but wouldn’t it be cheaper then to copy the stations over exactly as they are on the mainland and just change the evening news bulletin?
  6. Badly surfaced roads. I know this is a complaint pretty much everywhere in the world, but in Hobart’s suburbs it’s getting pretty ridiculous. Neither of the two electorates that Hobart covers (Denison and Franklin) are marginal seats (in fact pretty solidly Labor) so there’s not a lot of money spent pork-barrelling here.
  7. Slow Internet. We’re at the end of the world and there’s only a few Internet cables coming into the state. Add to that the high prices charged by ISPs in Australia generally, and it’s a pretty bad situation. The National Broadband Network (NBN) promises to fix the speeds, but at what cost?
  8. The jokes about two-headed Tasmanians when you travel to the mainland. It’s getting old guys, seriously.

Eight Things I Love About Living In Hobart




  1. The natural environment. In Hobart, you’re always really close to nature. Shadowing over the entire city is Mount Wellington, the suburbs are built around beaches and there’s more parks than you can poke a stick at.
  2. Everything is really close. I can drive from one end of the city to the other in about 30 minutes. The CBD is small enough to cover on foot without getting tired.
  3. You’re at the end of the Earth. If there’s going to be a nuclear war, Hobart is the place to be if you want to survive. It’s about as far away from anywhere as it’s possible to be, and still have an international airport.
  4. The weather. Despite how much Hobartians love complaining about it, it’s really not that bad. It doesn’t get stinking hot in the summer, nor is it freezing cold in winter. We don’t have acid rain and we’re not on a fault line.
  5. There’s still enough drinking water to go around. For the moment.
  6. The city itself is beautiful. Aside from a few buildings which really need to get pulled down, everything in Hobart is generally very pretty. The flower beds are all tended to nicely as well.
  7. The busses are always empty. To a Hobartian, a ‘full’ bus is one where more than half the seats are taken. If anybody has to stand up… well, something has probably gone wrong.
  8. It’s only an hour’s drive into the middle of nowhere. When you get there, there’s tonnes of pretty mountains and rivers where you can walk. And that’s probably the most underated thing of all.