‘It’s about time’: proud Tasmania ready to host its first Ashes Test

Most of the time, on the southern or eastern coast of Tasmania, you can feel how close you are to Antarctica. You feel it on the wind. Ten days by icebreaker across boilerplate seas, this is the last point of land between you and it. The gulf snaps back like elastic. Down the island’s flank, it flicks green fringes into the salt. Even when allegations of summer lie over its land, the water mutters of ice and cold. An edge to the weather. Tasmania, hunched with its head turned inward like a sleeping bird, in a futile attempt to deflect the white continent’s attention.

The capital city of Hobart sits on that southern coast, the wind in its face, rushing up the mouth of the River Derwent. The artist Jon Kudelka dreamed of that channel, then painted it, so full of whales that you could walk from shore to shore on their backs. It may even once have been true.

This week Tasmania will host an Ashes Test match for the first time. “It’s big,” says the typically understated Ric Finlay. ABC Radio’s premier cricket statistician has lived on the island all his life. “Everyone knows that because I don’t think we’ve ever had days booked out before. People down here scratch their heads a bit. There’s a feeling that it’s about time.”

In national terms Tasmania often feels like an afterthought. There is a whole genre of maps and art and logos that have used the shape of the mainland continent without its final piece of punctuation, and a genre of Tasmanians who delight in pillorying the omission. Within a box of Vegemite Shapes – biscuits in the outline of Australia – there are accompanying pieces of an outsized Tasmania, just in case.

The feeling is justified. By far the smallest state, with a population of just over half a million,