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

Australia’s often overlooked smallest state feels it has long earned its chance to host England and wants to do so again

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.

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