The first few people I ask roll their eyes. We don't talk about Rosehaven here.
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But I'm in Tasmania for the first time in five years partly because of the ABC series, set in the "fictional" town of Rosehaven, where Daniel McCallum (played by Luke McGregor) has returned because he couldn't hack it on the mainland.
That's the premise of the series, that gentle Daniel, bullied at school, is forced to move back home with his mum, Barbara, the local real estate agent, because he didn't have the skills to achieve glory in the big smoke.
The real story is, of course, that it is much harder for Tasmanian kids to make it in Tasmania than on the mainland. There are plenty of skilled jobs but it's a tiny state, so fewer opportunities. To hack it in Tasmania requires an unusual combination of skills – and may be why Tasmanians, more than any other Australians, are more likely to be doing multiple jobs at any one time.
Pro vice-chancellor at the University of Tasmania, and the bloke in charge of community partnerships and regional development for the university, David Adams, has another name for the Lukes of Tasmania. They are the regional returnees, who've been to the mainland and overseas and now recognise there is no better place than their home state. They long to return to the hills and the rivers, to the endless sky and raspberries and scallops, to the best beer* in the world. I'm sincerely hoping that in series three of Rosehaven, Grace, Daniel and Emma will set up a bed-and-breakfast, just like the rest of Tasmania, which is bursting with tourism beyond the fabulous David Walsh and his even more fabulous Museum of Old and New Art.
Tasmanians are making their own wealth beyond MONA, but whether the tourism boom is sustainable is the question that sustains Adams, whether it can have the scope and scale required to support the state through its transition from mining and logging. Right now, it is many cottage industries, based in those cottages from the Tarkine Wilderness to the south of Bruny Island, from wildlife tours to cheese makers, from ceramics workshops to folk festivals. The industry is hugely seasonal and the impact on workers is that their jobs are being casualised rapidly. Cherry pickers in summer can become apple pickers in autumn, but it's much harder for those working directly with tourists to have jobs when summer's over and we've all returned to our work.
As Adams puts it: "The tourism industry is multiple cottage industries which are cumulatively more than the sum of its parts."
Those who are employed or engaged in the tourism industry – from bird guides to cruise operators – are acutely aware of the fragile state of the industry. Some say Tourism Tasmania doesn't support tiny operators in the way it should. Others repeatedly criticise the logging and mining industries and one in particular described what Gunns did to Tasmania as akin to rape. I'm surprised by how political my tour guides have been, but then again I'm appalled by the gouged quarries and the vast tracts of land with piles of matchstick trees. Those more closely engaged with the environment appear to be more closely engaged with the politics, but away from the natural, others are making their own niches in the boom.
Rodney Dunn and Séverine Demanet started a cooking school in Lachlan at the Agrarian Kitchen 10 years ago. About eight months ago they opened a restaurant that is packed to its pressed metal ceiling day after day, mostly locals. Now Dunn and Demanet employ 20 people, many local, some new Tasmanians, mostly learning skills they didn't have before. It's industry where it didn't exist before. Local. Sustainable. That is, if you can hack the workload.
On the way to the class, I get lost. I pull in to a shop for directions and recognise it as the place where Daniel and Emma are turned away for wanting to pick their own muffins. I've found Rosehaven without even trying very hard. I ask Rodney what he thinks of the show. He's noncommittal but confirms my shop sighting. (I was more excited about this than about spotting the 40 spotted pardalote. OK, maybe not more. About the same.) He reminds me that Luke McGregor is originally a Tasmanian (Rodney isn't, but has become enthusiastically embraced by locals). Then I start thinking I can see the first house Daniel sold. Is it in Magra? Is the main street in Rosehaven really the main street of New Norfolk, just down the road from the Agrarian Kitchen restaurant?
Dunn mentions a review of the restaurant in The New York Times. He says the reviewer asked him if he liked the review, which praised the food but says it's a "bourgeois fantasy" sitting on the "precarious thrill of eating a $200 lunch on land that's stained by human misery". The reviewer will need to stop reviewing restaurants in Australia if she wants to avoid places of genocide and penal servitude.
Tasmania's weird like that. All the oxymorons*, the challenges, the hypocrisy, the contradictions. I ask David Adams if he's watched Rosehaven, thinking he will be in the school of "we don't talk Rosehaven here".
"Series two really blossomed and it's got that quirkiness that is so hard to find, we are now seeing that as a strength, rather than quirkiness is two heads."
Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney
Twitter: @JennaPrice
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