Connection and solace found on the way to Cradle.

Ana-Maria, a Belgian flight attendant and student of criminology, speaks Flemish, French and Romanian. She carries around a little metal box full of her diaries and gems of knowledge garnered from the places she visits and people she meets along the way.

Ana-Maria came to Tasmania to experience the southern lights as well as what she heard was a very spiritual experience at Port Arthur. Thia, who met Ana-Maria at a Queensland youth hostel through a friend, is an English poet who doesn’t talk much. She enjoys being immersed in nature and allows its spiritual inspiration to flow into her poetry. She came to Tasmania for the farm work advertised through Facebook.

Thia is of Kenyan and Italian descent. One of eight children, she was forced to leave home when she was 15 after becoming estranged from her family. This followed reports made by teachers after finding signs of abuse on her.

Although quiet, she did open up about the experience of racism that her skin colour brought about, in her life, on a regular basis, and the psychological effect it had on her development as a young woman.

In fact, Thia recounted an experience at one of the Deloraine pubs, recently, where a man approached her and asked her to step outside. Thia said she could not say whether the man was staff or a guest, but he felt entitled to direct her to remove herself from the building.

“He called me over and asked me to go outside to talk to him. I was happy to go and have a chat because I wanted a cigarette, but was gobsmacked when he asked me to leave. He said, ‘we don’t want your kind around here’.”

It was only after a father figure, in the potato farming group that she was with, spoke to the man at the pub, that Thia was left unharassed.

“I have often been mistaken for being Aboriginal and I’m not sure if it was the case in this instance, but that did happen quite a lot when I was on the mainland. Because of this, I spoke to Aboriginal people, there, about their experiences and they told me that fear was the main reason they chose not to look strangers in the face.”

Thia said she had been dealing with racism her whole life and it had made her prefer not to be around people.

Ana-Maria Dumitrache and Thia Aweis.

The potato season now over, Ana and Thia plan to see some of the natural wonders around Tasmania before leaving the island in mid-July. They called into the shop on their way to Cradle Mountain, as part of this quest.

What was meant to be a brief stop, turned into an evening of chess, jokes, laughter and a rare sense of connection to be cherished.

I shared homemade soup, a lentil curry and some wine, after the shop closed. They gifted me the book, “This Wild And Precious Life” which talks about the itch that we all have for face-to-face connection, with others, and to pursue a more precious way of life.

We ended up speaking and laughing for more than five hours, around the warmth of the Hearth, sharing our experiences and dreams for the future.