Margate
Margate is a small town on the Channel Highway, twenty minutes south of Hobart. There's a park on the water at Dru Point, a train full of second-hand books, and a brewery in an old hop-drying shed. It's a good place to live, which is why we do.
What it also has is position. Ten minutes to Kingston, fifteen to the Bruny ferry, twenty to Hobart, twenty-five to the Huon Valley. You can do very nearly everything in the south of this state from here and still sleep in the same bed every night.
Most people who stay here are on their way to Bruny, or on their way back from it.
How far things are
Those are honest figures rather than optimistic ones. At half past midnight, on an empty road, it's eighteen minutes from our gate to the edge of Hobart — so nobody's getting there quicker than that. In the morning, allow a little more. We'd rather you arrived early than sat in the car wondering why we said twenty.
If you're going to Bruny
The ferry leaves from Kettering, about fifteen minutes down the highway, and it runs every twenty minutes from early morning until evening, every day of the year. The thing worth knowing is that it doesn't work on booked departures. It's a queue. You can buy the ticket online beforehand, but it only puts you in the line for the next available sailing, and every ticket is a return.
If you've booked the wilderness cruise from Adventure Bay, allow properly for it. The boat goes at eleven, and once you're off the ferry it's another forty minutes of driving to get there. From here that's a comfortable morning. From Hobart it's an early one.
Eating
Ten minutes up the road at Kingston Beach there are two we'd send anyone to, a short walk apart on Beach Road. The Salty Dog is the beachfront pub — open seven days, and the most reliable thing in the district. Boho at the Beach began as a café in a shop and has become more of a shop in a café.
Closer to home, Hopfields is a brewery five minutes up the Channel Highway, in a heritage-listed shed where the hops used to be hung and dried — the paddocks behind it were once acres of them. Nick and Bec had their wedding in the building, and when it came up they took it on. We keep meaning to go; everyone who has tells us to. Kitchen from half past eleven, dinner from five, and the fire pit is lit every Friday and Saturday.
Close to home
Kuuma is a wood-fired sauna on a boat, out of Margate Marina, seven minutes away. It takes eight people, cruises out into North West Bay, and then you get into the sea. Dawn sessions in winter, evenings in summer.
Inverawe is the largest landscaped native garden in Tasmania, nine and a half hectares of it, five minutes along the Channel Highway. It's planted to bring in birds and it works. Open Thursday to Monday, September to April.
The Margate Train is the last Tasmanian Government Railways passenger train, parked permanently beside the highway with its carriages turned into shops — books, bric-a-brac, odds and ends. The buffet car does pancakes, which is why half the district calls it the Pancake Train, and there's local ice cream. It's the closest thing on this page to our front gate, and the only one you can decide on at the last minute.
Dru Point, on the water at Margate, has the good playground — the one with the flying fox and the little road-safety bike track — plus barbecues and a dog beach. Snug Falls is twenty minutes south: about an hour there and back through wet forest, and the return leg is all uphill, so leave something in reserve.
When to come
March, if you have the choice. It's our best month for weather, the Bruny Island Bird Festival falls in March every second year, and A Taste of the Huon is in March too. January through April is our busy season, so book earlier for those.
Otherwise we get a lot of people who are here for something specific. The Cygnet Folk Festival in January, because there's very little to stay in at Cygnet. The Huon Show on the second Saturday of November, running since 1947 and still pulling thirteen thousand people to Ranelagh for the produce, the flowers and a very serious alpaca section. And the Sydney to Hobart, when the town fills and the overflow comes to us.