Tasmania

It's possible my current love of the Weekend Island - AKA Karragarra - comes from the fact that I grew up on an island - a much bigger one, but an island nonetheless.

My hometown is Hobart, Tasmania. The island of Tasmania is Australia's smallest state and Australia is the world's biggest island country, incidentally.

Technically, I grew up on an island off an island.

I left home at 17 to live in my mother's homeland of Scotland, then moved back to Tassie for a year when I was 22 - six years ago.

That was when I also bought my first-ever house, in the now-gentrified Hobart suburb of New Town. It cost me $210,000. It had three bedrooms, a bunch of ramshackle outhouses and no heating. It was more than 100 years old and had seen very little improvement in that time.

Basically, it needed a lot of work.

I was earning a pittance in my first job out of university. Needless to say, I lived in the worst of the three bedrooms and rented out the better two.

These are the photos I have of the house. It's definitely cute, but I'm glad I sold it a few years later to buy into the house that Dan and I now share (aka House Number 1).

From the street.

That's me! I look so young and cranky and thin...

That bar heater was the only heat in the house, until I eventually installed a tiny wood heater.

The kitchen, my favourite room.

After a year living in this desperately cold cottage, my flatmate Briohny - who answered an ad in the paper, moved in to that house and remains one of my dearest friends - and I decided we really couldn't call Tasmania home after all. It was too small, too cold, too stifling.

I found tenants for the house, we packed up Briohny's little hatchback with our possessions and then we drove north. We took a ferry to the mainland of Australia, drove for four days up the East Coast and ended up in the hippy-haven of Byron Bay.

Eventually, Briohny headed back to her home-state of South Australia and I wound up heading further north to Queensland, where I live to this day with the man I met just afterwards.

I have never lived in Tasmania since, probably never will again. I seldom even visit it, even though my family still call it home.

These days, I'm happy to be here among the palm trees of Queensland, although Dan and I will be going back to Tassie for a week over Summer. Bizarrely, my Mother bought land on Bruny Island - off Tasmania's coast - about five years ago.

We'll be spending Christmas on an island off an island off an island.