It’s a funny, incoherent place, Eaglehawk Neck. There’s no planning or unity to the suburb. The houses are a mismatch of eras and materials, as properties were subdivided and new dwellings sprang up: old fibro shacks with decaying utes abandoned in their yards; log cabins framed by banksias with wide verandas; brick houses with trimmings so neat and tidy they scream suburban pride, some of which were rendered up in the late nineties or early noughties in an attempt to turn them trendy again; kit Colorbond monstrosities straight from the shop; and jaunty shipping container mini-houses that suggest off-grid living, even though they’re plugged into the mains.

Our place is one of the old weatherboard shacks, circa 1940s, insulated and modernised into a warm and comfy home. We’re at the back of the bush suburb on a couple of acres, and the way the height of the trees and the fall of the land works, you wouldn’t even know we have neighbours—not that we really do; they’re all shackies anyway, only down in the school holidays.

Of course, there is that other suburb of Eaglehawk: Doo Town, the cluster of black, sump-oiled, Tas oak shacks, all of which are branded with doo-themed names that range from the hospitable ‘Doo Drop In’, to the more jazzy ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, to the contented ‘Thistle Doo Me’. Doo Town is located right near the boat ramp, and is such a microcosm it has its own postcode, distinct from the rest of Eaglehawk, so it’s not really a suburb of Eaglehawk at all, but its own little territory.

‘They’re a rare breed down there,’ Jem’s been known to say. ‘Rough as guts and kitsch as kittens.’

But I digress; to get to Flo’s I drove north, not south, so there wasn’t a doo in sight, although when Flo answered the door, she did say to me, ‘Lucy, do come in.’

That was a joke. She didn’t really. She’d scoff if anyone spoke so formally. Stick up the arse, that one.

‘Lucy, how are ya?’ was what I was really greeted with when she opened the front door. I was standing on her porch, admiring the magnificently flowering leucadendron in her garden. It was one of those orange spiky ones which look a lot like waratahs but aren’t native, but that native birds have a field day in nonetheless. She was wearing blue jeans that looked freshly ironed and her hair was plaited down her back.

‘Yeah, I’m all right. How’re you?’

‘Good, good,’ she said. ‘Come on in. We’re just making a cuppa.’

She led me into a carpeted lounge room, which was furnished with a free-standing wood heater, a shelf of framed photos, a squashy-looking brown leather three-seater couch, which had a cream, pink and navy crocheted throw draped along its headrest, and two old tweed armchairs that looked just like the chairs my grandparents used to own. On the walls were two timber-framed maps of the Tasman Peninsula—one that looked as though it was from colonial times, and the other, mid-twentieth century—and the husk of an enormous crayfish, mounted on a piece of Huon pine. She headed through the archway into the kitchen, but I diverged from her path so I could take a closer look at the trophy.