A SACRED HILL
Several place names on the mountain have religious denotations: Pulpit Rock, The Lectern, Cathedral Rock, The Devil’s Throne; but when, why and how did/has the mountain become a place of religious veneration, sacred?
As the highest places on Earth, mountain tops are the nearest places to the heavens above and this ancient kinship was made for kunanyi/Mount Wellington by British and Tasmanians writers very early, but a great deal more than epithets is required to demonstrate religious veneration.
Governor General Sir Issac Issacs made the bond divine: ‘Towering Wellington, standing like some eternal monarch, pointing the way to the highest.’ [Mercury 12 March 1932] A few years later, during the 1940s, a Hobart poet named Myer described the religious aura of the mountain and rhymed the word sacred.
Half way up Mount Wellington I stay
To hear sweet music, celestial chords,
Much sweeter than the spoken words,
Half way up Mount Wellington I pray.
Cover of a booklet showing the order of sermons, readings and hymns for a divine Dawn Service
Another poet known as ‘Mulga Mick’ persuaded the cloaked chaplains of Hobart to sermonise upon the Pinnacle on Easter Sunday in 1937 and again in 1938. Hundreds walked up the mountain in the dark for the event. Alas, both Services were thwarted by the capriciousness of the heavens, the glory of the sunrise entirely blotted by blustery fogs.
In Mount Wellington in a Storm, (Mercury Jan 7, 1899) the writer E.P.D exclaimed: ‘You feel you are in one of Nature's temples, in which every rock and loose stone is painted with fair colours, accurately tinted, and in perfect harmony.’ Maria Grist transcribed a transcendent experience from the diary of Edith McCance who, gazing at the sun on the summit, glimpsed from below ‘the beauty of the Higher Life’ in 1888.
“After a heavy snow storm the sun suddenly burst upon the peak. To gaze on it was a delight because the gazer was fully conscious of its short-lived beauty. I often think we get glimpses here on earth of the beauty of the Higher Life.”
“Even still upwards rises the crowning peak, where, at a height of 4166 feet, earth kisses heaven.”
A geologist named S T Wintle, inspired by the echoes of thunder booming among the mountain’s crags, wrote Ode to Mount Wellington in 1864. Something religious was awoken in him by the mountain’s sublimity.
when rolling thunder's hollow boom
loud echoes among thy crags
then dost thou look
most terribly sublime
and doth awake
a true religion
in the soul subdued.
Quotation from a speech at the Opening of the Lower Reservoir by Governor Fox during the 1860s
Wintle’s engagement via the Sublime was felt by men and women living before Wintle as well as long after. A celebrated account of 1837 in The Hobart Town Courier—albeit replete with playful mythological references—reported Jane (Governor’s wife) Franklin’s second expedition to the Pinnacle as a caravan of ‘pilgrims’ who visited ‘the shrine’ and awakened before dawn to sit upon the summit’s ‘sublime throne’ and behold ‘the god of day’.
Conventional analogies to a distant heavenly realm appear throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. All suggest what the anonymous writer below asserted even earlier:
“The heart of that man must be made of stone that can ascend Mount Wellington in Van Diemen’s land without improvement both moral and intellectual. ”
Lady Jane’s evocation of the mountain top as a Sublime throne evokes a Romantic-era literary experience of awe, terror and awe. This Romantic frame still holds sway, however even awe is not proof of religious veneration and the idea that some modern animistic cult of worship has developed around the mountain is absurd but by the very fact that the matter is pondered is significant.
How many believers in the sacredness of the mountain are there today—when belief is in retreat—how many paganistic worshippers of the mountain are there? A handful, perhaps.
But to more than a few, the mountain itself is sacred. The eternally and indescribably seductive monument is first described as sacred in the winter of 1908.
A surprising number of people seek to rest eternally in the sunshine, expressing their final wish as My ashes be taken to the top of the Mountain to be carried into heaven by the wind. Unsigned 1908 letter to Hobart’s Daily Post.
The 2012 Wellington Park community survey recorded the lived experience of over 300 people. (Emotional territory.) About ten percent of the respondents shared spiritual experiences provoked by the mountain or by a special place on the Mountain. They described awe, mystery, grace, Otherness, rapture, submergence, assimilation, benevolence, enlightenment, and re-creation.
In 2026 the state government of Tasmania’s Our Mountain’s Future strategic review addressed contemporary spiritual practices. Alas, it combined responses for cultural and spiritual activities, still, 11% undertake cultural or spiritual activities on the mountain and in the future up to 25% of respondents would like to do more. The meaning of the mountain for 29% was as a nature sanctuary, for 24% it is an icon, for 14% it has cultural and spiritual significance, for 9%, it is a Weather guardian. The strongest response for cultural and spiritual significance, at 26%, was in the Aboriginal community.
The two surveys (together with a UTAS research project) allow a guesstimate of how widespread the Mountain’s sacredness across Hobart is, conceivably suburb by suburb.
Single figures for spiritual activity: Brighton (2%), Derwent Valley (4%), Clarence 8% and Kingborough 9%. Higher: Sorell 11%, Glenorchy 13%, and on top at 14%, Hobart. It’s a thing. It is five per cent of the region’s population. That might not seem many—it is about half the number of adherents of Catholicism or Anglicanism—but it is significantly more than any other faith.
On the same maths, however, the overwhelming majority do not experience or believe in it. Richard Flanagan ruminated on the mountain as a holy place in 1995. Diffident, he didn’t want to argue for it, he wrote, as any sort of holy place, but then said … ‘maybe I am even among them’ for whom it is a holy place.
A further dimension to the mountain’s spiritual significance is in its indigenous place.
“sacred Aboriginal-led ceremonies on the mountain” for all in 2021 (Hobart City Council website)
SBS
In Stoddard’s the mountain, Chapter Two is entitled ‘The First Stories’ and the author suggests that “Mount Wellington’s strong shape calls for a creation story; yet there are none to speak of”, but then she finds “the shreds of legends” in a cosmological account of the Wellington Range preserved in the Cotton Papers and transmitted in a letter received from Cotton by Michael Sharland in 1972 who wrote in the Mercury that “The black Tasmanian’s may have had their own spiritual regard for this densely-clothed mountain in early times, and, no doubt, justifiably so.” May.
Stoddard also quotes Greg Lehman saying “To the Aboriginal community, the spirit of the Mouheneenner still moves in the wind and amongst the trees of the Mountain”.
“paliti Pakana ngini makara lumi/
The spirit of our ancestors are still here.”
The bumper sticker: “kunanyi is sacred” appeared about 2019.
The nature and context of palawa belief was a subject of formal but private consultation between the Wellington Park Trust and the Tasmanian Aboriginal community in 2013 and this is now ongoing with the Trust’s remarkable Palawa Elders dialogue.
HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCE
Places that have a spiritual significance to a community group can be recognised as heritage sites at the state, national and international levels. Spirituality is a social value. This may merge with the “profound sense of place” noted in the WPMP and in a written submission to the Our Mountain’s Future by the HCC.
The biblical or church architectural references in placenames— so common as to be cliches—are insignificant. Tasmania has six Pulpit Rocks as well as the Devil’s Backbone, Earhole, Elbow, Eye, Throat and Thumb, also his Rock, Hill, Nest, Dell, Den, Gap, Gate, Chimney, Kitchen, Pot, Run, Sewer and Whirlpool, and his Throne, Trap, Tower and Teapot. Likewise the conventional analogy of mountain tops to the empyrean realm of heaven lacks significance. Moreover, the aura of sanctity in the mountain’s enormity, its transient atmospheric effects of gale and thunder, cloud and mist, snow and sunlight, or colourful harmony, is not highly significant either as these are far from unique; notwithstanding that such qualities are significant to the heritage significance of the mountain’s aesthetic value.
The sacred and the sublime intertwine. The sacred has a secular denomination. A definition of sacred (from the Latin sacre) is ‘that which is set apart as entitled to veneration and protection’. Sacre’s simile in English is holy—likely derived from whole. The holy is ‘that which must be preserved whole or intact’ or ‘that which cannot be defiled or injured with impunity’. In the beginning of the Wellington Park Management Plan it is written that The Wellington Park Management Trust is charged with the protection and preservation of the Park’s environmental and cultural features and values in their virtually undisturbed condition. To preserve the Park against violation or encroachment the Trust has powers of refusal, can issue fines, and authorise legal proceedings. The Park may not be defiled—but if it is defiled, not with impunity. The Trust is invoking a dimension of the sacred rooted in the sense not of Holy Writ but of Justice. And this has relevance to its heritage significance.
HERITAGE assessment
No specific assessment of the mountain’s spiritual significance has been done. The only hint we know of is in a 2010 historic heritage Assessment on The Mount Wellington Summit Area wherein the Park’s value to the state is ‘underscored’ by a ‘spiritual importance’. (see refs).
ENSHRINE suggests that its significance is outstanding at the state threshold and has high national significance for its rarity as well as its history.
REFERENCES
On the mountain by Dombriviskis, Flanagan & Kirkpatrick 1995 page 28
the mountain compiled by Emily Stoddard, HCC and WPMT 2004 page 9-10.
Our Mountain’s Future Consultation Summary, multiple references [search Spiritual]