People say Tasmania is a pleasant throwback to an Australia of more neighbourly, antique rhythms – the striped Torana, the blockie, frontyard pumpkins, early closing, footpath crowds ogling neon signs as if they are cinema verité. They say her tragedy is she will one day catch up with us and become a similarly metastasising stampede towards internationalism and modernity.

But I think it’s not a provincial time-lag as much as a hard-headed commitment to localism that makes Tassie different. The north island is an example to Tasmania – a big sister who’s left home and moved to the city. Tasmania looks at us askance and shakes her head and says: “She’s going out with the wrong blokes, dancing to the wrong music, and is beguiled by a pretty frock of futurism that will one day be as recognisably risible as shoulder-pads.” Or something like that.

In peaceful times, patriotism is too big an idea and naturally reduces to something more intimate and tribal. And there is always an us-and-them psychology inherent in living on an island. We are adrift, alone, and though we share tenuous links by ferry and jet, we acknowledge no King from across the water. Bass Strait is a psychological moat making Tasmanians citizens of an imagined castle and clan.

I recently walked the Walls of Jerusalem in the Great Western Tiers wilderness, a high country of spiky heath, snowgums and slow pines where wallabies, pademelons and wombats thrive in the fresh absence of the thylacine. Dolerite moraines flow from crags down into valleys resembling Japanese gardens of cushion plants and gorse and countless clearwater tarns hanging one above the other, and green rosellas and currawongs calling.

One day, we walked in cloud while big rain became hail and thunder burst close and the white world strobed with lightning. The best place to experience a storm is from its heart. Next day, the sky filled with distance and we named faraway mountains.

Launceston is the right size and pace for someone my age who no longer needs the small hours and big games and names. Any town where you can get good pho is sophisticated enough for me these days. The Tamar, unlike most Australian rivers, pushes sufficient water to give it dignity and make it navigable by ships.

At Launceston’s Harvest Market, bread makers have conjured loaves from forgotten grains and rare yeasts. There are displays of multicoloured edible fungus – yellow, rose, grey, orange, brown, arrayed in spilt cornucopia-like tributes laid before an elf king. Even the carrot has its fans here and lies on tables in multi-hued bunches denying that it’s a humble root. Cheese makers have alchemised rare-breed milks into cheese wheels that are anthems to the nose and tongue.

At one stall, 80 tomatoes are laid out in rows like beetles in a museum, each on its own white pedestal, each a different variety, colour, shape and size. On a trestle next to these, 60 varieties of apple are ranked and named as if at an agricultural show, but every one of them, from the Jaunet to the Improved Foxwhelp, is for sale. Tiny geniuses bring their produce to town and sell it here to thankful Launcestonians who eschew the supermarket shelves laden with the insipid droppings of the agri-industrial giants.

But Tasmania is also hip, man. Her young have contracted the global epidemic of disfiguring lesions perpetrated by tattooists, and everywhere limbs are a canvas of platitudinous pictographs chosen from dog-eared catalogues the same way a befuddled diner chooses a red duck curry after contemplating the other 80 options on a laminated Thai lunch menu.

In Evandale, a town of antique shops and old pubs shaded by European trees, we went to see an exhibition of finalists in the Glover Prize for landscape painting, a competition named in honour of John Glover, the colonial artist. The judges had favoured paintings that were so abstract they’d lost touch with the land – and their audience. This cack-handed avant-gardism seemed a small-town attempt to be worldly. Which is an impulse Tasmania almost never stoops to, being populated by staunch islanders confident that they need to bend the knee to neither New York nor Sydney.