Salamanca Wharf’s MACq 01 markets itself as not only somewhere plush to lay your head for the night, but the full bedtime story as well. “These rooms tell tales,” declares the establishment’s website, with each of those tales defined through “five character traits” to ensure that guests “will really begin to understand what makes us Tasmanian”. The traits are “colourful and quirky”, “grounded yet exceptional”, “fighting believers”, “curious and creative” and “hearty and resilient”.

The ethos appears to have paid off, with MACq 01 picking up a string of awards since its opening. My own experience of the hotel is limited, but even a short stop for a coffee reveals that the building’s narrative ambitions are hard to escape. Glass cabinets surrounding the dining room highlight Aboriginal history in the region, and even the toilet features narratives on the wall that recall the history of Hobart’s waterfront as it might once have been experienced from that location.

There is something charming about the blurred line where art meets human need, but as elegant as MACq 01 is, all of it is carefully constructed to create that experience, layering its own narrative over the top of what would otherwise be an entirely personal journey. It might well provoke the question: how far could that concept go if we let it?

Enter the House of Mouse.

If you ever want to know what something looks like when taken to its most extreme, the Walt Disney Company has your back. Recently, the brand announced “Storyliving”, a series of carefully curated and designed residential communities, beginning with a 10-hectare “grand oasis” named Cotino near the Santa Ana mountain range in California.

Disney describes the location as a “living painting”, “infused” with the magic of their “imagineers”. Certainly, the promotional images for the project call to mind this purported sense of luxury, and while it is hard to tell exactly how structured and controlled Disney’s ambitious locales might be, the concept images for Cotino certainly look like the sort of place that anyone would race to for a holiday – complete with a beach park operated by “Crystal Lagoons Technology” and special access to a “club-only” beach area where additional Disney entertainment can be found.

In many ways, this isn’t a million miles away from the narratives composed and experienced at a waterfront hotel in Hobart, except for a small but crucial difference: you don’t just visit a Disney Storyliving location, it becomes your life. The happiest place on earth is now your home.

. . .

It is hard for me to divine where a line has been crossed between MACq 01 and Storyliving, but I think that perhaps it is this: MACq 01 is a place where leaving is also part of the narrative; guests inhabit a moment that infuses history and imagination with their own holiday, and then a few days later they climb into their cars and return to the world they left behind. Disney Storyliving’s Cotino is a book or film that you fall into and which you are never supposed to return from.

It is possible that my concerns here are merely a sign of my own increasing obsolescence. Like Disneyland, or any other theme park, there is something comforting about a carefully managed experience that highlights immersion in worlds of escapism, but at the same time perhaps it isn’t unreasonable to imagine that we should be wary about when escape becomes reality. It is one thing to love fiction, quite another to bunker down inside the illusion and refuse to leave. Play can quickly become obsession.

Stories are supposed to be the imaginative tools that help us better understand our own past, the lives of others and the world around us. I have no objections to the aspirations of a business that uses this as part of its branding in the manner of MACq 01. We need not fear escapism, for there is so much in our world that it feels entirely appropriate to escape from. At Storyliving, however, the escape is life itself. It may be a world of stunning beauty and considered design, but it is also created, curated and fabricated. It is a dream from which there is no waking, and it should offer us a vital reminder that the tales that we tell ought to turn our heads back towards reality. They are tools of change. They are instruction manuals for a much bigger reality.

A hotel we can check out of, but a home is a little more challenging. I applaud the inclusion of narrative in public spaces, but let us strive not to forget that we have the obligation of the end point. Stories are paint, varnish and veneer: the thing made beautiful and meaningful, but not the thing itself. When the time is right, we must be prepared to let them go. We must awaken.

The real world needs us, and it is always waiting. Check out is at 10am.

Lyndon Riggall is a northern Tasmanian writer and English teacher at Launceston College and co-host, with Annie Warburton, of the Tamar Valley Writers’ Festival Podcast. His first picture book for children, Becoming Ellie, was published by Forty South in 2019. He can be found at www.lyndonriggall.com.