APPLE BLOSSOM BLESSING were an annual event for our family in the late 1960s and early ’70s. They were a coming together of a community based around family, faith and primary industry, and reflected the joy and expectation of the apple harvest ahead. And then they stopped – or we stopped going, I can’t remember which happened first. At the time, I was too young to understand that we – my apple-growing family and I – were living through a family business, an industry and a state in transition.

Not dissimilar to Tasmania now, where many families and communities are at the moment experiencing the social and economic transition from another foundation industry in this state, forestry.