Edition 39
TASMANIA – The Tipping Point?
- Published 5th March, 2013
- ISBN: 9781922079961
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
For many Tasmanians a darker reality lies behind the seductive tourism brochures showcasing the state’s pristine wilderness, gourmet magazine articles celebrating its burgeoning food culture, and newspaper stories gasping at a world-leading art museum.
Tasmania ranks at or near the bottom among Australian states on virtually every indicator of socio-economic performance – including levels of employment, income, investment, education and health.
Where does Tasmania’s future lie? Has Tasmania reached a ‘tipping point’, politically, economically and culturally?
In TASMANIA – The Tipping Point? Griffith REVIEW serves up strategic slices of Tasmania’s past, present and future.
Thinkers, writers and doers from Tasmania and beyond, including members of its extensive diaspora, challenge how Tasmania is seen by outsiders and illuminate how Tasmanians see themselves, down home and in the wider world.
Natasha Cica asks does Tasmania need an intervention?;
Peter Timms writes of Lady Franklin’s heirs and successors;
Jonathan West asks what’s wrong with Tasmania, really?;
Cassandra Pybus on tin dragons and silver smoke screens;
David Walsh with a story of humility and hubris from Glenorchy;
Danielle Wood says you can check out any time you like;
Jo Chandler tells how from little things, big things grow;
Kathy Marks on surviving, belonging, challenging and enduring.
With more works from Rodney Croome, Will Bibby, Richard Eccleston, Lea McInerney, David Hansen, Greg Lehman, Luke Wright, Scott Rankin, Matthew Evans, Moya Fyfe, Fleur Fallon, Margaret Merrilees, Celia Lendis and Joanna Talberg with fiction from Favel Parrett, Romy Ash, Erin O’Dwyer and Matthew Lamb.
Featuring a striking picture gallery from Julie Gough titled ‘Fugitive history’.
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In this Edition
We need to talk about the northwest
IT HAD BEEN raining the first time I visited far northwest Tasmania. Which isn't unusual. Rain, that often-fickle decider of rural fate, falls regularly and in volume on this little corner of the world. It can be a challenge for all farmers, too much...
Tasmanian utopias
OVER THE PAST three decades, the green hinterland beyond the population centres of the state has held an increasing allure for those working in the ideas, design, gourmet, boutique, arts, slow, simple, bespoke, specialist, teacher, media, craft, commentator, software, speechwriter, viniculture, luthier, boat-builder and...
The dancing man
I NEVER MET the dancing man. I watched him plenty of times in a Hobart mall, but not once did I shake his hand or ask him his name. He was just the dancing man. I suppose, though, without ever speaking to each other,...
Tasmanian gothic
SOME DARK SECRETS run so deep that they slip from view. The hole left in our collective conscience is gradually plugged, with shallow distractions and awkward half-truths. Questions, if uttered, pass unheard. An uneasy and enduring silence prevails.So it has been in Tasmania since...
A raid
TASMANIA WILL ALWAYS be a prisoner of its Vandiemonian past, hostage to its ugly penal and ethnocidal histories. It may be an exaggeration to say that you can see the blood running down Macquarie Street (no, Virginia, it's just the log trucks), but the...
More than two stories
A FRIEND ASKED me what drew me to live in Tasmania on and off for the past thirty years. I sketched an outline of the island on a blank page in my notebook.'It's a heart,' I said.'It could be a bum,' she replied.I went...
Canary in the mine
ON 18 JANUARY 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip and his small fleet finally entered Botany Bay, before making their short voyage around South Head to establish a settlement at Sydney Cove a week later. This not only marked the beginning of European settlement in Australia,...
China in the Tasmanian imaginary
THE SHARP CHILL of winter has settled upon southern Tasmania and I now rise at the same time as the sun to witness an eerily beautiful phenomenon unique to this part of the world. The 'Bridgewater Jerry' is caused by cold air draining down...
The cost of hubris
THE DEMISE OF Gunns in the spring of 2012 was as much a psychological shock to Tasmanians as it was economic. Alongside cricket stars Ricky Ponting and 'Boonie', Gunns had become the best-known Tasmanian. On 25 September 2012, Gunns went into voluntary administration after...
Obstacles to progress
FOR MOST TASMANIANS a darker reality lies behind the seductive tourism brochures showcasing the state’s pristine wilderness, gourmet-magazine articles celebrating its burgeoning food culture, and newspaper stories gasping at a world-leading art museum.
Churning the mud
PREJUDICE, IGNORANCE AND shallowness characterise the current national debate on Tasmania and its future. On the political right the island is portrayed as the kind of poor, tree-hugging, gay-loving, welfare-dependent, enterprise-free society Green-dominated Labor governments inevitably create. These images fit a narrative established in...
Assuming the mantle
ON THE MORNING I visit Ancanthe, a billowing veil of rain is drifting off the mountain, reducing the trees to downy silhouettes. Then, just as I round the bend past the Pura Milk factory and start up the hill, the sun suddenly appears –...
The cracks are how the light gets in
TASMANIANS BANG ON about 'place' a lot – at least some of us do. Maybe because Tasmania can be so affecting and beautiful, as a place. Certainly it was the resonance of one of Tasmania's significant sites that drew me back here in 2006....
Status anxiety
'JO, WHY ARE you going to the west coast of Tasmania?' a puzzled friend asked me in 1974. 'That's the end of the world.'Ah, but what a world! A world of tangled mountains and temperate rainforests; of sand-dunes and wild, windswept beaches; of Tasmanian...
Outside looking in
I QUITE LIKED living on the periphery when I was growing up in Tasmania and I quite like living on the periphery now. Where once the centre towards which I yearned included everywhere beyond the edges of my island state, these days that centre...
Hotel Royale on Liverpool
WITH A NOD to those jokes about Tasmanians (yes, you know the ones), it's been said that as a Tasmanian girl I did fine community service by going offshore to find fresh genetic material. And not only that, I also increased the island state's...
The digestion of history
WE ARE WEDGED around the edges of my grandmother's dining table. It is a large and imposing table, but has come down in the world. It is now fitted (how did they do it?) into a small suburban room already lined with china cabinets...
Censored conversations
A DOG runs up to my husband on a windswept beach on Sunday morning. Tess is a Jack Russell cross, caramel and white and a question mark white fluffy tail, an RSPCA-rescued dog, now eager to please. 'Not a bad place to live, this,'...
When the apple cart tipped
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...
Channelling Mannalargenna
Winner, 2013 Walkley Award, All Media Coverage of Indigenous Affairs 'YA PAKANA KARATI, pulingina milaythina pakana-mana-tu.' ('Hello all blackfellas and white friends, welcome to my Aboriginal land.') Hands clasped behind her back, three-year-old Sienna is performing a Welcome to Country at the Aboriginal Children's Centre...
The science laboratory
THE CAPTAIN STEERING Australia's Antarctic science program into its second century can't risk getting caught in the wake of history as he casts off from Hobart's Macquarie Wharf and heads south down the Derwent River.In the summer of 2013 there is no room on...
Long grass over home
Winner of the 2012 Josephine Ulrick Literature PrizeFor Jannine GrahamMRS ESDALE BOUGHT her petrol there until she got too old and had her licence taken from her. There was a car accident in the summer and although she was not at fault they still...
On Bruny
THEY LEFT HOBART as dusk was falling. Not an orange dusk with stiff black silhouettes but a green dusk, slightly shaky, not quite sure whether it was day or night. Their car was new and European. Harold guided it through the Battery Point laneways...
Damming
PATRICK SWIMS THROUGH the mountains. The eddies waver them. They're the colour of oil slick. The light blushes his cheeks. He's swimming breaststroke. It's so cold he can't feel his body. There are clouds in the water too. They pass across the surface quickly....
Across the Bass Strait
Mum was sitting by herself on a bench attached to the wall of the ship under a Perspex roof. We sat next to her holding on to the bottom of the bench. I told Mum that I had been sick and she wiped my forehead and cheek and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ and it looked like she was crying. She said it was just the sea spray and the cold. And it was cold. It was freezing and the wind cut into my back like I had no skin at all. I could hear the water crack against the ship, feel it hit then hear the spray shoot up. Only I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything past the light cast out on the deck. Out there the world was raging in the blackness.