My fellow Tasmanians, I am more than proud to be here tonight launching Future Perfect.
I am thrilled.
Because this exhibition represents an extraordinary moment of liberation for Tasmanian art, the moment when it finally found the courage to emancipate itself from the shackles of petty government patronage and the blinkered horizons they necessarily imposed, the moment when our art finished moving from a peripheral position in Tasmanian society to a central one, the moment when it discovered that whatever its subject or aesthetic, that it could be as large, as extraordinary, as powerful as this island in which it originates.
Future Perfect is not a political exhibition. But it does arise out of a very real political struggle. Tasmania contains imprisoned within it extraordinary fresh forces, seething and bursting to break out. But when crushed by the idiocy of its bureaucracy and the lies and arrogance of its government, these forces lead only to gloom and despair. Only in our arts do they find positive expression.
This is why and how the public have come to see in Tasmanian art its hope, its truths, it possibilities, a future free from the cleafells of the past. This is why and how we have here tonight joined by this idea everyone from Gunter Grass in north Germany to Hash House Harriers of North Hobart.
As the painter Richard Wastell said to me last night, this exhibition is not about the forests. It is about free speech. It is about being able to say what we want, how we want, without being told by others what the terms and conditions of our art are to be. It's about our society finally finding the voice denied it in its government and in its media to say the many diverse, passionate things that must be said in a forum without rancour or division.
If we are an island that has produced a disproportionate number of gifted artists,I am afraid we could not, without risking the accusation of deceit, make the same claim for statesmen. And in the dismal parade of appalling governments we have had to endure, the Bacon Government may well be the the very worst. It is, most certainly, the most pro-big business government we have ever had. If you are not Gunns, Federal Hotels, Duke Energy or Woolworths doors slam closed. If you seek to express an opinion at odds with the government it will seek to suppress that voice.
Lies, innuedo, smears, the threat of no more employment: all these devices are used and used to great effect to bring an oppressive silence back on this island. And yet, at this time of darkness it is Tasmanian artists and writers who have stepped forward to speak of the light of truth.
They have of course been pilloried. We have had that great proponent of free speech, Robyn Archer, as recently as last week saying that artists should make their protest through their work and not through their actions. Is she saying that Vaclav Havel ought to have stuck to writing absurdist plays? That Zola should have written a novel about anti-semitism instead of writing openly about the Dreyfus case? That Solzenitsyn was wrong? This is the argument of the oppressors, the book burners, the soldiers compelling Socrates to drink hemlock. It is the solace of oppression, the acrid taste of tyranny.
Jim Bacon, the man who had the vanity of thinking he was the new Don Dunstan of the south has ended up being revealed as only another Joh Bjelke Petersen. His Government's abysmal handling of 10 Days on the Island has brought anguish to us all whether we are taking part in this festival or not. They have tried to divide us, to diminish us, to make us feel less, to say that unless Jim and Robyn bring in a clog dancing troupe from Malawi that we have no real culture. And for a time, a short time, they suceeded. Like many of my friends, I have despaired of my island home, of whether there was a future in this world whose Government was now so hostile to us, who, invoking Stalin's term for those intellectuals he found troublesome, derided as cultural fascists.
They defined Tasmania's interests as their interests, as their continuing hold on power and Gunns' profits, this sickly cabal of those fallen men of 1989, the burst saveloys of the union movement and bearded bureaucrats with attitudes even more ancient than their shirts. When Tasmanians chose to question the ongoing destruction of all that is unique and irreplaceable in our world we were lambasted as destroyers, conspirators. The language of treachery and betrayal was invoked against us.
In another time and place Henry Reynolds and Robyn Archer would have gleefully rowed us down the Derwent to the traitor's gate. And yet who is it who has betrayed our island, its unique beauty, its extraordinary power? Who is it selling its soul for a mess of pottage trying to clothe the tawdry, shameful nature of the exchange in the motley of an arts circus?
Who is Robyn Archer to say we are wrong? It is an easy thing for her to make jokes about John Howard to an inner city crowd in Melbourne or Sydney. But here, if you make a stand, you pay for it. It is hard. It is so, so hard. You pay for it over and over, with your name and your prospects for work in the island. You pay for it by being sent into exile in your own society. You pay for it by being allowed no honourable way to contribute to the betterment of your world. You pay for it by seeing what matters in your own world deliberately, shamefully ignored here in Tasmania.
This exhibition is featuring in articles and reports in Le Figaro in Paris. In The Guardian in London. In the Sydney Morning Herald. But you can guarantee the one place you won't read about it is in the Hobart Mercury, that tawdry collage of faxed press releases from the Pentagon and the Premier's Office.
It is, it is true, how the island has been run since convict times and it is how the island continues to be run, with fear and intimidation. When I read Robyn Archer has said money is like sausage meat, that it's better not to ask where it comes from, I am reminded of those performers in Germany who played Left-wing Brechtian theatre in the 1920s, and then in the 1930s swung to doing nationalist Right wing anti-semitic theatre under the Nazis. Robyn Archer chose to side with the politics of her paymaster.
I admire all my fellow artists who had the guts to refuse the money, to cop the abuse, the lies and the derision, and yet who continue to walk proud and unbowed. I admire them because as the idea of Australia languishes in a war not our own, in refugee internment camps where freedom is just a word to carve into your forearm, the idea of Tasmania has blossomed, an idea combining the land with a radical, generous vision of place and people.
I admire them because over many years, at first slowly and hesitantly, latterly more confidently, something strange has happened in consequence of their efforts here in Tasmania. Something wonderful. Something extraordinary.
We hear more and more these strange days of what we only once dreamt: that we might be defined not as a backward society of rednecks and hicks, a place haunted by the past, but as an island of imagination, a society of the future. Of Geoff Dyer's win of the Archibald Prize the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that this was just the latest symbol of, and I quote, "the mighty Tasmanian art renaissance, that continues to spill out poets, painters, writers and musicians."
This renaissance has happened not because of any Tasmanian Government but in spite of it, in oppisition to it. It happened because over many, many years Tasmanian artists and writers, with the arse out of their pants and only belief in their hearts have made their home and work here, sensing that this place, our island, was a good and worthy place to work, that its experience was a good and valid experience to divine, that its future was molten and that through their work they might help remake Tasmania in the raiment of dreams.
This renaisance is the culmination of a long journey. It happened, slowly, uneasily, painfully over many years. The lineaments of its beginnings can be traced in the work and passions of Edith Holmes, George Davis, Max Angus and Steve Walker. Its strange political power became manifest in the landscape photographs of Olegas Truchanas, and its deep abiding historical origins apparent in Amanda Lohrey's first novel. Slowly, ever so slowly something began growing here.
In the late 70s, like buds arising from the earth appeared the lyrical joy of several extraordinary sculptures by Peter Taylor, in which the hands and heads of men and women explode open into flocks of birds. How beautiful, how very beautiful these were, and how very beautiful were the great furniture pieces of Kevin Perkins, who made wood sing of the sorrow and wonder of the land from which it had been wrenched, a cry for a return to the source of its life, of origins.
There was the melancholic ache of Roger Schole's Tale of Ruby Rose, the eerie sighing of Dave Keeling's landscapes, the embrace of Philip Wolfhagen's, the passion of Pedro Stevenson, the exuberant tenderness of Geoff Dyer, the novels in a cabinet of that Leunig of furniture Pat Hall, the magical realist histories in a building of architect Robert Morris Nunn, the fierce aesthetic of Craig Rosevears, as uncompromising and beautiful as the mountains's mouth at dawn, the big love of Steve Thomas's plays and documentaries.
There were, and are, so many others. Kit Hiller. Andrew Sant. Peter Adams. Margaret Scott. Tim Burns. Dave Owen. Barbie Kjar. Sarah Day. Bea Maddock. Pete Hay. My list is far from complete, but I make it only to honour all, the few named and the many more unnamed whose work was as important, as marvellous, so that I might say here tonight how without knowing it or meaning it or apprehending it, we together made something over many years, a large and extraordinary and powerful thing, that has in these past few months of struggle emancipated itself from its old creeping fears and servilities.
There is a glorious flowering upon us, a new-found confidence and courage. I have never known such passion among my fellow artists as I have felt in these last few days.
To Dick Bett, to Gerard Castles, to all the organisers and helpers and artists and writers who made Future Perfect I say, I am profoundly in your debt and I thank you. For this is not just about art. It is about democracy and freedom. Democracy and freedom do not come easy. Nor do they come where you expect them.
But if they are not to be found in our tawdry Parliament or in our largely craven media, I suspect they may exist here tonight. This is not really an exhibition at all, but an exploding kaleidoscope of hope. It is a beginning. The beginning of a Tasmania of which we all dream, diverse, passionate, extraordinary; joined by goodwill. The beginning of an era when it will be our future, and not others; the beginning of a time when our stories and our images, unbeholden to anything other than the cosmos of our souls, will reinvent this island. The beginning, our beginning, and this time there can be no ending.
Thank you.
FUTURE PERFECT, LAUNCH SPEECH BY RICHARD FLANAGAN, DICK BETT GALLERY, 26 MARCH 2003.