This is Tasmania
Tasmania
by Numbers
SAUL ESLAKE, the ANZ Bank's influential Chief
Economist, is a former Tasmanian passionate about his home state. "Despite
having been 'in exile' in Melbourne for the past 20 years I continue to think of
myself as a Tasmanian at heart (though not actually by birth) and follow events
there as closely as I can from the other side of Bass Strait," he says. This
is his fascinating, extraordinarily informative analysis of the
state of Tasmania. (PDF file - 3min download)
Moment of liberation
...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 imposed....
RICHARD FLANAGAN
The Rape of Tasmania, RICHARD FLANAGAN
There is in all this a
constant thread: the Bacon government's real mates are
not workers, but millionaires. Behind the smokescreen of
statistics, beyond the down-home cant of "timber folk"
peddled by the woodchippers' propagandists, is a simple, wretched truth:
great areas of Australia's remnant wild lands are being reduced
to a landscape of battlefields in order to make a handful of
very rich people even richer ..." RICHARD FLANAGAN
Into the valleys ...
MARGARETTA POS' fantastic journey into a memory of Tasmania ... and its resonance for today ...
What I did on my holidays ...
A wonderful piece of writing by ...
PETE HAY
The Parochial Attachment
Is Tasmania a state of naysayers? Yes, according to our record at referendums and it may be holding the state back, according ANZ chief economist SAUL ESLAKE -- although he acknowledges, even as an ecomomist, that economic growth rightfully is not everyone's prime objective.
Bruny's Tasmania
CHRISTOPHER PURCELL finds some fascinating quotes by Bruny D'Entrecasteaux...
MARIA ISLAND...
Is it a matter of snobbery that the
priest does not permit the sale of peanuts in the aisles of the church? LIBBY LESTER
Tasmania's future
By 2020 the Government of Economic Unity has
abolished the public service, its functions 'outsourced' to international consulting and resource-extraction conglomerates.
Elections are declared a scandalous waste of taxpayer money. They, too, are abolished ...
PETE HAY's dark vision of one Tasmanian future...
A Glass Half Empty
In the smallest state in Australia, it’s often easier to blame
Tasmania’s 500,000 odd less culturally experienced residents
for local organisations’ lack of success in developing
interest and commitment to contemporary art’s meaningfulness
in 21st century life. Hobart’s visual art scene sells itself
so far short of standard professional industry practices,
its funky insider status as an obscure provincial joke is
now well past its use by date ...
JANE RANKIN-REID
Another colour
Malcontent KEVIN BONHAM responds to PETE HAY with a savage
contrarian assault on the Liberals, the Greens and Labor, specifically the quality of public debate.
Another Country, really...?
The furtive, fugitive longing for secession
occasionally finds a champion who is famous,
crazy or desperate enough to carry its standard into the battlefields of
the public arena, writes JESSE SHIPWAY
A Tasmanian tragedy
Imagine the unimaginable ... the
unimaginable for almost every Australian ...
Richard Flanagan's Tasmania
...And I saw that everything that changed for the better in Tasmania changed not because of Government but in spite of it. I saw the power of the powerless, of those who refuse to be complicit in their own oppression, who believed in spite of all the lies to the contrary, that if you care enough, if you dare to stand up, you can change your own world for the better. And I came to understand that for many Tasmanians, this island was not a moribund economy or a set of bad statistics, but a dream that might yet liberate us all ... RICHARD FLANAGAN told graduating students at the University of Tasmania - after receiving an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University.
Christopher
Koch's Tasmania
Vogel Award winning author DANIELLE WOOD talks
to famous expatriate Tasmanian author Christopher Koch about his recent novels
and his lingering love of his home state.
A
Tale of Two Islands
We do not trust history ... the past remains a
shadowy and a shabby realm, and we pin our hope instead upon the future. Would
that it were that easy.
But what we reject is our communal identity; our
responsibility for the passage of time; our very soul. We are rendered rootless,
alienated, and most of the other pathologies in our unexamined cultural
inheritance can be traced through this pedigree back to the inferiority complex
of the nineteenth century: rampant anti-intellectualism; generalised scorn for
capital-C culture; the simplistic yearning for an already obsolete ‘Ruhr Valley
in the southern seasÅ industrialism. So writes poet/academic PETER HAY in
his brilliant A Tale of Two Islands (first published in Island 89, 2002).
Out in the Styx
Greg Barns needs to get off his soapbox and come down to earth if he wants to get
his finger on the pulse of the Tasmanian arts scene, MARGARETTA POS writes. And there's a
flanking assault on the ubiquitous Barns in a fierce Letters exchange
Lost in the Styx
Margaretta Pos' conditional applause
for Greg Barns resounds with the squish of concrete
mittens hitting the flesh of new ideas ...
JANE RANKIN-REID defends Barns ... and in the process
delivers an uppercut to Premier Bacon's "pork-flavoured"
artistic vision
A state of wonder
"The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men - the purpose of art is
the gradual, life-long construction of a state of wonder..." said Glenn Gould ... writes GREG BARNS.
Our Mary, Our Fred, STOP PRESS: that meeting, and new hot tip for Gov
The Hag, fresh
from two months' rehab, discovers some startling news
after logging on to her favourite barstool.
The State we're in
Tasmania hovers on the brink of a golden age -
if the Government and its cheerleaders are to be believed. By LINDSAY TUFFIN. Written September, 2002.
In the forest of a night
It keeps bubbling away like a stream though an
old-growth logging coup. And despite the best efforts of the spin doctors who say the stream is
still clear and fresh and beautiful it is getting increasingly brackish, muddy and unpalatable. By LINDSAY TUFFIN. Written September, 2002.
Brown on Labor and the Greens
Tasmanian Green Senator BOB BROWN included this subjective analysis
of Tasmanian political history in a Matters of Public Interest speech to Parliament on August 29, 2001.
And, there was poetry
Tasmanian poet JAMES CHARLTON in
conversation with Governor Arthur ...
RAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think?
If you bounce,
tuffinlindsay@hotmail.com
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