STARING aimlessly at the books littering my desk the other night, I noticed the words on the spine of a local travel book: “Your guide to a complete Tasmania experience”. A complete Tasmania experience, eh? It’s certainly a phrase to reckon with (and not just because it seems to have mislaid an n).
Is a complete Tasmania experience being lost in the reverie of a blue twilight or being told they haven’t got any camera film in stock at the only shop in a major tourist destination?
Is it picking up a shark’s egg on an empty beach or being fooled yet again by a driver indicating only as they turn a corner?
Is it chatting to an old friend met by chance in the street or getting a pile of cold salad served on top of a bowl of hot pasta at a mediocre restaurant (probably one where they bring out one those giant pepper grinders with a flourish)?
Is it the ability of people from all walks of life to talk with passion about issues facing the state or the mindless back-patting that goes on in the public sphere about our great Tasmanian talent/product/clean green state?
If this website would only get itself a winery as a sponsor (perhaps Tamar Ridge Wines), it could offer a nice bottle of something to the best definition of a complete Tasmania experience from a reader. Why not send suggestions in anyway …
And,
TASMANIAN-born writer John Dale put out a book last year entitled Wild Life, which would get my Complete Tasmania Experience award hands down.
It’s a less straightforward work than his brilliant biography of Sydney prostitute Sally-Ann Huckstepp, which captured the pervasively corrupt milieu of NSW in the 1980s as well as illuminating the hauntingly beautiful Huckstepp as a fucked-up junkie Joan of Arc who paid the ultimate price for her attacks on the heavy-hitters of the NSW police force.
Wild Life starts out as a simple exercise in family history. How did Dale’s maternal grandfather end up shot dead in a car outside his girlfriend’s home in a Launceston suburb in 1942? But as Dale researches the event, he finds Harvey Malcom’s life to have been much more interesting than his death.
It seems that his grandfather, a senior agricultural officer, was planning no less than the rescue of the thylacine from extinction — and that his partner in this undertaking was to be that famous animal lover Errol Flynn.
The book is based on a bundle of Malcolm’s journal entries Dale receives from his uncle. Where gaps exist Dale imagines the rest, without spelling out where fact stops and fiction starts. But it doesn’t really matter. What emerges is a picture of Tasmania that applies equally well in 2005 as in 1938.
It shows the bloody-mindedness of small-town power-wielders, the arrogance, the stupidity, the indifference to the fate of the state’s natural heritage. It also shows the resourcefulness of the practical Tasmanian, of the bushmen and women, the hunters and trappers who work with and understand nature.
And the passion of men like Flynn’s father, Theodore, who was Professor of Biology at the University of Tasmania and an avid researcher of Antarctic and Tasmanian wildlife.
Tasmania is still lucky to have talented scientists working hard to learn about and preserve the nature of this state — or at least to catalogue it before it disappears.
Unfortunately, Harvey Malcolm and Errol Flynn’s project never reached fruition.
And the time elapsed this week for someone to step forward and claim the Bulletin magazine’s $1.25 million reward for proof of the thylacine’s continued existence. Perhaps that reward can be rolled over to the quest to stop the Tasmanian devil joining the thylacine in extinction.
Gabfest is a Tasmanian media professional
