HOBART City Council aldermanic candidate Margaretta Pos is gutsy, glamorous and gracious. Throughout her twenty-year career as a senior journalist, feisty columnist and seasoned arts writer for the Tasmanian Mercury, she can still scare the pants off even the most sanguine political watchers.

After announcing her plans to run for Hobart City Council elections, Pos reveals that far from standing on the sidelines observing capital city politics, she’s committed to working hard for a range of urban passions that lie close to her heart.

Born in Launceston, raised at Nile, unbeknownst to many readers, Pos has a professional arts CV to die for. She was educated at the University of Tasmania followed by a MA at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. After an extended sojourn working as an English language editor for Motilal Banarsidass, a publishing house in Delhi. Pos returned to Tasmania where she tutored in Indian History at the University of Tasmania and taught English at Elizabeth College. She worked in the art market in Delhi, Sydney and Amsterdam before becoming a full time project officer with the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. From there, she went on to become a coordinator for traveling exhibitions for the Australian Gallery Directors Council in Sydney, before chancing her hand at freelance journalism, in time returning to Hobart to work for The Mercury.

For more than a decade, Pos wrote Positively Speaking, the paper’s informative Saturday Arts column. She’s won nine professional journalism awards in the past five years and is currently a finalist in three national media awards. She’s currently President of the Tasmanian chapter of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance and has been instrumental in developing special categories for local arts writers in MEAA’s annual Tasmanian media awards. Writing on the arts in a small community has always been a fairly thankless task but she has nonetheless remained a tireless advocate for the arts in Tasmania.

“I decided in a mad moment of civic responsibility”, she laughs when I ask her what has inspired her to run for this most fiercely contested of all local government elections in Tasmania this month. “Besides, my son chooses to live in Hobart, so I have a vested interest in the city.

“I want to work towards making Hobart a flourishing arts centre and a cultural tourism destination,” she continues. “The Hobart City Council should lead the way in the pursuit of excellence in design, development and all things great and small. We can and should become a great place to live and to visit.”

Margaretta Pos as a self-described political independent, although she has a number of causes close to her heart on behalf of the city of Hobart. A long time Battery Point resident, Pos has studied the potential for a foreshore walkway on her feet, serializing her shoreline roamings in The Mercury earlier this year. As she clambered over rocks, drains, fences, slip rails and other barriers, Pos contemplated the solutions for this perennially debated issue of public access to the district’s exquisite foreshore from a unique perspective. Readers were privileged to an exceptionally nuanced account of how the foreshore is currently managed — or not managed.

Greatest gift to the City of Hobart

Pos thinks a simple and immediate solution lies in a walking track around the foreshore, with obstructing fences removed, a negotiated settlement over the two titles beyond the high water mark, and obligatory steps on either side of slip rails. But such is the resistance by many foreshore residents, she has come to the conclusion that a low impact boardwalk would extend public access without intruding on the waterfront residents.

It’s not only Battery Point. As she began one of her rambles, she warns “Rusting slip rails, jetties, fences, paths which are blocked or peter out — a walk around the Hobart foreshore from Battery Point to Sandy Bay is not for the faint-hearted.”

But for Hobart’s community of artists, arts lovers and arts industry professionals, Pos’ greatest gift to the City of Hobart’s council chambers as an elected alderman, will come at an especially acute time historically. Earlier this year, after an extensive review of its heavily criticized public art program, HCC announced the appointment of a full time public arts professional to manage the program, as well as a $100,000 spending budget for the commissioning of new works of art. This package, along with the Council’s carefully worded pledge to seek professional assessment of the relevance of certain less than beautiful public sculptures for potential removal, will set our capital’s future artistic identity on far more solid ground than ever before.

Further reviews of the management of the Carnegie Gallery are said to be forthcoming, as are long overdue investigations and recommendations regarding Salamanca Arts Center’s perennial management dilemmas. As an alderman, Pos can be expected to play an insightful role in the constructive resolution of these issues. Her presence in HCC chambers should be seen as vital to the economic and critical health of Hobart’s arts industry henceforth.

A long time public champion of the arts in Tasmania, Pos has searched out hundreds of neglected local creative identities for her insightful Mercury profiles on those who’s unique visions have long made our community tick culturally. Along the way, she’s asked dangerous questions of the cultural status quo, although privately, none discount her invaluable contribution to fast forwarding the development of cultural excellence in this state.

I believe my Mercury colleague and secret sometime role model has the metal, persistence and insight to bring our city’s pressing cultural issues to the foreground, to raise the level of debate about the health and integrity of many of Council’s cultural endeavors and to add much needed professional awareness and strategic insight to HCC’s role in the delivery of the arts in our capital.

I urge all voting age members of our rich vociferous contentious community of artists, writers, musicians, composers, directors, actors, technicians, arts management professionals, arts lovers, readers and cultural mavens and mavericks to make a concerted effort to contribute to the changing shape of our urban democracy by voting 1 for Pos!

Written and authorized by Jane Rankin-Reid
C/O 13 Crelin St,
Battery Point.
12.10.05