Richard C Butler
THE WORLD is littered with superb beautiful images of Tasmanias Wilderness. So much so that one can lose a sense of scale. Pick up a book like Tarkine or one of the late Peter Dombrovskis works – and if you didn’t know better – it would be easy to think Tasmania has endless wilderness resources.

I was looking at American Photographer Eliot Porters book on the American West – a massive photographic document of a vast, vast landscape – and get no more or less impression of scale or supply. In a book – wihout context – size can be limited by imagination. Both the Porter text and the Tasmanian wilderness images give the impression of limitless supply.

The trouble with the huge volume of wilderness imagery from Tasmania is that its sheer volume creates an impression of availability. There is so much of the genre that a past Tasmanian Lecturer in Photography Tim Smith called it “wilderness porn” meaning the sacred has been turned into commodity and in many cases loses the point.

It is a responsibility that all of us who can draw breathe and pick up a camera and saturate our blogs and websites with images that show the opposite.

Images that show the destruction, the unsustainability and the lunacy of the policy which enables this to happen.

If one thinks it isn’t valuable to do that – in London recently a young lawyer and his lawyer girlfriend had sex at lunchtime, and the young bloke sent an email to one of his friends “celebrating the moment” with words not pictures. 24 hours later there over 180,000 people had received the email.

People all need to take pictures of the way this state is being trashed.

Send them to 10 friends and ask them to send to 10 of their friends. Go on youtube. Go on facebook.

These may seem to be trivial actions but you can make a massive difference. Just like the young legal buck who really got himself into hot water.

We’ve seen too many wilderness photographs.

We need to promote the bombsite many parts of the state look like.

When asked about how he saw Leadership in the 21st century General Norman Schwarzkopf almost bellowed “take charge, and do what’s right !”

Go to it. Make a difference.