RAY NORMAN
Now Premier Bartlett says that he wants Tasmania – including the Midlands – to be the “food bowl of Australia”! We wonder on what evidence and assumptions he is working. What research is he using to inform and realise this aspiration? Has the idea got any legs at all? Who is doing the research for him? Are they telling him everything he really NEEDS to know – rather that we need to know? Whose water is he planning to use? Who is asking these questions? What are the potential economic dividends? What are the likely social dividends? Who will measure these things?
Hello !
We’ve been putting a collection of images together to do with the RED TREE at Woodbury House on the Midlands Highway for a while. The guy who has been managing the RED TREE site for the last few years has just written about it in 40°South. 40°South is pretty much claiming (?) that the tree planting on the site now is to do with “woodland restoration”. We wonder!
We think that there are some issues – tensions at least – with this claim that might be addressed against the history of “rural tree decline” in the Midlands. We‘ve begun to put some of this story together on the websites below.
What people need to know is that the satellite images that we’ve taken from GOOGLE EARTH are relatively old (4 or 5 years?) and up to date satellite images would surely be telling a somewhat bleaker story. Governments of all persuasions in the last 20 years seem to have learned very little and applied even less of what they might have learned in regard to resource management including food and fibre production in the Midlands. Indeed, the Midlands makes a very good case study.
Now Premier Bartlett says that he wants Tasmania – including the Midlands – to be the “food bowl of Australia”! We wonder on what evidence and assumptions he is working. What research is he using to inform and realise this aspiration? Has the idea got any legs at all? Who is doing the research for him? Are they telling him everything he really NEEDS to know – rather that we need to know? Whose water is he planning to use? Who is asking these questions? What are the potential economic dividends? What are the likely social dividends? Who will measure these things?
There is some irony in this story in so much as the Midlands would be one of Australia’s most depleted (depleting?) landscapes. Clearly it is a landscape that is degrading as each year passes. Anyone who has travelled the Midlands Highway over time will have watched all this happening. In the last 20 years millions of dollars have been invested in tree planting and landscape mediation in the Midlands. Where are these trees? What are the results? Who has benefited from all this tree planting and farm fencing?
It is claimed that something in excess of a million people traverse the Midlands Highway each year many of whom will have formed opinions about what is going on in the Midlands’ landscapes. A great many of these people are the same ones travelling back and forth year after year. More importantly many of them are people Premier Bartlett needs to persuade that what he plans to do with the water they rely upon in various ways is indeed a viable proposition. Is this water in fact available, at what cost and to whom? Surely some of them might have asked themselves a question or two like this.
The LANDliteracy Network is currently looking for people who have photographed THE RED TREE at Woodbury over the years. These ‘pictures’ will have something to say about not only about how the RED TREE SITE has changed over time, and how people have seen it, but also they’ll have something to say about the landscape it sits within – albeit from one tiny vantage point.
Anyway here are the REDreadTREE BLOG links:
GO2 … http://redtreetasmania.blogspot.com/ … an attempt to put the story together as we know it
GO2 … http://treeplantingnow.blogspot.com/ … some documentation that we have done since 2002 of the current planting
GO2 … http://redstumpwatch.blogspot.com/ … another linked project in a logging coupe behind Stanley
GO2 … http://landliteracy.blogspot.com/ … an attempt to put some perspective on some of the issues and some context for the REDreadTREE & TREEreadRED
GO2 … http://ownedlandscapes.blogspot.com/ … an attempt to put some perspective on the base problem.
We’d be happy to work with you in regarding to promoting the LANDliteracy Idea if that is anything that you may be interested in doing. I have no interest AT ALL in promoting a debate but I do have an interest in engaging a diversity of people with a divergent points of view in a CONVERSATION.
Regards,
Ray Norman
Tasmanian Coordinator
eMAIL: [email protected]
http://www.landliteracy.blogspot.com/
