History
Bypass war looks lost
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Independent Denison MHR Andrew Wilkie, who asked the Federal Government to look at alternative options at Brighton when he supported their minority government in late August, rightly calls it a failure of good governance and process.
But even more than that, is the loss of both the spirit and potential of the special site.
As both Mr Wilkie and Greens leader Bob Brown said when they visited the levee bank paddock recently, even if the artefacts and relics were not physically destroyed by the highway constructed overhead, any sense of the “timeless place” inherent in the land will have been obliterated.
So too will the dreams of making the site a place where all Australians — including Tasmanians who know far too little of the Aboriginal ethnology and past of their island home — could have come to better understand and learn about such an ancient culture.
Imagine an interpretative centre near the levee bank site, ideally located for tourists so close to Hobart and the Midland Highway, showing the layers of ancient habitation through the Jordan River soil, and bringing together all the missing stories and cultures of at least three waves of Aboriginal arrivals known to have lived in Tasmania over the centuries.
Think too, of an end to the still-prevalent myth of Truganini as the last Tasmanian Aborigine and the growth of a new appreciation and understanding of the ancient culture and people still alive and embedded in our midst.
Why celebrate the Aboriginal cultures of Kakadu and the Kimberley, or the indigenous native people of nations such as Vietnam, China, Peru and even the United States when we travel overseas as tourists but not celebrate and value Tasmania’s extraordinary Aboriginal heritage at all?
But unfortunately, on the Brighton bypass front, the battle appears already lost.
Mr Wightman ominously announced on the day of his appointment that he would be making public his decision as Heritage Minister whether to allow the highway to proceed in three weeks.
That timing puts the likely announcement around the Thursday or Friday before Christmas, when Australia will have shut down on holidays for four weeks and little notice will be taken of the nightly TV news.
It can only be hoped the State Government doesn’t resort to such a cynical and shabby tactic, which the public would be right to interpret as a guilty admission of shame.