Tassie Gems

Pic of Wineglass Bay and The Hazards, here

‘Tassie Gems’
Address by Martin Flanagan
To the 2012 Tasmanian Tourism Conference Dinner
Tailrace Centre, Launceston – Tuesday, July 17, 2012

If I land at Launceston Airport, what do I see?

If I drive north and go through Perth, the first landmark I always note is Gibbet Hill, where the body of a man called John McKay was hung in chains in 1837 beside what was then the road from Launceston to Perth. Gibbet Hill is a road sign of an early Tasmanian kind.

In Launceston, I think of John West, the first editor of The Examiner, a great pioneering journalist who championed the Anti-Transportation Movement which eventually stopped this island being used as a dumping ground for the British Empire’s convict population. In Launceston, I also think of a great 19th century painting by William Piguenit, a Tasmanian-born artist, looking up the Tamar River at dusk. I am a big fan of William Piguenit. A lot of early Australian artists saw this land through European eyes and painted it that way – Piguenit saw Tasmania as it is. In Launceston, I also think of that wild Gorge and watching my brother shoot it in a kayak during a tumultuous, frothing flood. He disappeared for half the course.

If I land at Launceston airport and drive south towards Evandale, I think of the colonial painter John Glover. He was 64 when he arrived here in 1831 but he still saw the place more clearly than his contemporaries. He also persisted in putting Aboriginal figures into his landscapes after the Aboriginal population was thought to have been removed to Flinders Island.

Around Evandale, I also think of Ned Kelly’s father, Red Kelly from Tipperary. He was an Irish convict on a property near Evandale at the same time as my Irish convict forebear, Thomas Flanagan, was at Brickendon, outside Longford. Thomas Flanagan stole meal to feed his family during the Irish Famine of the 1840s. At Brickendon, you can sit in the laborers’ kitchen where he would have been fed and smell the wheat and oats and barley ingrained in the air. Why am I telling you all this? Because I have been asked to speak on Tassie’s charms and to me she has two great charms – her stories and her natural beauty.

At Brickendon, the Archer family has something you’d be very lucky to find in my adopted home state of Victoria – a Georgian mansion. The Georgian period, during which Tasmania has its birth and early adolescence, pre-dates the Victorian period after which Victoria very deliberately took its name. The Georgians and the Victorians were different people. The Georgians tolerated slavery; the Victorians didn’t. The Victorians were God-fearing and concerned for their reputations. The Georgians tolerated among their number rakes, rogues, ruffians, pisspots and gentlemen of fortune but they were – and you have to give them this – characters. Early Tasmanian history is full of characters like the journalist Henry Melville who wrote one of my favourite books, The History of Van Diemen’s Land 1815-35, from the condemned cell at Hobart prison where Governor Arthur had placed him.

I spent my childhood in Longford and consider myself fortunate to have done so. That is still the sort of country I love best – semi-rural. If I drive south from Longford, I like to go by back roads to Campbell Town or Ross. Highways are boring straight lines people rush down. Back roads are how you actually get to see a place, to discover the rhythm and mood of the landscape. I tell my friends coming to Tassie, “Take every back road you can find”. That’s how you see the place.

If I take the main highway, it’s to pass through Cleveland. Just after World War 1, my father, who will be 98 next month, saw his first game of footy in a paddock you now whizz past on the left. No-one followed Victorian footy back then. They followed Tasmanian football. The giant club in Dad’s boyhood consciousness was Campbell Town.

I’ve got a shack near Swansea so I turn east at Campbell Town. The Lake Leake Highway has got some lonely parts and it’s always good to see the Hazards. One of the most commonly attempted paintings in 19th century art was the sunset. I’ve seen sunsets over Great Oyster Bay that could hang in any gallery in Europe and the next night I’ve seen another one just as good and it’s different. Even a bushfire hasn’t dampened our enthusiasm for the place although climate change might get the better of us if king tides keep biting away chunks of the sand dunes that are all that stands between us and the sea.

Driving south from Swansea, particularly on a magic east coast day when the air is still and the sky is as blue as china, the islands to the east look as alluring as anything you’ll see in the Adriatic or the Aegean. The road is built into the contours of the land so that you bend and twist your way past white beaches and rocky outcrops. At Triabunna you can get top quality fish and chips from a caravan on the wharf or you can catch a ferry to Maria Island. Irishman William Smith O’Brien was the last man to be sentenced under British law to be hanged drawn and quartered after leading an uprising against the English occupying his country in 1846. He was imprisoned on Maria Island after his sentence was commuted to exile. There’s a statue of William Smith O’Brien in O’Connell Street, Dublin. Tourists look at it. Why shouldn’t tourists look at the wooden hut where he was held in isolation and read on the wall a letter he wrote to his nephew about the possum he attempted to befriend for company. Smith O’Brien said when he first saw Maria Island the idea that a place of such natural beauty could be conceived of as a prison physically revolted him.

Ladies and gentlemen, I could go on and on talking about Tassie’s charms. I spent from the age of 8 to 13 living in Rosebery on the west coast. I know what a rainforest looks like, I know what one smells like after rain. I’ve heard the roar of a wild river in flood. One of my brothers was a doctor at Smithton for 15 years and what a fascinating part of Tasmania Circular Head is, one with its own distinct history, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, a place where you could still see Tasmanian devils last time I visited, a place with lots of interesting craftsmen working with wood and – and – the cleanest air in the world.

My message tonight is not new – Tasmania is a wonderful place. It has so much history, such breadth and range of stories. It has beautiful produce and architecture of a sort otherwise little seen in this country outside New South Wales. Tasmania also happens to have world heritage wilderness. Hobart has Mount Wellington – within 15 or 20 minutes, a visitor to the state capital can be on a bush track drinking cool green mountain air.

If you are tempted to forget just how good Tasmania is, think Mumbai population 21 million – that is, the population of Australia – or Mexico city with its 20 million inhabitants, foul air and murderous drug war. There is a reason people are dying – literally – to get into this country.

I understand the economic gloom and uncertainty down here but each day as part of my job I scan the major British newspapers. You should see the economic gloom and uncertainty over there. Spain’s unemployment rate is three times that of Tasmania. I can’t solve Tasmania’s economic woes but I can tell you one thing you can bet your houses on – Tasmania, by world standards, is a gem.

Martin Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1955 and graduated in law from the University of Tasmania in 1975. He is the author of thirteen books including “The Call”, an imaginative re-construction of the life of Tom Wills, the founder of Australian football, that was adapted into a stage play for the Malthouse Theatre in 2004. His other books include Shorts (1984), a collection of poetry, and One of the Crowd (1990), a collection of his early newspaper writing, and an autobiographical novel, “Going Away” (1993). One of his more recent books is The Line, which he co-wrote with his 91-year-old father, Arch Flanagan, and is based on Arch’s experience of the Burma Railway. He has two daughters and two granddaughters and lives with his wife in Melbourne where he writes for The Age newspaper on sport and politics, Australian culture and the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.