Tasmania: The tipping point?

LITERARY MAG
Edited by Julianne Schultz and Natasha Cica
Griffith University/Text, $27.95

On the cover of the outstanding 39th Griffith Review is a pilot’s-eye view of Tasmania as approached from the north. The heart- or shield- or pudenda-shaped island on which so many metaphors have been imposed is upside down. Here is what Peter Conrad called ”the Appalachia of the Antarctic”. Beyond the south coast of the island is, well, if not the end of the world, then Antarctica.

Jo Chandler’s brilliant essay, The Science Laboratory, begins by imagining how the ghosts of explorers ”who sailed this passage to history … invariably accompany the ice-bound scientists, sailors and specialist tradesfolk as they wave their goodbyes from the great red ship [Aurora Australis]”. Their vital scientific mission (vital, too, for the struggling state economy) is to investigate the ”tipping point” in climate change: the erosion of ice sheets, ”the venting of potent methane hydrates into the atmosphere as warming releases them from their crypts”.

Chandler provides the title, and the key line of inquiry, for this Griffith Review, framed as a question to which deeply opposed answers are given: Tasmania: The Tipping Point?
Advertisement

Jonathan West’s Obstacles to Progress offers the sternest dissection of the Tasmanian malaise. It is not only that Tasmania ”ranks at the bottom among Australian states in virtually every dimension of economic, social and cultural performance”, but that Tasmanians ”don’t need to change because their way of life is mainly financed by the mainland”. One-third of the population belongs to an underclass that has lived on welfare for generations and is antipathetic to the education that might liberate it; besides the underclass, is the ”smaller, comfortable, government-dependent middle class”.

West finds no solution in vineyards, ecotourism or MONA (none of which employs anywhere near the number who worked in the dying forest industry). His dire conclusion is that ”the ultimate problem is not that Tasmania cannot afford its pattern of failure, but increasingly that it can”.

Others disagree. Although Moya Fyfe laments the end of ”a community based around family, faith and primary industry” when Britain joined the European Union and destroyed the apple-export industry in the early 1970s, she still asserts that ”as a Tasmanian, I find myself confident … that this state remains on the cusp of heading somewhere good and achieving something new”.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/tasmania-the-tipping-point-20130315-2g5oa.html#ixzz2NgR0FcWf

• Natasha Cica interviewed by Amanda Vanstone (ABC Counterpoint) here:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/the-apple-isle/4547680