Rodney Croome wrote the following article for Tasmania Times in 2013. It is a response to the late Prof Jonathan West’s essay on Tasmania in the Griffith Review’s ‘Tipping Point’ edition the previous year. West’s essay was named ‘Obstacles to Progress’ and can be found here: https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/obstacles-to-progress/. Croome’s essay in the same edition of the Griffith Review, called ‘Churning the Mud’, can be found here: https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/churning-the-mud/. Croome’s Tasmanian Times response to Prof West’s article is reposted to put a different perspective on the latter’s views on his native Tasmania.

Note: there are references below to the Tasmanian marriage equality debate. This occurred in 2012 and 2013 when the Tasmanian Government became the first in Australia to propose state-based same-sex marriage laws. There are also references to historical economic conditions: in 2012 and 2013 the Australian dollar was very high against other currencies, pricing Tasmanian exports out of their traditional markets and depressing the Tasmanian economy.

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I grew up loathing my Tasmanian-ness. The place seemed marginal, mediocre and without worth, and I with it. I wasn’t taught to hate Tasmania. It seeped into my bones from of the cold, dark mud I despised, and it ran deep. It was much harder to come to terms with being Tasmanian than it was to deal with being a homosexual, and it took twenty years longer.

My gay rights advocacy helped me learn to love Tasmania. The campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in the 1990s prompted visceral hatred, official repression and extreme ostracism from too many Tasmanians. The challenge to me at a personal level was either to do what bigotry demanded and become a sexual refugee, or stay and search for those seeds of hope that could be grown into a better future. I chose the latter.

My growing commitment to Tasmania deepened when I saw the light in my father’s eyes go out and the little ones I helped bring into the world looked back at me with his eyes. There are links that cannot be broken. I no longer step into the Tasmanian mud and pull away.

This is the background I bring to all my attempts to understand and explain Tasmania. My experiences demand I keep my eyes open to the island’s best as well as its worst, despite ever-present pressure to see only one side of the Tasmanian coin.

They draw my attention to those who, out of political investment, professional bias, lack of imagination, or Tasmanian self-loathing, present a lop-sided and superficial picture of the Tasmanian people.

I identified this superficiality in my essay on the Tasmanian marriage equality debate in the recently-published Griffith Review edition on Tasmania: it can be found in those on the right who tap into old anti-Tasmanian stereotypes by banging on about our Green-induced ‘mendicancy’ and it can be found in those on the left who lament how an innovative elite is held back by ‘local resistance to change’.

Unfortunately, it is also found in the Griffith Review essay by Jonathan West. Indeed, in what I assume is an attempt to show his policy is above politics, he combines the very worst of the right and left’s stereotyping.

Anti-intellectualism

West’s thesis is that Tasmania’s economic and social indicators are the worst in Australia because our high dependence on government welfare and public service employment means there is no incentive to overcome political and cultural barriers to personal improvement and private enterprise.

Education is of particular concern to him so I’ll use this as an entree to his thought. He cites a study showing ‘a large proportion of Tasmanians’ believe not being educated is a signifier of being a true Tasmanian and educated people are worse people. His conclusion is that this cultural antipathy to education perpetuates Tasmanian under-achievement and will only end when government coddling does too.

For now, let’s put aside other possible interpretations of the study West cites, not the least being that respondents value good character over value-free curricula and contribution to the community over deconstructionism. Let’s also leave until another time the fact that if we compare like with like, that is, Tasmania with other parts of regional Australia, Tasmania’s educational outcomes start looking pretty good. And let’s also not quibble about the fact Hobart has proportionally more scientists than other Australian cities, and that Tasmania seems packed to the rafters with writers and artists. Instead, let’s focus on the conclusion West draws.

It is true there is an anti-intellectualism in Tasmania, just as there is across Australia and in all Anglophone societies built from scratch in the last 250 years (and in which manual labour has therefore been idealised). As in those other societies, Tasmanian suspicion of education is not, as West suggests, limited to, or even strongest among, people dependent on the government. It was deeply ingrained in the anti-government, anti-welfare, private-enterprise-focussed dairy farming community I grew up in on the north-west coast.

“Why waste time at Uni when there’s jobs at Coles?” my prim, hard-working, Menzies-doting aunty asked me when I was a teenager.

Clearly, some people are suspicious of education for reasons other than just welfare-induced laziness. In Tasmania, these include the born-again evangelisation of parts of the island in the late nineteenth century, as well as the use of education as a form of discipline and a marker of submission by convict authorities some decades earlier (both of which had the knock-on effect of setting the bar very low when it came to the level of academic achievement required for respectability).

>West’s pre-occupation with proving his thesis means he ignores the other side of the education question – the great value placed on education by many Tasmanians in revolt at the anti-intellectualism they see around them, and the great innovation that has sprung from this revolt. West ignores Tasmania’s national leadership on district schools, television in education, pre-school and post-secondary education, Indigenous and special needs education, combating classroom prejudice and bullying, relationships and sexuality education, and employee skills training. This is a critical omission. How can we begin to understand how to achieve better educational outcomes in Tasmania until we understand what has worked up until now?

The Ignorant Tasmanian

West squanders an opportunity to understand what really lies behind Tasmania’s poor education measurements and what has worked to address this. Instead, his one-sided approach uncritically promotes one of the oldest stereotypes to plague us, that of the Ignorant Tasmanian. This stereotype started when convict authorities sought to pummel the pre-modern folkways out of their charges. It continued with landlords who used it to justify their feudal-style control over the poor and with Darwinists who assumed all island peoples tend to degeneracy. It was taken up by early twentieth century progressives who wanted to mould New Men out of peasant progeny. It continues today with people like West who see Tasmania as a test lab for how their single idea can reshape an entire people.

Worse still, by focusing only on the bad in education, and not its associated good, West gives false credence to his broader point that Tasmania is so irredeemably broken that ‘change can probably only come from outside’.

You can imagine why I find I this an unbelievably offensive and demoralising view.

There are many examples of native Tasmanian people and movements that seize the day, in defiance of the barriers placed in our way on the continent as well as in Tasmania. The environment movement is an obvious example. The local marriage equality movement I deal with in my Griffith Review essay is another. What hope can there ever be for Tasmania if we are mislead by people like West into believing we cannot alter, let alone master, our own destiny?

By declaring Tasmanians a lost cause, West perpetuates a stereotype far worse than the Ignorant Tasmanian. He invokes the Forever-Failing Tasmanian, someone so weak, conflicted and flawed that even when they realise the awful truth about themselves, they are powerless to do anything about it. They may try to make things better, but their efforts will inevitably make things worse. They may want to succeed but they are destined to fail. Think of all the easy catch phrases that speak to the stereotype of inevitable failure, ‘Fatal Shore’, ‘Tainted Place’, ‘Loser Land’, ‘Failed State’.

This is the view of Tasmania I grew up with and which I have repudiated. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that underlies just about all our failures. By perpetuating it West makes himself part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Plantation politics

In making his case, West compares Tasmanians to New Zealanders, another island people who achieve more, he says, because they can’t rely on a bigger polity to prop them up. Of course, he fails to mention that New Zealanders have control over their economy in a way Tasmanians don’t. Perhaps if Tasmanians were free to lower the international exchange rate of our currency to New Zealand levels, we would be able to maintain higher levels of international exports and tourism, comparable to New Zealand’s, and not have to go begging for money.

But the more important point about this comparison is that it is the wrong one. To understand Tasmania we need to look to places like Ireland, Sicily or Jamaica. Like Tasmania, these islands have rich cultures, enchanting landscapes and are engines of the human imagination, but they have also experienced society-wide forced or bonded labour systems, the extraction of natural resources with little return, massive emigration, chronically poor social and economic indicators, and the systematic devaluing of their people as ignorant, divided, prejudiced, benighted, helpless and in need of the kind of assistance that only ever benefits those offering it. In short, they have suffered rapacious, plantation-style imperialism.

Tasmanians cannot begin to solve our current troubles until we understand where they come from, and until we look to other societies that are also struggling out of the same mire.

Somewhere amidst this great struggle I locate my tiny little personal liberation from the belief that as a Tasmanian I am worthless. I locate West in there somewhere too, as someone whose hopes for Tasmania have sunk without trace into the island’s mud and who projects this failure on to all those around him.

Rodney Croome is a long-time LGBTIQ+ community advocate.