phill Parsons
Therein lies a conundrum. Do we constrain our gaseous emissions or do we go on as though there’s is no consequence, replacing the supposed mistakes of the past, the present Art Gallery, with the mistake of tomorrow. Where in this concept is the trigeneration combined heat and power [CHP] artefact of tomorrow to demonstrate directly and publicly to every Museum visitor Tasmania is not asleep to the impacts of carbon emissions, that it understand the impacts of perturbations of the past represented in the Museums paelontological collections and is making its contribution above and beyond the 1.5% of 1.2% to avoid them.
PREMIER David Bartlett has unveiled the redevelopment plan for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on Hobart’s waterfront and now wants comments.
Where was the public conversation involving those without?
The plan includes a 200-seat lecture theatre with the final cost expect to be as high as $200 million. That’s a bucketful of money per seat for what is replicated across the road in City Hall and also at the Concert Hall and probably at the Town Hall just up the road and across at the Art School.
And what will be the shows that draw such crowds to a lecture theatre roofed over by an archaeological display and park that the Museum’s current carpark in Dunn Place is slated to become that such a size is suggested?.
Where do the many Tasmanians, unable to arrive by the non existent public transport service for travel in a carbon constrained world, park their cars when they come to partake of the cultural services their taxes are so heavily invested in, in this Hobart-centric location.
The cosily located refuge for elements of Tasmanian culture, not too far from parliament or the proposed new hospital and so near to Sandy Bay and those foreshore coffee shops just across the road must be very comfortable for the few cognoscenti.
Of course, it is important to have a Museum to keep and study the prehistory of Tasmania and its modern period, and to locate in a colonial artefact is an excellent example of recycling, although I doubt if much thought was given to the potential size of the collections as time passes into centuries of history, as we see in Europe or is there something government is not telling us about the end of days.
Nevertheless, there must be some physical place where the Art history and the dead plants go to, possibly gathered with other sciences as a store of the past, for their reference value for the expert, the student and for the public.
Although this is not the only model, the Queensland Herbarium sitting in the grounds of the Brisbane City Councils Mt Cootha Botanical Gardens, Victoria and NSW keeping theirs in the respective capital city botanic gardens. In neither of these cities is the art gallery co located with the museum.
But how, beyond this collection warehousing, is this material to be conveyed to the students and to the public north of Oatlands, the sacrifice zones, taxed, but without access to the cultural service their funds support in Hobart to benefit from this new Museum? Perhaps the construction contracts, but certainly not access to the cultural services they offer, without travel to the South.
The State library demonstrated another model for service provision when it took the disparate local libraries servicing many towns, with their dog eared under funded collection of aged tomes, and combined them into a state-wide service, with locations in each town, bringing a wider access to literature to the corners far from Hobart.
How will the museum collections held in state be made live, be caused to reach out across the State and how are the cultural services offered by the regions supported by the state?
The governance elements of our ‘culture’ are unevenly distributed, with the courts perhaps best spread. The Parliament has gone on the road, leaving the permanent government in situ.
Perhaps electronic communication will allow for departments to be more evenly regionally located rather than clustered around the Parliament, although given the handling that Parliament received in Launceston a relocated sitting will probably have to wait until the next refurbishment 50 years on.
Too far from the many comfort zones.
Access to government through community forums is another way of taking the Parliament out, but keeping it bound by the location of a colonial era building belies the optic fibre cable that runs the length of the gas trunk pipeline let alone the medium of webcast.
One hopes these technologies will allow greater access to sittings in the refurbished Parlaiment and thus have impacts on the culture by making process available as much as expanding the number of MP’s.
The national parliament has webcast as part of its service for years.
And then we come to the sciences and the arts.
The University is breaking down the barriers between regions with three campuses, the advantage of a wider market and the reorganization of tertiary education being drivers for such a distribution taking the results of culture and attempting their alternation, so they both may remain alive.
However, if we are to have the living we need access the dead as every culture has.
In the northwest each of the ‘City’s’ has a ‘regional’ gallery, there are a number of small museums and other cultural institutions dependent on funding from constrained local governments, and on the work of volunteers to assist them to function.
Concerts by the TSO are well attended.
Therefore the demand for these cultural services must be there, held back as much by the service provided creating more interest as the funds available from local government.
It is well beyond time to restructure these services so they can cooperate with each other throughout the region and so their funding is not entirely dependent on the local tax base whilst the State’s revenue is focused on the one waterfront.
Are the mandarins of Hobart expecting the edifices of the Hobart Waterfront and dockside hospital to be repossessed by the old country that they need such a location.
If we are to be assailed by such a vision of the future, what assurances are there that a sea level rise of 2m, now in the range of considered by experts in the field as probable will not impact on the Dunn Place works, the cellars of the old Bond Store and the foundations of many buildings located within the expanded salt lenses that will follow sea level rise.
Ego may grow with a little power but surely their self belief is not so great that they think the sea level can be held back merely by denial.
Therein lies a conundrum. Do we constrain our gaseous emissions or do we go on as though there’s is no consequence, replacing the supposed mistakes of the past, the present Art Gallery, with the mistake of tomorrow. The old building has emitted all in its construction and will only emit again in its demolition.
At what point is such activity altered to save enough emissions to reduce the GHG’s growth in the atmosphere?. Are we able with steel, cement and glass to lessen emissions from a new building’s construction to such a degree we compensate the error of the old.
The balance of the State is available to display the collection in rotation.
Where in this concept is the trigeneration combined heat and power [CHP] artefact of tomorrow to demonstrate directly and publicly to every Museum visitor Tasmania is not asleep to the impacts of carbon emissions, that it understand the impacts of perturbations of the past represented in the Museums paelontological collections and is making its contribution above and beyond the 1.5% of 1.2% to avoid them.
It certainly is not yet demonstrated by the commercial production forests management.
Where is the plan for a statewide public transport system or a low carbon fuel produced here. Where is the carpark for the visitors still using this means, hopefully, in the from of low carbon emitters.
You put the trigeneration plant in the carpark.
If this investment is to be made, it must make a contribution to limiting sea level rise, however small, to educating about a Carbon constrained world. If the City of Woking and the City of London can make CHP pay then the colonials should be able to outshine them as a Larrikin act of culture.
Mr Bartlett said plans were open for public comment and so some are contained above as there is no place available on the TMAG site for same.
Is it too much to ask for a site where there is detail and a box to send the comment through the democratic channel to the land of sine die, where it may rest far from fevered brow in the climes of File 13, is made available on the day the project is launched.
After all they are comments and as government knows oh so well they can be ignored until they are, if they are, needed to save it from embarrassment.
Not yet has Bartlett begun to address the problems of the Tasmanian community, access to its culture as much a problem in arts and sciences as it is in governance.
Phill Parsons was considering a nom de plume to avoid the opprobrium given to the temeritous outsider questioning the emeritous proposal bundled as the redevelopment upon which comment may be made rather than asking for ideas. Managed debate to achieve the determined outcome.
