A Musingplace, Anxiety And An Elephant's Ghost
The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery(QVMAG) celebrates its 125 Anniversary with an exhibit that is as troubling as it might be described as being enlightening, beautiful, intriguing, interesting or even fascinating. However, let there be no doubt about it, unquestionably the room is filled with the beautiful, the curious and enlightening objects.
Nonetheless, while exploring the narratives the exhibit constructs, and the spaces it inhabits, somehow one can sense the presence of a ghostly and flatulent elephant in the room. One might grimace, and even deny its presence, but once this monster's presence is felt then its eerie omnipresence, and the smell of it, haunts you even after you’ve left the room.
This celebratory exhibit that explores ‘The World Inside’ at the QVMAG draws upon the rich histories played out in a place, a city, a harbour, a destination, and one that ranks highly among Australia’s oldest colonial outposts.
As a consequence of British imperial aspirations Launceston was founded in March 1806 as much as a penal colony and a military garrison as it might now be for the ‘settlement’, and the city, it was to become because of its geography and histories.
No matter how intently you might want to look ‘the other way’ there is no escaping the reality that the land upon which this city, this musingplace, this celebratory narrative, is constructed and laid out upon, is plundered and alienated land.
This land is an ancestral homeplace for ‘The First Tasmanians’. The tracks of the people crisscross this terrain alongside the tracks of marsupials, emus, etc. and it remains ancestral land. Nonetheless at the event’s opening, despite the ceremonial and ritual acknowledgement of the land’s ancestral significance, different and less polite imperatives are in fact in play when the crowd disperses....... Click here to read the entire paper
Nonetheless, while exploring the narratives the exhibit constructs, and the spaces it inhabits, somehow one can sense the presence of a ghostly and flatulent elephant in the room. One might grimace, and even deny its presence, but once this monster's presence is felt then its eerie omnipresence, and the smell of it, haunts you even after you’ve left the room.
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MUSING THE TAMAR/ESK #1
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| Click Here to go to CHAPTERgraphis |
Somewhat serendipitously a 1969 copy of John Reynolds’ “Launceston; history of an Australian city” landed again in 2015 to tell us about how “Ponrabbel” was understood in 1969. Just looking at sentence one, paragraph one in Chapter One, entitled as it is, “Ponrabbel”, it shines a light on a set of sensibilities that would be fiercely contested in so many ways in a 21st C context.
Meaning is always invested in the context. So, it needs to be said that John Reynolds was writing from an ‘adult education’ perspective and in chapter one, addressing the Tasmanian Aboriginal issue. Intriguingly, Reynolds was writing as a historian and a Hobartian. He was nonetheless informed from within, writing from within and somehow centered within, ‘Launceston society’. Nevertheless, the Hobart, Launceston rivalry evident at the time, and still there today, draws the critique that Reynolds comes with ‘Hobartian baggage’. It also needs to be said that John Reynolds had a background as a metallurgist and thus mining and industry also.
Meaning is always invested in the context. So, it needs to be said that John Reynolds was writing from an ‘adult education’ perspective and in chapter one, addressing the Tasmanian Aboriginal issue. Intriguingly, Reynolds was writing as a historian and a Hobartian. He was nonetheless informed from within, writing from within and somehow centered within, ‘Launceston society’. Nevertheless, the Hobart, Launceston rivalry evident at the time, and still there today, draws the critique that Reynolds comes with ‘Hobartian baggage’. It also needs to be said that John Reynolds had a background as a metallurgist and thus mining and industry also.
Hobart being Tasmania's capital its the place where decision making goes on. On the other hand Launceston is/was at the State's economic centre, and the place where all the money was/is actually made. Well that's the argument.
Given the sociopolitical cum cultural tensions between Launceston and Hobart it is interesting that with Reynolds’ Hobartian identity he was seemingly taken into the confidence of his Launcestonian sources. Speculatively, this might have been to do with it being imagined that he was unlikely to open doors on unwelcome and uncomfortable narratives – imaginings best left alone.
For a historian’s view of Reynold’s history, Tom Dunning sees Reynolds' book’s significance in what it tells us about the significant men in Launceston’s past. He also sees Reynolds a man of his time and with a viewpoint that is essentially sympathetic towards Aboriginal people...... Click here to read the entire paper
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As the ‘fresh’ collides with the ‘salt’ at the convergence of Northern Tasmania’s two Esk River systems and the Tamar Estuary much more than troublesome silt is deposited on the riverbed.
All these waterways are named for others elsewhere. Yet this river junction is a feature in a unique and evolving cultural landscape that has a human history of 40,000 years plus. More to the point, it is very much its own place in the world with its own geography and histories.
Two centuries ago there was a cultural collision at this set of coordinates that is now Launceston that involved two different sets of cultural imperatives and two distinctly different knowledge systems – each of which shapes, and has shaped, place in different ways.
Interestingly, the waters come together here at a point pragmatically and geographically described, and mapped, in 21st Century terms, as Catchment 43. Right here at this junction, the ‘spectre of the flood’ is possibly part of the explanation of place that is being navigated. Along with a hope of somehow accounting for the Launcestonian cultural landscape multidimensional mapping is an evolving process.
As a consequence of postcolonial mapping, in the hope of better understandings of place, Tasmania’s ‘waterways and catchments’ have been ascribed numbers in an attempt to better understand geographies, bioregions, topographies, ecosystems, cultural landscapes and the phenomena these things involve and exist within.
Current technologies enable us to look at multiple interfaced, interrelated and layered imaginings of place from never before anticipated vantage points. The amenities ascribed to places need to be mapped and asserted. Here, in Catchment 43, what is being identified is an ecologically and geographically defined network of phenomena – an ecosystem rather than a mathematically measured and mapped physical geographic feature.
The mapping here is ‘deep’ in so much as it is inclusive of all the phenomena that constitute ‘place’ – landforms, resources, populations, habitats, environments, cultural sensibilities, stories, etc. The mapping brings with it a kind of scientific compulsion to gather up multidimensional classes of information. It’s an open question as to whether that has yet been achieved.
Unsurprisingly ‘water’ is place defining and in multidimensional ways. Likewise, the various shifts in meaning relative to the changing understandings invested in a place’s amenity values, water sources come charged with cultural values and social obligations. Equally, in cultural landscapes, and in the cultural imperatives invested in them, water is a no small consideration. ..... Click here to read the entire paper
The mapping here is ‘deep’ in so much as it is inclusive of all the phenomena that constitute ‘place’ – landforms, resources, populations, habitats, environments, cultural sensibilities, stories, etc. The mapping brings with it a kind of scientific compulsion to gather up multidimensional classes of information. It’s an open question as to whether that has yet been achieved.
Unsurprisingly ‘water’ is place defining and in multidimensional ways. Likewise, the various shifts in meaning relative to the changing understandings invested in a place’s amenity values, water sources come charged with cultural values and social obligations. Equally, in cultural landscapes, and in the cultural imperatives invested in them, water is a no small consideration. ..... Click here to read the entire paper
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BELOW LINKS TO OTHER WRITING BY THIS AUTHOR
COOLABAH is the official journal of the Observatori: Centre d' Estudis Australians - The Australian Studies Centre at the Universitat de Barcelona. The aim of the journal is to become an international forum for original research in the field of Australian Studies and to be totally interdisciplinary in its content.
- COOLABAH Vol 11 2013 – Placescape, placemaking, placemarking, placedness … geography and cultural production ... CLICK HERE
- COOLABAH Paper Interrogating Placedness: Tasmanian Disconnections ... CLICK HERE
- COOLABAH Paper Necklace making and placedness in Tasmania ... CLICK HERE
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