Islands are easily overlooked – Tasmania is an island that
periodically disappears off maps, sometimes there, sometimes not, at the
edge of consciousness, at the end of space. Yet Tasmania has had an
uneven history in the consciousness of its northern neighbours, both near
and very far. There are no southern neighbours, just penguins and
scientific observation posts.
The distant South land has
often been seen as a place of refuge, far from the historical blunders,
codified observances and ossified practices of ageing empires, where a
prosperous, democratic land could thrive, free from these old ways. This
was the case with Australia in the 19th Century but later became more
so with Tasmania in the 20th, as a place even further South and even
more distant from the centres of world power. This is expessed most
recently in the view of Tasmania as a place of clean air and water, free
from pollution – pristine and pure.
At the end of the 1950s, when
On the Beach,
a movie about the last days of the world following a nuclear disaster,
was being filmed in Melbourne, one of the lead actors, Ava Gardner,
purportedly commented that Melbourne was the perfect place to make a
film about the end of the world. Even though this subsequently turned
out the be journalistic invention – part of a grand and long-established
Australian tradition even more prevalant today and, incidentally, a
very practical way of dealing with a shortage of gripping news – it
entered popular mythology.
On the Beach was about a Northern
hemisphere destroyed, with the South lingering on, as the last place to
succumb. In that film it meant Melbourne, probably because Hobart didn’t
figure. Melbourne was as South as it got then.
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| A sudden gust of wind stirs the evening air near Constitution Dock, Hobart |
