In Tasmania Read Online Free PDF

Mount Wellington, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein grumbled that the railway station ‘looked just the same … in spite of repeated representations for it to be modernised’. Fitzroy’s missing 105 seconds was a paradigm of Tasmania’s idiosyncratic relationship to the clock, and reflected the findings of a Tourism Tasmania survey which reported an overwhelming impression among visitors that Tasmania was ‘caught up in a bit of a time warp’. The mindset was understandable, given that the state for most of its history was a rural economy. At the trial for the murder of a North Motton girl in 1921, Chief Justice Sir Herbert Nicholls explained to the jury the attitude of the Tasmanian farmer towards time: ‘Without saying it in a derogatory sense or attempting to be humorous, it is a plain, sensible fact that a farmer often takes his time from his stomach. In the course of his work he gets no signal as to his meals, but goes home to his dinner, goes back to his work until dark, and then goes to bed. He has no occasion to look at his watch, no occasion to think about the time. It is no slander, possibly, to say that when he looks at the family clock and his watch they don’t agree, and probably they are both likely to be wrong.’
    Tasmania’s rural economy and its geographic position ensured that it was a blip that could disappear from the rest of Australia’s radar. Tasmanians were long accustomed to being patronised by Sydneysiders for living in ‘a sometimes forgotten teardrop at the bottom of Australia’ or to being ignored completely, as happened in 1982 when Tasmania was left out of the Australian reckoning for the Commonwealth Games. Andrew Sant captured something of the local fury in his poem ‘Off the Map’:
    Identity deleted,
    Close to the Continent,
    Who wouldn’t make a fuss?
    There have been wars for less …
    About its profile on the map, the Tasmanian-born writer Peter Conrad was taught at school that Tasmania looked like a human heart, or an apple with a bite taken out of it. I prefer to think that it resembled the pawmark that Tasman’s sailors came across in the sand at Marion Bay, left there by a wombat or a thylacine. But mainlanders were not so indulgent. Their jokes about the island’s shape had entered the Cassell Dictionary of Slang : ‘mapatasi – from ‘map of Tasmania’, supposed shape of female pubic region. Came into use in 1990s’.
    To an outsider, these jokes disguised an unease, as if Tasmania was a dumping ground for a nation’s bad conscience about itself. Bernard Lloyd put it bluntly in Beer, Blood and Water : ‘Australians project all the things they despise and loathe about themselves – their racism, their homophobia, their parochialism – onto their “other” Tasmania, the “Albania of the Antipodes”. They think “we’re not like that – Tasmania is.”’ Certainly, in Sydney and Melbourne they appeared to know all about ‘the Apple Isle’, even if they had never set foot there. In Tasmania were committed the worst atrocities against Aborigines; in Tasmania there ended up ‘the most felonious of felons’ in Tasmania the population – sometimes referred to as Tasmaniacs – was so backward and inbred that visitors were advised, as I was, ‘to grow an extra head’ (in Salamanca Place I could even buy a T-shirt with a spare hole). No-one was terribly interested to hear about the findings of the Menzies Institute, which showed that Tasmaniacs have a lower rate of congenital malformation than the Australian average.
    But Tasmania’s very remoteness had also protected it. After living here for three years, I could not help noticing that the absence of ‘progress’, which had made Tasmania the butt of so many jokes, was turning into its strongest attraction. Bypassed and undeveloped, this arrestingly beautiful