I spent the long weekend down at Victor Harbor sorting through my old view/field camera equipment that had been stored away for a decade or more, and then waiting for the weather to settle down so that I could start using the gear. I had some shots already lined up.

Whilst in Tasmania I realized that though the Leica S2 may be the finest digital camera in regards to image quality I will never be able to buy one. Nor could I ever afford to buy the new Hasselblad H4D-40 megapixel camera, its medium format equivalent, or even the Nikon DX3.

As Elizabeth Carmel observes:

The Hasselblad system cost really does not make sense as an investment for people not making a living from their photography, unless you are independently wealthy and want the joy of working with the best money can buy.

This is not just returning to the old and outmoded, given the possibilities offerred by Apple's iPad and its e-book format for photographers to break free of the constraints of the publishing houses and create & distribute their own content.

Charles Leadbeater in Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations for the British Council says that:

The growth of the digital cloud will change both culture and creativity. Digital stores of data in the cloud, ubiquitous broadband, new search technologies, access through multiple devices – these should make more culture, more available than ever before to more people. We are also living through a massive proliferation of expressive capacity to add to and remix culture with cheaper, more powerful tools for making music and films, taking and showing images, drawing up designs and games.

Permanent clouds of global cultural resources for people to draw on will be created by public, private and voluntary contributions. An example of global public cloud culture is the World Digital Library. Wikipedia is the prime example of a global cultural resource created by volunteer contributions. Google is providing private funding to digitise a vast collection of out of copyright books. iStockphoto is a quasi-commercial collection of photographs mainly taken by amateurs. Flickr allows the creation of a vast collection of user-generated photographs

The wild or untamed natural beauty of Tasmania has lured, inspired, enrapt, and obsessed artists since European occupation of the Island. However, the work of Tasmania’s contemporary landscape artists do not represent the sublime or beauty alone, as they have stumbled across the complexities underlying the island’s culture from invasion and ecological destruction and begun to introduce the politics, history and traditions of the island into their artwork.

This treescape, with its straggly, rhythmic formations, breaks away from wilderness as beauty and the 19th-century landscape painters, whose scenes reinforced an idealised notion of place. It's effect is for us to ask a question rather than confirm a view (the Heidelberg School ) and so become aware of the baggage that comes with representing the landscape. We are obliged to deal with the tradition as well as the politics of the push to develop again in wilderness areas and the on urban encroachment onto the land.

When I was passing through the Georgian village of Evandale in Tasmania last week, there were street posters advertising the Glover Prize for 2010, named after John Glover the Tasmanian colonial painter.

This is a landscape prize, and it is awarded each year for the best new (previously unexhibited and less than a year old) painting depicting the Tasmanian landscape. The work of the previous winners of the prize is varied. However, the images of the 2010 finalists are not up.

John Glover is known for his contribution to the early development of the colonial picturesque in settler landscape art in Australia, due to his depiction of the Tasmanian light as bright and clear. Glover also did commissioned works for the proud landowners of the Colony and he contributed to the development of tourism promoting ‘places to see’ using the natural local scenery in perfect picturesque post cards’.

Tourists in Europe in the early 19th century sought to locate places described in works by poets, romantic novelists and painters of the time which would accord with the ‘beautiful’, ‘sublime ’ ,‘ picturesque’ and ‘romantic ’. For Glover this was English Lake District .The touring artist often carried special items designed to assist in `aesthetic response’, such as a camera lucida.

I arrived back in Adelaide to discover that the Fringe Festival is in full swing. It has its own Flickr group and blog to inform those like me who have little idea of the events and happenings around the city.

The events that interest me are Street Dreams that is part of the DIY artist run festival and Renewing Adelaide. My reason is that it is nigh on impossible to legally set up an artist or community led space in the city centre on an ongoing basis in Adelaide, which lacks a vital urban artistic culture. Yet there are a lot of empty space in the city and those spaces make the city feel dead, especially when they remain empty for a period of years.

Adelaide like Newcastle is a ‘doughnut’ city –a city that lost their overnight populations and thus have a huge suburban belt but little city life with its sense of a lack of artistic community in the city centre, being isolated and bored with little option but to move to Melbourne.

The SMiLE album (1967) was to be the album the Beach Boys released after Pet Sounds, but it was never released. It remained unfinished until Brian Wilson returned to it in 2006.

However, the actual Smile material is accessible on numerous bootlegs and on YouTube. It is interesting to compare it to Brian Wilson's 2007 interpretation.

Smile was devised as a an album-length suite of specially-written songs which were both thematically and musically linked, and constructed from barely-related musical sections that were recorded, painstakingly spliced together, and then reduced into a short pop song.

I've just arrived back in Adelaide from the holiday/photography trip in Tasmania I came across this article on the Grateful Dead by Joshua Green in The Atlantic.

The Grateful Dead's version of Deep Elem Blues which they played from their earliest days up till 1983:

What is of interest is Green's observation that the band understood that in the information economy the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.

Giving something away and earning money on the periphery is the same idea proffered by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent best-selling book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Voluntarily or otherwise, it is becoming the blueprint for more and more companies doing business on the Internet. Today, everybody is intensely interested in understanding how communities form across distances, because that’s what happens online.

Given the recently discovered importance and significance of Reserche Bay as a site for wilderness preservation in Tasmania I was surprised to stumble upon spaces such as this amongst the rain forest:

This is one aspect of the settler or pioneer history of British settlement and frontier industry in Tasmania. There are saw mill sites, sawdust heaps, discarded machinery, tramways, wharves and house areas--along with the clear felled spaces amidst the native rain forest and wilderness. Hence the idea of natural and cultural heritage--- world heritage based on the natural landscape been modified through the various industrial and occupational activities.

If Cradle Mountain was a real eye opener as a mass tourist icon, then the Southwest National Park was a delight; especially around Recherche Bay. This is wilderness that deserves to be preserved from development in the form of logging.

Only Recherche Bay is not wilderness. It has a cultural history of French discovery, scientific expeditions and encounters with the aboriginal population and private landholding of the land that dates back to the early twentieth century, if not earlier. It is a cultural landscape.

The private land exists outside the national park which is a popular camping site for Tasmanians. During the 1830s and 1840s it was the site of a bay whaling station he main commercial activities in the later 1800s and into the early 1900s were timber-gathering and coal mining.

I'm currently staying in a wilderness lodge----Lemonthyme Lodge --- in the rainforest adjacent to the iconic Cradle Mountain National Park, which I will visit and explore today. If the pre-paidmobile broadband is working a treat, then photographing the wilderness sure is difficult.

The rain forest is messy, there is a monochrome greenness to everything, the sunlight in the dark spaces makes conditions difficult, and it is to hard lugging medium format camera's and heavy tripods for hours on end. I'm just not set up for this kind of photography.

My initial solution is to concentrate on detail in the more open areas of the rain forest.The second solution is to explore a space that is easily accessible so that I can walk in with the medium format camera's and heavy tripods. The third solution is to use a digital camera when walking sections of the Overland Track.

Tunbridge is in the Midlands, which lie due east of the Great Western Tier. Suzanne's sister Barbara and her husband Malcolm, who are from Brisbane are restoring a Georgian store as a 10 year project.

The Midlands around Tunbridge is an agricultural district of crops and grazing that is earmarked to be upgraded to irrigation agriculture in Jonathan West's Report for the Australian Innovation Research Centre at the University of Tasmania entitled ----An Innovation Strategy for Tasmania A New Vision for Economic Development.

Queensland, a mining town, is surrounded by wilderness---the South-West Wilderness is world heritage---and is home to some wilderness photographers such as Ivan Stringer. Roslynn D. Haynes, in Tasmanian Visions: Landscapes in Writing, Art and Photography explores the idea of wilderness that arose in opposition to the threats to the existence of wild rivers and old- growth forests from dams, mining, logging and other forms of commercial exploitation.

Haynes says:

As in the case of the desert, a vital role in the popularization of wilderness was played by artists, notably photographers. Like the flat expanse of the desert, most of the dense rainforest was un-paintable – for different reasons. There was too much of it, too close, too crowded. Unless you could position yourself on the other side of a handy lake – as Piguenit characteristically did, and as the Lake Pedder artists and photographers did, you would have enormous difficulty composing a landscape in traditional artistic terms. We needed Olegas Truchanas and even more Peter Dombrovskis, to invent a new way of depicting wilderness. We have now come to accept their new visual codes and conventions, so that a detail – a fern frond, a fungus, a single tree and of course, most famously, Rock Island Bend on the Franklin – can stand for the imagined whole. Without these images wilderness would never have secured the hearts and minds of Australia.

I have spent the day taking photographs in and around Queenstown and the Iron Blow open cut mine whilst Suzanne explored the Gordon River on an afternoon river cruise.

Queenstown hasn't changed much from when I was here in 2006. It is still a mining town:-- Vendanta Resources now own the Mt. Lyell copper mine. They have have a strong Indian connection re copper mining. The King River is still dead. The Queen River is still polluted.

However, the vegetation on the denuded hills is now slowing regrowing:

Whilst there I came across Raymond Arnold, an Australian artist/printmaker, who established Landscape Art Research Queenstown [LARQ], a non-profit studio/gallery in 2006. He threw in a lecturing job at the University of Tasmania to set up LARQ.

We are in Tasmania----we arrived in Devonport early this morning. We then drove down to Strahan on the west Coast via Cradle Mountain after I got Telstra prepaid mobile broadband working on an Apple MacBook in Devonport

Tasmania looks so dry. They've had little rain. And it is hot, just like Adelaide and Melbourne. Strahan looks rather tacky---as if it has suffered from the global financial crisis re the down turn in international tourism. There are lots of places for sale and empty cleared blocks. However, currently there is little surplus accommodation.