January 02, 2004
the old and the new
I have been unable to find good images of the ecological devastation of Tasmania's old growth forests. The historical images of logging at the State Library celebrate the industry and are all copyright.
There were references to previous wilderness exhibitions and landscape in the galleries, but few are online. I did come across photographs of drowned trees by David Stephenson:
Drowned, No. 121 (Lake Echo, Tasmania) 2002
In a state that successfully brands itself for international tourists as clean and green in a polluted world, their political/business world sure loved to drown, clearfell, poison and burn their old growth native trees. It was if they found the rainforests too claustrophic; a wilderness that was threatening and a lair for the wild beast.
We can take a different tack to such vandalism:
Janet Long, Seed Dreaming
An image from the Tanami Desert that points towards renewal and a different way of relating to nature.
However, things become a little twisted in Tasmania as they try to figure out the contradiction between 'clean & green' and 'ecological devastation.'
Tamanians have been embattled since the Franklin Dam days. In the old mining town of Queenstown, on the West Coast, famous for its lunarscape, the pioneer culture celebrates the devastation wrought on the temperate rainforest.
Martin Walch, West Lyell euclid tyre
A community, which had historically celebrated the heroism of taming nature, mining and progress, resisted rehabilitation of the lunarscape. It was deeply anti-green community, which rejected any (deep green) wilderness conception of natural value or beauty.They fought to keep the hills denuded and scarred. The greenies could go to hell along with the greenie (ecological) history of wilderness.
Queenstown would trade on the disgust of tourists for their ecological vandalism. What would be preserved was the mining heritage. The only history that mattered was the 100 year human history of the mining industry. The hills would remain bare.
I have not visited Queenstown, and I don't know the answer myself, so I can ask this question in a detached way: Was the decision to not revegetate the hills denuded by the fumes of copper smelting really motivated by a rejection of a 'wilderness conception of natural value or beauty'?
Or, perhaps, by an intention to conserve the evidence of what had happened there?
I am interested in keeping this kind of evidence visible in the landscape. And less interested in the project of creating a faux 'wilderness'. Let's not Bowdlerise the document.
I followed your link to the webpage about Martin Walch's photography, and found this: "He says that although the Queenstown mining community was often depicted as ‘redneck’ during the Franklin Dam campaign, most have complex relationships with the natural world. He has been a strong advocate for empowering the community to tell their own stories, many of which deal with the region’s industrial heritage, the dignity of work, social hardship and environmental decay.
"
...which I think hints at the possibility of seeing more layers of meaning in the landscape.
Posted by: Peter Marquis-Kyle on January 2, 2004 03:58 PMPeter,
I have not been to Queenstown either, though I would love to go.
I was working off reports from friends who had been there as tourists and various written texts.
I fully agree with your statement of "hints at the possibility of seeing more layers of meaning in the landscape."
I set the passage up as a 'them and us' (ie., pioneer v greenie) because that is the main historical reading of the conflict over the landscape in Tasmania.
But the greenie wilderness conception has been challenged by Aborigines as implying unihabitated and so denying their existence.
On the pther hand the pioneer conception of taming the landscape through mining is undermined by the community at Queeenstown allowing the trees to grown back; and preventing the unemployed on a work for the dole program from pulling them out.
From that twin process of undermining the old conceptions something new is emerging:---a more complex understanding of our sense of place?
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on January 2, 2004 05:34 PM