Colours of Tasmania

We have been two weeks in Tasmania - family, friends and anti-clockwise around the island, which is 2% of Australia's population in a space of 1% of Australia's territory, geologically, biologically a recalcitrant fragment of our lump of Gondwana traipsing behind the blathery brazen mainland slowly northward, moistened and blown at to greater and lesser degrees by the often over-articulate Southern Ocean, an extraordinary distinctive diversity, not big but as a lady whose husband told us he drove a cart a hundred miles through its wilds 60 years ago said: "If you ironed it out, it'd be as big as Queensland!"

Compare with France: Caesar saw its limits compared with Tasmania (which perhaps fortunately he did not see): 'Gallia est omnia divisa in partes tres' [the whole of Gaul is divided in three parts]. Tasmania, by contrast, I reckon, is divided into six parts:

1. the east coast with its mild weather, beaches and seafood;
2. the north with its comparative warmth and moist climate and extraordinary farm fertility and colour;
3. the west coast facing the sea
4. the mountains and lakes of the interior
5. Hobart and hinterland, old colonial and waters tumbling through pastoral worlds rushing to the sea in 1/20th of the distance the waters of the Murrumbidgee and Murray take from comparable landscape on the Monaro, through comparable vertical distance — and without drying up on the way...
6. and the sixth wonder: MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, just upstream from Hobart.

Hobart, Bicheno (via Frecinet), Launceston (via St Mary's), Smithton (via Penguin),
Strahan (via Waratah) and then through winding rainy roads to New Norfolk,
just upstream from MONA and oh yes, Hobart and airport.
We flew and rented a car —
time and money cheaper than driving a car 1000km from home to the overnight ferry
(wilderness failure of his graciousness our 1994 Peugeot diesel also possible!)

Everywhere there is astounding landscape and, more than most of us, Tasmanians actually live in the environment.

There is a warmth of engagement offered by many people, also for the most part modest lives and incomes. Australians who shift to Tasmania are different from those who travel north. They wear shoes, jumpers and they think. The economy struggles, given its small size; there are quarrels over environment. Tourism is a huge element of the economy but tourism is a mixed blessing for tourist-trodden people, not everyone looks pleased to be a servant in a fluctuating industry where the customer often enough is a whinger. "Industry, Industry!" many cry, but (for example) at Waratah, where the tin mine was opened again for several years recently before shut again by the global downturn "...we got nothing, it did nothing, it was all contract, they just blew in and blew out, no work for us, no business for us." Population 200, 50 houses for sale online today.

Predominantly the images of Tasmania in the outside world are of wilderness, especially as inspired by Olegas Truchanas, and the darker hues of the national parks and Derwent, as exemplified by the lovely work of Veronica Youd, in whose rental accommodation we stayed for our two last nights, upstream from Hobart. Predominantly the tourist experience is of the resort locations, but we managed to stay mainly in towns, in reasonably priced houses and apartments. These communities were very friendly and conversational places to be.

My photos below predominantly focus away from the familiar wilderness.

Here is rocky coast at Bicheno at dusk, gulls and children waiting for the parent penguins to come ashore to feed their babies in their fish-vomitty, squarky burrows.

Here is the [Fairly] Big Penguin of Penguin, also under seagull guard

and here perhaps a dreaming of customers at the fabulous and fabled Penguin Sunday Market

Here are colours of the human-imprinted Northwest.  I was staggered by what I could see if I really looked as we drove, thank you Helen for driving most of the way, thank you cameras (now an Olympus E-PL1 with standard zoom or with my old 50mm f1.4:1 Nikon lens to see in the dark) for having enabled me to capture and show such as I began to see in Italy long ago.

CLICK ON ANY PHOTO FOR A SLIDESHOW OF ALL

If you look carefully at the hedgerow above , you will see that this is in fact a photo of the famous 'Nut' of Stanley
... or, it seemed to us, 'StanleyWorld' - so picturesque and fully tourist focused.

Some of these photos are taken from the car at highway speed

and then we headed south through mountains to Strahan which to get to seems way down the west coast but while the most southerly town is in fact not half way down the coast, the rest of the south west being wilderness

Strahan is on beautiful Macquarie Harbour, an old fishing port... but you cannot buy a fresh fish to cook... The population is under 1000, with tourist surges. Retail of anything except catered tourism is precarious. A town which is shaped for tourists, like Strahan or Stanley on the north coast does look like, well, it's shaped for tourists. We escaped not on the rack railway ($133 or $220 per person) which we were told not to miss, but up the road from the supermarket to Lette's Bay where we found the habitations of locals and the wonders of heath plants.

We were in Strahan on two of the few days in the year without rain (the boy on the checkout at the supermarket said it rained 350 days of the year, apologised for the strange weather we were getting.

As Chinese friends might, we looked around here as elsewhere and said 'so many people could live here!' (as did demographer W.D. Borrie in his report on Australia's future population to the Whitlam Government in the 1970s, when he suggested that Tasmania, if developed like Manhattan, had resources for 60 million people, as I recall). But where large populations could be managed in the north, in the southwest the land is more fragile and vulnerable, be it in rainforest or heath. The secret would seem to be in finding the right kinds of settlement (not mind-numbing clear-felling timber) and making it work in the environment with strong local planning, limiting urban spread, building up not out, using modern technology for energy efficiencies, comfort and communication. A leap forward from simply butting heads together in endless arguments.  

Dusk

Macquarie Harbour

We did not go back to Hobart at the end of our trip but to its western edge, at New Norfolk, again choosing a town not a resort. Here is a view down the Derwent (Hobart not far down there by road but out of sight) from a lookout opposite New Norfolk.

Down there, where a small river, the Lachlan, enters the Derwent on the right, we saw a platypus. Taken me almost seventy years to see a platypus in the wild... ! 

Here is a little movie:

THERE IS A LITTLE DEVICE TO CLICK

AT THE BOTTOM RIGHT OF MOVIE

TO SEE IT ON FULL SCREEN

~~~~~ AND SO TO THE SIXTH WONDER

I wrote this review at tripadvisor.com:

We find the new MONA to be a gallery of world importance—and the world seems to be coming to see it now. It is so good to be able to wander through and be immersed in a whole enclosed environment, the underground building and the art, without interpretation everywhere. You can delve into lots of commentary on an iPod-like device provided. The senses and mind assaulted variously, mind-shifting: don't go if you don't enjoy that.

It hides in a vineyard in a suburb. on a small peninsula on the river.

The staff are not haughty or intimidating but smile and converse. 

You can use camera but not flash. This is an odd collection below. So is MONA; not appropriate to try to add some form, other than perhaps my own sight,.... also I was absorbed more in the visceral than the digital and the camera battery died. 

Photos have their own life and meaning, these are from me, not MONA. And as usual, the people are art forms too.

Well yes, there is a bit of printed info at the beginning...

People do look beautiful

The artist's statement for this hollowed out recumbent full sized human form is:
This work, with its glass display case, 

draws attention to the sinister way museums and art institutions

 alienate visitors from their own emotions.
—very much a statement of what MONA works hard to avoid being.

MY BEAUTIFUL CHAIR 2010

Greg Taylor. Dr Philip Nitschke

He has tapped the screen and assisted death is under way,
on his own initiative and by his own decisions.
He did not have to sit there and discover the experience.

This is a very moving exhibit.
The thing in his hand is not a needle in his arm, perhaps his finger makes the point.
Here we exit. Moved and alive.

OR WAIT,
THIS IS NOT AT MONA BUT PERHAPS IN THE SPIRIT OF MONA
...
and to lighten things up again

PHOTOGRAPHY: Sculpture by the Sea

There is, each year, on the cliff walk from Tamarama to Bondi beaches, in Sydney, Australia, a 'Sculpture by the Sea' exhibition. We went to see the 2012 exhibition early on Sunday morning 21 October — early for light, also early before the Sunday crowds. There were lots of people there already.

It is not an easy thing for the exhibitors to compete against extraordinary scenery, a mass of alive people, a parade of animals, not just people's pets but also (we estimated) perhaps a hundred dolphins hunting in the waters below the cliffs. I have not tried to produce a catalogue, the images include some of the distractions, some things that catch the eye with beauty extraordinary or ordinary.

Nature provides its own spectacle... and (below) the passing human parade provides proportion

This object provided dramatic contrast with natural forms. The net below, placed near the steps above, when looked at directly did not have the same force as that above. But looked at from the south, looking into the morning sun, and with humans turning their backs to it, to see the sea, it gets context.

Is the fisherman planning theft?

With the worshipping photographer, this seems to have a religious quality.

It is indeed a photographer's day out.
He with the professional air is Gary Blackman aka Manly Beach Adventure Photography.
I deliberately over-exposed the shot, looking into the morning sun reflected off sky and sea,
to intensify focus on the main subjects.
I take the liberty of not straightening the quickly-taken image
so as to add weight to the leaning on the donkey. 

Mainly people just walked past this, but it intrigues.
Clearly something happens to the seas below this cliff.
The 'Southern Oscillation' of the Pacific Ocean, which sweeps water up the coast of Chile and Peru and then westward before turning southward along the east Australian coast means that there is a point on Australia's east coast where warm water from the north meets cold water from the south — a point which moves north and south depending on the strength or weakness (causing El Niño weather patterns) of the Southern Oscillation.
I don't think this is that point, but I wondered... and I could not resist mentioning  :-)

Apart from the sea itself, there was a lot of human interest in dolphins fishing below.
I don't have a dolphin photo...

These next photos show works in human context

while these next photos show intriguing objects without human context

... and as we have a lot of bamboo on our own property, we realise this first photo offers a new idea on how to keep birds at a distance from fruit.

—and these photos taken inside the dome have an eye- and brain-confusing quality

that did not exist when your eye is there. 

Photography is not a literal record, not a copy.  It has its own life.[CLICK ON PHOTOS TO ENLARGE]

I continue to be distracted by or engaged by the crowd.
Towards 10am the crowd is thickening.

People are interesting,
in themselves and in the things they do and especially in their self-absorption.

Some see more than others. Only once did I hear a sniping use of the word 'gillard' — by an older puffing woman, interestingly as a new noun, perhaps for the Macquarie Dictionary***, not as a proper noun:
"You're not going to do a gillard are you?"

*** I've put the link from 'Macquarie Dictionary' to the Guardian newspaper report. 
The Guardian, unlike any Australian newspaper, 
notes that Macquarie were a decade behind the Oxford Dictionary
in making a change in definition of misogyny.

often enough in galleries I am distracted from the 'installations' 

to admire small miracles of non-artist origin, as below

Towards the northern end, creative items using common objects:
 one for fun in own context, one doing something quite original

and then to arrive at Bondi Beach... people, nature and objects

pivotal strategic moment

I said in an entry in this blog on 10 August that we are now in what seems the most important pivotal moment in Australia–China relations. It seems also the case with Australia's relations with the United States, though we don't seem to know it and, still largely asleep, may slide into an absurdity in our alliance with the US.

I was astonished today to see that a report of views of Edward Luttwak, commending our support of an American policy of containment of China, filled half of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, notionally a very sensible old Australian newspaper.

I wrote to the Herald thus:

Your Luttwak front page
I am astonished that you would give the front page to reporting Edward Luttwak's views on the containment of China. To have him enter the debate regarding Australia's relations with China and the United States should cause reflection on where we are going in supporting foolish American strategic policy.  

Since the 1970s he has spouted a dangerous nonsense far to the right of Henry Kissinger. He sees international relations as bizarrely abstract, a duel between great enemies, with all the countries in the middle proxies or pawns. He certainly has no real notion of Australia or Australian policy as other than a manipulable. He does not know, does not really have regard for Australian interests.  

He speaks not of China but himself when he writes, as you quote: "The Chinese are autistic in dealing with foreigners, they have no sense of the 'other','' he said. ''They think they are incredibly brilliant strategists as if they had been conquering other nations, when in fact it's been the other way around for 1500 years.''

The notion of containment of China is a huge strategic error. It could not work and as a frame of mind can only aggravate issues in the region, establishing hostile mindsets, reversing trends towards the construction of diplomatic and political infrastructures for development and the resolution of disputes.

====

There is another disconcerting development today, with reports that a State Department spokesman has said that the the US-Japan treaty covers the Senkakus, islands called such by Japan, also claimed by Beijing and Taipei, known in Chinese as the Diaoyu Islands. Wikipedia provides some account of the territorial dispute, Japan regarding the islands as having been terra nullius at Japanese occupation at the time of the China-Japan war of 1895, Chinese governments claiming otherwise. There has been a considerable escalation of tension in relation to these islands and claims to them recently. The importance of the disputes arises from contest for seabed resources. ASEAN countries, Korea and Russia as well as China and Japan are in the mix of this. The best current resource on this subject is Geoff Hiscock's new book, Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources available on paper or Kindle or from iTunes. 

Bringing the US-Japan Security Treaty in and in this way is serious. The Americans, in pre-election mode, seem to be racing ahead on this issue. Also as if they were still repaying for the Acheson 'doctrine' of 1950, thought contributory to the Korean war... or imagining that global security still works as imagined to work then.

The texts of US-Japan and ANZUS treaties are here

http://australianpolitics.com/topics/foreign-policy/anzus-treaty-text

http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&a/ref/1.html

Everybody rushes to Articles IV and V of ANZUS, Art V of US-Japan, the bits referring to military support, but really ought to spend a little more time on Art I, this the first sentence of Art I of the US-Japan Security Treaty: 

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

We should be saying to the Americans that we would not consider ANZUS to apply in the case of US at war with China over Diaoyo/Senkaku islands. If the Americans want to say 'we are just upping the stakes' then that would be folly of the first order, to live or die regretting. 

China-Australia

There is now a great blathering about Australia and China in the media, perhaps it will eventually come to something coherent, but Dennis Richardson's comments (summarised here), which veer into loose language and thus into inappropriate political argument by a senior official, tend to sustain feuding rather than coherent perspective. More and more it appears we have in the discussion a general ignorance of both US and Chinese strategic policy, trapped like some Dostoevskan double, projecting our own whims and fantasies about what those countries may be and may want.

I should stay away, do other things... but to this discussion at Club Troppo - part 1 and part 2, I offered comments, here, here and here. It's curious to join discussion in what is some sort of 'club', with academic base, you have a sense in relation to much of the discussion that you are very much an outsider in a university tea room conversation.

pivotal points in the Australia-China relationship, the biggest is now

This week I spent about three hours at the National Library of Australia recording an oral history interview on Australia-China relations from the perspective of my own career and views — as part of a collection being made by the National Library with the support of the Australia-China Council (their website and activity interesting) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: interviews with former Australian ambassadors to China under the title Behind the Cables. 

At the National Library web site
I have found this Australian Archives
photo taken for a passport in January 1972,
when I was China desk officer.
The ways we were....  :-) 

My government-related role in relations with China covered the period from 1970 to 1985 as desk officer, section head, branch and division head and as ambassador to China. I also had a watching brief when in the Washington embassy 1976-78, while senior advisor to the deputy opposition leader in 1978-79 and later when head of the research service in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library 1989-91.

I argued in the oral history that there have been four pivotal moments in the relationship:

1. the shifting of recognition and diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing, from one claimant of the title of government of China to the other, in December 1972;
2. the Fraser Cabinet decision in 1980 and ensuing action to add substance to the bilateral relationship, to shift it from an international political plaything (words I find now, not in the interview) as it had continued to be, towards a mutually beneficial substantial relationship of value to successor regimes in either country, supporting the development of a civil and productive society in the course of China's modernisation;
3. the events in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and the fracturing of the political dimension of the Chinese reform movement;
4. the present time, when China's emergent predominance in world affairs is the subject of wide debate and requires us to shift from a neglect of broad perspective of the relationship while we (people and government) have been focused on the money. The big new deal has snuck up and people are calamitously confused.

I have commented in this blog on the current debate (or rather, have provided links from this blog to places where I have engaged in the debate). Recently I commented on a piece by former Prime Minister Fraser at Project Syndicate and we discussed this subject further on the phone: he is very concerned that we need to shift public policy significantly to sort out both our relations with China and the United States. Malcolm Fraser's 2012 Whitlam Oration is well worth the time, a critical contribution. And this week former Prime Minister Keating has added a new substantial contribution ... though his views are well established this is the time when it is important to have them set out again. 

I recently copied to this blog some views I have on the difficulty in shifting public policy. I am not at all sure that the high minded articulations to which links above will get through and shift us from reactive muddle to sensible new strategy.

There are white papers on Asia and defence to come in the next year (see this commentary). There is also a federal election next year at latest. The capacity of major parties to adapt is poor; minor parties have difficulty adapting beyond narrow interest dogma. We are trapped in the adversarialism of Australian politics in a particularly vicious way, imposed especially by a conservative-side search for support in lowest-common-denominator fear mongering, a habit perhaps two decades old and now desperately inhibiting of creative thought, desperately damaging to public trust in government and public policy.

How does the demand for security and invulnerability among people, leaders and the media damage us? Listen to the TED presentations of Brené Brown, here and here. Yes, you need 20 minutes for each but they will be well spent.