Apart from its isolation, Tasmania encapsulates extremities. First there is the primeval environment, containing the second-largest rainforest of its kind in the world, now besieged. In the past there has been the near extermination of the Indigenous people, while the simultaneous convict experience was more pervasive and shaping than elsewhere in the country. There remain persisting poverty and lower levels of education among the non-Indigenous than almost anywhere else. All these elements give the island state a particular importance in understanding the nature of settler Australia.

“Change came slowly,” Flanagan writes of the Tasmania he grew up in, and until recently “it was possible to conceive the nineteenth century as a time not unlike now.” The past receded more quickly, “people died younger and memory struggled to see over the great embankments of history — the war, the depression, the Great War.” Yet it projected forward in unrecognised continuities: everyday speech was still peppered with convict terms; labourers on the big sheep properties still received the old convict rations, supplemented by meagre wages. Occasionally a cruel convict man trap, designed to ensnare escapees, might be found in the bush.

Rural Tasmania, while cluttered with ancient gossip, was in denial about convict ancestry and the persistent Aboriginal presence. Except on rare, electrifying occasions — as when the limousine of the visiting governor was stolen by some miners who drove it about with an Aboriginal local character in the governor’s seat, waving to the locals. “A bitter joke which cut every way,” writes Flanagan.

The author is highly appreciative of his parents: of his schoolmaster father, solid and decent, a survivor of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, who — perhaps partly because of that — believed in the power of small acts of kindness. And his mother, impetuous, boisterous, funny, crimped by the codes of her time and place but for all that fiercely loving. “My parents were frugal,” Flanagan writes, “not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason in making life about money.” They faced the world with dignity, looking at fate squarely in the eye.

The full contrast came some time after. Flanagan left school, worked as a labourer, and had a near-death experience on the Franklin River (grippingly narrated here). He then decided to go to university, and on graduating won a coveted Rhodes scholarship. But he came to see Oxford, with its superior airs, as a citadel of conceit. He ended up rejecting it — and academic history as well. “In Tasmania,” he came to write, “history was not a story of progress… nothing ever quite went forward and everything finally returned. There was no straight line… only a circle.”

To this Flanagan would eventually bring a necessary double-sightedness — on the one hand understanding what impels the agents of destruction but, at the same time, “be on the side that loses everything.” Readers of The Narrow Road to the Deep North will be familiar with this approach, evident in the empathetic depiction of Japanese officers on the Burma–Thailand railway.

Question 7’s hybridity comes to the fore with two great arcs that run through the book. To round them out, fictional techniques are used — very tellingly in the case of the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. But Flanagan’s primary purpose is to link Wells’s famous novel The War of the Worlds to Tasmania. This is easier done than might be imagined, for there is a passing reference to the eradication of the Tasmanians in the text, while it seems the germinating idea for that novel had been Wells’s discussion of the Tasmanians’ fate with his brother, as they went for a walk in the English countryside. In a daring leap, Flanagan calls the invading British settlers Martians, and — in retrospective revenge — decides the denizens of Oxford are best tagged that way too.

The second arc is no less daring. A second Wells novel (of 1914) is cited as the first to deal with atomic war. Flanagan traces the development of the idea of the atom bomb, again resorting at times to fictional techniques. His purpose is singular. The opening section tells of his journey to the site of the prison camp where his father was a slave labourer, but finds even the memory of it scarcely remains. At the same time, he knows that had there been an American invasion of Japan instead of the Bomb, his father would have been killed along with all the other Allied prisoners. Richard Flanagan cancelled; instead, a child of the A-bomb. The fortuity of his birth, the fortuity of his later survival. Contingency and fate, and the arbitrariness of destiny, loom large in this book. It poses many fundamental questions.

As Peter Carey recently remarked in the Age, “Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last hundred years.” He may very well be right. •

Question 7
By Richard Flanagan | Knopf | $35 | 280 pages

The post Double-sighted in the deep south appeared first on Inside Story.

Within three minutes of posting, two members of the group had commented on top of each other to say the photo was taken at the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth Streets, Hobart, looking up what is now Elizabeth Mall towards the GPO clock tower on the left. That’s how quick and attentive people are in groups like this. And they were correct, I know the place perfectly well. I don’t live there anymore, but this is my home city.

Old photographs are posted in this group several times a day and each attracts many comments, and sometimes dozens. This is just one local history group among countless others on Facebook and other social media platforms. Nostalgia is the main theme, certainly, but with every post, comment and share, memories are stimulated and connections with place and community are enacted.

Recollections are often detailed and intricate. Concerning the date of the rainy-day photograph someone suggested the women’s coats indicate late 1950s. “A bit earlier I think,” came a swift reply. “By the mid–late 1950s hemlines had risen a few inches to a bit below the knee. I remember them well from my teenage dressmaking days!”

Others leapt in to name the make of the cars, the consensus being that the one in the foreground is an Austin A40 Devon, although a few people suggested a Hillman Minx. “I immediately could smell the upholstery,” said one. “Go Dad!”

Still others noticed the banks. People love to reminisce about banks. “What happened to the beautiful old bank on the corner?” someone asked. It’s still there, came a reply, now a branch of the National Australia Bank, but the clock has been removed recently, they thought, having not displayed the correct time for a while.

The Hobart Savings Bank on the extreme right of the image has been pulled down and replaced with what one commenter described as a “modern monstrosity.” Someone else claimed to still have a pink bankbook from there with a few pounds in the account, but: “I suppose the government has pinched that.” This person remembered being interviewed by the manager there for a home loan, $20,000 over twenty-five years at 6 per cent. “Real service back then by real people, all those tellers. We have lost so much.”

By this time I was thoroughly engrossed in the world of this photograph. I sent it to my two brothers. Yes, that’s an Austin A40, said Paul, and the car with the smashed-up grille in the centre of the photograph is a Chevrolet (“1939 I think”). He noticed the traffic lights, which I had missed, and how all the pedestrians are wearing titfers. Hats, that is. (I had to look that up.)

Mark remembered the Kodak store still trading in the 1970s. “Mind you, I remember when Hobart had half-a-dozen good photo/camera stores,” he added. As a keen photographer himself, he appreciated the mood and story in the photograph. It’s harder than it looks to take pictures that do that.

For me the main feature is the GPO clock. Our grandfather worked in that building, and I picture him glancing out the window at that very moment, hoping the rain might have eased in time for his bus ride home.

I like to know the origins of things, so I sought out the photograph’s descriptive information at the State Library of Tasmania. It does have a fairly precise date, May 1953. (So, the Facebook commenter knowledgeable about 1950s hemlines was right.) It is one of a series of about 12,000 images made between 1951 and 1973 by the Tasmanian Education Department. Hats off to the library staff for their work to preserve and digitise this series; it’s magnificent.

The photos cover a wide range of subjects other than schools and education, suggesting that the department’s photographers could be called on for a variety of assignments. Our rainy-day photograph shows that they might also fill the end of a roll on the way back to the office with whatever took their fancy.

Mark is right, it’s the mood of the photograph that is captivating. Wet streets are eternally interesting for photographers and artists, and this unknown photographer appears to have sheltered under an awning and brought the shutter down just as everyone is too busy getting out of the rain to notice or care.

See how they have caught the Chevrolet’s crumpled grille just as it swung around the corner towards us? This car has had a bingle, as my father would say, the sort of thing that could occur on any wet day. Central Hobart was not built for cars, and yet in these postwar years a lot more people could afford them. The result: frustration.

Then there’s the woman on the right who draws our gaze as she walks briskly away from us into the frame. With her reflection shimmering up from the pavement, she turns provincial Hobart into a scene John le Carré could have conceived. The cut of her coat is pure 1950s. Clothes rationing is out, Christian Dior’s New Look is in, and this woman can afford the latest modes.

Other women appear to be making do with their older things. The woman with the basket crossing the street, head down against the rain: she could have been wearing that severe jacket and skirt since the 1930s. She’d be about our grandmother’s age, I should think, part of a generation for whom frugality was a necessity and later a habit.

The more I look at the photograph, the deeper I fall into a liminal state between connection and disconnection. I know this place, and yet I don’t. I belong and yet I don’t. I think it’s the raindrops bouncing up off the road that gives the image its perpetual drama. Where is all that water going to go? In Hobart, it goes into the Hobart Rivulet.

Autumn is when the rivulet is most prone to flooding. In June 1954, thirteen months after our photograph was taken, flash floods forced several feet of water into the basement of O’Conor’s shoe shop. You can see the shop sign in the photograph. Staff working there to save the stock might have drowned if the floor-level windows had given way. There had been bad floods in 1923 and 1947, but the 1954 floods were said to be the worst in a hundred years.

The rivulet emerges on the slopes of kunanyi/Mount Wellington and runs through present-day Fern Tree and South Hobart. Reaching the city, it ducks underground and up again a few times before disappearing for a kilometre or so directly under the CBD. (In 2016 the rivulet wall was breached during building works, causing more than $15 million in damage to the Myer department store and several retailers in the adjacent Cat and Fiddle Arcade.) Then it comes up for air for a short stretch parallel to lower Collins Street, disappears, and finally meets the River Derwent at an outlet north of Macquarie Point.

For thousands of years First Nations Tasmanians moving seasonally through the Hobart region would have understood the rivulet’s seasons and moods, and how it connected with other natural watercourses to support animal and birdlife. Then, in February 1804, lieutenant-governor David Collins decided that this was the ideal place to establish a settlement. The “Run of clear fresh Water” he found there played a large part in his decision. Efforts the previous year at Risdon Cove, on the eastern side of the Derwent, had faltered partly for lack of reliable clean water.

Collins understood the need to protect the rivulet, and within weeks had issued instructions to the settlers not to pollute it or destroy the “underwood” close to its banks. By 1805 a footbridge had been built across it connecting a bush track leading north, which later became Elizabeth Street. This bridge was replaced in 1816 by a brick structure named Wellington Bridge after the famous duke. Today it is covered over by Elizabeth Street but a small void protected by a grille affords the curious shopper a reminder of Hobart’s earliest days.

The first European settlers quickly learned that although the rivulet could sink to a trickle in the summer, heavy rain or snowfall on the mountain could turn it into a torrent. And this was even before the town authorities decided to alter its course for the first time, in 1825, with what was known as the “New Cut” along a section of lower Collins Street.

The New Cut diverted the rivulet towards another creek and sent both of them away from their natural bed, which had been under the present site of the City Hall. Their confluence had formed a silty beach prone to flooding, and the diversion was designed to facilitate land reclamation in support of burgeoning waterfront industries.

Early maps of Hobart — this one for instance — show how the rivulet once pursued its own gentle course from the mountain to the river, and how ruthless was the grid of streets imposed on top of it. Over time the rivulet has been diverted, dammed and forced through numerous pipes, tunnels and culverts: controlled and exploited, in other words, for the settlers’ convenience.

David Collins’s instructions to protect the rivulet were ignored, and by the mid 1820s it had become polluted by refuse from humans, animals, tanneries and distilleries. Outbreaks of disease were inevitable. In 1828 the town sheriff reported that the rivulet had become a “receptacle for all the filth and impurity of the town.”

The strip along lower Collins Street was the worst, and just as likely to flood as before. It has never been a pretty part of town, as you can see. In high school I had to catch a bus along here and my moody teenaged thoughts were not enhanced by having to stare at a tired old watercourse while I waited. Residential housing had all gone by then and I didn’t know that these streets used to be known unofficially as “Wapping,” after the working-class waterfront area of London. For a hundred years or more, the people of Hobart’s Wapping suffered the most from flooding and pollution, as the poorest people often do.

Efforts over many decades to improve the supply and quality of Hobart’s water finally culminated in 1895 with the completion of two major reservoirs at the Waterworks Reserve above South Hobart, with a combined capacity of 500 million litres. They still supply Hobart’s drinking water.

The rivulet can still rise up in anger. Calamitous flooding in 1960 led to new control measures, but in 2018 the section along lower Collins Street once again turned into a seething and very dangerous torrent. A group of urban geographers noted then that the problem (not unique to Hobart) is that urban planning measures have become disconnected from nature and overlook the ecological functions of watercourses. Built-up areas deprive a city of green spaces that act like natural sponges. It’s hard to apply water-sensitive planning principles to a city already built.

At the end of my meditation on the photograph taken in Hobart in 1953 I returned to the original question: where does all that water go? How do we prevent our cities from becoming alienated from their natural environmental features? The upper reaches of the rivulet are better managed now, but the challenges are real. Still, the open waterway is fouled by rubbish and other pollutants, some from the South Hobart tip.

If you have fifty-three minutes to spare, spend them with Pete Walsh, the Platypus Guardian. Pete, who first sought solace at the rivulet after a serious medical diagnosis, was drawn there to reconnect with something he thought he was losing. Sitting on the bank one day he was astonished when a platypus emerged from the water and zoomed up to him, wiggling her bill as if she had something to say. He realised that a fragile population of platypuses was still managing — against all odds — to call the Hobart Rivulet home.

The more Pete visited the rivulet the more often he saw this zooming platypus, so he named her Zoom. That profound moment of connection inspired in Pete a passion to do what he could to preserve a habitat for these ancient animals, and a whole community of supporters has since joined him. If Zoom has a message, it must surely be to ask us to tread more lightly on this earth. •

The post A rainy day in Hobart appeared first on Inside Story.

To research and write queer history before living memory — without oral testimony, that is — is to enter a much darker place. The last man to hang for sodomy in the British Empire was in Tasmania in 1867, and in 1997 Tasmania became the last Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise male homosexuality. Relationships and life choices that are criminalised, stigmatised and pathologised are unlikely to leave much of an imprint on the public record, and surviving historical evidence is often patchy, obscure and cloaked in euphemism.

In 1990 I wrote an honours thesis in the history department of the University of Tasmania on the Tasmanian writer Roy Bridges. It wasn’t a piece of literary criticism, for that would have been a short thesis indeed. Most of Bridges’s thirty-six novels were adventure stories for boys or middle-brow historical romances and melodramas dealing with the early days of Tasmania and Victoria. Frequently he was inspired by stories his mother, Laura Wood, told of her family history on their farm near Sorell, east of Hobart, going back to the earliest days of white settlement.

Bridges was Tasmania’s most prolific novelist, successful and admired in his time, but his reputation didn’t outlast his death in 1952. I wasn’t interested in the quality of his writing so much as his interpretation of Tasmanian colonial history, and how his own deep connection with the island was refracted through his works of fiction and memoir.

Born in Hobart in 1885, Bridges started publishing in 1909, and at first wrote prolifically for the gutsy little New South Wales Bookstall Company. Time and again he sold his copyright for fifty pounds per novel, whenever he was hard up (“which was often,” he once observed), grateful for the support the Bookstall gave to new Australian writers.

In his mature period his novels were published in London by Hutchinson or Hodder and Stoughton, but during and after the second world war his output declined. The gratifying success of That Yesterday Was Home (1948) eased his final years. Part history, part family history and part memoir, the book is a passionately expressed meditation on memory and connection with place. He died in 1952.

Roy Bridges in 1937. Inscription reads, “To my friends at Robertson & Mullins. Roy Bridges. 1937.” State Library of Victoria

By the time I started work on Bridges he was remembered mainly by enthusiasts interested in the literary culture of Tasmania. As a thesis project, though, he was perfect. No one else was claiming him, and significant collections of his papers were held in libraries in Hobart, Melbourne and Canberra. Methodologically I had Bridges’s memoir as a guide, which, unreliable as any memoir always is — and I knew this — was at least a place to begin.

I bought a 1:25,000 map of the Sorell district and pinned it to my wall in the history department. I drove out to meet Bridges’s nephew and his family, who were still working the property that Bridges had named “Woods” after his mother’s family.

The town of Sorell has always been a stopping point for travellers from Hobart heading either to the east coast or to the convict ruins at Port Arthur. To get there you must first drive across Frederick Henry Bay via the Sorell causeway at Pittwater. “All my life,” Bridges wrote in 1948, “Frederick Henry Bay has sounded through my mind and imagination. Like drums… or like cannonade in storm, or in the frozen stillness of winter’s nights.”

Every time I drive across the Sorell causeway I think of him, and did so again one brilliant day in February this year while heading up to Bicheno on holiday. With the sun sparkling off the bay I shouldn’t have been brooding on old stories, but suddenly I knew that the time was right to tackle again a biographical dilemma I had evaded, all those years ago.

The few others who have written about Bridges have struggled to understand the source of the loneliness and sorrow which, towards the end, amounted to torment. His journalist friend C.E. (Ted) Sayers first met Bridges in 1922 and remembered him as a haunted, “tense little man,” a chain smoker, embarrassed in the company of women, who had allowed a streak of morbidity and violence to enter his fiction. I developed my own suspicions about this haunting, and in my thesis in 1990 I speculated, briefly and carefully (because this was Tasmania), that Roy Bridges had been a closeted and deeply repressed gay man.

I wouldn’t have thought of this except for a conversation I had with the one friend of Bridges I could still find, a well-known local historian named Basil Rait. I visited the elderly Mr Rait in a tumbledown house in north Hobart somewhere near Trinity Church. Just as I was deciding that his recollections weren’t going to be particularly useful, he astounded me with the remark that one day, Roy Bridges had been seen emerging from the Imperial Hotel on Collins Street in central Hobart, and that the Imperial was a known place for homosexual men to congregate.

When did this occur? And did Rait see this himself? I was too amazed — and too timid, I think — to ask enough questions and, rookie historian that I was, I did not record the conversation. Why was Rait so frank, and what did he think I would do with his information? Perhaps I’d gained his trust because I had arrived without a tape recorder. I don’t know.

But I did consider his revelation very carefully. The once-elegant Imperial was rather seedy by then, which seemed to lend plausibility to what Rait had said. I had gay friends and I asked if anyone knew anything about the Imperial’s reputation. No one did.

Unable to verify Rait’s assertion, I turned to the textual sources. Although I was aware of the danger of reading too much into odd snippets of evidence that might have signified nothing, I was also unwilling to ignore what I had been told, which, if true, might explain everything. To speculate about Bridges’s sexuality in the thesis, or not: my thesis supervisor left it up to me. On an early draft I can see in his handwriting: “You decide.”

Royal Tasman (Roy) Bridges came from a family of prosperous wicker manufacturers and retailers. His father Samuel and uncle James ran Bridges Brothers, in Elizabeth Street, Hobart, which had been founded in 1857 by their father, Samuel senior. After graduating with an arts degree from the University of Tasmania, Bridges joined the Tasmanian News as a cadet in December 1904. Journalism was his career for most of the next twenty-five years. He accepted a job with the Hobart Mercury in 1907 but soon became disaffected by poorly paid sixteen-hour days on what his memoir described as a “rotten sweat-rag” and headed for Sydney.

He got a job immediately on the Australian Star under its editor, Ralph Asher. Sydney was a relief from Hobart’s “superficial puritanism, social restrictions and moral repressions of human nature,” but in 1909 the chance of a job on the Age lured him to Melbourne, where he settled in happily for a decade. Then, between 1919 and 1935, when he retired permanently to the farm near Sorell, he switched between freelance writing and journalism, mostly with the Age but also, briefly and unhappily, with the Melbourne Herald in 1927.

A shy man, Bridges did love the companionship of other journalists. Keith Murdoch, future father of Rupert, was one of his early friends on the Age, although they didn’t remain close. There was Neville Ussher, of the Argus and the Age, who died during the first world war and whose photograph Bridges kept close to him for the rest of his life. And then there was Phillip Schuler, son of Frederick Schuler, editor of the Age.

High-spirited, charming, handsome: Phillip Schuler’s nickname was “Peter” because of his Peter Pan personality. Friendship “blossomed” during a bushwalk on a “golden August Sunday at Oakleigh,” then only sparsely settled, and after that the two young men spent many weekends together. They read the same books, roistered in restaurants and theatres, and tried their own hands at writing plays.

On a walking holiday in Tasmania in 1911 the two men tramped from Kangaroo Point (Bellerive, on the eastern side of the Derwent) down to Droughty Point, “the way of many of my boyhood days.” They climbed Mount Wellington to the pinnacle and spent two nights at the Springs Hotel, part way up the mountain (sadly burned to the ground in the 1967 bushfires). From an upper window they watched the “glory of the sunrise,” looking across to Sorell and Frederick Henry Bay. In 1948 Bridges wrote:

The beauty and wonder of the island rolled on me, possessed me, and possesses me yet. We were talking and talking — life, Australia, journalism, literature; always we planned; always we hoped. We were worshipping life, the island, the sun.

If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, then no. Schuler returned Bridges’s friendship, but as his biographer has made clear, Schuler was thoroughly heterosexual and Bridges knew it. This could have been one of those passionate platonic friendships between men, but in 1990 I thought, and I still think, that Bridges was absolutely in love with Schuler.

After brilliant success as the Age’s correspondent during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, Schuler enlisted for active service but was killed in northern France in June 1917. His last letter to Bridges ended: “Keep remembering.” Schuler’s photograph was another that Bridges cherished always, and indeed he had it reproduced in his 1948 memoir, but Bridges himself was no Peter Pan. He had to carry on facing the disappointments that life inevitably brings, and he was not stoic. In his fifties, living with his sister Hilda back at Woods, he felt the loneliness deeply and became a demanding, querulous, self-pitying man who drank too much.

He did still have many friends though, and in 1938 he began corresponding with Ted Turner, an amateur painter whom he met through their membership of a Melbourne literary society known as the Bread and Cheese Club. Bridges was only a distant member because he rarely left Tasmania by then, but he took a fancy to Turner and found great entertainment in the younger man’s letters, which reminded him of his own Bohemian days in Melbourne. Bridges heaped affection and confidences on Turner, requested a photograph and was delighted with it. He was cross if Turner delayed writing and begged him to visit Tasmania (“Ted old son… I wish I had your friendship — near me!”), but Turner never did.

The two men met only once, in April 1940 when Bridges made the trip to Melbourne, but Bridges went home hungover and with a bout of influenza. He admitted to Turner that the trip had been “a series of indiscretions.” What exactly that meant I couldn’t tell, and their correspondence declined later that year.

Did I indulge in absurd speculation in my thesis about domineering mothers and emasculated fathers? No, but it was impossible to ignore the breakdown of the marriage of Samuel and Laura Bridges, Roy’s parents, in 1907 when Roy was twenty-two. Samuel was pleasure-loving and extravagant, and eventually the house in north Hobart where Roy and his sisters were brought up had to be sold. Of Laura, Samuel apparently said that she “may as well” live with Roy because “it’s plain she’ll never be happy without him.”

Laura managed the household while Hilda became her brother’s amanuensis, writing or typing all his novels from his rapidly scrawled sheets. Roy supported them all financially, although Hilda earned an income as a musician and fiction writer. Only now does it occur to me that there might have been an understanding among the three of them, tacit one would think, that Roy would never marry. Before Laura died in 1925 she begged Hilda, “Whatever happens, look after Roy,” which Hilda did. She never married.

Hilda Bridges, probably in the 1910s. State Library of Victoria

Did I mine Bridges’s writings for autobiographical clues to his sexuality? Yes, for no one warned me against mistaking writers for their characters, and anyway there was so much material to work with. Convicts, bushrangers, and the endeavours of the early colonists to establish a free and democratic society on Van Diemen’s Land: Bridges wrote obsessively on these themes for years.

Novel after novel, especially in his mature period, features a misaligned relationship between a beautiful, passionate woman and an unsuitable man. A son of the relationship will turn up as a convict in Tasmania, and the plot revolves around whether the mother’s folly can be forgiven and her son redeemed by love. Bridges despised hypocrisy and religious intolerance, and his clergyman characters are tormented by unsuitable desires and undone by having to preach Christianity to convicts who are not inherently evil but victims of an unjust society.

Symbolic of society’s condemnation of a convict were the physical scars left by flogging, for which Bridges seemed to have a horrified fascination. In his final novel, The League of the Lord (1950), the Reverend Howard France sits in his study in Sorell picturing an illicit meeting between a beautiful young local girl and her convict lover, which he knew was occurring at that moment. France is jealous of them both. “[Joan’s] eyes are deep blue… her mouth is red, her hands long and white… exquisite…” Further down the page France imagines the couple being caught, which would mean the triangles for young Martin: the “hiss and crack of the lash across strong young shoulders… red weals… red flesh… red running… red.”

Martin is deeply ashamed of being a convict and struggles to accept the love offered by his (free) family in Tasmania. He recalls his journey there on a transport ship, hoarded below decks with hundreds of other convicts:

The faces, the eyes, the voices, the hands; the loathsome, pawing, feeling, gliding, gripping hands… the squeaking laughter in the obscene dark… the foul perverted horde that [had] been men and boys… the brooding, breeding evil, the bestiality, lifelong contamination, incurable, malignant, cancerous.

I underlined this passage in my copy of The League of the Lord but didn’t know how to use it. Now I see it two ways. It could simply be an evocation of Marcus Clarke–inspired Tasmanian gothic. Or it could be evidence that Bridges’s many convict characters are studies of profound shame, self-hatred and alienation. In this reading, those convict characters were versions of himself, their alienation his own, and homosexuality his source of shame. Either interpretation is possible.

Roy and Hilda Bridges’s return to Woods in 1935 fulfilled a promise Bridges had made to their uncle, Valentine Wood, who’d died in 1930, to take on the old place. He knew that Woods meant more to him than Melbourne: “that I was of this land; that it was stronger than I, and that when it willed it would call me back.” Still, brother and sister missed Melbourne terribly, even though overstrain and a nervous dread of noisy neighbours had driven Roy to the brink of a breakdown.

It might have been in these years that the Imperial Hotel incident occurred. Did it? Bridges disliked Hobart, but if it was casual sex he needed, where else could he go? And yet, if the Imperial was a known place for gay men to meet, the police would surely have been there too. Put that way, the incident seems unlikely.

Bridges’s heart condition worsened in the late 1940s and he had a chronic smoker’s cough. He refused to go to Hobart for tests and hated doctors visiting from Sorell. One doctor threatened to have him certified to get him to hospital. “He implied my not liking women about me in such treatment was an abnormality,” Bridges grumbled to a friend. The burden of his care fell as usual on Hilda. Eventually he had to be rushed to hospital in Hobart anyway, and he died there in March 1952 aged sixty-six. Hilda stayed on at Woods for many years until she moved to a Hobart nursing home, where she died in 1971.

I never spoke with Bridges’s family about his possible homosexuality because I was relying on them for recollections and photographs. I drove out to Woods for a final polite visit to give them a copy of the thesis, and after that, unsurprisingly, I never heard from them again.

My research had not included any reading on the ethics of biography so instead I learned it the hard way. I’d gained the trust of my subject’s family only to betray that trust in the end. However, this time — for this essay — I contacted a relative a generation younger and did have an open conversation. There is nothing new to say except that Bridges left a complex personal legacy that is still being felt.

Some people blame homosexuality among male convicts for the long shadow of repression and homophobia in Tasmania that delayed gay law reform until 1997. Perhaps. Such a thing would be hard to prove, and in any case, what is “proof”? What constitutes “evidence” of a queer life? When found, how do we assess its significance? The thing is to not shrink from the task, because with patience and honesty we might still open up some of these painful histories to the light. •

The post Lifting the shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

“A passer-by finds a drunk on his hands and knees under a street lamp, and asks ‘What are you looking for?’ ‘A dime I lost.’ ‘Where did you lose it?’ ‘Up that alley there.’ ‘Well why look for it down here?’ ‘Because there’s some light down here.’”

Stretton drew the moral that the researcher who really wants to find the dime will go, “groping but rational, up the dark alley.”

I was reminded of Stretton’s story as I read Lucy Frost’s new book, Convict Orphans. Frost chooses to search in the light, with results that are both rewarding and to this reviewer a bit frustrating.

Lucy Frost has been bringing us vivid voices from the past for almost forty years. I remember the joy of discovering her first book, No Place for a Nervous Lady (1984), and introducing my history students to the women’s “voices from the Australian bush” that she gave us there.

Her second book further enriched my teaching. The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin (1998) presented us with an educated, articulate woman whose voice was instantly accessible to an educated late-twentieth-century audience. That hers was a world-weary voice made Annie even more interesting to my feminist students — and to me — though I was uncomfortable with the middle-class voices that dominated my own research at the time, and keen to find ways of understanding the lives of the less articulate.

From the late 1990s Frost has been in search of less educated, less privileged voices, with more success than I could muster. She has been involved with the Founders and Survivors project, a huge enterprise digitising and linking all the available records left by and mostly about the 73,000 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania. Links to court records in Britain and Australia bring some of these convict voices to life, and a few have left letters and diaries. Frost’s publication with Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives (2001), shows what can be achieved by history from below where the sources are sufficiently thick.

Frost continues to be especially interested in the historical experiences of women. She has served as founding president of the Female Convicts Research Centre and as an editor and contributor to its publishing arm, the Convict Women’s Press. Her research into the lives of 150 female convicts who arrived in 1838 on board the Atwick resulted in Abandoned Women: Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas (2012). Nineteen children were landed with the Atwick women; wondering about their fate, she tells us, led her to write her latest book.

Convict Orphans sets out to tell the stories of the thousands of children who passed through the Queen’s Orphan Schools and their rebrand, the Queen’s Asylum for Destitute Children. Most were not orphans in the modern sense, having at least one parent living; they were, as Frost puts it, orphaned by the convict system. She places their stories at the head of “a long corridor of suffering”: First Nations children stolen from their families; child immigrants similarly stolen; children abused in institutions that should have protected them. It is time, she writes, that their voices “were heard — and heeded.”

Frost began her research by listing all the children admitted to the state orphanages but soon committed herself to searching where the evidential light was brightest. “Because the array of sources is thickest for children apprenticed during the period of the Queen’s Asylum,” she writes, “I decided to concentrate on ‘orphans’ indentured during the institution’s final decades, 1859–79.” With almost 1000 subjects in hand, she combed a great numbers of other sources — newspaper reports, court records, committee minutes, family histories. “Out of this process grew the collection of stories from which I have woven the narrative of this book.”

She begins with the story of Hannah Bennett, a dark tale with a surprisingly bright ending. Hannah was a convict’s daughter, held in an Orphan School as a toddler, “retrieved” by her mother at five years old but raped and seriously injured at nine. She gave convincing evidence in court against her assailant, and was then returned to the Orphan School. At thirteen she again gave evidence, this time to an inquiry into the management of the school. The inquiry found systematic abuse in the institution: the children’s rations stolen, their bodies mercilessly beaten. But the matron was merely reprimanded, and the girls who had given evidence against her were returned to her care.

Hannah suffered a year more in the school before again being “discharged to mother.” At this point the story changes. Fifteen-year old Hannah married a twenty-one-year-old farm servant and lived a long and settled life, raising seven children with, as Frost says, “proudly confident names” like Hannah Georgina and Victoria Elizabeth.

Hannah’s story is emblematic of the trajectory of the book. We read stories of children whose lives were blighted by their experience of orphanage and apprenticeship, while others survived and even prospered. Some established families of their own; others — particularly the boys — seemed incapable of long-term relationships. The concluding chapter begins by laying the blame for this trauma squarely on the convict system — “transportation smashed families.” But then Frost ends with the stories of two women who raised generations of descendants and lived long enough to be remembered and memorialised by family historians.

Convict Orphans begins by asking us to “heed” the children’s voices, and Frost’s storytelling is so skilful that we won’t forget them. But it isn’t clear what lesson we can learn from these stories. Frost doesn’t weigh the successes against the failures; we are not told how many of her thousand subjects she could trace to a settled life, how many vanished, how many lives were destroyed. These are facts she could draw from the sources within her evidential pool; she chooses not to.

Another recent history of the Tasmanian convicts, Janet McCalman’s Vandemonians, sets out to put their stories in historical context. McCalman has taken a leading role in a project gathering biographical data on some 25,000 convicts: “cradle-to-grave data” intended to evaluate the effects of penal servitude. In setting their research questions, McCalman and her fellow researchers did indeed go “groping but rational, up the dark alley.”

As it happens, many of their questions were wrong. Life expectancy was not affected by height, nor by literacy. Flogging did not shorten lives; rather, “men’s mortality rose in proportion for every day spent in solitary confinement.” Overall McCalman found “that transportation was good for men, and compounded the risks for women.”

Frost doesn’t offer this level of certainty, but she doesn’t need to. Most of her readers will be caught up in the immediacy of her children’s voices, moved by their sufferings and resilience. That they lived is significance enough. •

Convict Orphans
By Lucy Frost | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 304 pages

The post Writing history in dark places appeared first on Inside Story.

That would be a stunning swing of 8 per cent against Dominic Perrottet’s government — a government one could argue is the most progressive and competent the Coalition has produced in the past decade, certainly relative to its counterparts federally, or in Victoria or Queensland.

Four days later, a Resolve poll for the Sydney Morning Herald came up with roughly similar findings, though on those figures the swing seems to be more like 6.5 per cent. It would still be curtains. The bookies give the Coalition’s last government on the mainland just a 20 per cent chance of holding onto office when the voters deliver judgement on 25 March.

If that proves right, it would be a dramatic illustration of how far the Liberal Party has fallen. At its peak in 2014, the Coalition ran every government in Australia except for South Australia (where it won the election on votes but lost it on the seats) and the ACT (where it hasn’t won an election since 1998).

The Abbott government’s 2014 budget of broken promises marked the turning point. Since then the Coalition has lost one government after another.

Three of those governments fell after a single term. Six months after Abbott’s budget, Victoria led the way, following four years dominated by the Coalition infighting that brought down premier Ted Baillieu. Queensland followed two months later, with premier Campbell Newman, the hero of its 2012 election win, losing his own seat in a 14 per cent statewide swing.

The polls suggested Abbott’s own government would also be booted out after a single term, but Liberal MPs forestalled that by dumping him and installing Malcolm Turnbull to win them the 2016 election.

Coalition governments continued to fall: Northern Territory voters dumped the Country Liberal Party government in 2016, leaving it with just two seats; the following year Mark McGowan began his remarkable reign by ousting the Coalition government in Western Australia.

In South Australia, by contrast, the Liberals finally broke through after sixteen years in opposition to win power in 2018. But that government too lasted just one term, and Labor emphatically returned to power last March — two months before voters finally sent the federal Coalition on its way.

But the NSW Coalition government should surely be less vulnerable. While the Morrison government showed no appetite for tackling climate change, NSW treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean has been a national leader in pushing the pace of decarbonisation. No government in Australia is more subject to integrity watchdogs than the NSW government is to its own ICAC. And, with some exceptions (water, for instance), it has been more a reformist government than a reactionary one. On gambling reform, it is far more progressive than Labor.

But this election cycle has become merciless for the Coalition parties. They began it with seven of Australia’s nine federal, state and territory governments. They now have just two, and if the NSW government falls on 25 March, they will be left with just one.

It’s worth recalling that latest cycle, and what it means for the Coalition parties. South Australia’s Liberal government fell in March last year, the federal Coalition government was voted out in May, and the Victorian Liberals received another thrashing from voters in November. In 2021, the Western Australian Liberals were left with just two seats in the Legislative Assembly and the Nationals replaced them as the official opposition.

2020 saw Queensland’s Labor government re-elected with an increased majority, leaving the Liberals with just five seats in Brisbane. The Labor–Greens government was given a sixth term in the ACT, while in the Northern Territory Labor was re-elected for a second term.

The one victory for the Coalition in that time was in Tasmania, where former premier Peter Gutwein called an early election in 2021 and narrowly retained his majority. If Dominic Perrottet loses in March, Gutwein’s successor, Jeremy Rockliff, will lead Australia’s only Liberal government. He doesn’t have to face the voters until early 2025.

Being out of government makes everything harder for political parties. They have far fewer staffers to call on, few public servants to provide policy assistance, less fundraising power and a bigger challenge finding things out. Talented people don’t waste their energies on a party destined for opposition, so the opposition parties are left with rusted-on supporters and branch stackers’ recruits.

But cycles change. In the last years of the Howard government, Labor controlled every state and territory government in Australia. Then, with the Rudd government still at the peak of its popularity, Western Australians voted out their Labor government. Two years later Victorians did the same, and by early 2014 Labor had only two governments left.

The next political cycle began with the Andrews government taking power in Victoria in November 2014. If the Perrottet government is voted out, that cycle will culminate on 25 March.

But would that also imply that Labor is now at the top of its cycle? That it will be all downhill for Labor from here, and the Coalition will soon start taking back the governments it has lost?

Not necessarily. A looming Coalition revival would be a reasonable expectation if you assumed that its losses of government reflected cyclical factors alone: bad luck, changing political fashions, one-off factors, and in the NSW case, the wear and tear of twelve years in government.

But if that were so, we should be seeing signs of it in the state that was first to switch its allegiance to Labor. And those signs should have been apparent in November’s election there. As we shall see, though, there was little if any sign of a Liberal comeback.

It’s early days yet for the Albanese government. We’ve seen many governments enjoy an extended honeymoon before crashing — the Rudd government, for example — but eight months after the election, all the polls suggest it’s the Coalition that has lost a lot of ground.

Labor won the 21 May election with a tad over 52 per cent of the two-party vote. The latest Resolve poll in Tuesday’s Age/Sydney Morning Herald implied that the figure has jumped to 60 per cent since the election. Peter Dutton’s poll ratings remain far behind Anthony Albanese’s.

In this Labor cycle, the Coalition lost its first state government just eight months after reaching its peak of running seven of the nine governments. But the Coalition’s next cycle might not begin anytime soon.

After New South Wales votes it will be almost a year and a half before the next election anywhere in Australia, and then there will be a bunch of them: the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland in the second half of 2024, and then Western Australia, Tasmania and federally in the first half of 2025. While you’d think the Coalition will surely win one of them, it could face a long wait before its own cycle gets going.

Why?

First, since 2000, the Coalition has mostly been in government in Canberra, but Labor has dominated government at state and territory level. So far this century, in the states and territories, Labor has been in power for roughly three-quarters of the time, and the Coalition for just one-quarter. Outside New South Wales and Tasmania, Labor has become the natural party of government, and the Liberals/Nationals/LNP/CLP the natural parties of opposition.

In Victoria, the Coalition has been in power for just four of the past twenty-three years. In Queensland, three. In South Australia, six. In the Northern Territory, five and a half, and in the ACT, the Liberals have had less than two years in office and twenty-one in opposition.

Maybe that’s logical. The federal government’s main jobs are economic management, social security and foreign relations — and on two of those, voters have a conservative bias. The states, by contrast, are mainly responsible for running the services we rely on: hospitals, schools, roads and public transport. On those issues, voters have a bias towards improving services. Keeping the budget in the black seems to have gone out of fashion.

But former NSW premier and federal Liberal president Nick Greiner put it well when he said the Liberals’ problem is that its activist base is well to the right of its voter base. (Just as the Greens’ activist base is well to the left of its voter base.) And the longer a party is out of power, the more deep-seated that becomes. Failure breeds more failure.

Take the ACT Liberals. In its first twelve years of self-government the ACT mostly had Liberal governments. Red Hill pharmacist Kate Carnell was parachuted in to become party leader. She won two elections, presenting a moderate, modern face that Canberra voters could relate to. But in 2001, the Libs lost office, went into opposition, and stayed there.

By 2023, it’s come to feel as though the Labor–Greens coalition is the permanent government of the ACT, and the Liberals are the permanent opposition.

Could the same be happening in Victoria? There, the Coalition parties have won a majority of Victoria’s seats in just one of the last sixteen elections, federal or state. For a Liberal Party that once governed the state alone for twenty-seven years straight, defeat has come to be seen as normal.

The Coalition’s one victory was at the 2010 state election under another moderate, modern Liberal, Ted Baillieu. But in truth they were not ready to govern, were profoundly disunited and had no coherent agenda. When voters turfed them out in 2014, there was little to show for their four years in power.

Love him or loathe him, Daniel Andrews has been full of ambition to do things, above all investing in transport infrastructure and tackling cutting-edge social issues. In 2018 Labor was returned with a massive majority — so large that we all assumed 2022 would see a swing back to the Coalition.

That assumption seemed certain after the government’s mishandling of Covid. It imposed harsh, unpopular lockdowns that effectively closed down Melbourne for eight months, then changed course 180 degrees and dropped all controls as the death toll from Covid soared. More than one in 1000 Victorians have now died of the disease — 76 per cent more than in the rest of Australia.

Surely the 2022 Victorian election should have been the start of a new cycle of Liberal renewal. But no. At face value, the Libs made no progress at all. Labor had fifty-five seats in the old Assembly, the Coalition twenty-seven, and the Greens and independents three each. In the new one, Labor has fifty-six, the Coalition twenty-eight (assuming it retains Narracan at Saturday’s delayed election), and the Greens four. Labor won easily — and while the Nationals gained three seats, the Liberals went backwards.

But there are nuances to that narrative — and in politics, nuances matter. One reason why the Albanese government is riding so high is that it has the freedom of having a clear majority in the House of Representatives. But that majority came so close to being a minority.

If fewer than 500 votes in the relevant booths had changed hands, the Liberals’ Andrew Constance would have won the federal seat of Gilmore from Labor, the Greens’ Steph Hodgins-May would now be the member for Macnamara — and Labor would be a minority government, negotiating every bill with the crossbenches or the Coalition. Small changes, big difference.

For Victoria, nuance one: The pre-election redistribution of boundaries, on the Victorian Electoral Commission’s estimates, gave Labor a net gain of three seats (because Melbourne had grown rapidly, and Labor held most of the seats with swollen enrolments). That was the real starting point: so Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two. Not much difference, sure, but there was some movement the Coalition’s way, however inadequate.

Nuance two: As in the federal election, Labor was lucky. A shift of just 350 votes in the relevant booths would have seen the Greens take Northcote and the Liberals win Pakenham and Bass. Instead of the seats going from 58–26–4 to 56–28–4, they would have ended up as 53–30–5. Not much difference there either, but it would have shown clear movement from Labor to the Coalition.

Nuance three: On the votes, there certainly was movement. For the eighty-six seats contested by both sides at the last two elections, Labor’s share of the two-party-preferred vote fell from 57.5 per cent in 2018 to 54.8 per cent this time. That’s a swing of 2.7 per cent to the Coalition.

But in the twenty-five marginal seats — those where the election is decided — it was a very different story. The average swing from Labor to the Coalition there was just 0.3 per cent. The Coalition won four seats that were notionally Labor’s on the new boundaries (Caulfield, Hawthorn, Nepean and Morwell), while Labor won three seats that were notionally the Coalition’s (Bayswater, Bass and Glen Waverley).

(Labor also lost Richmond to the Greens and the Coalition won Shepparton from independent Suzanna Sheed. That’s why, in net terms, Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two).

Mostly, the big swings to the Coalition were in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, where it had no chance of winning: seats like Greenvale (15.1 per cent swing to the Liberals), Mill Park (13.5), St Albans (12.4), Thomastown (11.4) and Kororoit (11.1).

Across the nineteen middle and outer suburbs northwest of the Yarra, the average swing to the Coalition was 7.1 per cent. But it won none of them, and even after those swings, only two of them were even mildly marginal.

To win a majority in the Assembly, the Coalition needed to make a net gain of nineteen seats. On the traditional pendulum, admittedly a rough measure, that required a swing of 10.4 per cent.

At the 2026 election, to win a majority, it will need to make a net gain of seventeen seats. On the pendulum, that would require a swing of 8.1 per cent. No opposition has gained a swing of that size since 1955, when Labor split in two.

The start of a cycle that will see Australia swing back to Coalition governments? I think not.

At this election, twelve Labor seats were marginal against the Coalition. At the 2026 election, only eight will be. Most of the seats it needs to gain to win office will need to be won by swings of 6 to 10 per cent.

These are normally classified as “fairly safe” seats. If Labor is still riding high with voters in 2026, they won’t be threatened. But if it loses support in the next four years, as governments often do in their third terms, some could come under threat. Labor would have far more territory to defend.

Nuance four: A significant development was lost in the focus on Labor’s triumph and the Liberals’ woes. This election saw the Greens almost double their territory. Richmond was the only seat they picked up, but they came close to winning five other seats: Northcote (lost by 0.2 per cent), Pascoe Vale (2.0), Preston (2.1), Footscray (4.2) and Albert Park (4.5).

One in ten seats in the Assembly, all in the inner suburbs, are now either held by the Greens or within their reach. That’s a position they’ve never been in before, anywhere in Australia.

In the Legislative Council, they now hold the balance of power, winning four seats, up from one in 2018. Labor will have to negotiate with them on any legislation the Coalition opposes.

Their first-preference vote rose just slightly, from 10.7 per cent to 11.5. But there’s a simple reason for that which media commentators ignored: at this election there were three times as many minor-party candidates as last time. Animal Justice and Family First ran in every seat, and the Freedom Party in most of them. Those candidates took votes from all other parties. As the table shows, the minor parties’ vote more than doubled, from 5.2 per cent last time to 11.7 per cent.

Note: while the independents’ vote fell by 0.6 per cent, the Liberals by 0.8 per cent and Labor’s by 5.8 per cent, the Greens’ vote rose by 0.8 per cent. They clearly did the best of the major players.

We can compare apples with apples by looking at the vote for the three main parties after minor-party preferences. The comparison is limited by the fact that only in twenty-seven seats were Labor, Liberals and Greens in the final three in both 2018 and 2022 and the commission distributed everyone else’s preferences between them. (The VEC has promised that this time it will eventually distribute all preferences in all seats. Thank you, at last.)

When just Labor, Liberals and Greens were left in those twenty-seven seats, the Liberal vote was unchanged from 2018. But Labor’s vote was down 3.2 per cent, while the Greens’ vote rose by 3.2 per cent. In the new marginal seats of Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston, the swing from Labor to Greens was three times that size.

But isn’t that just because the Liberals changed their preferences from Labor to Greens? No. These are three-party figures: the Liberal preferences hadn’t been distributed at this stage. And note: when they were, they didn’t change the outcome in a single seat, not even Richmond. As the VEC has repeatedly shown, most inner-suburban Liberals don’t follow their party’s how-to-vote card.

Where Liberal preferences were distributed, they lifted the Greens’ two-party vote by an average of 4.5 per cent. The Greens were slowly expanding their territory even when the Liberals preferenced Labor, but in 2026 that 4.5 per cent would make it far easier for them to keep doing so. And conversely, Labor would breathe a huge sigh of relief if the Liberals preferenced them instead.

In war and politics, they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Helping the Greens win Labor seats brings the Coalition no closer to government, as the Greens would always support Labor. But making Labor fight on two fronts dilutes its campaign resources: and of Labor’s thirteen most marginal seats after this election, in five its opponent is the Greens. If the Liberals redirect preferences to Labor in 2026, the only one Labor need worry about would be Northcote.

The Greens often declare war on themselves, and do or say silly things that discourage you from taking them seriously. But they have stood up for principles that matter to many Australians — tackling climate change seriously, treating refugees humanely, ending persecution of whistleblowers — which is why they have become the first party since Federation to establish itself as a lasting independent alternative to the two major parties.

The Country Party, now the Nationals, began as an independent group but abandoned that to form what has been a permanent coalition with the Liberals. In the last term of the NSW Coalition government, their one public stand on principle seemed to be to defend the interests of land developers against koalas.

The DLP and the Australian Democrats each lasted a generation and won significant support as independent alternatives to the two majors. But neither established a territorial base that could win them lower house seats, and eventually they withered away.

The Greens have carved out their own territory by making themselves the party of young voters in the inner suburbs. In those nine seats in inner Melbourne, they won 38.7 per cent of the three-party vote this time, ahead of Labor with 38.4 per cent and the Liberals with 22.9 per cent. At the federal election, they also won all three seats in inner Brisbane.

And the young, and the inner suburbs, just keep growing. It’s a good constituency to have.

New South Wales has become the Greens’ weakest state. At the federal election they polled just 10 per cent there, compared with 13.3 per cent in the rest of Australia. While they are now competitive in nine state seats in Melbourne, in 2019 they were competitive in just two seats in Sydney (Balmain and Newtown, both safe Green seats) and two in the hippie north of the state (winning Ballina, just losing Lismore). This state election will test them too.

For Victoria, the bottom line is that the Liberals have lost not only the 2022 election but probably the 2026 one as well. What happens then will be determined by the events of the next four years, and how voters respond to them. But things would have to go very badly for Labor for the Coalition to emerge with a majority.

For Australia, the bottom line is that if the Coalition loses what many see as its best government of recent years then it could be a long road back to power. And if the Greens’ MPs, senators and activists manage to avoid alienating their potential voters, it’s possible that the ACT will not be the only parliament in which the successor to a Labor government is a Labor–Greens one. •

The post The turn of the electoral cycle could be a long time coming appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a brave act, then, to see ourselves as Indigenous authors and researchers responsible for telling histories from a first-person perspective, and to radically decolonise that writing by others. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou godmother of Indigenous methodologies, forged these two powerful Indigenous methodologies and taught us that our voices need to “talk back to” and “talk up to” research. The academic drive to speak for and about us through a Western cultural lens is starting to be deeply interrogated and increasingly found unhealthy.

In Tasmania, the need for local Aboriginal voices to “talk back to” those who profit from our dead, our dispossession and our trauma is imperative. When the strangers in the boats appeared on our trouwunna shores in 1803 to claim our country — by any means — in the name of a faraway British Empire, they really meant it.

In less than thirty years our plentiful peoples were reduced to a handful by planned massacres and declared war, theft and slavery of women and children, and the impact of being treated as less than human. By 1876, with the death of our countrywoman Trucanini, we were subject to mythical extinction, extirpation and elimination.

Yet we did survive after 1876. We survived in the pockets and shadows of colonial Tasmania to raise families and communities. We survived in out-of-the-way places like Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, and in the middle of townships like Latrobe in the northwest.

Among these survivors, one amazing family was never far from the colonial capital city of Hobart — the family of the matriarch Fanny Cochrane Smith. Fanny, who died in 1905, was the ultimate survivor of the abuse that the colonisers so freely gave in return for taking our lands. Now, one of her great-great-grandchildren, Joel Birnie, has decided to tell her history, and his family story, of surviving colonisation.

Joel’s reclamation of important ancestral and familial women in My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania is a shockingly rare example of a Tasmanian Aboriginal history told through the research of a Tasmanian Aboriginal person. From the narratives of others, he retrieves Fanny, her sister Mary Ann Arthur and their mother Tarenootairer — women who shaped colonial moments and spoke their own truths even while captive and exploited — and returns them to Country and power.

Joel offers readers hospitality to join him on his family’s journey. His introductory section regenerates the “Song of Welcome” that Fanny recorded on a phonograph in 1903. From there he returns to the first years of the damnation wrought on our people, when Joel’s many-times grandmother Tarenootairer was stolen as a young girl for slavery, her life thereafter shadowed by the evil that men did to her as a chattel. By creating her own family, Tarenootairer is one of the only women to have create generations that survived the colonial genocide.

Joel restores one daughter, Mary Ann, from the periphery to her rightful place as a central figure in the first Australian call for recognition of land and sovereign rights in 1846. While her death in 1871 was a solitary and degraded affair, her afterlife now becomes rich with heroic dimensions of meaning and survivorship.

Mary Ann was able to use her “educational instruction” to talk back to the colonisers through her letters, and to leave a legacy of women’s advocacy as a natural way of being Tasmanian Aboriginal. Joel follows in her footsteps, for in his writing he too talks up and back and recovers the space to write and speak, in reshaping both Mary Ann’s legacy and his own as an Indigenous academic.

Tarenootairer’s younger daughter, Fanny Cochrane Smith, while suffering the same kinds of degradation as her sister in early childhood — stripped, whipped and tied to a kitchen table, locked in a crate, separated from her mother to be housed in an “orphan” school — veers away from Mary Ann’s organised marriage and childlessness to become an eminent member of colonial Tasmanian society.

Fanny’s reputation and standing as an “industrious” Christian and an Aboriginal woman meant she lived apart as one of the first Tasmanian women to be given a land grant south of Hobart. Parliament debated the paradox of granting land to a recognised Aboriginal woman when the colonial government, vociferously defending their extermination of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, could not acknowledge what she was known for.

All three women lived lives of hardship and poverty. They were all under an intense colonial gaze, though neglected in every other way, but Joel is able to emblazon the spaces where they resisted colonisation. He shows us Tarenootairer laughing, smoking and sharing her life with a group of kinship women in the mission gulags of Wybalena and Oyster Cove, privately communicating in ways that cannot be known by the colonisers, and yet out in the open as a resistance taunt.

He shows us Mary Ann’s feverish writing at her desk, her contributions to political discussions led by the men, and her absolute care for her younger sister Fanny, all hard fought for, on her terms and in defence of her right to belong to Country as a free woman. He shows us Fanny and her husband, newly married, opening a boarding house in Hobart that became a refuge for her family and others, a place where she gave privacy and comfort to our peoples outside the colonial gaze.

In every way, these three women, while subject to deprivations, survived on their own terms to poke back just a little bit.

Joel’s work is an exceptional piece of accessible and vivid writing that smashes the colonial, racist depictions and brings to the surface stubborn, vital Tasmanian Aboriginal women. He has given back to Tasmanian Aboriginal communities a story of ourselves and a template of how we might proceed to think of other men and women who need to be reclaimed.

A small quibble is that the book is written as a third-person narrative of “them” and “theirs,” even when these women are his family. It is disconcerting to read — a reminder of the unconscious adoption of the academy that displaces Indigenous peoples into the “you” not “us,” but this speaks to the infancy of an industry of Indigenous authors and academics within Western spaces rather than a deficit within us. Our minds were conditioned all that time ago, when the boats came and the strangers took our lands, a reckoning that Linda Tuhiwai Smith suggests is still ongoing; but at least we now have a way to proceed to untangle the colonial from the Indigenous and to tell our stories.

My People’s Songs is a book that should evoke pride in Tasmanian Aboriginal people, helping us see ourselves and speak to the courage of our survival. It may not be joyous to read of the horrors of what happened to us, but in Joel’s decolonising of the old narratives we find a space to simply be, to breathe easy in having confirmed what we already knew — we come from warriors, we protect fiercely what we love, and we will always be strong Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. •

My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania
By Joel Stephen Birnie | Monash University Publishing | $34.95 | 256 pages

The post The matriarchs appeared first on Inside Story.

I grew up in Hobart, but I had never been to this part of Tasmania before. Liffey is a very beautiful place, not a town but a cluster of small farms following the valley of the Liffey River. The cemetery is clearly marked on the map, but on the ground a cemetery without a church is an easy thing to miss. Suddenly, a glimpse of white showed above the tall yellow grass — white where there shouldn’t have been any white. We pulled over.

The cemetery’s double iron gates have crosses worked into them, signalling that this is consecrated ground. A lichen-encrusted sign tells us that the Mountain Vale Methodist Church occupied the site from 1867 until 1952. Behind us was Mountain Vale Hill, and across some green paddocks to the west, rearing up grimly on the other side of the Liffey River, were the densely forested Cluan Tiers.

We stomped through a patch of long grass and Scotch thistles, where the church must have stood, and past the remnants of a paling fence. The white headstone we’d seen from the road turned out to belong to Bertram Henry Saunders, who died in 1906 aged nineteen, and his sister Lily, who died in 1910 aged twenty-eight. Inscribed on their headstone is a pair of clasped hands surrounded by leaves and flowers. We could only see about twenty marked graves, none more recent than the 1930s. All were humbler than the tall marble headstone dedicated to young Bertram and Lily Saunders reaching out above the grass to beg passers-by that they not be forgotten.

Saunders. I knew the name. I’d been researching the impact of the first world war in this district and I knew that five men named Saunders had enlisted from around here, and that they feature on local war memorials. Bertram and Lily must have been from that family.

War memorials were why we had come. I had written an article about memorial tree-plantings in Tasmania’s northern midlands. Our visit to Liffey was to take some photographs of trees planted in 2015 at the old Liffey school to replace those planted in 1918 in honour of the men from Liffey who had volunteered for war. That done, we’d be on our way. We were snatching a few days’ holiday over Easter and would be spending that night in Longford.

But you can’t stand in an old cemetery, as we were doing, and not wonder about the entire history of the place and the people, and whether, after all, war was the defining event in their lives. I could see by the dates that these must have been some of the first white settler families in this district. Some had sent grandsons and sons to the war; others — whose names I did not recognise from local war memorials — had obviously not.

Anzac has narrowed our focus too much. It reduces our questions to those that treat the war as an inevitability. But it was not inevitable for Bertram and Lily, who died before 1914. These young people died quite innocent of one of the twentieth century’s great tragedies. The war, so soon to grind itself into Australia’s national psyche, never happened for them.

Glancing up and around, I had an uneasy sense that there were stories folded into those hills that it might not be my business to pry into. And yet I was so desperately curious about these people I would gladly have got down on my knees, right there and then, and scraped though thistles and bare earth if only that would reveal their lives to me. It wouldn’t, of course. I would have to wait until I got home to Canberra to dig into the traditional historical record.

But the experience of being in a place allows us to shift our gaze. What else happened here? How did the land and environment shape people’s ambitions, work and family life? Investigating this might produce histories that don’t sit comfortably with one another.

Victoria Falls, one of the four waterfalls on the Liffey River, c. 1940–50. State Library of Tasmania

The headwaters of the Liffey River gather in Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and take a wild course through rainforest before plunging down four magnificent cascades known collectively as the Liffey Falls. The river is close to the boundaries of three nations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and several clans within these nations made seasonal journeys through the area. The Pallittorre clan of the North nation was based at Quamby Bluff, not far from Liffey Falls.

On 24 June 1827 a group of Pallittorre people camped between the Liffey Falls (then known as Laycock Falls) and Quamby Bluff, a prominent nearby mountain peak. They woke late in the evening to the barking of their dogs. Their fires had revealed their location to five white settlers — two soldiers, a police constable and two stockmen — intent upon reprisal for the murder the previous day of a white stockman, William Knight. The settlers fired on the Pallittorre people as they ran into the bush.

Depositions given the following week in Launceston by two of the settlers stated that only one round was fired on the Aboriginal people (many more on their dogs) and that one person had been wounded. But the Hobart Colonial Times reported — almost gleefully — that up to sixty Aboriginal people had been “killed and wounded.” Historians who have studied the incident accept that a massacre took place, with more killings on both sides in the ensuing days, part of what historian Lyndall Ryan has called an “eighteen-day killing spree” in June 1827.

The Pallittorre survivors may have been too frightened to return to the killing sites to observe funerary customs over the dead. Their normal practice was to cremate bodies, but fires would have given away their location. Without these rites, the spirits of the dead would never rest. In later years, stockmen and timber cutters passing through might have heard stories about the killing of the “Blacks,” might even have found a few bones here and there. Today, no memorials mark the sites near Liffey where the Pallittorre people died.

By the 1860s land outside Tasmania’s central midland corridor had been opened up for closer settlement. In Liffey, one of the first white arrivals was James Green, and it was he who donated a sliver of land for the building of the Methodist church in 1867, naming it Mountain Vale after his own property. Timber for the church was cut at his steam sawmill. The structure was so austere you might almost mistake it for a barn, not a church. A flourishing community grew up around it, and every year, for many years, Green gave his workers a day off so that they and their families could celebrate the founding of the church.

Mountain Vale Methodist Church, date unknown. Churches of Tasmania

Most of the blocks sold or leased in Liffey were just a few hundred acres each, and located in difficult country. Fertile certainly, but densely timbered, wet, very cold in winter, and remote from markets for the settlers’ produce. Clearing enough land to establish a viable farm could take a lifetime, but landholders were at least entitled to vote in local and colonial elections, which gave them some say in the sort of society they wanted to live in.

Until then much of the colony’s best land had been granted to free immigrants with plenty of capital who had used convict labour to establish vast pastoral estates. But now, new generations of settlers were pushing into “new” country and helping to level out old social inequalities.

The Saunders family were among that cohort. There were two couples: Caroline and John Saunders, and Maria and William Saunders. Caroline and Maria were sisters, and their husbands were probably cousins. Such couplings were not uncommon. Caroline and Maria’s parents, Jane and John Jones, had taken up land in Liffey in 1863. John was killed by a falling tree while he was building a house for his young family.

Caroline and John Saunders married in 1881 and had ten children. Eventually they did well enough to build a six-room farmhouse, quite fine for Liffey then, which they called Silverburn, but like many bush families they probably started out in a simple timber hut. With too many people living in unsanitary conditions, disease was common. Rose, their third-born, died of typhoid in 1884 at just ten months. She was probably buried in the Mountain Vale cemetery under a simple wooden cross, but if so, the grave marker is long gone.

Bertram and Lily at least survived to adulthood. I don’t know what carried them off, Bertram in 1906 and Lily in 1910. Tuberculosis perhaps. By then, the Saunders parents could afford an elaborately carved headstone for them. Unusually for a woman of twenty-eight, Lily was unmarried.

War came. Caroline and John still had four sons, and all enlisted. Leslie and Colin had moved to Queensland and were living in Gordonvale, a sugar-growing town near Cairns, when they signed up in August 1914, only weeks after war was declared. Both were at the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915. Colin went missing that day, but his death was only confirmed for his parents eighteen months later. Leslie survived Gallipoli but was killed in France in August 1916. Neither man’s remains were ever found; they are commemorated on memorials at Lone Pine, on Gallipoli, and at Villers-Bretonneux.

Their younger brother, Alan, enlisted from Tasmania in March 1915 and managed to have himself transferred to the same battalion as his brothers, presumably to be closer to them. After a few months on Gallipoli he joined the fighting in France. After Leslie’s death, Alan requested and was granted a compassionate discharge from the army on the grounds that his parents had lost two sons and were partly dependent on him as the only son left. He arrived home in Liffey in November 1916.

But here’s the twist. Alan had not told the truth. He was not in fact the last surviving brother in the family because all along, his oldest brother, Walter, had been living in Bracknell with his wife and four children. Walter did eventually enlist, in late 1917. He made it to France just before the armistice, when it was too late for him to see much action, and returned to Tasmania unscathed in October 1919. He took up a soldier-settlement block near Longford, and had four more children.

You can learn a lot from archival records and local newspapers. That’s how I put this story together. But there are limits. Often you can uncover “what happened” — or some of it — but not “why.” The emotional coherence that once held people’s decisions together is lost.

For instance, Leslie and Colin had left Tasmania before the war to strike out in Queensland. Why? Was there a family argument? Perhaps they were looking for work, which is why most young people leave Tasmania, but perhaps they just wanted to get out of this remote, tight-knit community where everyone seemed to be related to everyone else. But why go so far, to a place so different?

Young Alan seemed a troubled soul. He rushed to the war when, at age twenty, he still needed parental permission to enlist, but after his brothers died he lied his way out of the army to get back home again. Did his family connive at this? Given how long it took for letters to travel between continents, I would say not.

Clearly this was a family in acute emotional distress. How did Alan explain his return? What was said around the kitchen table at Silverburn in late 1916? None of us can suggest Alan was a coward. We weren’t there. But the fact that no one in authority checked his story (for instance, by requesting information from the local police) suggests that Alan may not have been an effective soldier, and that the army was willing to quietly let him go. Did his older brother Walter know of Alan’s duplicity? If so, it must have placed Walter in a most dreadful position. Perhaps — here’s a thought — the decision to volunteer for the war was more agonising for Walter than his actual experience.

The postwar years brought fresh worry for Caroline and John. In 1921 their oldest daughter, Beryl, died, leaving her own three children to Caroline and John to care for. Alan married and had a daughter but in the mid 1920s he and his family moved to Queensland, to Gordonvale, where his brothers had lived before the war. He died there in 1930, of war-related illness according to his family. He was thirty-five.

Caroline Saunders died in 1926 aged sixty-two. When John died in 1937, aged seventy-nine, he had been predeceased by seven of his ten children. The three who were left buried their parents next to their sister Beryl under a single, unadorned headstone at Mountain Vale, and added the names of their solider brothers — Leslie, Colin and Alan — who had died “For King and Country.” Thus were these adventurous, impetuous boys brought home to rest with their family.

Social historians of the first world war invariably point out that bereavement in war — the scale of it, the shock of it, and the fact that relatives could not be present at the death or bury their dead with traditional rites — was not the same as in peacetime. It isn’t natural that adult children should die before their parents. All true. And yet if we go back before 1914 we discover that many people were already in mourning when the war broke out. Each of my two Saunders couples in Liffey lost three children before 1914, and that can hardly have been a unique experience.

Maria and William Saunders married in 1886 and also established a farm in Liffey, and had eleven children. In 1901, diphtheria broke out among children in Liffey. This bacterial infection, transmitted by coughing and sneezing, was made worse in small houses where children shared cots and beds. It attacks the respiratory system; if unchecked, a toxin creates a thick grey film in the nose and throat. Many victims who die are unable to breathe.

In the space of a week, Maria and William watched three of their children die in this way: Stanley, aged nineteen months; Horace, thirteen years; and finally baby Grace, only a few months old. All three received separate funerals at Mountain Vale. Three times a procession set out from the Saunders’ house to travel a few kilometres on foot, surrounded by forest, behind a horse-drawn hearse to the little wooden church at Mountain Vale. Nothing marks their graves now.

Not surprisingly, Maria and William sold up and moved. They had more children, and were living in Hadspen, near Launceston, when war came. They had lost two sons who might have volunteered for the war, but still had three eligible sons, Harold (known as Errol) and twins Lawrence and Clarence. These young men would have had plenty of friends who rushed to the colours — including their own Saunders cousins — and yet they hesitated.

Many did. In Tasmania the enlistment rate among eligible men was 37.8 per cent. Pragmatically, men weighed up their various duties and obligations, calculated the pay and allowances made to soldiers and their families, and decided not to go. Others attempted to enlist but were rejected on medical and other grounds. But that left huge numbers who never went near a recruiting depot.

Tasmania voted twice in favour of conscription, in the plebiscites of 1916 and 1917, but the debate was bitterly divisive. For those who stayed home it must have taken a particular sort of courage to accept that their lot would be to plant potatoes, mend fences and get the harvest in; that they would be shooting rabbits and possums, not the beastly Hun.

Under the weight of all this, only Lawrence went. He enlisted in October 1916 and served on the Western Front until he was killed in action in Belgium in February 1918. He is buried in a cemetery near Ypres. Clarence, his twin brother, stayed home, married and had a family, and lived a long and outwardly uneventful life. There are tales aplenty of twins who enlisted, fought and died together, but these two didn’t. How did they decide who would stay and who would go? Could it possibly have come down to the toss of a coin?

The more we attempt to dwell inside the lives of people in the past, especially ordinary people who leave little trace of themselves in the historical record, the more questions we uncover that elude easy answers. So be it. My stories from Liffey are fragmented and unresolved. But small stories inspired by encounters with local places often ask us to reconsider broader national narratives: Anzac, or something else that we cherish. They nibble away at accepted versions of history and propose new relationships between apparently disparate experiences.

Who is a hero and who is a coward? Who is remembered and who is forgotten? How is the memory of the dead to be preserved? That man with a gun — that man with a spear — is he a patriot or is he a criminal? These binary questions are probably not useful. What is important is that we are attentive to whatever unquiet stories the land might reveal. •

The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of historian Dr Shayne Breen in the preparation of this article.

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Even John Howard’s famous jump in support after the 11 September 2001 attacks and the arrival of the Tampa mostly turned to dust by the time Australians cast their ballots in November 2001. September’s double-digit two-party-preferred leads had whittled down to a touch under 2 per cent, which is probably what the government would have won by if neither event had taken place.

Budget bounces — if and when they happen — tend to be short-lived. And those midterm leadership changes are no more than a sugar hit. Even the big, long rise in figures after Kevin Rudd’s elevation to the Labor leadership in late 2006 ended with an election day result at around the level of his predecessor Kim Beazley’s polled leads.

As an election approaches, swinging voters’ minds turn back to the things they usually vote on. Any desire they have to kick out the current government is tempered by considerations of security, safety and paying off the mortgage.

But the Covid-19 polling boost experienced by all state and territory leaders more than a year ago is the real deal. It just keeps going, and it applies to actual elections as well. The virus and its repercussions permeate our lives, and it’s wrapped in the very same things that drive people’s votes: stability, income, safety. Bread-and-butter issues. Yes, Big Brother has loomed large, but he’s welcome for the time being. People cling to their institutions, their governments and the state apparatus. Border closures, scratching a longstanding territorial itch, are an added bonus.

Five re-elections have shown it’s a brilliant time for incumbent governments in Australia. From the arrival of Covid to last Saturday, four Australian governments had asked for another term: in the Northern Territory, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and, most recently, Western Australia. All had big wins.

But last weekend’s contest in the Apple Isle was different. Unlike the four earlier elections, this time the sitting government was Liberal. And those four earlier elections were held after governments had served more or less their full term.

The fact that the four were all Labor governments matters. When a party is in power federally — as the Liberals are at the moment — voting-intention figures tend to drift towards the other side during a state campaign. And while Labor oppositions have struggled during Covid, the Liberals have had the extra challenge of trying to balance the demands of the wider electorate with those of an excitable support base demanding politically risky pronouncements about lifting restrictions.

The other obstacle Tasmania’s premier, Peter Gutwein, created for himself was his timing. Having observed interstate counterparts reap political rewards, he decided to engineer an early election.

In the end, the Liberal vote of 49 per cent last Saturday was a few points down from what polling during the pandemic suggested, but up on pre-Covid numbers. It was also lower than at the last election. But Labor also went backwards, with the Greens and independents improving. Gutwein won, but not as resoundingly as pre-campaign polling would have led him to believe. So Tasmania did indeed follow a different trajectory from those other states and territories, but still, on current counting, the government seems likely to have achieved, just, a majority (thirteen out of twenty-five seats).

What are the federal implications? Scott Morrison already knows Covid is good for incumbents. He might also take encouragement from Tasmanian Labor’s poor showing. But there’s a caveat. Tasmania is the one jurisdiction where “bandwagon effect” can be said to apply: some voters will back the expected winner to avoid the dreaded minority government, of which Tasmania has had a few. That dynamic doesn’t usually apply to federal elections, although we can expect the Coalition and the Greens to be playing up the prospect of a Labor–Greens government during the next campaign.

In fact, the Morrison government has been the odd one out in the polling. While the prime minister’s ratings have soared, voting intentions have remained mediocre. If they drop by as much as the Tasmanian Liberals’ did, the federal Coalition is gone.

Scott Morrison and his colleagues would love to go early to bank some of that Covid goodwill. Possibly the PM can take some heart from the apparent absence of voter malice towards the premier’s obvious cynicism in cutting parliament short. If there was any anger, it seems to have been overwhelmed by Covid magic.

Covid is still great for Australian governments; the main question is: how long will that last? •

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The poem reminds me of country drives. You stop for a break, and on the way back to the car you glance across at the town’s war memorial and frown, wondering if you should pause. If someone had the decency to put a memorial there — no, if someone had the decency to volunteer for war in the first place — the least you can do is spend five minutes having a look.

You wander over to read the names inlaid, and marvel at the men, obviously from the same family, who all joined up, quite possibly breaking their parents’ hearts. You circle the memorial respectfully so as not to neglect names from later conflicts, or the names of the occasional Boer war man or army nurse. But the wind whips up and you go back to the car. Doors shut, you turn up the music and get on your way.

A curious traveller might pull out their phone. Many websites are now dedicated to Australian war memorials and monuments, putting biographical flesh on the names they list. A few taps will bring you the service record of every Australian enlistee in both world wars, kept in the National Archives of Australia.

Twenty-three years after Page’s poem came the pivotal academic work on war memorials, historian Ken Inglis’s masterly Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (written with Jan Brazier). Despite those earlier fears, interest in Anzac, and in the history of the first world war especially, has not withered. Quite the contrary: our last man might have long passed away, but his memory is kept alive by many, many commemorative shillings.

“Every town has one…” Yes, so it feels, as if small-town and suburban memorials have always dotted the Australian landscape. And yet there must have been a time during and after the first world war when no town had one, when no names were inlaid. What did families do when they began, painfully, to accept that the empty place at the dinner table would never be filled? How would the memory of their son or husband be kept alive not just for now, but for the future?

Historians have written extensively about mourning and commemorative practices in Australia during and after the first world war, and about whether and how they brought consolation to the bereaved. These are not new questions, and indeed they were not in the front of my mind when I came across a photograph of a woman named Fanny Cooper in the Australian War Memorial’s collection. This studio photo with her son Louis was taken in Launceston shortly after he enlisted in October 1916.

Fanny Cooper with her son, Private Louis Cooper, in late 1916. Australian War Memorial

It was the image of Fanny that gave me pause. I wondered instantly who this beautiful, sad-eyed woman could possibly be. She seemed old enough to be Louis’s grandmother rather than his mother. Patient resignation is written on her face, as if she has known tragedy and is steeling herself for more. And it came. Louis served on the Western Front with the 12th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, but in July 1918 he died of broncho-pneumonia in a military hospital in England. Such is the ready availability of records these days that it took very little effort to establish these facts. The lad in the photograph did not come home. What then of his mother?

The Coopers lived in Longford, a small town about a twenty-minute drive south of Launceston. The family made no special mark on history and apparently left no personal letters or diaries in public archives or libraries. But the National Archives holds Louis’s pay file and service records, and in these I found a few letters from Fanny to military authorities seeking information about this and that. Not much, and little to tell me about her life or character.

Now fully immersed in this story, I kept digging and turned, inevitably, to local newspapers. The Launceston papers, the Examiner and the Daily Telegraph, routinely covered events in this and other northern districts. For decades historians have been using local papers to recover myriad small but telling details of people’s lives, but digitised newspapers now make this astoundingly quick. They open new paths for searching across places and associations with church, school, sport, leisure and work. This is how I recovered the Cooper family’s war story.

Fanny was the daughter of Isaiah Briggs, a saddler by trade and stalwart of Longford’s Methodist church, and his wife, Maria. One of Fanny’s sisters married the brother of Walter Lee, a Longford man from a Methodist family that ran a business making agricultural implements. Lee rose to prominence as a Tasmanian parliamentarian and, as Sir Walter Lee, was three-time premier of the state. Fanny married William Cooper, a painter and decorator, in 1880. Large families were still common then; Fanny was one of ten children, and she and William had six sons and five daughters. All eleven survived infancy, but their daughter Elsie died of typhoid in 1904, aged seventeen, and in 1910 two of their grandsons died in a horrific fire, aged just six and four.

Louis was the only one of Fanny’s sons to enlist, but by the time he did, seven of her nephews had enlisted and three had died. It is no wonder that, by then, Fanny looked all of her fifty-seven years.

The Coopers were at their property at Liffey when the dreaded telegram arrived in July 1918 announcing Louis’s death. For some years the family had divided their time between Longford and Liffey. The Liffey River drains the cliffs of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and meets the Meander river near Carrick. It is an area of wild beauty, known today for its protected wilderness areas and especially for the famous Liffey Falls. In the Coopers’ time, families ran small  farms in the valley, grew vegetables and fruit, and trapped rabbits and marsupials for their fur.

The Cooper property appears to have been a mixture of farm and orchard, and provided extra income and employment for the Cooper sons beyond the family painting and decorating business in Longford. The Coopers sent Louis and perhaps some of their youngest children to the school at Liffey, but although there is a Baptist church there the Coopers worshipped at the Methodist church in nearby Bracknell, where William was a lay preacher.

A path towards acceptance? The former Liffey state school, site of an early honour board and tree-planting. Edward Condé

Among the first things William and Fanny did after hurrying back to Longford was place an “In Memoriam” notice for Louis in the Daily Telegraph headed “Duty nobly done.” A few weeks later, at Bracknell on 16 August 1918, a memorial tree-planting was held at the recreation ground. Premier Sir Walter Lee attended the event along with local councillors and clergy, and addressed the crowd. His wife, Margaret, planted the first tree in honour of Colin Saunders, killed at the landing on Gallipoli, who was the district’s first soldier to die. The relatives of twelve other soldiers then planted trees, the last one being for Louis Cooper. He had not been dead a month at that point. His parents must still have been reeling.

This was several years — many years, in some cases — before permanent war memorials were established in Australian towns and cities. Ken Inglis has noted that expenditure on lavish monuments was discouraged during the war because all fundraising was directed to the war effort. Afterwards, local communities took so long to raise the money and settle upon the form and the site for their memorials that it was too late, Inglis thought, for them to serve as sites of immediate healing or consolation for many bereaved relatives. Anzac and Remembrance Day observances were still only in a formative state.

In the meantime, families needed something, somewhere to go, something to do, beyond their private grieving. This is what a funeral is for, after all. The Coopers and 60,000 other families had no body to bury or funeral to arrange, and no one knew when or how permanent memorials would be established. In the meantime, tree-plantings must have been a response to a hunger for ritual.

In Tasmania in the spring of 1918, with the war still going on, public tree-plantings were occurring all over the state — in fifty towns, according to one estimate. The trees were usually planted along major roads as “soldiers’ avenues.” They drew on a longer-standing practice: community tree-plantings as civic beautification projects had been a feature of Empire Day celebrations each 24 May, possibly based on an American tradition known as Arbor Day. Australia’s nationwide tree-planting movement — both to encourage enlistment and to mark the sacrifice of men of the district who had volunteered and died — began in 1916, promoted by returned soldiers’ associations and state recruiting committees. A major memorial avenue of 520 trees was established on Hobart’s Queen’s Domain in 1918 and 1919. These were planted solely for the dead, but in some towns there were plantings for all known volunteers.

Not a huge amount of money or coordination was required to clear and prepare land to establish soldiers’ avenues, and councils or local committees raised the funds to cover the costs of trees, tree guards and name plates or boards. Although they were usually secular affairs, a local clergyman would typically make a speech, and there would be hymns. “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” was the most popular, and the assembled crowds would salute the flag and sing the national anthem.

Tree-plantings didn’t have to be gloomy. The town of Cressy, about ten kilometres south of Longford, was described as “en fête” for the planting of its sixty trees, and the ceremony at Exton featured games and races for the children. People were often encouraged to support the latest national war loan, and a word of thanks would be put in for the Red Cross. Families gathered for photographs. Children might help plant the trees, although surely no one in these rural towns minded getting a bit of dirt on their knees. Proceedings invariably concluded with an afternoon tea provided by a committee of local women.

About 150 trees were planted along several of Longford’s major streets on 24 August 1918, a few weeks after the event at Bracknell. Premier Lee was again in attendance. He paid tribute to the bereaved parents of the district and declared his belief that trees were a much better way of “keeping green” the memory of those who had enlisted than the “rearing of a marble monument,” because the trees “would grow and live for many years.” The names were too numerous to be noted by the local press, but it seems likely that Louis Cooper was among those memorialised. Anyone who had “a boy at the front” could plant a tree as long as they promised to look after it.

Less than a month later, in the grounds of the Liffey state school on 15 September 1918, the Coopers had another tree-planting to attend. Basil Archer — a member of the Longford Municipal Council, Methodist lay preacher, and scion of one of northern Tasmania’s wealthy landowning families — did the honours this time. Again, the first tree was dedicated to Colin Saunders. (Five Saunders men — four brothers and a cousin — had enlisted and three had died, a fact that was probably the stuff of legend in the district.) A tree was planted for Louis Cooper.

As years passed, though, most soldiers’ avenues, even the large one in Hobart, fell into disrepair. Relatives who had tended to “their boy’s” tree, who had gathered there to spend a moment remembering or even have a picnic, gradually moved away or died. Councils ceased to pay attention. Trees died or were cut down to make way for other developments. Guards and name boards were lost. Memories were not “kept green.” Rather than being “inlaid,” the names were usually painted, impermanently, on timber.

At some point Longford’s council removed the name boards for refurbishment, after which they were forgotten and finally disposed of, apparently with no record kept. Were it not for newspaper reports, the existence of many soldiers’ avenues would be almost impossible to trace. In 2015 the little community in Liffey replanted their commemorative trees on the site of the old ones, and marked each with a new metal plate. Likewise, volunteers in Hobart have restored the soldiers’ avenue and launched a website explaining the history of this and other Tasmanian avenues. It keeps the memory digital.

Tree-plantings were one form of community response to the loss of sons and husbands. Honour boards were another, and here again we benefit from the efforts of volunteers in recent times to locate and digitally document artefacts scattered across sometimes obscure places.

Honour boards were unveiled in churches, schools, workplaces and community halls: hundreds in Tasmania, thousands across the country. Most consisted of lists of names painted onto a timber plaque, or “tablet” as they were sometimes called, perhaps embellished with elaborate carvings. Some were merely painted or printed on paper and framed. As with soldiers’ avenues, the same names would be repeated in different places, or sometimes omitted entirely for reasons impossible to recover now. No official coordination was undertaken, and few precedents or traditions existed. People just did what they felt was right.

Louis Cooper is named on a large, printed honour board dedicated to hundreds of men of the Longford district, which includes enlistments as well as deaths. It looks like a commercial effort by a publishing company, and evidently someone who was not local has gathered the names because all five of the Saunders men are erroneously called Sanders.

The same mistake was not made on the honour board for fifteen men from Liffey state school (now a community hall), which includes the Saunders men as well as Louis Cooper. A more elaborate board dedicated to “the mothers in sympathy and in memory of those sons from Longford who fell during the Great War” was unveiled in Longford in 1920. Twenty-six men are named, including Louis and two cousins, Guy Briggs and Charles Lee. Curiously, Louis was not included on the Bracknell town honour board even though his parents planted a tree for him there.

He is named on the honour board unveiled at the Mountain Vale Methodist church, however. A settlement principally based on sawmilling grew up in this area south of Liffey towards Blackwood Creek in the 1860s. The church served as a school building as well. Although the village was in decline by the early twentieth century, fifteen volunteers, including Louis Cooper, are recorded on the honour board. Six had died. The church has been dismantled and the honour roll is now kept at the Liffey Baptist Church.

Back in Longford, in May 1922, a memorial window was unveiled at the Methodist church, commemorating the loss of Louis Cooper and six other men from the parish. After the hymns and addresses, the assembled stood in silent prayer as Basil Archer drew aside the Union Jack to reveal the window. Its central feature is a crusader in armour with sword and crown, surrounded by the words “Faithful unto Death” and “I Have Fought the Good Fight.”

Longford’s permanent memorial was finally unveiled in Victoria Park, in the centre of town, in August 1922. It is a black granite obelisk with fifty-three names inlaid, including Louis Cooper’s. By then his name had been honoured with three tree-plantings, three honour boards and a church window, meaning that the Coopers had put his name forward for commemorative projects no fewer than eight times in four years. I have no doubt they and their family attended every single planting and unveiling.

We can read accounts of all these events, but we can only imagine the social interactions: the greetings among neighbours and extended kin, the consoling hand on a shoulder, the stories told in odd moments between formalities. Ageing parents listen eagerly to men who had been to the war and come back, keen for anything that could help them understand how their son had died. Over cups of tea, they might grumble about how slow military authorities were to pass on information but also share some of their son’s letters and mementos, perhaps even a pocket diary sent home with his last effects. Clergymen murmur words of consolation. Young men who had not volunteered stand apart talking among themselves. Children dodge about, gobbling cake while trying to look solemn.

Community events like this gave the bereaved a space within which to renew social connections and compose a story of the war that they could live with. They would see roughly the same people and hear the same speeches from the same local worthies at events held sometimes only weeks apart. The very repetition might have been comforting. Everyone had heard all the rhetoric before, of course, but that didn’t matter. Seeing their boy’s name listed in public among the others was what mattered. If that helped to define and externalise their loss, a path towards acceptance might just have been possible.

Fanny Cooper would have known that Louis might not come back. Other women in her community, including her own sisters, had already been bereaved by the time mother and son posed for their photograph in a studio in Launceston in late 1916, he in his newly issued uniform and she in her best dress. How could any parent live with that awful uncertainty? That is the mystery preserved in the photograph; that is what draws our eyes to hers. •

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In a feat of scholarship unlikely to be repeated for some time, Pybus displays an intimate, lifelong connection with the research material. She is an equal to those she counts as peers and mentors, deserving a place alongside Lyndall Ryan (to whom she dedicates the work), Brian Plomley, Rebe Taylor and Henry Reynolds as someone whose thoughtful, knowledgeable and compassionate words stick to the skin long after the reading is over.

I will revisit this volume often as I learn to see old facts regarding my many-times grandfather Mannalargenna and grandmother Woretemoeteyenner in new ways. And I am grateful for the turn of restorative history towards our countrywoman who, nevertheless, can never be at peace while she is so central to a foundational Australian myth of extinction (ours) and beginnings (not ours).

So why, then, would I hesitate to recommend this book if you, like me, were from trawlwulwuy people of tebrakunna country, now known as Cape Portland, northeast Tasmania? It is so obviously about our kin, ancestors, country and bodies, so obviously concerned to reclaim our magnificent Trucanini by finding “the woman behind the myth,” and it will become a staple in many of our homes, including mine — yet I see little of my people in it.

Some of Pybus’s narrative choices are concerning. She interprets Trucanini as “pensive, even sad” in a sculpted bust or “grumpy and uncomfortable” in a photo, when it’s more likely her expressions reflect the lengthy sitting times for those art forms. We have to be careful when we seek more than Trucanini is capable of giving. The same can be said of some of the evidence used — for example, on the renaming of the subject of Thomas Bock’s portrait of Trucanini in the British Museum. To me, the evidence cited — which includes Bock the artist mislabelling his own portrait, and George Robinson, who spent decades with Trucanini, confusing her likeness with another — is too slim to justify the claim that another woman is depicted.

It is also disappointing that the narrative ventures into the exoticised and sexualised disease of syphilis. Pybus is not the only historian to diagnose a syphilitic Trucanini, yet in the same breath she acknowledges the comorbidity of a range of common diseases (which led to a complete immune breakdown for our people) to demonstrate a poverty of health.

Is it likely that syphilis would have gone unnoticed in Trucanini, the woman whose flesh was boiled down by the best anthropologists in the business and whose skeleton was displayed in a museum? Hardly, I would say, given the evidentiary importance of the public display of her remains, and the state’s interest in demonstrating how unworthy our diseased bodies were. Absence of evidence is not evidence of syphilis.

Yet I am more unnerved by the things Pybus takes for granted in framing the research, which produce a kind of soporific that lulls us into complacency and acceptance of the things that harm First Nations. Even while doing the real work of truth-telling, and trying to repair colonising wrongs, this book reproduces tropes, stereotypes and deficits associated with First Nations, especially trawlwulwuy peoples, that permeate Western humanities.

When Pybus reflects on a 1980s Tasmanian museum diorama including Trucanini, describing it as a “melancholic requiem for the disappeared that reeked of regret without responsibility,” I can’t help but feel that strains of this sentiment are reproduced here. Her book is themed around two women — Trucanini and the author — whose stories come together through time and place, yet only one is given life. Trucanini remains a dead black woman, contrasting with the one who is very much alive and able to choose the facts, the narrative style and the story’s start and ending.

Pybus’s story ends with a poignant call for what is right: “to pay attention and give respectful consideration when the original people of this country tell us what is needed.” Trucanini’s story, by contrast, ends again in her death, with not one word of what happened afterwards. That original full stop gave rise to the myths of extinction that our peoples suffered so dreadfully between 1876 and December 2016, when we were acknowledged in the Tasmanian state constitution as traditional owners and First Peoples. Here, it again stifles and mutes her and, in effect, her kin today.

This leaves no sense that our peoples exist beyond her death. It’s hinted at, alluded to, given a sentence here or there, but it is clear that we don’t own this story and have been separated from our own historical labour and sorrow.

The choice to end with Trucanini’s death is also the choice to steer clear of engagement with “what is needed” by us, by people like me, in the complex task of picking up the pieces and gaining our own voice and spaces, and making our own interpretation of our ancestors and kin. This right is absent from Pybus’s towering volume, prompting bittersweet reflections on my own un-belonging in this narrative of my peoples and family.

Yet I unashamedly take pride in this feat of history writing because I belong to Trucanini, not by blood but by kinship and the reciprocity of our women, our Elders, our grandmothers and ancestors here in Tasmania. I do this because I know that the stories of our women, including Trucanini, are still unfolding, and hope for a time, perhaps in my lifetime, when her voice is brought alive with the joy and language and belonging and connection by one of us. Then our precious and dear countrywoman will finally finish the cultural journey home that she is due. •

* Trucanini is the reviewer’s preferred style and spelling, and the trawlwulwuy people’s language and Country are also italicised.

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Now Georgina Downer has entered the fray. Her successful bid for Liberal endorsement in her father’s old Adelaide seat of Mayo, made vacant by the section 44-induced resignation of the Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie, means that she might become a fourth-generation Downer in the national capital.

Downer’s great-grandfather, John Downer (1843–1915), was premier of South Australia from 1885 to 1887 and, after he was knighted, from 1892 to 1893, and then served in the Senate from Federation until 1903. He returned to state parliament as a member of the Legislative Council for a decade from 1905.

Sir John’s son, Alexander Downer (1910–1981), was a senior member of the Menzies ministry, and went on to serve as Australian high commissioner to Britain from 1964 to 1972. He, too, was knighted. His son, Alexander Downer, held the seat of Mayo from 1984 to 2008, was federal opposition leader in 1994–95, and served as foreign minister throughout the Howard government. Most recently, he has been Australian high commissioner in London. (His great misfortune was to reach adulthood after the abolition of Australian knighthoods.)

Family connections might have counted for little when Georgina Downer sought preselection for a Melbourne seat before the 2016 election, but the home-ground advantage has clearly carried some weight in Adelaide, where pedigree is a salient factor. For the same reason, though, she will have had to overcome deep-seated opposition, just as she will at the ballot box. For all its establishment cosiness, the Liberal Party in South Australia continues to be riven by feuds, often as much familial as ideological.

Take Robert Hill, for example. The son of a former long-serving SA Member of the Legislative Council, Murray Hill, he was thwarted by the Downer forces when he sought to leave the Senate for the lower house seat of Boothby in 1994. The reason? He was seen as a potential leadership rival to Downer in Canberra. Although both men served as senior ministers under Howard, Downer was keen to see Hill out of parliament as part of his own long-term but ill-fated plan to return to the party leadership. Hill resigned from the Senate in 2006 and was appointed ambassador to the United Nations two days later; he had been reluctant to go, but Howard and Downer arranged the convenient diplomatic slot.

The Hill–Downer rivalry had deep roots in South Australia. The Downers were solidly conservative while the Hills were towards the liberal end of the spectrum — so much so that Murray Hill courageously introduced a private member’s bill in 1972 to amend the section of the law that criminalised homosexuality in the state. This first serious attempt to decriminalise homosexuality in Australia followed the brutal murder of a law lecturer, George Duncan, at a known gay meeting place. The bill faced much obstruction, especially from the right, but legislation was finally passed in amended form in 1975, making a first for South Australia. Robert Hill’s politics were similarly inclined.

Among South Australia’s more formidable forces was the Playford family, which contributed two of the state’s premiers, including its longest-serving. Thomas Playford II (1837–1915) served as premier from 1887 to 1889 and from 1890 to 1892, and later sat in federal parliament as vice-president of the Executive Council, 1903–04 and defence minister, 1905–07. But it is his grandson, Sir Thomas Playford IV, whose name was almost synonymous with the state for more than a quarter of a century. His run as premier, from 1938 to 1965, is the longest of any elected leader in the history of Australia, or anywhere within the Westminster system. Helped by a gerrymander that inflated the value of the rural vote, Playford was in the “strongman” mould as premier, boldly defying many inside his own party with his tough pragmatism, nationalising electricity companies and using state enterprises to drive economic growth. For an entire generation, he was “Mr South Australia,” and with a pedigree to back it up.

Also from South Australia, Keith Wilson was a senator from 1938 to 1944 and MP for Sturt for most of the period between 1949 and 1966. His son, Ian Bonython Cameron Wilson, succeeded him in Sturt in 1966–69 and 1972–93 and was a minister in the Fraser government. Ian was also the great-grandson of Sir John Langdon Bonython, a federal MP from 1901 to 1906, and great-great-grandson of Sir John Cox Bray, the first Australian-born premier of South Australia (1881–84).

Another direct succession involved the prominent McLeay family. John McLeay served a term as an independent in the SA House of Assembly (1938–41) before being elected lord mayor of Adelaide in 1946. Three years later he was elected as Liberal member for Boothby, serving as speaker for more than ten years (a record that still stands) until he retired in 1966. He was succeeded by his son, John Jr, who served as a minister in both the McMahon and Fraser governments.

John McLeay Sr’s brother, George, also sat in federal parliament. He was elected to the Senate in 1934, serving as minister in several portfolios from 1939 until 1941. Defeated in 1946, he was re-elected to the Senate in 1949, again serving in several portfolios.

Like the Downers and the Hills, the Wilsons and the McLeays came from the opposite end of the spectrum. Ian Wilson was initially passed over by Malcolm Fraser in 1975 for being “too liberal” and it was John McLeay who got the ministerial nod. But McLeay’s pro-Rhodesia and pro–South African sympathies eventually proved too much and he was dumped in 1981 and replaced in the ministry by Wilson.

Other prominent conservative political families in South Australia include the Chapman and Evans clans. Ted Chapman served as MP for Alexandra from 1973 to 1992, and was a minister for three years. His daughter, Vickie Chapman, was elected to the seat of Bragg in 2002 and is currently deputy premier. Stan Evans served as member for three electorates between 1968 and 1993, being succeeded in Davenport by his son, Iain Evans, later a minister and opposition leader, who retired in 2014.

South Australian family dynasties even transcend political boundaries. The current federal Labor member for Port Adelaide, Mark Butler, is the grandson and great-grandson of conservative premiers, Sir Richard Layton Butler (1930; 1933–38) and Sir Richard Butler (1905).

In Tasmania, meanwhile, there seems to be a clear political advantage in being named Hodgman or Barnard. The current Liberal premier, Will Hodgman, is the son of former federal MP (1975–87) and minister Michael Hodgman, who also served in Tasmania’s Legislative Council (1966–74) and House of Assembly (1992–98 and 2001–10). Michael’s brother, Peter, also served in the Council (1974–86) and Assembly (1986–2001), as did the Hodgman family patriarch, Bill Hodgman (Assembly, 1955–64; Council, 1971–83).

On the Labor side, Claude Barnard was federal MP for Bass (1934–49), the same seat held by his son, Lance Barnard (1954–75), who served as deputy prime minister from 1972 to 1974. Eric Barnard, nephew of Claude Barnard, was a minister in Tasmanian governments. Michael Barnard, grandson of Claude Barnard and nephew of Lance, served in the House of Assembly from 1969 to 1986, and was also deputy premier.

For sheer numbers, though, Tasmania’s nineteenth-century Archer family is hard to beat. Thomas Archer, Legislative Council, 1827–44; Joseph Archer, Legislative Council, 1851–53; William Archer, both houses between 1851 and 1868; Robert Archer, House of Assembly 1869–71; Basil Archer, House of Assembly, 1871–72; William Henry Davies Archer, House of Assembly, 1882–86; and Frank Archer, House of Assembly, 1893–1902.

Of course, other states have had their family successions too. In Victoria, for instance, two John Cains, senior and junior, both held the top job; in Western Australia, the Courts, Charles and Richard, provided two premiers.

If Georgina Downer makes it to Canberra, the Downer clan will be the first to send four generations to federal parliament, and will eclipse that long-running Country Party/Nationals clan, the Anthony family: Larry (Richmond, NSW, 1937–57), Doug (Richmond, 1957–84) and Larry Jr (Richmond, 1996–2004).

But political dynasties are still uncommon at the national level. And a famous name, as Georgina Downer might yet discover for a second time, is no guaranteed fast track.

John Bjelke-Petersen, a son of that formidable Queensland power duo, Joh and Flo Bjelke-Petersen, found this out in his repeated attempts to join the political elite. First, he was the National Party candidate for the seat of Fisher in the 1996 federal election, losing to Liberal Peter Slipper. He tried again in 2005 as the Nationals’ candidate in the seat of Nanango at the 2006 Queensland state election, but lost to an independent, Dorothy Pratt. He also stood unsuccessfully for the LNP at the 2009 state election and was again defeated by Pratt. Then, in a change of colours, he contested Maranoa for the Palmer United Party at the 2013 federal election, losing to the long-time incumbent Bruce Scott (LNP). Still not discouraged, he ran again in 2015 for the seat of Callide, again on behalf of the Palmer United Party, but to no avail.

That was one dynasty that just wasn’t going to happen. ●

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Or will it? The new Labor opposition leader, thirty-five-year-old Rebecca White, has shaken things up thoroughly with a radical plan to rid the state’s pubs and clubs of poker machines. Not surprisingly, she has drawn the wrath of the Liberals and the giant Federal Group (formerly Federal Hotels), the state’s biggest poker machine operator.

Country-raised White, who gave birth to her first child less than a year ago, is a politics and commerce graduate. She entered parliament in 2010 after working as a political staffer, and was still its youngest member when she became Labor leader last year. Smart and articulate, she is running a courageous campaign against one of Tasmania’s largest industries.

She’s not alone: the ranks of anti-pokies campaigners also include the Greens, the Jacqui Lambie Network, the independent federal MP Andrew Wilkie, MONA museum owner David Walsh, the national lobby group Bad Bets, welfare organisations, and writer James Boyce. Boyce, an award-winning historian and author of the recently published book Losing Streak, a critique of Tasmania’s gambling industry, has warned that undeclared gambling industry donations could unduly influence the election result.

Indeed, the extent to which the Liberals’ campaign spending is outpacing that of other parties is worrying many observers, as is the question of who is funding a parallel “grassroots” campaign against Labor’s plan. Independent Legislative Council member Rosemary Armitage is among those calling for greater transparency than what is currently required under Tasmania’s political donation laws. And the Greens will move a no-confidence motion when parliament resumes if the Liberals don’t declare the sources of their funds.

But polls are showing that the issue is a low priority for most Tasmanians, so it’s unlikely that White’s plan will be sufficient to win majority government. It would be a herculean effort for Labor to more than reverse the fall in its primary vote to just 27.3 per cent, a thirty-year low, at the 2014 election. In fact, ReachTEL polling suggests that the Liberals are comfortably placed for Saturday’s election, though Tasmania’s Hare-Clark voting system and divisional boundaries mean that even the poll’s 46.4 per cent support for the Liberals won’t necessarily translate into a majority.

The Liberals won’t be expecting a repeat of their landslide 51.2 per cent primary vote in 2014, which delivered them fifteen seats in a twenty-five-seat parliament (with seven Labor MPs and three Greens). In fact, they are worried enough to have out-promised Labor in key areas of social spending (health, education and affordable housing) as well as making their usual promises of more jobs, higher economic growth and a continuing budget surplus.

Labor had held office for three terms when it faced the voters at that election. Its support base had been in decline since a 2002 high, and the Greens had managed a remarkable 21.6 per cent of the vote in 2010 (after 16.6 per cent in 2006 and 18.1 per cent in 2002). Indeed, the Greens had been cannibalising the Labor vote ever since Labor failed to back the campaign to save the Franklin River in the 1980s. But the Greens’ result in 2010 had probably also been bolstered by voters who were tired of the Labor government.

The Greens face their own challenges in 2018. Already down to three members and probably needing preferences to hang on in Bass, they could struggle to recapture an extra seat in the sprawling rural electorate of Lyons. They have always relied on their ability to rouse public concern over environmental issues and to attract sufficient funds to effectively communicate their policies. After the election, and after the distraction of any minority-government manoeuvring, they will need to analyse the continuing slide in their support.

With Labor’s vote likely to be higher this time but still well short of a win, talk has inevitably turned to the possibility of a hung parliament. If that happened, and if the Greens chose not to support a Hodgman minority government, then it would fall to Labor to negotiate a deal of its own. But a repeat of the 2010 agreement, under which the Greens shared government, eventually with two ministers, is unlikely given the electoral backlash it drew from both parties’ supporters.

The experience of that period is no doubt in the minds of both parties’ strategists. In 2010, like today, voters weren’t entirely convinced that a change of government was needed. When the Liberals gained 39 per cent to Labor’s 36.9 per cent, and the Greens managed an unusually high 21.6 per cent, some kind of minority government was guaranteed. In the end, after a period of confusion during which Labor offered to step aside, it was governor Peter Underwood who invited caretaker Labor premier David Bartlett to test his support on the floor of the house.

The support was there, and the new government formed by Bartlett and Greens leader Nick McKim — whose parties together represented a solid 58.5 per cent of the voting public — went on to govern effectively and serve a full term. Both parties’ ministers sounded surprisingly similar when they promulgated government policy, and the Greens gained some environmental concessions despite tight budget constraints following the global financial crisis. It was undoubtedly a shock for Labor and Green supporters to see Greens in a Labor cabinet, and it cost both parties electorally. But it wouldn’t have been viable for Labor to govern alone in minority.

Having been in office for sixteen years, and having been forced to share power for the last four of them, Labor faced an uphill battle against the energised, popular, centrist Liberal leader Will Hodgman in 2014. No one was especially surprised when the Liberals returned to government.

Another four years later, Tasmania may well be facing minority government again. This would be a blow to the leaders of the major parties, who have both said they want to govern in majority or not at all (unlike South Australia’s premier Jay Weatherill, for instance, who has said he will work with whatever the voters decide). But it may yet be the major parties’ views on pokies in pubs and clubs, and on political donations, that determine the next government.

Given their intended motion of no confidence, the Greens are unlikely to support the Liberals, so Rebecca White’s anti-pokies stance may prove crucial. Greens leader Cassy O’Connor, an MP from the same Denison electorate that Andrew Wilkie holds federally, also wants to rid Tasmania of pokies in pubs and clubs, and the Greens’ long-term policy is right behind her. If the Greens did support a Labor minority government, though, it would be from outside cabinet.

Across the Tasman, a precedent exists for a stable minority government supported by the Greens. Jacinda Ardern, a new Labour leader herself, has created an innovative “inside-out” cabinet, with conservative New Zealand First ministers inside cabinet and Greens ministers on the outside. This keeps the Greens at arm’s length in order to satisfy New Zealand First, who would have supported a conservative government rather than tolerate working in cabinet with the Greens. Ardern relies on a confidence-and-supply deal with the Green Party’s eight MPs. The Greens have three ministerial roles and an under-secretarial position outside cabinet, and join cabinet discussions only as needed.

If the Tasmanian Liberals do fall short of a majority and refuse to, or can’t, govern in minority, the governor would turn to Rebecca White. She could strike a similar “inside-out” deal with the Greens, keeping them outside cabinet but still sharing the ministerial load. This would give the Greens some policy control, but keep them at sufficient distance to satisfy supporters of both parties. Otherwise Labor may strike a lesser confidence-and-supply agreement in return for policy concessions, and beyond this seek vote-by-vote support in parliament.

If the Liberals are returned with a majority, Labor will be looking at a two-term return to government while trying to keep its anti-pokies policy alive. But a Liberal minority government would be inherently unstable and probably shortlived.

For Rebecca White, forming minority government would be a trial by fire, but one that Jacinda Ardern has handled well in more complex circumstances. With a Greens alliance to negotiate and maintain, her pokies policy to implement, and anti–minority government sentiment to repel, White would be dancing on hot coals for years. ●

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For a society still struggling with its identity and searching for a more open relationship with its past, coming to terms with the fact that the killing of Aboriginal people was intrinsic to the founding of the nation seems never to have been more urgent. The creation of the island colony now known as Tasmania was New South Wales’s response to an apparent threat of French invasion after ships under the command of Nicolas Baudin began surveying the area in 1802. Governor King, despite being assured by Baudin of France’s lack of interest in colonial expansion in the region, dispatched lieutenant John Bowen in September the following year to establish a permanent British settlement. Within six months, the first coordinated military action by a European power against Tasmanian Aborigines had occurred.

Baudin’s visit had been preceded in 1772 by an expedition led by Marion du Fresne. The French anchored in Frederick Henry Bay on 3 March and, after unintentionally provoking Aborigines by lighting a fire, were attacked with stones and spears. Du Fresne responded with a fusillade, wounding several Tasmanians and killing at least one. This, the first recorded Aboriginal fatality on the island at European hands, has been largely forgotten. But the events of 3 May 1804, when Bowen’s detachment fired on approaching Aborigines at their Risdon Cove settlement, continue to resonate in contemporary Tasmania.

The small inlet on the Derwent estuary just north of the city of Hobart is widely known today as the first British settlement in Tasmania. In fact, it proved to be unsuited to development, and lieutenant governor David Collins quickly established alternative sites at Sullivan’s Cove and New Town Bay. It was from these new locations that the colony’s convicts and free settlers heard the sound of a cannon being fired at a large group of Aborigines who had entered Bowen’s camp.

Enough has been written about these events at Risdon Cove to establish that around 200 Aborigines were engaged by soldiers for a period of at least three hours. Estimates made around the time of the number of Aborigines killed range from as few as three to as many as fifty. And while official reports described the Aboriginal presence as threatening and violent, other observers described the incident as an overreaction to an innocent kangaroo hunt.

These events created an identity for the site as Britain’s first beachhead in the invasion of the island and the consequent dispossession of its Aboriginal population. For contemporary Tasmanian Aborigines, it is the place of the Risdon Cove Massacre, and the beginning of Australia’s first forgotten war.

Over the next three decades, hundreds of Tasmanian Aboriginal men, women and children were recorded as having been killed by convicts, settlers and military as the colony’s newspapers howled for their blood. Roving parties, funded by the governor, attacked Aborigines in districts targeted for settlement, and a vast military operation known as the Black Line swept across those parts of the island in an armed campaign to capture and remove the survivors.

Johnson and McFarlane draw critical attention to Risdon Cove, joining a long list of authors who have attempted to sift through the contradictory fragments of evidence available to make a forensic account of the events. Despite allocating over twenty pages to the subject, the authors are emphatic that its importance is overstated:

The so-called “Risdon Massacre” occurred the following May, an incident that has often been grossly exaggerated. On this occasion there was certainly loss of life, but to refer to it as a “massacre” is naive at best.

The authors share such sentiments with those of Windschuttle in his publication The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Macleay Press, 2002). But it would be too simple to describe them as sympathetic to his project. Johnson and McFarlane are at times dismissive of Windschuttle’s assertions, describing them as “errant nonsense,” but give him credit for many other observations. Overall, they contribute a valuable analysis of the disparate records of the events at Risdon Cove. But it is in their energetic rejection of the term “massacre” that the authors’ subjectivity becomes problematic. Equally apparent is their discomfort with contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal identity and the possibility of an authentic cultural expression. Through frequent reference, the authors seem to veer back towards Windschuttle’s distaste for contemporary Aboriginal cultural self-determination. The passage of the Aboriginal Lands Act 1995, unamended and with unanimous support from both houses of the Tasmanian parliament, was perhaps the greatest example of self-determined achievement in Tasmanian Aboriginal history. Yet it goes unmentioned. Criticism of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, an organisation at the heart of Aboriginal political assertion and Indigenous cultural renaissance in Tasmania, seems oddly passionate and strenuously critical. This belies a historical text that invests otherwise admirable effort in compiling one of the most extensive and wide-ranging accounts yet published.

It is this aspect – the character of the historical commentary – that is most troubling about Van Diemen’s Land. From its introduction, which describes Aboriginal attempts to “recreate language and customary practices, not always successfully, with their authenticity at times highly questionable,” and asserts contemporary constructs of identity as a “mockery,” the authors seem intent on a broader project. In their tendency towards judgement, which too often overshadows the attempts at careful, evidenced observation that characterise most of the book, they raise questions about exactly what is implied by the subtitle of their volume: An Aboriginal History. If added simply to differentiate their book in the marketplace from James Boyce’s excellent Van Diemen’s Land (Black Inc., 2010) then the answer is uncomplicated. If the subtitle is meant to suggest some sort of account of a Tasmanian Aboriginal presence in history, however, then the subtitle is misleading.

Johnson and McFarlane’s acknowledgements fail to mention a single Aboriginal person. Complete absence in this regard is surprising, but perhaps telling. I can only suspect that the book is somehow framed in spite of Tasmanian Aboriginal historians and commentators. The dismissal of Patsy Cameron’s book Grease and Ochre (Fullers Bookshop, 2011) as the work of an “uncritical revisionist” taking things to “fanciful heights” seems to confirm this. If I am right, and the book is an attempt to reclaim Tasmanian Aboriginal history from the idiosyncratic hands of Aboriginal scholars, then it does so in a blunt and unsophisticated way.

Any claim that Van Diemen’s Land is an “Aboriginal history” might be expected to require an engagement with Aboriginal voices, otherwise it may only succeed in denying Aborigines the ability to tell our own story. In asserting this, I am not arguing that such voices are beyond criticism. But they should be engaged with on the basis of an understanding of the social and historical context of their advocacy for recognition, and their value as cultural documents. Outright dismissal stakes out some very high moral and academic ground, which becomes problematic given the authors’ own subjectivity, and their reliance on secondary sources and newspaper reports in exploring such difficult subjects as paleoclimates, anthropology and linguistics. Circumspect treatment of these sources, as well as of “revisionists” like Cameron, would result in a more balanced and considered approach to what is otherwise a valuable summary text.

Henry Reynolds features strongly in Van Diemen’s Land’s acknowledgements, and contributes a valuable foreword to the volume. Reynolds commenced his academic career with Aborigines and Settlers, published in 1972, and followed it with The Other Side of the Frontier, ten years later. His latest book returns to the subject of frontier conflict as a matter of urgency and relevance. Counter to the arguments of Windschuttle, which see colonial domination of Aborigines as overstated in its pertinence to Australians today, Reynolds argues that these events are increasingly germane to understanding both the past and the future of the nation. He points to Australia’s intensifying relationship with war as an ongoing defining element of national identity, and argues that the current focus on providing long-overdue constitutional recognition of Indigenous people is a key reason for confronting the lasting implications of frontier history.

Unlike well-known conflicts such as the Boer wars, Gallipoli or Vietnam – through which, Reynolds points out, nothing was won for Australia as a nation – frontier wars like those fought in Van Diemen’s Land were essential in subduing violent resistance to British invasion of Aboriginal land. They also paved the way for key economic drivers such as pastoralism. Reynolds argues that their importance has been obscured by the widespread myth, which emerged in the early twentieth century, of a romantic frontier, in which the only war was that waged on nature and the elements. This replaced the national narrative of preceding decades, in which the debate was not about the existence of conflict as much as about the morality of campaigns that were acknowledged to kill Aborigines.

These, says Reynolds, were the wars that made the nation, not those on faraway shores. In the future, he argues, when minor engagements such as Gallipoli and those of the cold war fall into obscurity, it will be the foundations of imperialism and colonisation that will endure as central to Australia’s origins. For this reason more than any other, they require recognition and serious treatment by institutions such as the Australian War Memorial. Figures as diverse as historian Geoffrey Blainey and governor-general Sir William Deane have highlighted this challenge. Yet the Memorial’s official position remains that such subjects are best considered in the nation’s museums, a view that Reynolds sees as misguided and negligent.

Each of these books offers a measure of judgement and opinion on the implications of colonial conflict as it is variously seen in Australian history. But it is Reynolds who astutely recognises the dilemma facing historians who wield history as an instrument of judgement on the past. Those who committed killings – whether or not they are correctly described as massacres – acted according to the standards of their times. Whether they should be judged by the standards of those times or of our own is, according to Reynolds, a substantial question. Contexts change, and continue to do so.

Meanwhile, Windschuttle’s call for objective truth in history remains as a hollow, ideological hope. His legacy, however, is a template method for energetically dismissing narratives that seek to engage in the richer task of understanding the contextual terrain in which ideas of truth grow. Reynolds’s call for critical engagement with the mythological dimensions of Australia’s view of itself directly confront Windschuttle’s belief in the existence of a single, proper story. His call should also be taken account of by those who wish to document the experience of Aborigines in history. The task of the historian is to search out evidence, account for its context and present it for collegial analysis. Ridiculing those colleagues – or worse, the subjects of historical inquiry – will always say more about the political and social context of our times and our relationship with the past than it can about the facts of our history. •

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ON THE slopes of Mt Lindsay in Tasmania’s Tarkine wilderness, Ruth Groom runs her hand over a myrtle tree’s huge trunk, soaking in the magnificent rainforest. Below her feet, buried deep, is one of the largest undeveloped tin resources in the world.

Groom, who works for the Wilderness Society, is one of many environmental campaigners arguing against further mining in this part of Tasmania’s northwest. Meanwhile, exploration company Venture Minerals plans to develop a world-class tin and tungsten mine on the site where she is standing. Venture has applied for a total lease area of 1029 hectares (about 515 times the size of the Melbourne Cricket Ground) to develop the Mt Lindsay mine, which would contain a 40-hectare open-cut pit 220 metres in depth. “The impact is massive. The area will never have the same biodiversity,” says Groom.

Mt Lindsay is one of multiple new mines of various sizes proposed for the Tarkine region, leaving Tasmania with a choice to be made. The state is faced with potentially sacrificing a unique wilderness area to entrench its mining industry, or ensuring the Tarkine’s preservation, possibly at the expense of significant investment in Tasmania during the current mineral boom.

The decision comes at a particularly sensitive time. Tasmania’s economy is the weakest in Australia and its unemployment rates are the highest in the country, particularly in the northwest. The Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s chief economist, Phil Bayley, cites a number of contributors to Tasmania’s struggles – including job losses in manufacturing and forestry, and long-term issues such as an underperforming education system at both school and tertiary level. “Money won’t necessarily fix it,” he says. “There are no silver bullets. But there are opportunities and the mining sector is one of them.”

THE Tarkine is an expansive wilderness region renowned for its contrasting, connected landscapes. It contains the largest cool temperate rainforest in Australia – the second-largest in the southern hemisphere. The rainforest’s flora is of ancient descent and can be traced to the continent of Gondwana, which existed hundreds of millions of years ago. Similar rainforest once dominated the southern hemisphere, but now only small tracts remain in southern parts of Australia, as well as New Zealand, Siberia and North America.

The Tarkine showcases rarities of geological significance, such as magnesite karst caves. Its tall eucalypt forests are home to the endangered wedge-tailed eagle and threatened owls. Its commanding coastline supports white-bellied sea eagles and significant Aboriginal relics; and the abundant waterways are home to the giant freshwater crayfish, the largest freshwater invertebrate in the world. Its vast buttongrass plains are home to diverse ecosystems, and the Tarkine is also the last area where the state’s endemic Tasmanian devil survives free from the devil facial tumour disease.

The wilderness area between the Arthur River and the Pieman River was nominated for permanent national heritage listing last year. The Australian Heritage Council recommended 433,000 hectares of the Tarkine be recognised for outstanding heritage values. Former federal environment minister Tony Burke rejected the full recommendation, but listed a strip of 21,000 hectares along the coast, to protect Aboriginal heritage.

The chair of the Australian Heritage Council, Carmen Lawrence, has publicly voiced her disappointment with Burke’s decision. She says those who deny the Tarkine’s value misjudge the diligent nature of heritage assessments. “They must have their eyes closed and ears plugged. The evidence is there too, it’s not just a matter of sentiment.”

The extensive area recommended for heritage listing is largely untouched by human activity, besides the extremely small-scale mining and selective logging of early prospectors. “We were very careful not to include areas of degradation,” Lawrence says.

Lawrence warns that by refusing to acknowledge the Tarkine’s heritage values, Australia risks losing a rare gem. She says the Tarkine is of international significance and to damage it would be a global tragedy. “It has unique biodiversity and a history that is global in its import. That’s why people have suggested that it should be World Heritage listed. The Kimberley has similar character.”

Some opponents of the heritage recommendation were concerned that a listing would exclude mining from the area and threaten the 581 employees at Grange Resources’ Savage River mine, located at the centre of the Tarkine. But Lawrence clarifies that existing mining operations were omitted from the heritage recommendation. She says views that mining would be excluded are incorrect. “When people talk about locking things up they are misreading the legislation. These listings are not a barrier to other activity.”

Instead, a national heritage listing requires that an area’s values be duly considered when proposals are brought to the table. Lawrence says the Tarkine’s irrefutable values should be properly recognised. “If you wanted to mine under the Opera House you would be told to go away.”

But the state government argued in a submission to minister Tony Burke that heritage listing the Tarkine would have a significant impact on investment in the state. Interest in northwest Tasmania’s mineral resources has increased considerably with a rise in metal prices. The government said “increased approval times” resulting from heritage listing would complicate access to resources and encourage companies and investors to source minerals overseas instead. The government’s submission cited multiple expressions of concern from existing and interested mining companies, including established miners worried that a listing would prevent them expanding or adapting their operations.

The largest of the new mining proposals currently on the table are Shree Minerals’ recently reapproved iron ore project at Nelson Bay River (its original approval was challenged and overthrown in the Federal Court because of concern for the Tasmanian devil) and Venture Minerals’ Mt Lindsay tin/tungsten mine.

Shree estimates that its iron ore mine would employ 125 full-time workers, including contractors, and return about $80 million a year. Venture Minerals predicts that its Mt Lindsay mine would employ 1000 people for eighteen months, then sixty employees from then on, and claims that the project would produce about $100 million a year for the Tasmanian economy.

The Tasmanian Minerals Council chief executive officer, Terry Long, says that if new mining projects don’t come to fruition the northwest would lose a substantial opportunity. He stresses that indirect benefit should also be considered. Long says that a survey commissioned by the Tasmanian Minerals Council found that mining and mineral processing operations spent $800 million on goods and services in Tasmania in 2010–11. “If mines want electrical material, pipes, design and construct engineers, freight, someone to clean the offices – they contract that out. That is why [mines] are important to a regional economy.”

Of Venture Minerals’ three projects currently proposed – Mt Lindsay plus the Riley Creek iron ore mine and the Mt Livingstone hematite mine – two will be totally exhausted in two years and are intended to fund the major Mt Lindsay project. The company’s bankable feasibility study of the proposed Mt Lindsay mine identifies a nine-year mine life based on presently known resources at current mineral prices. But Long emphasises that the Mt Lindsay mine’s predicted lifespan is not necessarily a maximum. He says because mineral exploration is an expensive undertaking, it is standard for companies to lock in a shorter period, then expand.

A director of the Tasmanian Minerals Council, geologist Kim Denwer, says that there is no way of determining for sure a mine’s longevity, as the operations are dependent on a finite resource. But he says the impressive lifespans of existing mines on the west coast are indicative. “One of the things Tasmania is very spoilt with is tremendous ore bodies. In the mid 1980s, the Rosebery deposit was known to have twenty million tonnes, but in the last thirty years an additional thirty-four million tonnes of ore has been discovered.”

Denwer acknowledges that a mine’s endurance is also dependent on fluctuations in metal prices. “The Renison mine on the west coast has opened and closed in the last ten years with the major fluctuations in the tin price,” he says. But Denwer believes that the currently high tin price will be sustained for a considerable period, now that Europe has banned lead solder in its electrical products. “The only alternative to lead solder is tin solder,” Denwer says.

The Tasmanian Minerals Council believes that the resource base in northwest Tasmania is one of the most promising in the world for its size. Denwer says the northwest has a rare opportunity to benefit from the new demand for metals such as tin and tungsten, because of its diverse selection of minerals. “The iron ore deposits of Western Australia are probably worth more, but here we have so many different elements enriched in the crust,” he says.

The state government’s submission to the federal environment minister stated that if a heritage listing prohibited new mines there would be an eventual decline in the mining industry. Denwer agrees that despite the typically long life of Tasmania’s existing mines, new mining is essential for the industry’s advancement. “Growing the business and replacing old resources – that’s where the Venture and Shree projects are the future of the mining industry.”

Seventy-three per cent of the state’s mining industry operates on the west coast, and largely supports mining towns such as Queenstown, Waratah, Tullah, Rosebery and Zeehan. According to economist Phil Bayley, the total mining sector added $402 million to the Tasmanian economy in 2011–12. Tasmanian resources minister Bryan Green told the Mercury that mining royalties are now ten times more valuable to Tasmania than they were a decade ago.

Open-cut mine at Savage River.
Brent Melton

THE Australian Workers’ Union, or AWU, has held two rallies in the northwest in support of mining – rallies explicitly supported by the state government. The first assembly saw people gather in Burnie, the west coast’s port and urban centre, in November last year. Pro-mining supporters congregated again on 25 May in Tullah, a small community of 250 nestled amid rocky mountains on the fringe of the Tarkine.

The AWU, through its campaign Our Tarkine, Our Future, has accused those fighting for the protection of the Tarkine of trying to shut down the mining industry. Signs reading “Unlock Tasmania, lock up the Greens,” “Get rid of Green parasites before they destroy Tasmania” and “Save the Tassie miner from extinction” were raised at Tullah. Rosebery miner Kim McDermott told the crowd that protection of the area would render the region an “economic wasteland.”

Conservationists have stated repeatedly that they are not opposed to existing mines like Savage River. Winding her car through the mountains towards Tullah, the Wilderness Society’s Ruth Groom emphasises that her desire to protect Tasmania’s natural assets does not signal a disregard for the people of the northwest. “I’m from the northwest. I’m a Burnie girl who grew up here and I certainly feel very deeply for the people of the west coast,” she says, “People are desperate for economic opportunities.”

Passionate about Tasmania, Groom accepts that mining is part of the west coast’s future, but she hopes for a transition towards renewables on a broader scale. “The Tarkine is just a completely inappropriate place for mining. At some point we are going to have to find alternatives anyway, because we are relying on finite resources.”

AT THE abandoned Mt Cleveland tin mine, near the ghost town of Luina in the Tarkine, the gurgling, polluted streams stink of sulphur. The underground mine, closed in 1986, is currently leaching acid from its former tailings dam into the Whyte River, causing a six-kilometre dead spot that supports no aquatic life. Bright Phase Resources – an Australian mineral resource development company – has proposed a new project to extract additional tin from the Mt Cleveland mine and rehabilitate it. Mancala, another mining company, is looking to re-mine and rehabilitate a legacy site at Burns Peak.

Scott Jordan, of Save the Tarkine, supports proposals to re-mine and remediate previous mining sites in the area. He says the projects would deliver economic benefit and a substantial number of jobs, without affecting undisturbed areas. “Where we draw the line is new mines in wilderness areas creating entirely new legacy issues.”

But Tasmanian economist Bruce Felmingham, in a report commissioned by the Tasmanian Minerals Council, argues that if the mining industry does not grow as predicted – a growth dependent on new prospects – it may not have the same capacity to replace existing mines. Felmingham believes significant growth in mining could also absorb some of the impact of the eventual closure of the state’s existing mineral processors, which have acknowledged a decline. “I don’t know of any economy in the world that is not making some kind of transition right now – it’s not unique to Tasmania. Tasmania’s transition probably means the phasing out of the current mineral processors. But it also means we need to replace that loss in production.”

Environmental campaigners have proposed developing tourism as an economic alternative to mining in the Tarkine. The Tourism and Transport Forum – an industry group – says that tourism is an important industry in Tasmania, directly employing about 15,000 people. The forum’s director of research and strategy, Adele Labine-Romain, says tourism contributes about $2 billion annually to the state’s economy, driven by Tasmania’s nature-based product, which differentiates it from other states. There is an increasing sphere of tourism dedicated to the preservation of the environment.

Tourism in the northwest is underdeveloped compared with other regions. In 2008, the Cradle Coast Authority – an organisation created by the northwest’s nine councils – identified a huge potential for tourism in the Tarkine. It developed the Tarkine Tourism Development Strategy based on market research and investigations of latent demand. It found that the Tarkine had an “unrivalled opportunity to ‘raise the bar’ in responsible, ecologically sustainable tourism.” The study recognised that “the primary attributes of the Tarkine… are increasingly scarce in the modern world,” and argued that, if developed correctly, the area had the potential to attract international attention.

Modelling found that if “a menu of meaningful, high quality visitor experiences,” were created, tourism in the Tarkine could generate $58.2 million per year and provide 1100 jobs, as long as the required infrastructure was developed. The study recommended that nature tourism be complemented by local produce, to provide food and wine experiences, and predicted that flow-on effects could considerably boost local communities. Cradle Coast Authority executive chairman Roger Jaensch says the 2008 assessment of the Tarkine’s potential is still applicable, as results were based on long-term projections.

Jaensch is confident that the Tarkine could complement established destinations on the west coast, like Cradle Mountain, the Gordon River and Macquarie Harbour. He says the Tarkine’s unique immensity and diversity distinguishes it from existing nature-based tourism developments in Tasmania. “The Tarkine has a juxtaposing range of appeals. That assemblage of things doesn’t happen in too many other places.” He also believes that the Tarkine’s variety of landscapes has the potential to provide attractions year-round in a traditionally seasonal industry. “On the coast when it’s wild, there is a whole different raw, powerful experience associated with winter that we haven’t tapped into yet,” he says.

TARKINE Trails is a long-running tourism business operating in the Tarkine. Current owner Greg Irons bought the business after his first encounter with the Tarkine’s ancient beauty and majesty changed his life. “You leave there after a few days and it just feels wrong that you are wearing clothes,” he says, “You drive around the streets thinking, ‘What the hell have we done?’ This is a place that native Australians lived in for 40,000 years without leaving a footprint and look what we’ve done to Australia in 200 years.” Irons says he is yet to meet anyone who didn’t feel wonderment on experiencing the Tarkine. “I think everyone would appreciate the world a lot more should they get a taste of the Tarkine.”

So with this unique opportunity in plain sight, why hasn’t tourism been developed to its full potential? Irons cites tenure and investment security as critical factors. He says that previous owners had to relocate Tarkine Trails’ six-day walk because of mineral exploration tenures, a move that cost them thousands of dollars. Since then, Irons has invested around $250,000 in a Tarkine camp.

Irons already owned a successful wildlife shelter, Bonorong, when he decided to invest in Tarkine Trails in order to expose people to the Tarkine’s conservation value. He believes no one pursuing a tourism business for commercial purposes would have taken such a risk. “No one in their right mind would do what I have done – put that much money into a camp that is under mining tenure. I could be told to leave in two weeks and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on,” he says.

Irons says uncertainty surrounding whether nature tourism’s product – the natural environment – was being properly managed could also cause reluctance to invest. He says eco-tourists are equally discouraged by the perception that the environment is being degraded. “It can become a very sad experience.”

In its submission to the federal environment minister, the state government stated that tourism investors would be deterred by further environmental regulations in a similar way to mining companies. But the owner-operator of the Tarkine Wilderness Lodge, Maree Jenkins, argues that most nature-based tourism businesses would be willing to jump through some initial hoops to ensure that their long-term product, the natural environment, was being preserved. “I’m more worried about mining activities than I am about it being made national heritage,” she says. “Without the forest we’d just have a lodge stuck up on top of a hill.”

But the state government says “it is highly unlikely that [tourism] would be able to replace the value of the existing industry, especially mining, in the short to medium term.” Economist Bruce Felmingham agrees. He says mining also provides opportunities for high-salary-earning knowledge workers, like engineers, whereas tourism does not. Felmingham suggests that knowledge workers migrating to Western Australia and Queensland in pursuit of major mining operations may be drawn back to Tasmania. He says attracting high-salary earners could help the state transition to support a “managerial class.”

“The thing we miss here in Tasmania is that head office culture,” Felmingham says. “Getting those higher incomes involved is an essential issue for our future.” But he insists that tourism and industry must coexist in a healthy economy. “It’s got to be a co-tenant. Diversity of industry is the argument here.” He also says that the pursuit of economic benefit shouldn’t eclipse environmental consideration. “I support mining in the Tarkine and I don’t agree with a blanket ban. But I’m not going to support a massive open-cut mine that is going to destroy the wilderness.”

Felmingham believes that the Tasmanian forestry peace deal – the result of a long-running war – was a positive outcome, but he hopes to avoid a conflict of that scale over mining. “People are just going to have to find a new way of looking at these issues. Another war like the forestry war is beyond us.” He says new land-management agreements could help strike a much-needed balance between tourism, industry and conservation. “This is an opportunity to revisit an area and designate it down to areas used by industry and areas that are not.”

The Cradle Coast Authority’s Roger Jaensch echoes this sentiment. “We should be smart enough in this day and age to manage a range of different land uses without them compromising each other unduly,” he says. “It does rely on there being specific, unique, vulnerable things being protected. We don’t believe there needs to be a blanket exclusion of other land uses, but we need to ensure that we don’t compromise values that have already been identified. If mining can be done without damaging irreparably things that can’t be replaced, good on it.”

THE state government maintains that a balance has already been struck within the Tarkine region. Premier Lara Giddings told the ABC and the AWU rally at Tullah that a balance had been realised in that only one per cent of the Tarkine was open to mining.

Venture’s three project leases (Mt Lindsay, Riley Creek and Mt Livingstone, occupying 1,824 hectares combined), Shree Minerals’ assigned 778-hectare lease at Nelson Bay River, and Grange Resources’ existing mining leases do equal about 1.8 per cent of the 433,000-hectare area recommended for heritage listing.

But Save the Tarkine says that Mineral Resources Tasmania’s records show that there are currently fifty-eight mineral exploration licences across the heritage-nominated area, leaving about 70 per cent of the Tarkine under mining tenure. According to Mineral Resources Tasmania – a division of the Department of Infrastructure, Energy and Resources – Venture Minerals’ total tenure alone equals nearly 300 square kilometres, or 30,000 hectares – about 7 per cent of the recommended heritage listing.

Venture – which is listed on the stock exchange – has already identified several other prospects in ASX reports to investors, suggesting the area is a “province of tin.” Last year Venture discovered significant resource potential at a new location dubbed Big Wilson, six kilometres from Mt Lindsay. In March this year the company found another potential hotspot called North Cashbolt a few kilometres north. It has also identified potential at Contact Creek, much further north of Mt Lindsay (which is situated in the south of the region). This prospective resource lies almost adjacent to the Savage River mine – located in the middle of the Tarkine.

Resources minister Bryan Green told a budget estimates hearing on 5 June that he was confident the mines would go ahead. He said he hoped Venture’s proposed projects, including Big Wilson, would be approved – suggesting that expansion beyond Venture’s original three projects’ footprint would be encouraged.

Map: WikiMedia

Premier Lara Giddings told the ABC that “most of the area is already under some form of reserve.” The Tarkine contains a variety of reserves, predominantly regional and multiple-use reserves, as delegated by the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement of the 1990s. Much of the area is protected from forestry, but mineral exploration is technically permitted across 96 per cent of the heritage-recommended 433,000 hectares. Only Savage River National Park, a contiguous tract of 18,000 hectares of rainforest, is strictly protected from mining. This means only about 4 per cent of the Tarkine recommended for heritage listing is formally protected from mining and mineral exploration. Unlike other national parks such as Cradle Mountain, Savage River National Park does not facilitate access for tourists.

SAVE the Tarkine’s Scott Jordan says he attempted to negotiate a balance between conservation and mining before launching his campaign for the Tarkine’s protection. Save the Tarkine approached prospective mining companies, the state government and the Tasmanian Minerals Council, hoping for a round-table discussion in order to allocate particular areas of the Tarkine for protection and others for mining.

“We received some support from some of the mining companies – they were keen to test whether it was possible to come to an agreement. But the state government and the Minerals Council weren’t prepared to look at it,” Jordan says.

Tasmanian Minerals Council CEO Terry Long confirms that he refused to negotiate, because he believes land use in the area is already balanced. Long says that when both the Savage River National Park and multiple use reserves were established in the 1990s, the distribution of land was fair. “I told [Save the Tarkine] that I wasn’t interested because a compromise had been made in the nineties. Their idea of compromise is simply to preclude mineral exploration and mining from more of the compromised area,” he says. “The parliament made a judgement that we had a heavy area of mineralisation and it’s reasonable to expect that the community can take advantage of that.”

Long argues that mining’s extensive tenure across the region does not guarantee the development of mines. “There might be nine proposals, but only a handful of those will come to pass. Lots of people want to start a mine, but not many actually get round to it.”

Long believes the current share of the land is particularly justified considering Tasmania’s reserve base. “I’m not aware of any other state that has 52 per cent of its land in reserves. Just to the south of the dreaded Tarkine, you’ve got a quarter of the state in a World Heritage area. It’s not as though we are short,” he says.

But Heritage Council chair Carmen Lawrence says the Tarkine’s unique values cannot be cancelled out by the quantity of Tasmania’s reserves. “Heritage criteria are comparative, so any site that is recommended for listing has to have characteristics which are not listed in other properties. It means the Tarkine’s unique characteristics are peerless.”

Long says the area’s reserve category demands a stringent process be followed before mines are developed. “If you have found an ore body, it’s not a matter of an automatic right to mine.” But environmentalists are concerned that the state government’s explicit determination to see new mining projects come to fruition may compromise processes. Resources minister Bryan Green signed a mining lease for Venture Minerals’ Mt Livingstone mine in May last year, but then answered questions about the project incorrectly at a budget estimates meeting, denying that the lease resided in the Meredith Range reserve.

“He made an apology for making an incorrect statement, but he never addressed the issue of whether or not he knew which lease he signed,” Jordan says. “It’s clear that the minister hadn’t even extended the courtesy of actually checking which lease he was signing.”

A COMMON misperception is that most new mines would only affect “plain old buttongrass,” as one mining supporter put it. But Venture’s Mt Lindsay proposal is entirely positioned within rainforest; its Mt Livingstone lease covers a varied terrain of diverse habitat including myrtle rainforest, eucalypt forest and buttongrass plains; and the Riley Creek strip mine, while causing a smaller footprint than the aforementioned open-cut proposals, will require clearing of both old growth and regrowth forest.

Terry Long argues that any natural values onsite will be carefully managed and assessed by the company’s environmental scientists. “The quality of science these days is quite remarkable,” he says.

Environmentalists contend, however, that the area’s heritage values cannot be sufficiently identified or protected because government has failed to recognise them. Scott Jordan says existing regulatory authorities are not required to consider the values identified by the Heritage Council. He cites Tony Burke’s decision against heritage listing, and the state government’s submission, as examples of the government’s refusal to acknowledge the Tarkine’s values.

Conservationists are also concerned about the government’s commitment to mitigating long-term legacy risks. Bryan Green recently told a budget estimates hearing that past mining activity had polluted about forty Tasmanian rivers.

“Those longer-term issues are like time bombs – it might be twenty or thirty years before their impact,” Jordan says.

Each of the proposed new mining leases contains multiple waterways. But Long says the science of rehabilitation has progressed dramatically and is designed to manage these risks. “People used to drive down the highway and throw their tinnies out the window, now you wouldn’t dream of doing that. It’s the same in mining.”

Long admits that open-cut operations obviously change the topography of the affected area, but he says they can also be rehabilitated acceptably. “When you dig the ore out you have a hole, you are not going to have a hill. But the plan for Savage River, for example, is to have it as a series of lakes open for tourism development.” He is confident that mining companies will be adequately held to account by the EPA during both the approval process and the mining operation. “Your environmental case has to be particularly rigorous and of very high quality or it’s going to be knocked back,” he says.

The Wilderness Society’s Jon Sumby – an expert adviser on environmental policy and science who has been looking into Venture’s mining proposals – acknowledges that the EPA made some positive recommendations for water management in its approval of the Riley Creek project. But he says its consideration of the Tasmanian devil was worryingly insufficient. Concern for the devil has skyrocketed as fast-spreading facial cancer threatens to see the animal follow in the footsteps of the state’s iconic Tasmanian tiger, now extinct. A serious hazard for the fragile species is roadkill. Sumby says regular trucking, along with the cumulative effect of Venture’s three projects, and the fact that the Riley Creek and Mt Livingstone mines will run twenty-four hours a day, puts devils at risk. “There will be 148 trucks per day running from Riley Creek alone. Add in Mt Livingstone and Mt Lindsay and that goes up to 528 vehicles.”

Sumby believes that while it may issue conditions, the EPA is unlikely to deny mining proposals, even if the environmental impact is too great, as it is only required to assess material presented to it by companies. “You will never find a person who is hired to do an environmental assessment for a company who will come back and say ‘it can’t be done,’” he says.

SO IT SEEMS that true balance to satisfy all stakeholders is still in doubt. Tarkine Trails’ Greg Irons says people fear that a desirable outcome may be jeopardised by what has become a highly political feud. “Governments,” he adds, “are looking to be able to say ‘look what we did for the economy.’”

He hopes all parties will strive to find a middle ground for conservation, tourism and industry. “We have a whole lot of people who don’t want to see a leaf touched and a whole lot of people who don’t want to see a leaf. Sustainability is where the world needs to be,” he says.

The Cradle Coast Authority’s Roger Jaensch says that the only way to go is forward. “This is going to be a bit messy, but it’s got to be a rolling process,” he says. “The alternative is to go backwards, to say we have no hope of possibly managing people and conservation in this environment and therefore we should close it down to everything. That would be defeat.”

Jaensch believes agencies responsible for the land must communicate more effectively and that no one should get first bite of the cherry. “I don’t think we can reserve the whole region hoping tourism operators come up with great things, just as we can’t reserve the whole region to exclude tourism because miners might find a nice bit of ore. Tourism and mining each bring their own impacts into these environments – we’ve got to manage them and we’ve got to do it smarter. And we have to get people in, whether they be mining companies or tourism operators, who are up to that challenge.”

Looking out over the rainforest, Ruth Groom says decisions ought to be made with long-term consequences in mind. “When the industrial and technological revolutions were changing the world, we really didn’t know what the consequences would be. We can’t pretend we don’t know any more.”

Groom hopes that decision-makers will consider the wider repercussions of failing to protect rare environments like the Tarkine. “Forests are actually working for us. They are protecting our soil, our water and our air,” she says. “By compromising these environments we are compromising our water, our endangered species, and ultimately ourselves.”

Venture Minerals declined an interview. Resources minister Bryan Green was unavailable for comment. The AWU and premier Lara Giddings did not return calls.

The post Drawing a fine line in the Tarkine appeared first on Inside Story.

Many Tasmanian writers have discussed Trollope’s observations of the physical and social imprint of convictism on Tasmania, especially his famous dictum that Tasmania was destined to live on the relics of its convict past. This sense of “islandness” – the geographical and historical factors that shape Tasmanian identity – is an important theme in Henry Reynolds’s lucid and engaging new history of Tasmania. But Reynolds also argues that writing a history of Tasmania inescapably means writing about nation and empire. Tasmania has a unique and profound story, he argues, but that story contributes to our understanding of Australia’s past and present in significant ways.

Trollope visited Tasmania during the long economic slump after transportation to the island ended in 1853. The downturn contrasted with the boom on the other side of Bass Strait. Vandemonians had once seen Victoria as their colony; now it was striding ahead. Deprived of the British revenue and military force associated with the convict system, the island’s ruling class sought to shore up its own privileges by imposing labour conditions and criminal sanctions reminiscent of the convict system. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, though, some of the same public figures who had campaigned for independence from Britain were advocating union with Victoria.

The deeply human story of convict transportation connects at many points with the driving intellectual interest of Reynolds’s distinguished career: the interaction between Indigenous people and colonisers (or invaders, as he puts it). Reynolds has explored the complexities of Indigenous–settler relations in a dozen or so books. The title of the book that brought him to public prominence, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), summarises his focus on conflict and Indigenous resistance. His subsequent analysis of the legal, political and moral contexts of colonial occupation and property rights, The Law of the Land (1987), was influential in the High Court’s recognition of native title in the 1992 Mabo case.

Reynolds’s work during that period gained him an international audience and large measures of praise and criticism at home, and he found himself at the centre of a major political and legal battle. As the Western Australian academic David Ritter observes, opponents of native title assumed that discrediting Reynolds would weaken the doctrine itself. Later, Reynolds and other revisionist historians found themselves under attack on another flank of the “history wars,” most contentiously through Keith Windschuttle’s assertion that they had exaggerated the number of Indigenous deaths from armed conflict in Van Diemen’s Land.

In 1998, Reynolds retired from James Cook University, where he had taught Australian history for three decades, and returned to his birthplace of Tasmania. There, he has encouraged the work of an emerging group of Tasmanian Indigenous historians and produced a clutch of new work. This latest book is not intended as a reference work, he says, but rather as a more selective account of Tasmania’s political development and the major economic and social changes the island has seen over the past 200 years.

IT WAS the European maritime expeditions to Van Diemen’s Land in the late eighteenth century that began this era of significant change. Between 1772 and 1802, eleven expeditions explored and mapped the southeastern Tasmanian coastline, with French landing parties spending lengthy periods onshore. Conflict – often, in Reynolds’s view, born of misunderstanding – was never far away, for “each party found the other conflicting and volatile.”

Early in his account, Reynolds discusses the pivotal encounter in 1804 between the Mairremmener people of southern Tasmania and the British marines based at Risdon Cove, the earliest British encampment. Working with contrasting contemporary accounts, Reynolds concludes that what began as a kangaroo drive by the Mairremmener may have turned, following an initial volley of musket fire by the soldiers, into the most serious frontal assault on settlers in Tasmanian history. The confrontation lasted for three hours, and colonial observers – including the evangelical “conciliator” G.A. Robinson – concluded that it destroyed any real prospect of peace between black and white in Tasmania. As Reynolds says, the Mairremmener were at the heart of the “Black War” in Tasmania. Whether or not other language groups became aware of the episode, within a generation “all had been engulfed by the overwhelming tide of settlement.”

Reynolds dismisses a simple connection between the Black War – and particularly its best-known episode, the costly and inept attempt to drive Indigenous people into the southeast corner of the island – and the removal of the Indigenous Tasmanians to the disastrous Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island. With martial law declared in 1828 and a bounty placed on Indigenous people, the decision to relocate was, in Reynolds’s view, pragmatic. Once resettled, they resisted controls over their movements and attempts to make them work, and made clear their claim to ownership of the land and its resources. They considered themselves a free people with political rights and grievances.

Opinion among the colonisers was divided. Some colonists protested against the brutal and immoral treatment of the Indigenous people, although Reynolds argues that Robinson’s “friendly mission” salved many a colonist’s conscience. (Travelling through the island with Trugernanner and several of her compatriots, Robinson attempted to make contact with Indigenous people and convince them to relocate to Flinders Island.) With disease and distress taking its awful toll on the population at Wybalenna – in contrast to the good health of the convicts held there, as Reynolds observes – the settlement was closed in 1847 and the remaining group moved to Oyster Cove in the southeast. Trugernanner, the last surviving member of the Wybalenna community, died in Hobart in 1876. Her funeral was attended by the Tasmanian premier, several cabinet ministers, and religious and civic leaders.

Evolutionary theory invested this event with special significance. Darwin himself had commented on the vulnerability of the Indigenous people on his visit to Hobart in 1836. Trugernanner’s death seemed for many to close a sad, if inevitable, chapter in Tasmania’s history – a view that was reinforced by the public display of her skeleton in the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery until 1951. How surprised the mourners would have been, Reynolds suggests, if they had witnessed the political re-emergence of Tasmania’s Indigenous community a century or so later, particularly around land rights and the politics of cultural heritage. For Reynolds, this is one of the striking features of Tasmania’s recent history.

Tensions between convicts and free settlers were also significant and enduring. The desire of the colony’s governors, particularly the autocratic George Arthur (1824–36), to cultivate a colonial gentry was supported by huge grants of prime pastoral land. Tasmania’s social structure and patterns of wealth were established early, with pastoral settlement initially extending from Launceston and Hobart into the fertile grasslands of the midlands. Rising wool prices for much of the nineteenth century ensured generations of prosperity for the select group, as they did in many parts of the mainland. In 1875, ninety-two of the largest hundred rural estates had been acquired before 1832, their interests well served by the disproportionate number of pastoralists sitting in the Tasmanian parliament.

At the other end of the social scale, the convict system had left a significant institutional and welfare burden on the state. With its small population and isolation, argues Reynolds, it was more difficult to conceal or rise above a convict past in Tasmania than elsewhere in Australia. The large number of state and charitable institutions established in the late nineteenth century housed a far larger proportion of state dependents than in any other Australian colony.

The feeling of vulnerability among socially privileged Tasmanians led to passage of the repressive Masters and Servants Act in the last days before self-government in 1856. An employee accused of breaking a contract by failing to work diligently could be arrested by any member of the master’s family and jailed without charge for up to a week. Drunkenness or obscene language could be punished by imprisonment for three months. A correspondent to the Southern Star newspaper claimed to have heard the act denounced by Tasmanians in outback South Australia, “men who did not know what freedom was until they reached Australia’s shores.”

The economic decline continued until the discovery of mineral deposits in Tasmania’s north and west in the late nineteenth century. By the end of the century, the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, formed to exploit the copper deposits at Queenstown on Tasmania’s rugged west coast, had an annual turnover rivalling the entire Tasmanian state budget. But Tasmania’s long-term economic performance, slow population growth and reliance on shipping concerned legislators.

CHANGE was on its way, however. Desperate for zinc for munitions production, the federal government helped establish a plant on the banks of Hobart’s Derwent River powered by the new hydro-electricity generators located in Tasmania’s central highlands. The era of hydro-industrialisation had begun.

The formidable Hydro-Electric Commission is popularly associated with “Electric” Eric Reece, Labor premier for most of the years between 1958 and 1975. Reece began his working life in the west coast mines, rising through Labor’s industrial and political wings. He was unemployed for several years during the Great Depression, and for much of his long and powerful premiership he lived in a weatherboard cottage in the Housing Commission suburb of Goodwood, on Hobart’s northern fringe.

Labor’s association with hydro development dates back much further, however, as Reynolds reminds us. Albert Ogilvie, Labor premier during the later depression years of 1934–39, deserves greater recognition for setting Tasmania on its uncompromising development path, principally through a brilliant tactical ploy in the 1934 election. Having received leaked plans for a new power station on the upper reaches of the Derwent River, Ogilvie built his campaign on the project and won government. Between them, Ogilvie, his successor Robert Cosgrove, and Reece, all firm supporters of hydro development, held the premiership for almost four decades.

Ogilvie’s political tactics were backed by a commitment to stimulatory public investment, a view that ran contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy of balanced budgets and financial austerity. When the Tarraleah power station opened in 1938, it doubled Tasmania’s electricity generating capacity. Paper production plants were opening in northwest and southern Tasmania, and soon came the decision to construct a power-hungry aluminium smelter at the mouth of the Tamar River, north of Launceston.

Some Tasmanians, bureaucrats as well as citizens, had reservations about the Hydro-Electric Commission’s dominance of the state’s political economy, from its drain on the state’s loan funds to the secrecy surrounding electricity supply to its major customers. As Reynolds points out, there was also considerable opposition in the 1930s to the plan to raise the level of Lake St Clair as part of dam works. This early environmentalism was fashioned from a romantic view of the landscape as sublime and undisturbed by humans. In the late 1960s, popular and political opposition to hydro-industrialisation – scarcely imaginable a decade earlier – began to spread, fuelled by a significant miscalculation by the commission and the government, the decision to flood Lake Pedder. It found political expression through the United Tasmania Group, which Reynolds and other writers identify as the world’s first green party.

Recent environmental debates, particularly the successful campaign to prevent the damming of the Gordon River, necessarily receive limited attention in this book. By choosing to end the narrative in 2004 – the date oddly nominated by the Tasmanian government as the bicentenary of European settlement (read the book for an explanation of the political gymnastics surrounding that episode) – Reynolds also misses covering much of the recent pulp mill debate. But his analysis of Tasmania’s political, economic and social development helps explain the alternative visions for Tasmania advanced during the pulp mill debate, as well as its brutal politics.

REYNOLDS’s conviction that writing Tasmanian history also involves writing about the history of the nation, and about the British empire, is exemplified in many ways in A History of Tasmania. Van Diemen’s Land was Australia’s second settlement, and Hobart its second-largest urban centre until the middle of the nineteenth century. The island was central to imperial strategy, both as a defence against the expansionism of other European nations and as the empire’s jail. Its wool clip fed British mills in the nineteenth century and its young men fought – and many died – under the British flag in the twentieth. Andrew Inglis Clark, Tasmania’s attorney-general for much of the decade 1887–97, made a significant contribution to Australian federalism and democracy as a drafter of the constitution and theorist of proportional representation. Debate over Tasmania’s economic position within the federation was an important factor in establishing the Commonwealth’s grants commission. More recently, Tasmania’s environmental politics has exerted a strong national influence.

Although one of Tasmania’s achievements is its record as an early and successful democracy, this was not seen as noteworthy in Tasmania’s 2004 bicentenary celebrations, particularly among elements of the environmental movement. But there is a fragility to Tasmanian democracy that matches – indeed, appears to go hand in hand with – concerns about its economic vulnerability. The Legislative Council acted for many years as a brake on the lower house by upholding what its members saw as “the fixed interests of the community.” And although, as Reynolds acknowledges, minority or slim majority government has been a norm under the state’s Hare-Clark electoral system, the major parties conspired in 1998 to reduce the Tasmanian parliament to the size it was in 1856 in order to minimise the Greens’ influence.

As Reynolds eloquently demonstrates, Tasmania has a unique and compelling story, but how is it told, and where? Concluding the book, he expresses his disappointment at the lack of history in the Tasmanian school curriculum. There is, he suggests, a striking contradiction between the palpable nature of Tasmanian history – evident in its built heritage and the imprint of agriculture and industry on the landscape, as well as in its social and political institutions – and its neglect as an object of study. Unfortunately, his observation of the Tasmanian scene is true of the teaching of history in other parts of Australia, in schools and in universities. This fine book shows how the past continues into the present, and why our knowledge of it is vital to understanding where we are now and charting our future. •

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AROUND a decade ago, ABC Radio National’s Arts Today ran a feature on Tasmania called “Essence of Place.” “Tassie,” said the promotional blurb, is “sometimes completely left off maps… But mainlanders neglect it at their peril because this is a land of stimulating contrasts and, like a canary in the coal mine, often acts as an indicator of things environmental, political and social.” Guests on the program included the late Tasmanian poet, humanities academic and Good News Week star Margaret Scott. A sparkling raconteuse, Scott recounted her “unique Jelly Bag Theory, which is that the national experience drips down in a concentrated form into Tasmania.”

Ten years on it’s a good time to have another look at what’s come out of Scott’s old-style jelly bag, not only to see where Tasmania is heading but also to check whether it offers fresh insights into the national condition.

First, to forests, the issue with which Tasmania is most often identified in the national imagination. The Tasmanian Forests Intergovernmental Agreement, championed by the state Labor government and its federal counterpart, recently hit what may prove to be insurmountable obstacles. At the end of March, Jonathan West, of the Hobart-based Australian Innovation Research Centre, released his summary of the findings of a five-month inquiry by the Independent Verification Group, or IVG, which he heads. The inquiry’s job was to verify the conservation values of 572,o00 hectares of native forests nominated under the agreement and assess their compatibility with the forestry industry’s sustainable wood supply requirements. West’s fellow IVG members were natural resource management and forestry industry expert Robert Smith, natural resource social scientist Michael Lockwood, Brendan Mackey of ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society, ecologist and risk analyst Mark Burgman, and geologist Ross Large.

In a nutshell (and it’s a hefty nut: the report proper ran to an encyclopaedic 2500 pages), the IVG outlined a nine-point plan for compromise between the entrenched positions of environmentalists and foresty industry representatives, including maximising the potential for private investment in the sector. The group found that Forestry Tasmania has been harvesting native forests at double the sustainable yield; that existing contracts need to be reduced through negotiations to restore sustainability to the native forest industry; and that environmentalists must accept some logging in the forest areas they want protected.

To those on the fringes of the forestry debate — in Tasmania it’s almost impossible to be a complete “outsider” on this question — it looked like a reasonable, workable compromise to end a fight that’s divided Tasmanians for decades. No one has presented a detailed, considered and fully costed alternative to the IVG framework, setting out an economically plausible future for the industry. But rusted-on combatants on both sides of the forest dispute — timber industries on one side, environmental groups on the other — thought otherwise, and West became the high-profile target of a round of personal attacks seeking to undermine the IVG’s findings.

West was accused of bias against forestry because many years ago he was a director of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society for a short period. Never mind his many subsequent years at Harvard Business School and beyond, and never mind that the current negotiations are not, in fact, focused on wilderness as it used to be understood. West was also alleged to be biased against Tasmania’s natural environment because he “supports a pulp mill and mining in high conservation forests, because he is also on the board of a major supplier to the mining industry,” and, according to the Tasmanian Times North blog, “could also be trying to shut-down the Tamar Valley olive industry to assist his massive Murray Valley olive production company…”

Could someone standing in West’s shoes actually “win” in Tasmania’s forestry fights at the moment? The short answer is probably no. But that response may be too hasty. Soon after the release of West’s summary of the IVG findings and discussion of this topic on ABC1’s Q&A, I fielded a request to talk about forestry politics from two Tasmanian men with deep personal and professional investments in the outcome of the dispute. One was a timber industry investor, supplier and employer; the other, an office-holder in a prominent environmental group. Social acquaintances for over a decade in the small community we all share, they’d realised that they largely agreed on a shared strategy for transitioning Tasmania’s forestry practices into industry options that are more economically viable, environmentally sustainable and socially palatable.

Both men despaired of the current state of public debate on these questions. Together they asked me for practical help, pointing to the “peace polls” in Northern Ireland, conducted by Colin Irwin of the University of Liverpool and Queen’s University Belfast in collaboration with the political parties elected to take part in the Stormont talks. An iterative series of public opinion surveys, the “peace polls” improved transparency, inclusiveness and public confidence in the prospect of ending the Northern Ireland conflict, shifting language and moving minds. It’s time, my clearly distressed but determined visitors claimed, for something along these lines in Tasmania.

Their call is timely, given the pitch and prejudices of our political culture, in Tasmania and nationally. There’s a worrying common thread running through the criticism of Jonathan West’s CV and the hyperscrutiny of Julia Gillard’s wardrobe by everyone from Germaine Greer to Tony Abbott. Many of us might not fancy the contents of either, but it’s a distraction from the urgent issues.

To her credit, Jane Calvert of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union called for the personal attacks on West to stop. “It does no good to tear strips off people because you don’t agree with what they say,” she is reported to have said. “Play the ball not the man.” It’s a shame that Calvert’s message didn’t fully register with fellow trade unionist Paul Howes, Labor Party powerbroker and secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union. On a recent fly-in-fly-out visit to Hobart, Howes called for Tasmania to stand up to the environmental movement for the sake of the state’s future, warning that its opposition to the proposed Gunns pulp mill in the Tamar Valley is bound to translate into threats to the aquaculture industry as well. Howes told Tasmanians to “muscle up” and give “the middle finger” to mainlanders meddling on the pulp mill and other issues, especially those from the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

On one reading that’s a cheapish dog whistle designed to criticise high-profile players in this debate — people like Sydney-based businessman Geoffrey Cousins, an outspoken opponent of the pulp mill. It’s also startlingly reminiscent of the message delivered by John Howard to 2000 forestry workers in Launceston on the eve of the 2004 federal election. And it overlooks the fairly glaring fact that Howes lives in… well, Sydney, actually.

A while back, Sydney was also the home of Peter Whish-Wilson, the newly anointed replacement in the Senate for retiring Greens leader Bob Brown. Unlike Jonathan West, Whish-Wilson does have a tangible bias in the field of Tasmania’s contemporary forestry conflict. A Tasmanian resident since 2004 and currently an owner of Three Wishes Vineyard on the banks of the Tamar Valley, he has actively campaigned against the proposed pulp mill and ran on exactly that platform for the Greens in elections for Tasmania’s upper house in 2009 and for the Senate in 2010.

Once he was fingered as a likely successor to Brown, though, mainstream commentators, mainlanders mainly, began working hard to drive a wedge between the two senators by painting Whish-Wilson into a “light green” corner, presumably a place with less appeal for the Greens’ more traditional, activist-oriented supporter base. Given the catchcry that the Greens are anti–big-end-of-towners, it was surprising that analysts made nothing very substantial of Whish-Wilson’s professional experience working in equity capital for Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank in places like New York, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Sydney. They also largely left unexamined the curriculum content he’s delivering in the School of Economics and Finance at the University of Tasmania, including what’s said to be the world’s first environmental finance course. A better tagline to attach to Whish-Wilson might have been “bright green.”

If choosing someone like Whish-Wilson is indeed part of rebranding the Greens as a party, it seems unlikely to alienate rusted-on Greens voters in significant numbers. It could even pull across more of the disaffected from both the Labor and Liberal camps, whose leaderships have noticeably lost connection with chunks of their own heartland constituencies. Parties with dramatically declining and ageing memberships, and a growing cadre of parliamentary advisers and aspirants with few visible beliefs, are unlikely to attract and hold latent Greens voters.

LIKE Brown, and like those men who came to my office (and unlike Howes, in this case), Whish-Wilson has a big personal stake in the issues he’s prosecuted politically. In the 1980s, Brown gained public purchase by being arrested, assaulted and shot at in now-iconic protest actions against flooding the Franklin and logging Farmhouse Creek. Twenty years younger than Brown, Whish-Wilson has relocated a sizeable chunk of his financial capital, his family and his career onto Tasmanian land — no small investment. He’s surfing a New Tasmanian wave that today features even fresher arrivals and returnees, lured by the notion that Tasmania is an optimal testbed for a niche range of clever cultural and economic initiatives. Which brings us to the broader, and changing, state of Tasmania’s economic and social makeup.

At its best, the small scale of Tasmanian society means it’s relatively easy here to connect across all kind of divides that keep mainlanders more huddled in educational, occupational and ethnic “ghettos.” Tasmania can function like a salon, lending itself unusually well to interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations across familiar and established divides. That quality has long nurtured rich clusters of creative types that Richard Florida (best known for his book The Rise of the Creative Class) would die for, and was recently picked up in the trend-spotting international magazine Monocle.

Among these newer entrepreneurial thinkers are social researcher and author Ross Honeywill, now living in Hobart, who for some time has mapped a trend driven by “the four million Australians and fifty-nine million Americans” who, he estimates, “value experiences that directly touch the human mind and feed the human spirit... who spend more, earn more, read more, know more, and are better educated.” Another relatively recent arrival is Sydney restaurant critic Matthew “Gourmet Farmer” Evans, who farms a small landholding in the Huon Valley, further south. Back in town, Sri Lankan–born New Yorker Varuni Kulasekera has opened a remarkable tea emporium near the headquarters of Arts Tasmania, and the glowingly gonged Garagistes wine-bar-and-diner team of Luke Burgess, Katrina Birchmeier and Kirk Richardson serve fare of distinctively Tasmanian provenance on the site of an old inner-city garage.

They’ve joined longer-embedded Tasmanians like former antiques trader Penny Clive, whose art foundation Detached, housed in a heritage church in Hobart, is complemented by an impressive high-end dining venture she runs with her funds manager husband Bruce Neill at Peppermint Bay on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. More blockbusting are the efforts of gambler David Walsh, who’s invested around $180 million to build and service the increasingly internationally famous Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart’s northern suburbs. There’s also a companion music festival called MONA FOMA (curated by ex–Violent Femmes bass player Brian Ritchie, who originally hails from Wisconsin), which recently included a commissioned work called The Barbarians, an immersive opera by Hobart composer Constantine Koukias with an award-winning set designed by local multidisciplinary design practice Liminal Studio. This summer also saw the arrival of a seasonal, sustainability-focused community market called MoMa on the museum’s roof, featuring Tasmanian craft, design, produce, food, wine and music, all housed in a Minnie Mouse snake monster tent by New York Artist Daphane Park (the brainchild of David Walsh’s partner Kirsha Kaechele, an art curator born in California and raised in Guam).

Increasingly, the MONA juggernaut is credited locally as one of the best human-made things Tasmania has going for it right now — partly because it attracts tourist dollars to the state’s sagging economy, partly because it’s already inspiring a range of smaller-scale spin-off ventures, and partly because it’s no drain on the public purse at a time of severe budget constraints.

That last point is increasingly pertinent. The scope of MONA’s potential ongoing activities hinges quite dramatically on the size of the back-tax bill the Australian Taxation Office may or may not deliver to the reclusive Zeljko Ranogajec, another Tasmanian gambler who’s generously backed Walsh’s bankrolling of MONA. If the ATO claws back, say, tens of millions of dollars or more, where might that leave MONA and the evident public good it delivers to Tasmania? Would or could the state government pick up a shortfall at a time when it’s struggling to maintain baseline funding for schools, hospitals and policing — and when the Liberal opposition has hammered it on all those bread-and-butter fronts, throwing in promises to axe the office of the State Architect and halve public funding to Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island arts festival? And would any federal government come to the party at a time of increasing strain across the Commonwealth about the fairness of current GST distribution, persistent complaints by mining-rich states like Western Australia that it unfairly props up its “mendicant” southern cousin, and signs from opposition leader Tony Abbott that in government he’d at least contemplate cutting up to $700 per annum in GST revenue from the state?

Right now, Tasmania does need a real circuit-breaker, if not a game-changer. If we can’t yet strike a better deal on forests, giving MONA a fair break would be a sensible start. •

Natasha Cica is Director of the Inglis Clark Centre for Civil Society at the University of Tasmania and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow. Her latest book is Pedder Dreaming: Olegas Truchanas and a Lost Tasmanian Wilderness.

The post Looking for an island circuit-breaker appeared first on Inside Story.

IN Aleksei Popogrebsky’s film How I Ended This Summer, screening at Hobart’s State Cinema at the moment, the lone inhabitants of a remote Russian Arctic island – Sergei and Pavel – fall out. The problem starts smallish, with a fixable and forgivable failing of moral courage on Pavel’s part. Neither man fixes or forgives, however, and they become locked in mortal combat, driven by fear and suspicion to a kind of codependent madness. The ending – involving contaminated trout, and a final Slavic embrace – is bittersweet.

It’s a timely tale for Tasmania. As our own summer ends on our own remote island, are we poised to pick new fights or revive old feuds for the long, dark nights ahead?

There’s certainly cause for testiness. In recent years, Tasmania’s persistent socioeconomic cankers – its high rate of welfare dependence and poor educational retention rates – have been camouflaged by an unprecedented real estate boom, strategic pork-barrelling and the federal economic stimulus package. That feel-good factor flowed through much of David Bartlett’s premiership, which ran from May 2008 to January 2011. Bartlett issued a stream of announcements linked to the innovation strategy he’d commissioned from the University of Tasmania’s Australian Innovation Research Centre, most famously a food-bowl vision that’s back in the news now that the federal government has approved a massive irrigation scheme for the Midlands. More recently, the opening of gambler-philanthropist David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art has been a boon for boosterism – in just ten weeks, it’s attracted an estimated 130,000 visitors, promising new opportunities for Tasmania’s tourism industry.

But Tasmanians today are also staring down the multiple barrels of some very harsh realities. Utility bills are skyrocketing – and, with the recent privatisation of water and sewerage services, there are more of them. West Australian premier Colin Barnett’s recent jibe that Tasmania is a mendicant, anti-development state that’s become “Australia’s national park” – marginally more refined than his federal colleague Don Randall’s description of Tasmania as a “leech on the teat” of the national economy – has raised doubts about the security of Tasmania’s slice of the national GST pie. Fremantle could poach Tasmania’s Antarctic industry because of Hobart’s ageing port facilities, and the world-class Menzies Research Institute might lose staff and money in foreshadowed federal budget tightening. Tasmania’s Treasury is rumoured to be polishing very long knives for its own bone-deep cuts in the state’s June budget – over half of which is spent on public servants’ wages – and the early retirement incentive package just announced by the new premier, Lara Giddings, could be the thin end of a deep wedge. Speaking of wedges, a key challenge for Giddings is holding discipline in her own ranks – not so much within Labor’s dwindled parliamentary presence, but in her wider fowl-fish Labor–Green power-sharing government, which has been straining at a number of points, but has not yet fractured.

Last week’s news included the arrest of protesters at the site of the Brighton bypass, just north of Hobart. This federally funded project upgrades the Midlands Highway and involves construction of a dual-carriageway flyover at the Jordan River levee, a site named Kutalanya by Tasmanian Aboriginal groups. They oppose the project on the basis that sediment at the site contains up to three million artefacts dating back 42,000 years, making it the oldest known site of human habitation in the southern hemisphere. Both the precise heritage value of Kutalanya and the exact impact of the flyover are contested, and an alternative bridge location has been rejected as too costly by the state and federal governments. Commentator Sue Neales highlighted the irony of the premier and her heritage minister, Brian Wightman, celebrating the preservation of Tasmania’s convict heritage at the Cascades Female Factory on the same day police were dragging young Aboriginal leaders into paddy wagons at Kutalanya. In a related irony, Greens leader and Aboriginal affairs minister Nick McKim called for a halt to the project, evoking the “long-running shame” of the dispossession of the island’s Aboriginal peoples, while continuing to serve as a minister in the government that’s rolling it out.

That didn’t look good, and neither did the spectacle of Giddings being cornered into a public apology, in early April, alongside her children’s minister, Lin Thorp. The minister had imprudently revealed confidential information about the rankings in the selection process that had elected not to reappoint Paul Mason as Children’s Commissioner. Mason is now running as an independent against Thorp in the upcoming May poll for her upper house seat. Liberal opposition leader Will Hodgman unsuccessfully moved a no-confidence motion against Thorp for her “appalling, unethical and horrendous conduct.” Greens support for the motion would have brought down the government. After hours of backroom negotiations, against the backdrop of vocal Greens criticism of Thorp’s indiscretion, that support was not forthcoming.

The decision not to reappoint Mason was announced late last year, soon after he released a report criticising the behaviour of Thorp’s department in the case of a twelve-year-old Hobart girl who was sold for sex while she was a ward of the state. Of the approximately 120 men who were allegedly her paying clients, the criminal prosecution of just one is proceeding. That’s former Glenorchy mayor and state parliamentarian Terry Martin. Back when Paul Lennon was Tasmania’s premier, Martin was expelled from the parliamentary Labor Party in 2007 after crossing the floor to vote against legislation fast-tracking Gunns Ltd’s proposed pulp mill in the Tamar Valley. He has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges.

Today Martin is muted in the public arena, and a book he was said to be writing about his experience of the pulp mill process is now unlikely to see the light of day. Speaking in late 2007, though, he was candid on that topic. The reaction to his crossing the floor on the pulp mill approval process, he said, “was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and I’m not a novice. I was blown away by the response around Salamanca; it was basically hero worship.” At the same time, he was worried about the reaction in his electorate, whose heartland is the traditionally blue-collar, Labor suburb of Glenorchy. “I made the mistake of thinking Glenorchy people would probably be pro–pulp mill and buy the simplistic argument that it’s all about jobs,” Martin said, “So I came out here and purposely went for a walk round the CBD, Northgate, the bus station – the response was again extraordinary. In all these places there were people coming up to me… saying there’s something shonky, and we so admire you for standing up for your principles.”

Shonky days are here again, according to many rusted-on opponents of the pulp mill. Just when nearly everyone thought it was finally dead because of a lack of financing, the project has secured newly visible support from the Tasmanian government, now of course led by Giddings and her deputy, the “old Labor” pro-forestry stalwart Bryan Green. In March this year the pulp mill – wholly improved, insist its rusted-on supporters – emerged as the dealmaker or -breaker in the high-profile process of implementing the Tasmanian forestry statement of principles, signed by a range of environmentalists, industry groups and unions in October last year. Facilitated by former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, the de facto bottom line in those negotiations became this – the price of an effective end to logging in Tasmania’s old-growth forests is supporting a plantation-fed pulp mill in the Tamar Valley.

THAT’s still like Sophie’s Choice for many Tasmanians. But which Tasmanians, and why do they feel that way?

The Kelty process has been criticised for its perceived lack of transparency, especially since green activist groups Still Wild Still Threatened and the Huon Valley Environment Centre walked away from negotiations at the start of April. Delivering his interim report at that juncture, Kelty acknowledged ongoing “cynicism and bitterness” in relation to the pulp mill approval process, called for an independent review of that process, and recommended compensation for Tamar Valley residents seriously affected by the mill. Since then, a coalition of influential pro-mill advocates has nailed its colours to the mast, coughing up $20,000 recently for a newspaper spread urging “the Tasmanian community and our leaders” to consider the pulp mill as “a necessary cornerstone investment which will underpin our state’s future prosperity.” Some 125 Tasmanian industry leaders (seven of whom were women) were named signatories, including senior executives of government business enterprises Forestry Tasmania, TasPorts and TasRail. All the webpages listed in the ad were government and Gunns Ltd websites. To many, that smartly wrapped package looked like a fish and smelled similar – but is that truly the case? Can Tasmanians trust that this product’s safe for consumption?

Given his fondness for vivid metaphor, you’d expect writer Richard Flanagan to have something to say about that. He’s long been one of the most outspoken opponents of the pulp mill. In early March, Flanagan stepped back into the fray, challenging the assurances of new Gunns Ltd managing director, Greg L’Estrange, who presents persuasively as the kinder, gentler face of the revived pulp mill. Reasserting his non-negotiable opposition to the project and his commitment to civil disobedience, Flanagan took another swipe at the “chainsaw Camorra” that allegedly runs Tasmania. “To agree to this mill is to say to everyone in Tasmania – every politician, every businessman, every citizen – that in the end might is right,” he wrote in the Mercury. “That the only law is the dollar, and that the corruption of our public life is not only acceptable but the only way to get anything done in Tasmania.” L’Estrange responded on the same pages: “I want to engage in a proper discussion and I fully understand that putting old enemies aside is very difficult. We can’t let that stand in the way. Holding on to these feuds is a luxury I can’t afford, nor can the rest of the Tasmanian community.”

As March wore on, their arm wrestle shifted to the ABC’s opinion website, the Drum. There, Flanagan attacked Kelty, saying he’d been duped by Gunns and dudded by the Tasmanian government. L’Estrange responded: “The challenge I send out to the likes of Richard Flanagan is: be objective not emotive and understand that yours is not the only point of view. They all matter, and we have a responsibility to find a way to meet many people’s needs, not just one. It is the mark of a civilised society.”

Surely that’s a key development challenge facing Tasmania today – how to build a society that’s more civilised and indeed civil. But can Tasmanians reach consensus on the best way to do that? Psychologist and parenting author Steve Biddulph – another strong opponent of the pulp mill – has called for restoration of due process at the point where it was broken, namely, in the fast-tracked legislative approval of the project in the Lennon era, Terry Martin’s political crucible. “While government remains too weak, or as some are arguing, too intellectually challenged to understand the need for strong laws, we will be vulnerable to third rate companies seeing Tasmania as easy pickings,” Biddulph wrote at the end of March. “Gunns may well disappear, but the problem will not be solved. Until we act like a first world jurisdiction, competent and businesslike investors will stay well clear.”

Since the last missive from L’Estrange, Flanagan has also made the case for civility. The occasion was the presentation of the 2011 Tasmania Book Prize for his novel Wanting (Random House, 2008) at a gala event in Hobart’s Town Hall on 3 April. The award was conferred by Giddings. Given that Flanagan was a key proponent of the international boycott of an earlier incarnation of this prize – because Forestry Tasmania sponsored part of the Ten Days on the Island festival in 2003 – she presumably approached the event with some trepidation. On the day, after Giddings gave her speech and handed over $25,000, Flanagan simply kissed her on the cheek and delivered a gracious speech in return. He did employ metaphor, and it was industrial: “Civility, so long absent in public life here, is not just a virtue, but a necessary practice if we are to grow together. Differences are the fuel of human change, civility the necessary oil that allows the motor to run.” Then Giddings and Flanagan hugged, and kissed again.

Dispensing much larger cheques the same week at the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards, this time in a spectacular space at the Museum of Old and New Art, the Sidney Myer Fund chairman Carrillo Gantner put the case against the pulp mill succinctly to invited dignitaries, parliamentarians and business people: “Art is more attractive than chlorine.” In that audience was social researcher Ross Honeywill, CEO of the Social Intelligence Lab and author of the bestselling book, NEO Power. Honeywill believes that Tasmania’s traditional economy should no longer frame debates about its future options. “We need a new, or neo, economy to future-proof jobs and investment in this state. And it will be delivered by cultural capital – creative, artistic, educational, intellectual, entrepreneurial, innovative, environmental assets,” reckons Honeywill, when I ask him about the pulp mill. Typically, he thinks, when politicians talk about economic development, they use Tasmania’s legacy industries as a reference point. “Discussion revolves around factory closures, forestry and pulp mills. But with manufacturing challenged and the timber industry in decline, the question must be asked… is the traditional economy enough in twenty-first-century Tasmania?”

“The economic power generated by cultural capital is beyond and distinct from the traditional industrial model of economic activity. It values and delivers economic value from tertiary assets. Creativity, innovation, knowledge, education and social equity have long been considered worthy but worthless, economically marginal, but they are now the new economic levers rather than the secondary assets of the industrial era (manufacturing, mining, industrial production),” expands Honeywill, getting to the guts of his “new economic order” theory. This is more than fanciful argument – he’s put his money where his mouth is, relocating with his artist wife Greer to Hobart last year. The opportunity for Tasmania today, reckons Honeywill, “is not in buttressing an industrial age legacy, but in creating a business culture of entrepreneurship and innovation – a neo-economy and the traditional economy coexisting peacefully. One is not better than the other – they’re just different.”

Just five to ten years ago in Tasmania, as many locals would attest from rough experience, you’d have paid a toxic price – professionally and personally – for saying much of that publicly. Which must amount to progress. •

The post Island on edge appeared first on Inside Story.

TASMANIA has long been stereotyped as the land that time forgot. Provincial and punitive (cue: criminalising gays, bashing greenies, the prose of Richard Flanagan) and poor to boot (cue: psychological and practical dependence on the twinned purses of Centrelink and Canberra). Naturally and often sublimely beautiful, of course – all that stunning World Heritage wilderness, all those photogenic mountains and forests and lakes – and lately delivering a picnic basketful of brie, bubbles and blueberries to visiting gourmands. But ultimately still culturally backward (cue: sound of banjos twanging, champion axes swinging, with blokey white-singlet costume). That prejudice has long tentacles – on a recent working visit to Paris, I was smirkingly introduced as “a Tasmanian intellectual.” I laughed. So did everyone else.

Did the carapace of that caricature start cracking last weekend?

It started with a bang on Friday night – or four o’clock in the afternoon, to be exact – with the invitation-only party to open the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, followed by a weekend of musical playtime welcoming the wider public. Designed by Melbourne architect Nonda Katsalidis, MONA perches on the bank of the Derwent River in Hobart’s traditionally unfashionable and down-at-heel northern suburbs, near the original home of its (lately) mega-wealthy owner and bankroller, Tasmanian gambler David Walsh.

Everyone arrived unfashionably on time. Most zoomed in on a fast ferry from Hobart’s waterfront, taking in the passing views of a zinc works, a catamaran factory and random McMansions on the banks of the river’s opposite shore. There were 1500 VIP party people in total. The guest list was strongly Tasmanian, complemented by a heavy-hitting offshore arts industry and media contingent, plus an eclectic selection of old and new “friends of David.” Despite hysterical build-up rumours, these did not visibly include David Bowie or Mick Jagger, which was somehow reassuring. Walsh himself reputedly made a mid-party announcement over MONA’s public address system. No one heard it over the hubbub. Once we reached MONA’s dark and cavernous interior, the sensation was overwhelming. But first we passed a small mountain of Bruny Island oysters on ice, heaped on a tennis court plonked on a rooftop evoking Melbourne’s Federation Square (except with real water views), then entered a mirrored portal and sank three storeys via a tubular glass lift with wraparound staircase.

Party central was a vast space running off the Void bar, which welcomes descending visitors with Walsh’s Moorilla wine, Moo Brew boutique beer and rosemary and elderflower martinis. The bar is flanked by the spectacular raw sandstone wall of the original cutting, which I saw one talented twenty-something pianist licking at around five o’clock. Guests jostled near tables heaving with food; behind was a cinerarium by New Zealand artist Julia De Ville showcasing Walsh’s late father’s ashes in something resembling a noir Fabergé Easter egg. Chunks of gamey terrine, displayed with a still life of freshly killed, unskun rabbit and deer (Walsh is a dedicated vegetarian); bamboo boatloads of sushi from Masaaki of Geeveston (that’s forestry industry heartland); piles of the greenest salad I’ve ever tasted – an impossible medley of broad beans, zucchini flowers, lime, apple tarragon, basil oil and pistachio macaroon; real caviar accompanying great vodka, served with a flourish rarely seen outside Moscow; a ziggurat of perfect Tasmanian stone fruit; and another, sweeter pile of what looked like dismembered wedding croquenbush. All this led inexorably to another bar, framed by the seductive, watery swish of Julius Popp’s Bit.Fall. Wow, it googled in my face in dripping diamonds, then wild, then wtf?!… or was I hallucinating?

Probably not, as the Void hadn’t yet sprung into full gleaming green absinthe action. Yet possibly so, because I’d just taken my first full gulp of the just-hung offerings in MONANISMS, the opening exhibition comprising some 460 of Walsh’s favourite works from his larger collection.

MONA’s worth double the airfare, from anywhere, just to see Sidney Nolan’s massive Australian modernist masterwork Snake unleashed as intended, even if your taste doesn’t extend to Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s stinking Cloaca Professional, specially commissioned for MONA. A collapsed Catholic, Walsh prides himself on his iconoclasm. “David hopes to shock and offend,” pronounces a fact sheet, and confronting reactions to sex and death are a famous focus for this maverick collector. Ponder the opening definition of MONANISMS: monanism [moh-nuh-niz-uhm] – noun. obsessive activity characterised by an inability to discriminate between normative public behaviour and displays of immorality and alternating self-loathing and egoism. a behavioural disorder which, when observed by a representative member of a population (esp. Australian) elicits the epithet “wanker.” Origin: 2010; by prothesis from onanism. There are no wall labels, no “artwank” (MONA’s term, again) experts telling you what to think about any of it… but you can press O on a real iPod, featuring MONA’s smart-spinning “+ X” logo and pink/black branding, for randomly generated infoblurbs, many written by Walsh, then email them to yourself – obsessively, and indiscriminately, if you wish; museum entry is free, including the toys. And the catalogue can be purchased online; $130 with postage. Its heavy, black-spun pages open with a gratifying crackle. After reading it you may wish to genuflect.

It’s probably anti-MONAtical to classify the talent, but the premiere exhibition features duly controversial Young British Artists like Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst and Jenny Saville, along with Europeans Charles Sandison, Toby Ziegler, Marina Abramovic, Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer and Wassily Kandinsky, North Americans including Jenny Holzer, Balint Zsako, Jennifer West, Gregory Green, Andres Serrano, Takeshi Murata and Gregory Barsamian. Australians Vernon Ah Kee, Howard Arkley, Polly Borland, Fiona Hall, Brett Whiteley and Ah Xian make this first cut too. So do a handful of interesting contemporary Tasmanian works – you can sit on Hobart designer Pippa Dickson’s aluminium bench (A Fleeting) Encounter, for example, while you watch Cloaca Professional churn and disgorge fresh excrement. As notable are the imaginative presentations of Walsh’s extremely old artworks – ancient coins, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, African and some pre-Columbian artefacts and curiosities – pinned like insects, dreamily drowned, spookily suspended. These works formed the core of the collection in Walsh’s earlier onsite Moorilla Museum of Antiquities, established in 1999. “David jokingly says nobody came,” says another MONA fact sheet, “so he decided to expand.” Which might be the understatement of Tasmania’s twenty-first century, I realised, as I emerged from underground at eight o’clock to a hazy view of Mount Wellington in the distance, then a more-pumped-than-espresso pyrotechnics display by France’s Group F.

“Nothing succeeds like excess,” quipped Oscar Wilde. “Let them eat cake,” Marie Antoinette almost certainly did not. Does that approach sum up MONA? “I happened to make some money,” Walsh recently told the ABC’s Arts Online. “I felt some guilt, some desire to do something with it,” he continued, “You know, get myself off my bum.” And he truly has. MONA is as wild as a rainforest, elegant and gratifyingly unboxable. It’s a brand spanking new potential pillar of civil society. It’s the agora Tasmania needed to have. But is that enough to take us to a tipping point, where the freer-wheeling, open-thinking style that MONA represents isn’t just a hideaway from more dour realities – the equivalent of slinking into a porn store or a nightclub called Luvvieland? How typical was the reaction of Renate from nearby Rosetta, who told the Mercury newspaper she found MONA “moving and emotional – I cried. You have to check your attitude at the door, open your heart and your mind and you’ll be moved.” Outside MONA’s walls of wonderment, what are the real options for a still substantially undereducated and underemployed Tasmanian population, many hammered hard (existentially as much as economically) by a decline in legacy industries including forestry – still waiting for then-premier David Bartlett’s undeniably attractive food bowl and NBN visions to translate into pay cheques?

“Wow!!!” typed Tasmania’s personable then-deputy premier, treasurer and arts minister Lara Giddings into Facebook the morning after the opening – was she also channelling Bit.Fall? – “Mona is world class brilliance here in Hobart.” Like, like, like.

“Not all of the art works will be to everyone's taste, but then David Walsh would be disappointed if they were,” she continued. In hindsight this was a prudent qualification, given the overwhelming family-values flavour of Bartlett’s departure as premier just one day later, and subsequent attention on Giddings’s own unmarried, childless condition when she succeeded him. (For the record, that ground is surprisingly safe. Adults who look parental are warned about child-sensitive material on entry, and the five-year-old boy I accompanied to MONA later that weekend really loved Erwin Wurm’s shining red Fat Car, James Angus’s Truck Corridor and hitting the O).

“Thank you David for a great night,” Giddings went on. She meant Walsh, not Bartlett, although fair-minded Tasmanians would agree the two men have shared important future-seeking qualities, and the Bartletts certainly fronted and frocked up at the MONA party for their last big gig as Tasmania’s First Couple. Then Giddings signed off with this – “And more importantly for investing in Tasmania in this way.”

How that unusually high-stakes dice roll may pay off, and the role our new premier may play in the next chapter of Tasmania’s story, remains to be seen. •

The post Succeeding like excess appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s almost seventy years since an Australian federal government held power without a majority in the House of Representatives. But minority governments have been much more common in the states and territories, particularly over the past two decades. Since 1990, minority governments have held office for at least a short period in all six states and in both territories. Tasmania, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory are currently governed by parties that don’t have an absolute majority of MPs.

Over the past week in Inside Story we’ve published articles about three well-known minority governments – Victoria’s (1999–2002), South Australia’s (2002–06) and Tasmania’s (since March this year). Each of the three was – or, in Tasmania’s case, has so far been – more successful than expected, and in at least one case significant long-term parliamentary reform has resulted. Some other minority governments have been just as successful; a few have ended in failure and acrimony. Drawing heavily on two sources – Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin’s book, Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics, and Gareth Griffith’s report for the NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service, Minority Governments in Australia 1989–2009: Accords, Charters and Agreements – here’s an overview of those governments.

Tasmania: Uneasy alliances

This two-decade period opens and closes with minority governments in the same state, Tasmania – the first headed by Michael Field and the latest by David Bartlett.

For seven years from 1982 Robin Gray had headed a majority Liberal government that’s best remembered for its promise to dam the Franklin River. At the state election in May 1989, well after that battle was over, the Liberals lost their absolute majority and five Green Independents – among them Bob Brown, then a Tasmanian MP – took the balance of power. Not surprisingly, the Greens refused to support Gray, instead signing an accord with the Labor Party that gave opposition leader Michael Field the numbers he needed to govern. “When an attempt to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor – and save Gray’s government – was exposed, the political atmosphere became superheated,” write Costar and Curtin. “Gray lost a confidence motion on 29 June, resigned and was replaced by Michael Field.” They go on:

In hindsight, the accord contained the seeds of its own destruction by being too detailed and prescriptive. The Greens demanded too much and Labor was naive to believe it could deliver on those demands… Of the accord’s seventeen discrete clauses only one dealt exclusively with parliamentary reform. Ten clauses made very specific environmental demands. Section 9, for example, stated that “the state export woodchip quota will not exceed 2.8889 million tonnes per annum.” Other sections dealt with independents’ access to ministers and public servants which, while reasonable in themselves, were presented in an uncompromising tone. Some demands, such as the one that called for the “abolition of subsidised liquor to ministers,” were relatively trivial.

De facto independent leader Bob Brown was correct to state in the foreword to the accord that the Greens had gained “access to and influence on the whole range of government decisions” but, by being so concerned with detail, the document betrayed a lack of necessary trust between the parties.

The parliamentary reforms spelt out in the accord were less detailed than the other clauses but equally ambitious. Foreshadowing themes that run through many of the agreements struck by independents and small parties in similar circumstances, they included “a total review of parliamentary procedures and standing orders,” “the creation of new parliamentary committees including estimates committees,” a provision guaranteeing Green Independent members “pre-cabinet consultation on legislation” and another promising consultation on appointments to selection panels for heads of public service departments. Little of this program was locked in during the life of the accord.

The agreement’s successes included significant improvements in coastal management and marine parks, but the growing hostility between the independents and Labor limited the scope and longevity of reforms. According to the political scientist Steven Reynolds, the accord broke down “over issues of forestry management, bringing to a head clashes that began with education policy issues not long after the accord was signed. It was formally dissolved in September 1991 when the ALP increased export woodchip quotas in specific violation of the accord.” The Greens continued to support Field’s government over his opposition counterpart until the February 1992 election, which Labor lost.

Four years later, the Tasmanian parliament once again lacked a majority party. Liberal leader Ray Groom had promised during the campaign that he would only head a majority government, and Labor also refused to enter into an agreement with the Greens. Groom resigned and his deputy, Tony Rundle, took over and came to a workable arrangement with the Greens that allowed the Liberals to take power. Griffith writes:

This second period of minority government was not based on either an accord or even a “confidence and supply agreement.” Instead, it was founded on the twin rocks of the personality differences between the Labor and Greens leaders (Michael Field and Christine Milne), on one side, and on an “open door” policy adopted by Premier Rundle towards the Greens, on the other. This policy permitted the minor party to pursue its agenda on such issues as an apology for Indigenous Tasmanians and homosexual law reform.

In an attempt to gain a majority, Rundle announced a snap election in July 1998. The major parties had already combined forces to reduce the size of the Legislative Assembly from thirty-five to twenty-five members; this made it more difficult for minor parties by raising the required quota of votes under Tasmania’s voting system from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent. Rundle lost the election and was succeeded as premier by Labor’s Jim Bacon. “Despite achieving some policy outcomes favourable to the Greens,” write Costar and Curtin, “the Tasmanian accord came to be associated with political instability; its foundering provided a pretext for the major parties to entrench their dominance.”

Despite the reduced parliament, the Greens once again managed to capture the balance of power earlier this year. Although the Labor premier, David Bartlett, had ruled out minority government during the campaign, the post-election negotiations eventually led to a novel outcome: no formal agreement between Labor and the Greens as a party; two Green MPs to sit in the Labor cabinet; and the government reliant on the support of the Greens inside cabinet and at least one Green outside cabinet to pass its legislation. Kate Crowley discussed the agreement, and its success to date, last Monday in Inside Story.

New South Wales: The fabulous fiftieth

As the first Labor–Green accord in Tasmania was breaking down, Nick Greiner’s government in New South Wales suddenly found itself without a majority. After a crushing defeat for Labor in 1988, the Liberal–National Coalition had seemed assured of victory in May 1991. But the final result, Coalition forty-nine, Labor Party forty-six, and four independents, gave one of the independents – Tony Windsor, John Hatton, Clover Moore or Peter Macdonald – the power to extend Greiner’s period in office. Windsor declared his support for the government. But the situation quickly became more complicated when the Liberal Party lost a by-election and the government needed the support of at least two more MPs. Greiner began negotiating with the other three independents about the terms under which they might support his government, and the outcome was a memorandum of understanding, signed on 31 October 1991. According to Costar and Curtin:

Like Tasmania’s accord, the NSW agreement was a very detailed and specific document. But almost all of its nineteen pages sought to enhance accountability of the government to parliament and people; it was policy-prescriptive only in the legal and constitutional areas of freedom of information, the powers of the ombudsman and the auditor-general, defamation laws and whistleblower protection. Significantly the memo had nothing to say about regional and rural New South Wales, reflecting the fact that Moore and Macdonald held Sydney seats and Hatton, while he represented a regional constituency, had made his parliamentary reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner.

Among the reforms implemented under the agreement were a referendum on four-year parliamentary terms (which was held and passed), a referendum on independence of the judiciary (also passed) and the introduction of parliamentary estimates committees and whistleblower protection for public servants. Indeed, argues the political scientist Rodney Smith in his book Against the Machines: Minor Parties and Independents in New South Wales, “most of the reforms were achieved in some part, easily making the ‘fabulous fiftieth parliament’ the period in which independents played the greatest legislative role since 1910.”

In a speech in June 2003, independent MP Clover Moore acknowledged the reforms of parliamentary procedures during this period, but added, “Since the return of majority government following the 1995 election, some of the parliamentary reforms we achieved have been watered down or effectively set aside” – a point also made by NSW parliamentary researchers David Clune and Gareth Griffith in their book, Decision and Deliberation: The Parliament of NSW, 1856–2003.

Unlike the fate suffered by premiers Field and Rundle in Tasmania, it wasn’t a breakdown in the minority government’s relations with the non-party MPs that eventually brought down the government – or at least not directly. Costar and Curtin take up the story:

In October 1991 the former education minister, Terry Metherell, who had not been included in the new Greiner cabinet, resigned from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent. He later accepted an unadvertised position with the Environment Protection Authority, precipitating a by-election in his seat of Davidson that was won easily by the Liberal candidate. Greiner was accused of subverting normal public-service recruitment procedures to induce Metherell’s resignation and improve the government’s position in parliament. The independents insisted on referring the matter to ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and threatened to support a no-confidence motion if the premier did not stand aside. For its part, ICAC ruled Greiner’s behaviour to be “corrupt” (a finding that was later overturned by the NSW Supreme Court) and he was forced to resign; his successor, John Fahey, presided over a minority government supported by the independents until the Coalition narrowly lost the 1995 election.

The circumstances of the 1995 election revealed the level of hostility towards the independents in both major parties. Greiner (now out of parliament) wrote personally to all voters in the electorates of Manly, Bligh and South Coast urging them not to support the independents, describing the trio as the power “alcoholics” of NSW politics. “Dirty tricks” campaigns were alleged to have taken place in Bligh and Manly, and Clover Moore described the campaign as the “nastiest” she had experienced. With the election result in the balance (Labor eventually won by one seat), the major parties seriously considered contriving another election rather than dealing with the independents.

The amount of vitriol heaped on the independents by the major parties and sections of the media suggests that they might well have achieved their accountability objectives. Certainly the success of the referendums on four-year parliaments and judicial independence put at the 1995 election suggests this was the case. The referendums were part of the independents’ agenda and, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the major parties, they secured Yes votes of 66 per cent and 76 per cent respectively.

Queensland: Two very different independents

After thirty-three years in opposition, Labor returned to power in Queensland in 1989. Three years later, with the corruption of the Bjelke-Petersen years still fresh in people’s minds, Premier Wayne Goss and his colleagues won a second election. The expectation was that Labor would win for a third time at the July 1995 election. Partly as a result of its controversial plan to build a freeway through an environmentally sensitive corridor in Brisbane, though, Labor lost nine seats, giving it a majority of just one over the combined numbers of the Coalition and the newly elected independent, Liz Cunningham. Labor had won the seat of Mundingburra by just fourteen votes; after the inevitable challenge and several months in the Court of Disputed Returns, the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti won the seat at a by-election in February 1996.

“For the first time in the state’s history,” writes the political scientist John Wanna, “a single independent held the balance of power between two equally matched opponents. Parliament as an institution began to matter, for the first time in living memory.” That one member of parliament was Liz Cunningham, who – at a media conference convened under a large tree in Gladstone – declared her support for the Coalition and its leader, Rob Borbidge, on confidence motions and supply but reserved the right to vote on all other legislation as she saw fit. She sought no specific policy commitments from the Coalition but did receive additional staff.

Cunningham argued that her decision was justified for three reasons: it avoided another election; the Coalition had polled over 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote; and the agreement between herself and the government was “best for my local electorate and for the state as a whole…” As Costar and Curtin write, “Unlike the Tasmanian Greens, who had Labor over a barrel and knew it, Cunningham installed a Coalition government largely because she sympathised with its conservative social agenda and was prepared to hand it an executive blank cheque.”

Cunningham didn’t demand increased accountability and the Coalition didn’t offer it. In fact, write Costar and Curtin, “The Borbidge government proved controversial and cavalier in its notions of accountability. When the parliament passed a no-confidence vote in the attorney-general in August 1997, for example, the premier backed his colleague’s refusal to resign.” They go on:

Despite numerous gaffes and controversies the parliament ran full term, but the 1998 Queensland state election was to prove one of the most dramatic in modern Australian politics. In the best debut electoral performance by any new party since Labor began entering the colonial parliaments in the 1890s, the newly formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won eleven seats – five from the National Party and six from Labor. By winning six seats from the Liberals, the Labor Party, now led by Peter Beattie, emerged with 44 seats to the Coalition’s 42. Two independents were elected: Cunningham, again, and first-timer Peter Wellington, who won Nicklin from the Nationals and with whom Beattie began negotiations to form a minority government. These discussions culminated in a six-page letter of understanding from Beattie to Wellington dated 25 June 1998.

As Antony Green observed, “The only alternative would have been a ramshackle coalition of Liberal, National, One Nation and several independents. Wellington chose to back stability…” Reform of parliament, an ongoing budget surplus and detailed guidelines for ministerial travel and expenses were among the requests he made in return for his support. Beattie refused another proposal – the introduction of citizen-initiated referendums – but promised to hold community cabinet meetings outside Brisbane. Although he didn’t get everything he wanted, Wellington agreed to support Labor, and the new government stuck to its side of the bargain.

Wellington believes that minority government worked well. “[O]ne thing that happened was that every minister was on their toes, every shadow minister was on their toes, and every member of parliament was in parliament,” he told ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently. “There was a real sort of hands-on, ‘We have to really understand what we are doing.’ But I suppose I was sort of in a desperate situation because my electorate was very conservative, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, I think I’ve done the right thing, but let’s see what happens in the next election, I may not be here after then.’”

He was back after the next election (and is still in parliament) but in the meantime the circumstances had changed. Beattie gained a parliamentary majority of one seat after a by-election in November 1998 and Wellington no longer held the balance of power.

The Australian Capital Territory: Hare-Clark on a Robson rotation

Earlier in 1998 voters in the Australian Capital Territory had gone to the polls faced with a choice between the incumbent chief minister, Kate Carnell, and the Labor opposition leader, Wayne Berry. Minority government had been a fact of life in the territory since it had gained self-government; legislation put forward by a cabinet of four government MPs was negotiated case-by-case through the Assembly. But this election yielded an even more interesting situation.

The succession of minority governments partly reflects the territory’s relatively small population, but more important is its unusual electoral system – initially the modified d’Hondt system and, since 1995, the Hare-Clark proportional representation system, which also operates in Tasmania. Candidates’ names are “rotated” on the ballot paper (using the Robson rotation method, to avoid the influence of the donkey vote) and how-to-vote cards cannot be distributed within a hundred metres of polling booths. Combined, these features tend to dilute the influence of parties over the composition of the Assembly. As the political scientist David L. Hughes writes, “Voters are more likely to choose their own combinations of individual candidates, rather than follow a strict party line in allocating preferences. As a result, the public profile of a candidate is very important, independents have a greater chance of election, and there is much greater competition between candidates within a party.”

Both major parties emerged from the 1998 election with six seats, with the balance held by the ACT Greens (one), the Osborne Independent Group (two), and the Moore Independents (one). To break the deadlock, Carnell offered the sole Moore Independent, Michael Moore, the job of health, housing and community services minister in a Liberal government. Moore negotiated an “unprecedented” arrangement with Carnell, “binding him to the conventions of collective cabinet solidarity only in relation to his own portfolio areas and the annual budget bills,” write Costar and Curtin.

This experiment in government was partly prompted by the findings of the Review of the Governance of the ACT, released in the same month, which had recommended increasing the number of ministers from four to five and pondered the possibility of “a looser coalition arrangement that would enable some cross-benchers to serve as ministers.”

One of Moore’s priorities was drug law reform, and in late 1999 his legislation to establish supervised drug-injecting rooms was passed by the Assembly. Although Carnell resigned in October 2000, Moore remained health minister until he retired from parliament in 2002. “I have achieved more in the three and a half years that I spent as a minister than the years I spent on the cross benches…” he said in 2001. “I make no bones about it, it was a trade-off and in accepting a ministry I did lose some of my independence, but not all of it by any means.” The Liberals continued as a minority government until the 2004 election, when Labor surprised observers by taking power in its own right.

As Norman Abjorensen argued in Inside Story last November, “it was probably an anomaly that the sixth assembly elections in 2004 returned the first majority government to the territory in its twenty years of self-government, an outcome that the champions of Hare-Clark had argued was next to impossible. But an exceptionally popular chief minister, Jon Stanhope, and an especially inept Liberal opposition delivered just that.”

Abjorensen’s article was published to coincide with the first anniversary of the ACT’s return to minority government – a Labor government with Greens backing – at the 2008 election. Labor won seven of the seventeen seats at that election and, with the Liberals holding six seats, needed the support of the four Green members to pass its legislation. The result was an agreement that included the Greens member Shane Rattenbury’s becoming Assembly speaker, and a series of parliamentary and policy reforms. Abjorensen wrote:

Parliamentary reform has ranked high on the Greens’ agenda and forms the first part of its two-part agreement with Labor. A key plank is the adoption of the Latimer House Principles on probity and accountability, so named after a Commonwealth conference at Latimer House, London, in 2004. At the root of the principles is a commitment to ensuring that the executive is held fully and firmly accountable to parliament, and that decision-making is transparent and takes proper regard of civil society.

The Labor Party does not pretend the relationship is an easy one. “They are not a party like us; they are four individuals,” says a senior party figure. “They are really a series of interest groups. And their staff come from those groups, so we have to keep very close tabs on what is happening, because the ground shifts.” Another common complaint from Labor is that the Greens are “manipulated” by the Liberals into thinking that government is a monolith and that ministers have only to snap their fingers to get action. Meredith Hunter [the ACT Greens’ leader] denies this, arguing that the Greens’ long-term deep community roots ensure an appreciation of government decision-making and that the Greens are under no illusions as to the complexities of government.

The second part of the agreement focuses on policy and – under the headings of climate change and energy, transport, waste, water, planning, housing, small business, justice, education and health – progress against stated objectives is regularly discussed not just between leaders but among all four Greens and the ministers they shadow. The state of play is then reported on the Greens’ website.

Another nine months later the relationship still seems in good shape.

Victoria: Prelude to a landslide

“The Kennett government went to the polls in September 1999 in a seemingly invincible position,” write Costar and Curtin. “As in New South Wales in 1995, the election result was a cliffhanger. Strong swings to Labor in country Victoria and the election of a third independent, Craig Ingram, in Gippsland East produced a hung parliament, the Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one with the three independents holding the balance of power. The inconclusive result was complicated by the fact that the sitting member for Frankston East had died on polling day, triggering a supplementary election four weeks after the poll.”

The result, as Brian Costar and David Hayward described recently in Inside Story, was a minority Bracks Labor government with the support of the three independents. At the suggestion of a former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, one of the independents, Susan Davies, contacted Premier Peter Beattie and independent MP Peter Wellington in Queensland to obtain a copy of their 1998 agreement, on which the three then based their Independents’ Charter.

“This issue of the balance of power caused me some significant anxieties and significant grief,” said the third of the independents, Russell Savage, at a conference the following year. “Susan very quickly came up with an idea that was quite brilliant and that was to have a Charter and that would get the media off our backs… It is very easy to succumb to the obvious – well let’s get some significant development in our electorate… We believed that… was immoral because it was exactly how the Kennett-style government worked.” The independents had negotiated with both leaders, but found Kennett intransigent on key points.

Government accountability (including a restoration of the independence of the auditor-general), parliamentary reform and the rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the key elements of the agreement with Bracks. Costar and Hayward’s article recounts the three-year relationship between government and independents, and Labor’s growing popularity in the lead-up to the 2002 state election.

“The Frankston East result had revealed a change in electoral mood,” observes Antony Green, “and over the next eight months Labor won two extra-ordinary by-election victories, first winning the Burwood seat of former Premier Kennett, and later winning the rural Benalla seat previously held by Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Pat McNamara. The good news continued for Labor and at the 2002 election, Labor won its greatest ever victory in Victoria, for the first time winning a clear majority in the Legislative Council.”

Not surprisingly, the independents became less influential after 2002. “But they had managed to lock in a number of important parliamentary and electoral reforms, the most noteworthy being the changes to the Legislative Council, which have now become accepted policy,“ write Costar and Hayward. “Despite dire predictions, Victorian government and politics did not descend into instability or gridlock.” When he was asked to comment on that period on ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently, Steve Bracks said:

I rate that as one of the best periods of government that I had of the period right through the eight years, and the three terms. We had to be on our toes, there was a lot of accountability, but also we had to explain properly what legislation meant, and what it meant to the broader public. Not just simply driving through your agenda because it happened to be a matter on which you were elected on, but to keep explaining, keep consulting, keep working it through. I enjoyed the periods on each parliamentary session where I sat down with the three independents and worked through the legislative agenda, where we’re going, providing support and assistance in understanding better the legislation so they could make decisions. So, in some ways, it was a moderation on your own party and I found that quite useful.

One of the three independents, Craig Ingram, still sits in the Victorian parliament. He told the Age this week, “Most of the outstanding reforms of parliament came as the result of minority governments. We got a significant change of direction in spending towards the regions. The most positive thing about this federal election is that there will be much greater focus on regional Australia.” During that period passenger trains returned to the Bairnsdale line (which runs into Ingram’s electorate), water allocations to the Snowy River and the Gippsland Lakes were increased, and the government promised that the Mitchell River would not be dammed. But another of the independents, Russell Savage, was less fortunate. “He speaks bitterly about betrayal as Labor broke its promises to him,” reports the Age. “Passenger trains never came back to Mildura. Its hospital remained in private hands, and then Labor chose the Mallee for a toxic dump, sealing his defeat in 2006. He has some pithy advice for Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott. ‘Don’t trust anything they say – get them to put it in writing,’ he says. ‘Watch your back all the time – from both sides.’”

South Australia: Shifting alliances

Minorities were a feature of South Australian politics throughout this period. Between 1989 and 1993 Labor formed a minority government with two “Independent Labor” members, losing to the Liberals in 1993. Four years later, an election swing forced the Liberals to rely on the support of a National MP and two independents to retain government over the period 1997–2002.

It’s at this point that the situation became even more interesting. After the February 2002 state election the House of Assembly had twenty-three Labor members, twenty Liberals and four independents. Labor needed the support of just one of those independents to take office. “When parliament resumed on 5 March 2002 [Liberal leader Rob] Kerin nominated independent Rory McEwen as Speaker and opposition leader Mike Rann nominated independent Peter Lewis,” write Costar and Curtin. “Lewis won in a secret ballot twenty-five votes to twenty-two.” They go on:

Peter Lewis had been a Liberal member of parliament for over twenty years. Since the 1970s he had been a gadfly within his party, advocating parliamentary reform and various rural and irrigation policies. Eventually – on 5 July 2000 – he was expelled from the Liberal party room, and he resigned from the party in October. Lewis contested his seat of Hammond at the 2002 election under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition and defeated the Liberal candidate by 822 votes. Prior to the poll Lewis gave contradictory indications of which party he might support in a hung parliament…

Between polling day and the first meeting of the new parliament, Peter Lewis negotiated a Compact for Good Government with the Labor Party. The compact drew heavily on agreements in other states and included mechanisms to improve ministerial accountability, reform parliament and assist rural South Australia. What was different in Lewis’s compact was his insistence that the government “pass an Act of Parliament and make other such arrangements as deemed necessary by the Speaker [Lewis] to meet such costs and facilitating such processes as may be involved in any aspects of the work related to the establishment of a Constitutional Convention…” The Convention was held in August 2003 and made a number of recommendations to be considered by the state parliament.

But the most remarkable of Rann’s initiatives was to appoint another independent, Rory McEwen, as his trade minister. Like Michael Moore in the ACT, McEwen remained an independent and was free to criticise the government of which he was a member. Norman Abjorensen described the events surrounding McEwen’s appointment, and the appointment of another non-Labor MP to Rann’s ministry, in a recent article for Inside Story.

Western Australia: The coalition that wasn’t

In early August 2008 the Labor WA premier, Alan Carpenter, called an early election for 6 September 2008. Unexpectedly, the election resulted in a hung parliament – twenty-eight Labor MPs, twenty-four Liberals, four Nationals and three independents. Since he’d taken over the leadership of the National Party in 2005, leader Brendon Grylls had pursued greater independence from the Liberal Party, and during the campaign he ruled out any Coalition agreement. Suddenly, with a hung parliament, Grylls and at least one independent were in a position to dictate terms.

The terms for winning National Party support were relatively simple: Labor or the Liberals needed to accept Grylls’s “royalties for the regions” plan, which had featured in the party’s election campaigning. Twenty-five per cent of the state’s mining and onshore petroleum royalties would be returned to regional Western Australia for use in infrastructure and community services via various programs. After a week of negotiations with both parties, Grylls struck his deal – essentially an informal coalition agreement – with the Liberal leader, Colin Barnett.

To add the necessary extra MP, the Liberals appointed one of the independents, Elizabeth Constable, as education, tourism and women’s interests minister. According to Gareth Griffith, she didn’t enter into a formal agreement with the new government, but it might be significant that the Liberals hadn’t contested her seat of Churchlands at the election. Griffith continues: “The other two independent members (Janet Woollard and John Bowler), who have not accepted government or parliamentary positions, have supported the Liberal minority government in the main. Indeed, it was not until 6 May 2009 that the government lost its first vote on the floor of the Assembly…”

Like Rory McEwen and Karlene Maywald in South Australia, National Party ministers in Barnett’s government are free of the usual cabinet constraints in relation to certain issues. Naturally enough, in the WA case these relate mainly to regional issues, although matters of “conscience” are also covered by the agreement.

Northern Territory: The devil in the detail

In August 2009 a member of the NT parliament, Alison Anderson, resigned from the Labor Party over its Indigenous affairs policies, depriving the government of its majority. Ten days later the chief minister, Paul Henderson, struck a deal with the other NT independent, Gerry Wood, who would stay on the cross benches but support the government on supply and no-confidence motions. In return, the government pledged to honour the terms of a written agreement with the MP. According to Griffith:

The terms of this agreement are wide ranging, including substantial parliamentary and constitutional reforms, as well as other policy measures. Perhaps the most interesting constitutional aspect is the agreement to establish a cross-party Council of Territory Cooperation, comprising two government members, two opposition members and at least one independent. Among its objects would be to enhance inclusion and transparency in decision making. The Council would be empowered to conduct inquiries, either referred to it from the Assembly or self-referred, and to make recommendations on matters of public importance.

The government also agreed to reform parliamentary procedures, including reform of question time to allow more non-government questions.

An appendix to the agreement sets out specific policy commitments under a series of headings that indicate the level of detail in the document. These include prison location, caravan legislation, property law reform, lands and planning issues, the environment protection authority, public housing, natural resources and the environment, a strategic Indigenous housing and infrastructure program, youth, rural area issues, special education, local government and “miscellaneous.” Writing earlier this year, Griffith says that the implementation of this program “remains in its early stages.”

AS THESE examples show, the states and territories have already explored many of the relationships that could develop between the Gillard government and the Greens and independents over the next three years. As the prime minister made clear on the 7.30 Report earlier this week, the government is already looking at the experience of at least two states, South Australia and Victoria, and Steve Bracks was an adviser to Labor during the recent negotiations with the three independents. Bracks’s experience – and those of a remarkably high proportion of the state and territory minority governments – suggest that Labor might not be facing quite as fraught an experience over the next three years as many commentators have predicted. •

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IS it a surprise to hear David Bartlett, Labor premier of Tasmania, extolling the virtues of his minority government, which holds power only with the support of the two Green MPs in cabinet?

At the present time, no, it is not at all surprising. Both the amiable young premier and the very popular Nick McKim, leader of the Tasmanian Greens, are pursuing stability and policy innovation. The new generation of Labor–Green politicians represented by these two leaders is helping this minority government work, and so too is their ability to embrace similarities rather than to pick over bitter and long-held ideological differences.

Both men are avid cyclists, keen on sustainable transport and open to new ideas for a renewed Tasmania. One, the premier, is an IT specialist with a thumb-ring; the other, Nick McKim, is an advertising expert in a powder-blue shirt. It’s not hard to imagine each admiring the other’s political strengths and pragmatic leadership abilities.

Both have shown leadership, strength and pragmatism in steering their parties into the current arrangement. The premier has dragged doubting old Labor hands to sit at the cabinet table with their deadly foes, the Tasmanian Greens. And the Greens leader has convinced his party colleagues of the overriding need to provide the minority government with the stability and certainty that he and his fellow Green, Cassy O’Connor, bring as minister and cabinet secretary.

It wasn’t such smooth sailing in previous periods of Greens-supported minority government in the state. In 1989, Labor led a minority government for two years in a short-lived and acrimonious experiment. At a time when the Greens were making history both in the state and globally, there was ill will, distrust and even malice on both sides of this arrangement.

A formal Accord did deliver upfront policy benefits to the Greens in many key areas, including world heritage extensions and native forest protection, in return for a guarantee that the party would not block supply or support no-confidence motions. But beyond these concessions, the Greens gained little from the arrangement, and were shunned by Labor figures. Relations eventually broke down completely when Labor breeched a critical promise not to raise the export woodchip quota. Although the Accord had been highly innovative in terms of policy and reform, it created bad blood that has persisted for decades.

In 1996, the Greens supported the Liberals in minority, this time without a formal agreement. Policy-making wasn’t easy under this arrangement either, but relations were remarkably positive and policy innovation was among the results. Like Labor, though, the Liberal government kept the Greens at arm’s length, so it was only a matter of time before a key difference – this time the government’s intention to sell its stake in hydroelectricity – threatened and very soon broke the arrangement.

With these two very different experiments ending badly, it is no wonder that the major parties have campaigned since on platforms of “no deals with the Greens,” as Premier Bartlett did before the March election. But this time, despite a massive swing against the government in March, the premier agreed to work closely with the Greens in a bold show of confidence that Liberal leader Will Hodgman was unable to match.

Because there are no recipes for the formation of minority government, the current arrangement was shaped by the negotiations between the parties. Two individual Green MPs, rather than the Tasmanian Greens as a party, were invited to sit in cabinet, making this not a formal coalition but a Labor administration accommodating political outsiders.

Labor gains more certainty in the act of governing, and can also spread the ministerial load in a diminished parliament – the result of a reduction of MP numbers in 1998 in a failed attempt to rid the lower house of Green MPs. The Greens benefit by moving, partly at least, inside the tent. They are learning the pragmatic skills of governance and grooming themselves for future coalition government, while retaining the ability to vote against government proposals.

For its part, the government is relying issue-by-issue on the support of the Greens and at least one Green outside cabinet to pass its legislation, except in circumstances where it gains Liberal support. If the two Greens can’t support a proposal before cabinet, then they can absent themselves from both the discussion and the vote, and won’t be bound by the decision. Once the proposal comes to the floor of the House, the two Green cabinet members can vote against it.

Still relatively untested, the arrangement is likely to prove complex issue-by-issue, with both parties looking to achieve their key aims and, in the lead up to the next election, a measure of independence. The Greens have a complex dual role as cabinet members and insiders on the one hand, and government critics and outsiders on the other. The Greens leader, Nick McKim, has even tried to quiz the premier, his cabinet colleague, during the budget estimates hearings.

McKim is a minister (for human services, corrections, consumer protection, community development, climate change, sustainable transport and alternative energy) as well as a Greens spokesperson (for innovation, science and technology, attorney-general, justice, economic development, sport and recreation). His astute and articulate colleague, Cassy O’Connor – an environmental campaigner and former Labor staffer – is cabinet secretary with responsibility for housing and disability services, and Greens spokesperson for environment, parks and heritage, animal welfare and the arts, as well as being McKim’s partner.

The remaining Greens, as party spokespeople, divide up the portfolios between them, which includes covering – and quizzing – their Green colleagues in the Labor cabinet. This insider–outsider split sees the Greens speaking both for and against the Labor government, and has the makings of tension and drama down the track.

The arrangement is all the more remarkable given the vitriol that was expressed between Labor and the Greens as recently as in the lead-up to the March election, and indeed the historical enmity between Labor and the party that has effectively eroded its dominance of Tasmanian politics and government.

For its part, the Liberal Party has so far been eclipsed by the minority government. In reality, however, the parliamentary numbers provide great opportunities for Liberal politicking. If party discipline and political accommodation break down, any combination of numbers is possible, and all sorts of opportunities would arise for individuals to assume disproportionate influence. The five Greens might all support government. Or the two cabinet-based Greens could stick with Bartlett and one or more of their colleagues break away. If enough do so in combination with the Liberals, the government can be voted down.

Between them, the three “outside” Greens and the Liberals hold the numbers, so the Labor government is governing on a knife edge where one false move could be disastrous. For the Liberals to benefit in this scenario, they would need to be prepared to work with the Greens. Liberal leader Will Hodgman wouldn’t agree to do this immediately after the election when, despite winning the popular vote and a statewide swing against Labor, he refused to form a Greens-supported minority government. This missed opportunity, and the perception being peddled around the Tasmanian media that he was restrained by right-wing Tasmanian Liberal senator Eric Abetz, might yet cost Will Hodgman the party leadership.

It is also yet to be seen how the Greens will cope with their split roles, and whether they will be able to marshal their numbers towards creative and cooperative, rather than destructive and divisive, political opportunities. At the moment, their insider–outsider status means that they can ensure stability and policy progress while maintaining scrutiny of government. The Greens member for Bass, Kim Booth, has launched a series of critical attacks on government, behaving as if he is entirely unconvinced by the new collegial Labor government and its green embrace. He has attacked the premier over the alleged special treatment of the greyhound he part-owns and initiated a move to enforce a $1 betting limit for poker machines, defeating the government by gaining Green–Liberal support for a parliamentary inquiry.

For the Greens, it’s not so much about swings and roundabouts as keeping true to the highest levels of integrity and accountability on all issues, not just those ecological issues held dear by the green voting public in Tasmania. Although maintaining those standards might pitch Kim Booth against his party leader and Greens colleagues in cabinet, it is a critical role that keeps the faith with the green constituency and keeps a distance from Labor politics.

THE REWARDS of an arrangement like this might not be obvious for the major party involved. In the two previous Greens-supported governments in Tasmania, the minority government party took a hit at the subsequent polls and lost office – Labor losing 5.8 per cent in 1992 and the Liberals losing 3.1 per cent in 1998. But these margins are not big enough to justify the negative rhetoric from the major parties in the wake of these experiences. The Greens took hits too – 3.9 per cent in 1992 and a modest 0.9 per cent in 1998.

This time around the climate is incredibly different. Most significant of all is the fact that a significant number of voters approve of the arrangement. Essential Media polling has Labor up 6 per cent to 29 per cent since the March election and the Liberals dropping 8 per cent to 30 per cent, with the Greens still close to their election share of 21 per cent.

Which takes us back to where we began, with the leadership, strength and pragmatism of the premier and the Greens leader, and their ability to project stability and confidence in this government. The ability to negotiate and to keep clear-headed is crucial, but so too is the projection of competence, certainty and calm by the leaders, the disciplining of the troops and the ability to survive creative disagreements. •

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MIDWAY through this election campaign, Hobart is the only Australian capital city that’s been more or less ignored by Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. Labor’s Duncan Kerr has held Denison – which takes in most of the metropolitan area – for almost a quarter of a century, and with a comfy margin of 15 per cent it looks about as safe as any seat can be in contemporary Australia. But there’s rising speculation that, with Kerr’s departure at this election, Denison’s not quite the done Labor deal many assume.

Kerr’s anointed successor is Jonathan Jackson, a thirty-six-year-old accountant. Born in Hobart and educated at the expensive Friends’ School, he’s the son of retired state Labor minister Judy Jackson. Although he was preselected ahead of some would-be MPs who don’t enjoy all these advantages, and although he’s has been promoted heavily by better-known Labor faces, in person Jackson isn’t the party hack you might expect. And there’s more to him than autocue slogans like “moving forward.” Important as that general direction might be for Jackson – if it means better education and smart, sustainable jobs in a state that’s not (yet) renowned for leading on either front – his evident passion is social justice. “The fundamental thing is to give Tasmanians an equal opportunity in life, the people who don’t have a voice in society, and what you can do as an effective representative is give people a voice,” he tells me, “and that means you need to listen, and fight for what’s right.”

For starters, though, that means communicating with diverse sub-constituencies that have potentially competing priorities. The electorate stretches along the Derwent River and wraps around Mount Wellington. It runs from the generally socioeconomically disadvantaged northern precinct of Glenorchy (traditionally Labor – heavy on “blue collar” manufacturing work, and featuring high levels of dependence on welfare and public housing and noticeable ethnic diversity compared with wider Tasmania). It proceeds through Hobart’s inner suburbs (Denison’s latte belt, in a city unusually dependent on government employment and stacked with members of the “creative class,” and with the strongest Greens support base in the nation). And then it takes in Hobart’s wealthier southern suburbs (most strongly Liberal and business-focused) and folds in the sparsely populated peri-urban communities on the periphery.

Isn’t connecting with all that difficult – never mind finding commonalities and, ah, moving forward? Not according to Jackson, who returned to live in Hobart after professional stints in Utrecht, London and Shanghai. “I like campaigning, I really enjoy the peacefulness of doorknocking and meeting people. You listen to people’s issues and concerns, in their environment. It’s a real privilege to knock on someone’s door and ask them how they’re feeling, and there’s no better way of finding out.” He cites early inspiration. “My grandmother was a strong influence on me as a young person – my mother too, who grew up in Glenorchy, and my father, who was a doctor and spent a lot of time away from home helping people. I see them all as very kind people who are very giving. My grandmother, who was a life member of the Labor Party, always volunteered – she never had a lot of paid work, but she did that until the day she couldn’t catch a bus anymore.” But why the Labor Party, beyond this pedigree? Essentially, it’s because of the party’s roots in a quest for fairness for workers, “and the fact is if you don’t have fairness in the workplace, as a society there’s not equality. Equality in a workplace resonates outside.”

For old-style class warriors, it may be a strike against Jackson that he lives in Taroona, one of those affluent southern suburbs. But so does the Liberal candidate for Denison, Cameron Simpkins, a forty-something former Australian army major. Since leaving the Australian Defence Force he’s worked in Cairns, Darwin, Sydney and Karratha – in a warehouse and a slipway, in IT project management, human resources and cable TV installation, and in a lobbying role securing funding for remote Indigenous communities. He was born in Canberra, where his father attended Duntroon, footsteps in which he would eventually follow. An early stint in primary school in Hobart when the family was posted to Anglesea Barracks left a happy impression on Simpkins, so when he and his wife sat down a couple of years ago to choose the place they really wanted to live, Tasmania was in the mix. Hobart won over Perth, and they relocated there two years ago, where he now works as a bank manager.

Simpkins sees Hobart as the best fit for what he calls their “values set.” “I have two young children, and I worry about the society that we are creating for them,” he tells me. “I watch the television and read the papers, and I hear the platitudes coming out of politicians’ mouths, on all sides of politics, right across the spectrum, and I get angry at that. And I thought, well, I could just get angry – or I could see if I could make a difference.” The impact he wants to make isn’t exactly like Jackson’s, of course. “Duncan Kerr has held this seat for twenty-three years, and people have been loyal to this man and that party. Then you go to Glenorchy, to Moonah and Claremont, even the city – and after all that loyalty, you’ve got every right to be saying, where’s the money?” Simpkins says. “If I can win this seat, whichever party wins in Canberra will drop money into the electorate, to win the seat back. If I get voted out in three years’ time, that’s okay. I will have achieved my aim.”

Simpkins also seems squarely on Jackson’s broader social-justice page. He talks a lot about fairness, and this week publicly supported gay marriage. His campaign office is in Hobart’s northern suburbs, and it will stay there if he wins, because “the people that need to see a politician in this electorate are Glenorchy, Moonah and Claremont people. You need to be close to the people. You look at where Duncan’s office is in the CBD, he’s too far away, and it’s intimidating in that building. If I can be half as good as Michael Hodgman, as a servant of the people, then I will be an okay politician.” (Hodgman was Kerr’s Liberal predecessor in Denison, from 1975 to 1987, and a minister in the Fraser administration. Known as the “Mouth from the South,” he spoke out in favour of East Timor, water fluoridation, daylight saving and even saving Lake Pedder, when none of that was popular.) Simpkins continues, “I’m a small-l liberal, very much a moderate. If you want to see change in the party, you need more moderates like me. One of my fundamental beliefs is in the freedom of the individual. That’s why I’m standing for the Liberal Party, because Labor’s all about the collective movement. I have no issue with the trade union movement, as such, I’m talking about the party culture.”

Simpkins freely acknowledges that winning is “a really long shot, I’d only just creep over the line.” The same has to be said for the Greens’ Geoff Couser, even though his first tilt at political office follows the unprecedented elevation of Tasmanian Greens leader Nick McKim to a ministry in the state Labor government. An emergency specialist at the Royal Hobart Hospital, Couser came to Tasmania a decade ago, lured by the quality of its natural environment and by Hobart’s proximity to Antarctica. He traces his attraction to the Greens to watching the Franklin dispute on television as a teenager in Brisbane in the 1980s – “to seeing this wonderful wilderness in Tasmania, and being inspired that there was a doctor leading the way!” And now? He points to the pull of being part of a political party that, as he sees it, has evolved beyond a narrow activist focus to have a real chance of playing a policy-shaping role not unlike that of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom. “I’m proud to be part of the Greens, because we’re taking the space that the conservatives and Labor deserted long ago. I’m a small-l liberal. I’m a Sandy Bay doctor who lives on Nutgrove Beach” – which means Jackson and Couser are practically his neighbours – “my house is the only one with a Greens poster out front, and we have nowhere else to go at the moment.”

EXCEPT, maybe, somewhere else. The wildcard in Denison is the most experienced and highest-profile candidate of the field. Originally from Tamworth, Andrew Wilkie now runs a rug and kilim business in inner-city Hobart, also lives in the southern suburbs, and knows Cameron Simpkins from their army days in Canberra. First noticed nationally (and internationally) in 2003 as the only Anglosphere intelligence officer to blow the whistle on the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the Iraq military intervention, Wilkie stepped into politics proper as the Greens candidate for Bennelong in 2004. After moving to Hobart soon afterwards, he ran as a Greens Senate candidate in 2007, then dramatically split from that party to run a Nick Xenophon–style “no pokies” and “integrity in government” campaign as an independent candidate for the state seat of Denison in the election earlier this year. Wilkie missed out by just 315 votes, scoring almost twice as many primary votes as the Liberals’ Elise Archer, who was ultimately elected under Hare-Clark preference flows from other women candidates. This should give everyone pause, not least because all the candidates for federal Denison are men. (Except for twenty-six-year-old Socialist Alliance candidate Melanie Barnes, a climate-change activist – but it’s hard to see her gaining much popular traction with published statements like “‘capitalism’ and ‘sustainability’ are mutually exclusive concepts; only socialism is sustainable.”)

As with all his fellow candidates, and consistent with his public trajectory, matters of values quickly come to the fore, unvarnished, for Wilkie. “I wasn’t going to stand federally. I’d campaigned for twelve months before the state poll, and spent most of our savings,” he reflects. “But so many people in Denison fall through the cracks, and someone like me comes along, they ring me. Like the woman who called because she’d been shortchanged on her disability pension, or the Housing Tasmania tenant who’d been waiting for three months to get a walker so he could leave his house. It goes on. There’s a lot of unmet need, and it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s frustrating, because I’m very interested in each person but I am almost powerless to help them unless I get into office. But I do write letters on their behalf, and sometimes that works. It’s really heartening and it’s part of the reason why I’m going again.” Rather than getting worn down, he says, “I think I’m ramping up.”

Which is why he decided to run for the House of Representatives, even though he believes that, with the right preference deals, he’d have a better chance in the Senate. “But now I’ve established relationships with the people of Denison, this is my home and it’s the place I’d like to represent.” To preserve his independence, he has ruled out preference deals with any of the competing parties – he says they’ve all approached him – and could be helped by the fact that Denison isn’t part of the national Greens–Labor preference deal. “I judge my chance of success as small, but real. I also judge that I am the only candidate who has any chance other than the Labor candidate. The baseline Liberal and Green votes are simply too small compared with the baseline Labor vote – and then there’s the way that preferences flow, or rather don’t flow, between the two major parties. So the Liberal candidate will probably finish second, but he can’t win because the Liberals won’t get preference flows from the Greens. I hope to collect votes from across the spectrum from all parties – as long as I can leapfrog one party, I expect to get flows.”

So will Denison act up and deliver an upset? No one can say. Not even the Greens national leader and Tasmanian senator, Bob Brown, who’s been acting up for longer than most. “Denison’s a strong Green seat, and Geoff’s a great candidate, and will get a stronger vote because the Greens are going well at the state level,” says Brown, as you’d expect. “But the result is by no means predictable,” he continues, observing that Tasmania’s the only place in Australia where Liberal how-to-vote cards are putting Labor ahead of the Greens. In Denison, they’re recommending Wilkie 2, Jackson 3, Couser 4. “There was a national understanding that the Liberals would preference the Greens in Denison – we said we’d go open ticket, and we’ll stick to that,” Brown says. “This shows the influence of the extreme right of that party, and if it’s a knife-edge election, it may amount to Eric Abetz effectively handing federal government to Labor.”

That would put Denison back on everyone’s map. •

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WITH THE growing number and influence of independent and small-party MPs in Australian parliaments from the mid 1980s, an important new ingredient emerged in state and territory politics: charters negotiated between independent MPs (or, in one case, the Greens) and the major parties as a precondition for supporting a minority government.

These charters usually committed the governing party to a range of parliamentary initiatives to promote executive accountability and honesty; in return, the independents undertook not to bring down the government by voting against supply or confidence motions. The independents reserved their right to consider all other legislation on its merits and to vote accordingly. Sometimes the charters imposed policy demands on the government; improved rural infrastructure and services, and environmental protection are recurrent themes. Seven of these charters involved independent MPs – in Tasmania, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory. An eighth agreement, this time between two political parties – the Greens and Labor in the Australian Capital Territory – was examined by Inside Story’s Norman Abjorensen in this article published last November.

The trailblazer, the 1989 Tasmanian Parliamentary Accord, was a little different from most of those that followed. The independent signatories, who called themselves the Green independents, could also be regarded as a political party; and, more importantly, the accord was dominated by very prescriptive environmental policy demands. Each of the charters discussed in this article was the product of the local political circumstances in which the major parties had to deal with minorities to secure parliamentary support to form government. In Tasmania’s case the Liberal government of Robin Gray had lost its absolute majority at the election of May 1989 and five Green independents held the balance of power. The Greens were reluctant to support Gray because of his environmental record, but the premier refused to resign and intimated that he might call a second election. His resolve was not weakened by the publication of the Labor–Green accord on 29 May 1989 and he insisted on his right to meet the parliament as premier. When an attempt to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor – and save Gray’s government – was exposed, the political atmosphere became superheated. Gray lost a confidence motion on 29 June, resigned, and was replaced by Michael Field.

Field himself was to lose office in 1991 because of the collapse of the accord and the withdrawal of Green support. In hindsight, the accord contained the seeds of its own destruction by being too detailed and prescriptive. The Greens demanded too much and Labor was naive to believe it could deliver on those demands. The agreement was a product of Labor’s keenness to return to office after seven years in opposition and the Greens’ eagerness to lock in as many conservation goals as they could as quickly as possible. Of the accord’s seventeen discrete clauses only one dealt exclusively with parliamentary reform. Ten clauses made very specific environmental demands; Section 9, for example, stated that “the state export woodchip quota will not exceed 2.8889 million tonnes per annum.” Other sections dealt with independents’ access to ministers and public servants which, while reasonable in themselves, were presented in an uncompromising tone. Some demands, such as the one that called for the “abolition of subsidised liquor to ministers,” were relatively trivial. De facto independent leader Bob Brown was correct to state in the foreword to the accord that the Greens had gained “access to and influence on the whole range of government decisions” but, by being so concerned with detail, the document betrayed a lack of necessary trust between the parties.

After a term of majority Liberal government, a minority Liberal administration supported by the Greens suffered the same fate in 1998 as Field’s government had seven years earlier. Stung by these experiences, the major parties combined to reduce the size of the Legislative Assembly from thirty-five to twenty-five members which, under Tasmania’s proportional voting system, disadvantaged minor parties by raising the required quota for election from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent. Despite achieving some policy outcomes favourable to the Greens, the Tasmanian accord came to be associated with political instability; its foundering provided a pretext for the major parties to entrench their dominance – until last weekend’s election, that is, when the question of a Green–major party accord became a live one again.

SEEMINGLY dominant, too, was Nick Greiner’s Liberal–National government in New South Wales as it faced an election in May 1991, but here the result would also give independents considerable leverage. The 1988 state election result had been disastrous for Labor and few doubted that Greiner would be re-elected at the 1991 poll. Yet the election produced a lower house in which the Coalition held forty-nine seats to the Labor Party’s forty-six, with four independents. Although one of the independents, Tony Windsor, declared himself in support of the government, the Liberal Party then lost a court-ordered by-election, robbing the government of its majority. Premier Greiner entered into lengthy negotiations with the other three independents (John Hatton, Clover Moore and Peter Macdonald) about the terms on which they might support the government. The result was a memorandum of understanding, signed on 31 October 1991. Like Tasmania’s accord, this was a very detailed and specific document. But almost all of its nineteen pages sought to enhance accountability of the government to parliament and people; it was policy-prescriptive only in the legal and constitutional areas of freedom of information, the powers of the ombudsman and the auditor-general, defamation laws and whistleblower protection. Significantly the memo had nothing to say about regional and rural New South Wales, reflecting the fact that Moore and Macdonald held Sydney seats and Hatton, while he represented a regional constituency, had made his parliamentary reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner.

Somewhat ironically, corruption was to terminate Greiner’s premiership. In October 1991 the former education minister Terry Metherell, who had not been included in the new cabinet, resigned from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent. He later accepted an unadvertised position with the Environment Protection Authority, precipitating a by-election that was won easily by the Liberal candidate. Greiner was accused of subverting normal public-service recruitment procedures to induce Metherell’s resignation and improve the government’s position in parliament. The independents insisted on referring the matter to ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and threatened to support a no-confidence motion if the premier did not stand aside. For its part, ICAC ruled Greiner’s behaviour to be “corrupt” (a finding that was later overturned by the NSW Supreme Court) and he was forced to resign; his successor, John Fahey, presided over a minority government supported by the independents until the Coalition narrowly lost the 1995 election.

The circumstances of the 1995 election revealed the level of hostility towards the independents in both major parties. Greiner (now out of parliament) wrote personally to all voters in the electorates of Manly, Bligh and South Coast urging them not to support the independents, describing the trio as the power “alcoholics” of NSW politics. “Dirty tricks” campaigns were alleged to have taken place in Bligh and Manly, and Clover Moore described the campaign as the “nastiest” she had experienced. With the election result in the balance (Labor eventually won by one seat), the major parties seriously considered contriving another election rather than dealing with the independents.

The amount of vitriol heaped on the independents by the major parties and sections of the media suggests that they might well have achieved their accountability objectives. Certainly the success of the referendums on four-year parliaments and judicial independence put at the 1995 election indicates this was the case. The referendums were part of the independents’ agenda and, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the major parties, they secured Yes votes of 66 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. Nevertheless, Clover Moore lamented that as soon as majority government returned to New South Wales after 1995 “most of the parliamentary reforms we achieved have been watered down or effectively set aside.” She explained that, while the independents hoped their reforms would change the “culture of the parliament,” their impact was overwhelmed by the “more powerful culture of the major parties, especially the Labor Party…”

IF THERE were devils to be found in the detail of the Tasmanian and NSW agreements, the same could not be said of the 1996 compact between the independent member for the Queensland seat of Gladstone, Liz Cunningham, and the leader of the National–Liberal Coalition, Rob Borbidge – for the simple reason that the agreement contained almost no detail. In fact it was hardly an “agreement” at all, for Cunningham declared her support for a minority Coalition government by way of a two-page statement read to the media from under a tree near her electorate office.

The circumstances leading to this arrangement were unusual and controversial. With the collapse of the Bjelke-Petersen regime in the wake of a royal commission into corruption, the Labor Party won the 1989 election in a landslide – its first victory since 1956. The 1989 result was replicated by Premier Wayne Goss and his colleagues in 1992. But at the July 1995 election, partly as a consequence of alienating environmentalists by planning a freeway through an ecologically sensitive corridor, Labor lost nine seats. The government emerged with a bare one-seat majority over the Coalition and the newly elected independent, Liz Cunningham. Then the Liberal Party successfully challenged the result in the seat of Mundingburra, which Labor had won by fourteen votes, and the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti won the seat at the subsequent by-election.

The result in Mundingburra robbed Labor of its parliamentary majority and handed the balance of power to Cunningham. In her statement declaring support for Borbidge as premier, Cunningham pledged her vote on confidence motions and supply but reserved her right to vote on all other legislation as she saw fit. Significantly, she did not demand accountability or policy commitments from the Coalition in return for her support, though she did receive additional staffing entitlements. Instead she defended her decision on the grounds that another election was best avoided, that the Coalition had polled over 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote (and voters had confirmed this result in Mundingburra) and that she believed the agreement between herself and the government was “best for my local electorate and for the state as a whole…” In expanding on the last point she cited such existing problems as a leaking roof at a local hospital. Unlike the Tasmanian Greens, who had Labor over a barrel and knew it, Cunningham installed a Coalition government largely because she sympathised with its conservative social agenda and was prepared to hand it an executive blank cheque.

The Borbidge government proved controversial and cavalier in its notions of accountability. When the parliament passed a no-confidence vote in the attorney-general in August 1997, for example, the premier backed his colleague’s refusal to resign. Despite numerous gaffes and controversies the parliament ran full term, but the 1998 state election was to prove one of the most dramatic in modern Australian politics. In the best debut electoral performance by any party since Labor began entering the colonial parliaments in the 1890s, the newly formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won eleven seats – five from the National Party and six from Labor. By winning six seats from the Liberals, the Labor Party, now led by Peter Beattie, emerged with forty-four seats to the Coalition’s thirty-two. Two independents were returned: Cunningham, again, and first-timer Peter Wellington, who won Nicklin from the Nationals and with whom Beattie began negotiations to form a minority government. These discussions culminated in a six-page letter of understanding from Beattie to Wellington dated 25 June 1998.

In contrast to the Cunningham compact, this agreement required Beattie to pledge the government to reform parliament, maintain a budget surplus and, reflecting recent scandals, issue and enforce detailed guidelines for ministerial credit cards, travel and expenses. Beattie did not agree to Wellington’s desire to implement citizen-initiated referendums, however, promising instead to hold regular “community cabinet meetings.” Despite this disagreement, sufficient mutual trust had been established that on the same day he received Beattie’s letter, Wellington agreed to support a Labor minority government on the usual terms, though Cunningham complained that Wellington had “jumped the gun” in sealing the contract with Beattie before exhausting all other options.

PARLIAMENTARY reforms were also the key to the agreement between Peter Lewis and the Labor Party in South Australia after the February 2002 state election produced a House of Assembly of twenty-three Labor members, twenty Liberals and four independents. Labor needed the support of just one of the independents to turn out the Liberal government of Premier Rob Kerin. When parliament resumed on 5 March Kerin nominated independent Rory McEwen as Speaker, and opposition leader Mike Rann nominated independent Peter Lewis. Lewis won in a secret ballot twenty-five votes to twenty-two.

Peter Lewis had been a Liberal member of parliament for over twenty years. Since the 1970s he had been a gadfly within his party, advocating parliamentary reform and various rural and irrigation policies. Eventually – on 5 July 2000 – he was expelled from the party room, and he resigned from the party in October. Lewis contested his seat of Hammond at the 2002 election under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition and defeated the Liberal candidate by 822 votes. Prior to the poll Lewis gave contradictory indications of which party he might support in a hung parliament. An article in the Adelaide Advertiser on 28 January 2002 reported that he “would support a Labor government if its major priority was parliamentary reform,” yet when asked by a reporter from the same paper two days before the poll whether he was intending to support the Labor Party, Lewis replied: “You can quote me. That’s bullshit… clear, unequivocal, hot, green, sloppy, fresh bullshit. I’m not into forming government with Labor.” Nevertheless he listed the Labor candidate second on his how-to-vote card. In a later civil case in which the Liberal Party tried unsuccessfully to have his election voided on the grounds that he misled voters, a Supreme Court judge described Lewis as “a man of high principle… at times impetuous and single minded. I must treat his evidence with caution…”

On 13 February 2002 Lewis announced that he would support a Labor government. He defended this “extraordinarily painful decision” in a statement to parliament subsequent to his election as Speaker. He highlighted his desire to provide stability and certainty of government but also said that he was angered by the Liberal Party’s “arrogant” assumption that he would automatically support its bid to continue in power. He also expressed concern at “the lack of ministerial accountability and parliamentary standards” and the spread of the “parasitic weed broomrape” over pasture land. Following Lewis’s statement the Liberal government lost a confidence vote twenty-three to twenty-two; Lewis did not vote.

Between polling day and the first meeting of the new parliament, Peter Lewis negotiated a Compact for Good Government with the Labor Party. The compact drew heavily on agreements in other states and included mechanisms to improve ministerial accountability, reform parliament and assist rural South Australia. What was different in Lewis’s compact was his insistence that the government “pass an Act of Parliament and make other such arrangements as deemed necessary by the Speaker [Lewis] to meet such costs and facilitating such processes as may be involved in any aspects of the work related to the establishment of a Constitutional Convention…” The convention was held in August 2003 and made a number of recommendations to be considered by the state parliament.

OF THE AGREEMENTS between independents and governing parties, the best-documented is the charter that brought to an end the colourful, controversial Kennett era in Victorian politics. Drawing on earlier agreements but heavily influenced by the specifics of the impact of Kennett’s government during the 1990s, the 1999 Independents’ Charter Victoria unexpectedly handed government to Labor under its new leader, Steve Bracks.

A Liberal–National Coalition led by Jeff Kennett had won the 1992 Victorian state election in a landslide following an unprecedented decade of Labor government. The 1992 result was confirmed in 1996, but at that election there were early signs of the shift in voter support that would take place in 1999. In the north-western rural seat of Mildura, Russell Savage became the first independent member elected to the Legislative Assembly since 1976, and independent candidates in other rural and regional electorates performed strongly. The following year another independent, Susan Davies, won a by-election in rural West Gippsland. But the Kennett government went to the polls in September 1999 in a seemingly invincible position. As in New South Wales in 1995, the election result was a cliffhanger. Strong swings to Labor in country Victoria and the election of a third independent, Craig Ingram, in Gippsland East produced a hung parliament, the Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one, with the three independents holding the balance of power. The inconclusive result was complicated by the fact that the sitting Liberal member for Frankston East had died on polling day, triggering a supplementary election four weeks after the poll.

The month between polling day and the Frankston East “deferred election” was tense and dramatic. Susan Davies set the tone two days after the election when she told Kennett he should resign. Had her advice been accepted, the Coalition may well have retained government because Kennett’s aggressive political style was unsuited to negotiating with the independents. On the advice of a former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, Davies contacted the Queensland premier Peter Beattie and independent Peter Wellington to obtain a copy of their 1998 agreement, which served as a template for what became the Independents’ Charter Victoria. This document went through a number of drafts but, like its Queensland model, emphasised principles rather than details. Accountability of government, parliamentary reform and the social and economic rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the main themes.

For the three independent MPs, drafting the charter was easier than negotiating with the major parties and deciding which of them they would install in government. Premier Kennett wasted no time in putting pressure on them by telling the high-rating radio station 3AW on 23 September that they should support him because they held “conservative” electorates. Tension between the Coalition parties was evident when Kennett insisted on meeting with the independents without the National Party leader, Pat McNamara. Kennett’s negotiating tactic was to try to separate the newly elected Ingram from the other two. He offered the speakership to each of them and then later only to Savage and Ingram. In the midst of the negotiations Kennett also offered the speakership to a member of the National Party. Meetings were held between the independents and the party leaders before Labor and the Coalition were presented with the draft charter on 27 September, when the outcomes in several seats were still uncertain.

None of the participants in the negotiations expected the 1999 election to produce such a fluid political environment. The Liberal Party was in shock; Labor had not anticipated forming government; the independents were in the unexpected (and perhaps unwelcome) position of having to decide the next government. There was no shortage of unofficial advisers to the independents as a myriad of groups and individuals put forward interested and disinterested suggestions. Rating agency Standard & Poor’s (an enthusiastic supporter of the Kennett government’s neoliberal economic policies) issued a news release on 28 September that, while not overtly supporting either major party, warned against future temptation “to turn to pork-barrel politics to address the concerns of rural voters… and the independents…” The agency also observed: “A Labor minority government would also have to contend with a coalition majority in the Upper House.”

Upper house reform soon emerged as a critical issue in the negotiations between the independents and the party leaders. Lawyers and constitutional experts convinced the independents that they could best achieve and sustain their accountability objectives by altering the structure of the Legislative Council with a Senate-type proportional voting system. This presented the independents with a dilemma: the Labor Party had long supported electoral reform to the upper house, but a Labor government could not achieve it because of its minority position in the Council; whereas the Liberal Party, and especially Kennett, was on record as opposing proportional voting but had the upper house majority needed to deliver it. As Susan Davies later said, had Kennett given way on upper house reform the independents would have been under great pressure to support a minority Coalition government.

Kennett was maladroit in his detailed negotiations over the contents of the draft charter. His major problem was that accepting much of what the independents demanded, such as restoring the powers of the auditor-general, would mean repudiating policies he had vigorously advocated over the previous seven years. Labor was advantaged by the fact that most of the contents of the charter was settled Labor policy. Kennett’s strong, decisive but non-consultative leadership style proved wanting when he was required to negotiate and compromise with the independents. He restricted his negotiating team to a group of four – himself, deputy premier Pat McNamara and the two deputy party leaders – and as late as 30 September had not shown the draft of the charter to his party room.

Throughout the negotiations Kennett regularly contacted Savage and Ingram but not Davies, whereas Bracks left all three to their own deliberations. Kennett seriously misread the allegiances of the independents – believing, wrongly, that Davies was a lost cause for the Coalition, and underestimating Savage’s hostility. When Savage was first elected in 1996, the premier had directed Coalition members not to socialise with him and in a later parliamentary exchange called him a “fuckwit.” Kennett made the mistake of trying to alter individual clauses of the charter rather than, as the independents insisted, responding to the document as a whole. The formal Coalition response delivered on 12 October was a detailed document of eighteen pages with a further twelve pages of attachments. Kennett committed to the establishment of a Constitutional Commission to report on possible parliamentary reform, but did not commit to acting on its recommendations. Indeed he stated that “the Coalition is of the view that the options for parliamentary change [in relation to the Legislative Council] put forward by the ALP are fundamentally flawed…,” thereby rejecting a key plank of the independents’ reform agenda. On the other key issue, rural reconstruction, much of the response was given over to a tendentious defence of past Coalition policies.

The independents could be forgiven for concluding that Kennett would rather have gone into opposition than accept the constraints of minority government. Or perhaps he was so confident that Savage and perhaps Ingram would not be prepared to alienate their conservative rural constituencies by installing Labor that he believed he could afford to be obdurate on some points and secure a freer hand in government.

The opposition leader, Steve Bracks, also responded to the independents on 12 October. “I support the Charter in its entirety…” he told them, going on to detail how a Labor government would implement its terms. Having received the responses of the government and the opposition, the independents announced that they would give their decision at 11am on Monday 18 October, two days after the Frankston East supplementary election. On 13 October the Labor Party sent a memorandum of understanding to the independents which sought to establish a formal relationship between them. Davies and Ingram had a meeting with Bracks and his deputy John Thwaites at Parliament House on the eve of the Frankston East election at which Ingram, who had kept his own counsel up to this point, said he would support Labor if it won the next day’s poll. Susan Davies recalls what transpired after the meeting ended:

I was half-way down Victoria Parade when I got a call from Bracks on the mobile. He said he wanted me to come back to parliament. He was pretty pushy. He didn’t usually sound like that. I went back.

Bracks and Thwaites had a memorandum of understanding which they wanted Craig to sign there and then. Craig was going to be out of reach up the Snowy [River] over the weekend. He didn’t want to leave them with a signed document which was only going to be relevant if they won Frankston East and they wanted a signed document as early as possible if that was the outcome.

I took it. I drove home with the memorandum of understanding in my glovebox. It was a very strange feeling. I wasn’t going to sign it until I knew what was happening in Frankston East, and said I would only sign then if there was a clear indisputable result. Craig told me to keep it safe and rip it up if the result went the other way.

Labor won Frankston East decisively. On the following day Bracks’s senior adviser flew by light plane to Newhaven airport, where Davies signed the memorandum. The adviser then flew on to Mildura and collected Savage’s signature and then back to Frankston where Bracks, who was attending a celebratory barbecue, affixed his signature. It had been a month of unprecedented high drama which concluded with the installation of the first minority Labor government in Victoria since 1947.

THE LATEST of the agreements involving independent MPs and large parties involves Gerry Wood MP and the governing Labor Party in the Northern Territory. Struck in August last year after the resignation of Alison Anderson from Labor, it shares a potentially fatal flaw with the first case we discussed, the Green–Labor agreement in Tasmania in 1989. It is overly detailed (thirty-seven projects, many in Mr Wood’s electorate, are listed) and is likely to suffer the same fate as its predecessor.

The majority of the charters we’ve discussed were intended – by the independent signatories, at least – to increase the accountability of executive government. Did they achieve that objective? Alas, Clover Moore’s pessimistic appraisal of New South Wales after the return of majority government in 1995 holds true for the other jurisdictions as well. “Accountability independents” discovered that changing parliamentary cultures, especially in the lower houses, was to prove much more difficult than changing governments. Why? As the author of a recent study of the House of Lords explains, “even true democrats [once] in government will find it hard to prioritise a parliamentary reform which will involve their work being scrutinised more closely.”

This is not to suggest that the various independent charters did not bring about important reforms – most notably in Victoria, where the upper house was thoroughly renovated in 2003. The difficulty lies in making the reforms durable when governments regain parliamentary majorities and no longer need to accommodate minorities. The further development of an “accountability culture” in upper houses presents the best option for durable reform. The independents may come to be seen as “pathfinders” in putting issues and reforms like these on the political agenda, to be pursued and entrenched by those who follow. •

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