The topic has also evolved in the published scholarship. For example, the focus of historian Russel Ward’s 1977 A Nation for a Continent (the title snipped from a Federation campaign speech by Edmund Barton) was neatly flipped by environmental historian Libby Robin’s 2007 book How a Continent Created a Nation. Robin advanced the transdisciplinary dialogue between science and history that is central to Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm’s new book, The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent. As the subtitle indicates, though, the central focus here is on culture rather than the environment.

The book’s immense temporal and spatial reach is organised by chapters focused on journeying, food gathering, landscape management and social organisation. In each, the authors synthesise archaeological evidence, computer modelling and the Indigenous knowledge and cultural memory encoded in song and story to document human flourishing in diverse and changing landscapes.

Like the television series of the same name, which screened in 2023, The First Inventors begins with the peopling of the Australian continent around 65,000 years ago. The Australian landmass, a third larger than today, was part of the Sahul region that included New Guinea and eventually Tasmania. Crossing between Timor and the Kimberley coast, one of the first settlement routes, required watercraft and navigation techniques suitable for over-the-horizon voyaging. This was, the authors contend, the longest sea journey yet undertaken by humans. Several centuries of two-way journeys suggest purposeful rather than accidental settlement, and left an archaeological record that the authors believe provides the first evidence of modern human behaviour.

Much of that evidence was submerged by a sea level rise, eventually reaching some 130 metres following the last glacial maximum around 21,000 years ago. The first humans settled along coastal fringes like those of Timor and Sulawesi, but movement inland — the speed and spread of which has long been underestimated, according to new modelling — required adaptation to hotter, drier environments, and to country that had evolved to burn.

Across the continent, developments in aquaculture, astronomy and pharmaceuticals came through observation, experimentation and evaluation, the hallmarks of science. Archaeological evidence shows the development of hafted axes suited to the dominant eucalypt hardwoods. Maps were encoded in song and story to guide navigation and help locate food and water sources. Fire was repurposed for landscape management, with cool season burns facilitating hunting while preserving local ecologies.

Present-day dating techniques, computer modelling and simulation have produced new evidence of occupation and adaptation that frequently overlays and supports traditional knowledge embedded in stories, songs and cultural memory. “We come to these ancient oral accounts with a healthy scepticism, as well as a deep regard for Indigenous knowledge of Country,” conclude the authors, “and we are persuaded of their veracity by the sheer volume and variety of narratives, both across the continent and within specific stories.”

Describing the earliest Indigenous occupants as inventors might seem implausible to some. The authors tackle this head on, subverting a romantic trope of the inventor as a solitary genius to argue for understanding “invention” at landscape scale, adapted and nurtured across countless generations.

The myth of European exploration and discovery, too, is debunked in the book’s discussion of the songlines and long-distance navigation trails, some stretching across the continent, that facilitated food gathering and cultural diplomacy. European explorers frequently relied on Indigenous guides or followed established tracks, as do many present-day roads. Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson completed their celebrated crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by trailing a short distance behind an advance Indigenous party.

Yet a colonial mindset lingers. The material evidence of early settlement and trade located by underwater archaeology is unrecognised and unprotected by maritime heritage legislation. Australia is not party to the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Australia’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Act of 2018, the authors assert, prioritises the protection of shipwrecks and submerged aircraft. Conversely, the nomination of the Budj Bim cultural landscape in southwest Victoria, with its network of kooyang (eel) traps, was Australia’s first community-nominated accession to UNESCO’s world heritage list. The chapter featuring Budj Bim shows the capacity of new remote sensing technologies to accurately map the extent and sophistication of Gunditjmara aquaculture in this region.

More encouragingly, settler-colonial perceptions of fire as an alien force and deadly threat is giving way to an appreciation of cultural burning as a strategy for wildfire management.

The First Inventors does feature one figure who might more conventionally be identified as an inventor: Ngarrandjeri man David Unaipon. A chapter recounts the well-known story of Unaipon’s modified design of a sheep-shearing comb, which revolutionised productivity in the wool industry but yielded no financial benefit for its developer. But readers may be less familiar with the oppressive regulation of Unaipon’s daily life. Most of the chapter’s attention, though, is given to his design of a helicopter that applied the aerofoil principle of a boomerang. The final part of the TV series featured a delightful proof-of-concept trial of the design.

Of the three authors, Larissa Behrendt’s name is likely to be most familiar to non-academic audiences, although many may be unaware of the breadth of her activity across academia, fiction, screen and media, and in advisory roles. Larissa wrote and directed The First Inventors series.

Billy Griffiths, a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, enlivened the history of archaeology in Australia in his award-winning Deep Time Dreaming. The accessible, character-driven style of that book is emulated in The First Inventors.

Sean Ulm is a professor of archaeology at James Cook University whose substantial body of work focuses on the relationship of cultural and environmental change in archaeological and paleo-environmental eras. Deep knowledge of the country and longstanding relationships with Indigenous people and disciplinary colleagues come to fruition in this project.

The book, which has appeared after the documentary’s screening, provides space to expand and defend claims and arguments, grounding the project in an impressively wide scholarship. It is also candid about the limits of the archaeological record. Much of the technical innovation described in the text involved the use of fibres, which have limited chances of surviving as material evidence. Beware, say the authors, of conflating the archaeological record with what was once considered important, and which might influence later judgements of cultural advancement. The durability of stone gave rise to the trope of a stone-age people, and to anthropologist A.P. Elkin’s marginally less crude assessment that Indigenous people were parasites, dependent on what nature produced.

But the tendency to essentialise — to fall back on descriptions of timelessness and cultural uniformity — persists. Kevin Rudd’s 2007 apology, note the authors, referred to an “ancient culture.” The demand to prove the existence of native title rests on a static concept of continuity. Perhaps the strongest message of this book is its debunking of a primitivist notion that Indigenous people lived in simple harmony with their natural environment. They were — we all are — living with complex, changing and constructed environments. Successfully navigating the future, argue the authors, will need Indigenous knowledge and Western science working together. •

The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent
By Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm | Allen & Unwin | $36.99 | 320 pages

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Explorers, settlers. In First Tasmanians: A Deep History, Shayne Breen’s long view puts Aboriginal experience at the centre of Tasmanian history, subverting its foundation story. But here deep history is more than an extended chronology of human–environment interactions. As Indigenous scholar Greg Lehman writes in the book’s foreword, it conveys the profound meaning of being on Country and tells the story of living in a place that we must all come to know and respect.

Breen has published widely on Tasmanian environmental, social and Indigenous history, and the depth of his scholarship and commitment to pedagogy — he helped establish Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania — is evident in this ambitious book.

Breen’s long view is revealed through the book’s three sections, covering the deep past, collective Aboriginal life and the colonial period, and the recent past. Each section draws sequentially on environmental history and archaeology, cultural anthropology and history, with genocide and trauma studies informing the final section. The skill with which Breen weaves these strands together is one of the book’s accomplishments.

The title is carefully chosen, emphasising prior occupation and affiliation with a wider polity. First Tasmanians squares off, rhetorically and thematically, with Tom Haydon’s 1978 film The Last Tasmanian, featuring young ANU archaeologist Rhys Jones.

Jones interpreted data from his excavations at Rocky Cape, on Tasmania’s northwest tip, along with readings of historical sources including G.A. Robinson’s journals documenting his attempts to relocate Tasmanians to Flinders Island, to paint a picture of isolation and cultural decline. Tasmanians, Jones claimed, had a far simpler toolkit than mainland populations. Archaeological data suggested they ceased to eat scale fish about 3,500 years BP and, Jones argued, had lost the ability to make fire. Increase ceremonies did not feature in ritual life. All were markers of a fatal trajectory that began with the separation of Tasmania and the mainland and was dramatically hastened by colonisation in 1803.

The film’s opening scenes show the reburial ceremony of Trukanini (the last “full blood” Tasmanian) off Bruny Island in 1976  and includes footage of two Cape Barren Islanders saying they did not consider themselves Aboriginal. Those statements bolstered Haydon’s extinction narrative. For Breen, they revealed a lived experience of oppression and marginalisation.

He doesn’t dwell on the film, although he identifies Jones, along with N.J.B. (Brian) Plomley, editor and annotator of Robinson’s journals, as “firmly located in the evolutionist framework.”  Since the film’s release, further research — including excavations in southwest Tasmania, new understandings of environmental conditions, food resources and diet, and re-examinations of earlier archaeological evidence and written sources such as Robinson’s journal — has revealed the extent of occupation, patterns of resource management and trade, and the complexity of religious and cultural life of the first Tasmanians.

The debate over eating scale fish, Breen remarks drily, has been blown out of all proportion. To be fair, Jones and others conceded the point. Indeed, Jones participated in the important Kutikina cave dig that revealed Ice Age occupation of the southwest “wilderness.” But the damage had been done. As Indigenous Tasmanians asserted their political rights, Jones ceased to work there.

The book’s second and longest section deals with collective life, with chapters on people, country and culture. “Apart from a few short articles,” Breen notes, “there are no extended accounts of Tasmanian collective life that use methods and insights from cultural anthropology.” Reinterpreting historical British and French sources, he describes a complex, organised and culturally rich society.

Breen challenges the emphasis on Tasmanians’ isolation by drawing parallels with Indigenous populations in mainland Australia, South Africa and North America. Similar techniques of land management, such as mosaic patterns of burning, are evident in each region. He argues that burning country “produced an island-wide infrastructure of well-maintained hunting and gathering niches that were well stocked with staple foods — and a range of less common delicacies.” Colonial surveyors found country that was “cultivated and diversified.” Some parts looked like “freshly ploughed fields,” other parts exhibited “the most beautiful verdure from the sprouting of young grass and rushes.”

The Tasmanians’ landscape management was likely part of an overall pattern of ancestral design, Breen argues, fulfilling ritual obligations necessary to assure social order and fertility. The surveyors, though, were on the lookout for new territory to incorporate in the “settled region” of Van Diemen’s Land. That process involved overcoming Indigenous resistance, eliminating any threat to enlarging the sheep walk.

This process was facilitated by declaring an “open emergency” and martial law in the late 1820s, followed by the infamous Black Line manoeuvres designed to sweep the remaining Tasmanian population into the island’s southeast corner. That operation, Breen argues, is conventionally seen as a fiasco, a failed exercise in hard power replaced by Robinson’s “friendly mission” to remove the dwindling Tasmanian population from the island. Breen connects both strategies within a wider pattern of oppression.

Here, Haydon’s film is a point of flexion where a narrative of the passing race is confronted by one of resistance and revitalisation. Trukanini’s reburial campaign was a significant event for a new generation of activists, part of a wider strategy of self-determination that included repossession of ancestral remains, land rights, and language revival. A turning point was a 1971 meeting in Launceston of three communities — southern, northwest and Islander — to establish the Aboriginal Information Service. In 1977 the organisation became the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. TAC-led protests picketed Haydon’s film in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney, but its international distribution kept the narrative of a doomed race in circulation.

In the book’s final section, The Recent Past, Breen steps back to give voice to Tasmanian Aboriginal writers, activists and artists to tell their own story, through the lenses of invasion, resistance, trauma and revitalisation. The political and cultural significance of language is a key theme. Seeking a conceptual vocabulary to adequately describe the historical experience of colonisation, Tasmanian writers and activists began using the term genocide from the 1980s.

The term was coined by the Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland for the United States in 1941. The description of Nazi attempts to “Germanify” Polish society was later extended by Lemkin into a global history of genocide which, Breen points out, included a chapter on Tasmania. There, Lemkin drew mostly on the work of nineteenth-century historian James Bonwick, who had a better understanding of Tasmanians than most of his contemporaries.

Cultural genocide, Lemkin argued, had two phases, first imposing the occupier’s society, economy and culture on the country stolen from local owners, and second — in response to resistance by the colonised group — destroying collective life through assimilation policies and outright violence. Later scholars, seeking to rescue the term from its immediate application to the Holocaust (which, Breen argues, also enabled colonial states to avoid judgement on their actions) theorised colonial genocide, a wider historical process in which the colonial power permanently occupies Indigenous lands, enacting policies of assimilation and cultural erasure that might take centuries to unfold.

Imposing a colonial culture has, almost everywhere, involved eradication of Indigenous language. The anthropologist Wade Davis has described Indigenous languages as old growth forests of the mind, a metaphor that seems appropriate in the Tasmanian context. The reconstruction and use of palawa kani, a composite language built from historical records including Robinson’s journal and from fragments of living memory, has been central to the revitalisation of Tasmanian Indigenous culture. This patient work of several decades has produced fluent speakers and a range of palawa kani teaching resources.

Colonisation’s legacy is complex. Palawa are unable to demonstrate continuous practice of traditional laws and customs to claim rights under native title legislation. In 1995 the Tasmanian government, the first in Australia to apologise for past treatment of Indigenous people, handed back significant archaeological and cultural sites, and the Australian government has facilitated the purchase of other land parcels for agricultural enterprise and training in environmental management.

The Tasmanian government suspended the process of gazetting palawa kani place names in 2019, and Palawa experience greater disadvantage in education, housing, employment and encounters with the justice system than the wider Tasmanian population. Yet, as Breen concludes, “for a people on the edge of oblivion just 200 years ago, the revitalisation is a triumph of human resilience.”

This is a marvellous book, deeply researched and accessible. Future printings should, though, correct an error on the foreword’s first page. The Australian parliament was not opened on 1 January 1901, as stated. That day saw the proclamation of the Australian constitution in Sydney’s Centennial Park, when the colony of Tasmania, as it was renamed in 1856, became part of the new Federation. The national parliament first convened in Melbourne’s Exhibition Building on 9 May 1901. •

First Tasmanians: A Deep History
By Shayne Breen | Miegunyah Press | $49.95 | 336 pages

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When Dunstan’s league enjoyed a brief revival in 2007, the Victorian Football League had become a national competition, but the island state — the source of so many footballing greats — was left off the map. Instead, media deals beamed AFL games into Tasmanian homes, the state government guaranteed funding for Melbourne clubs Hawthorn and St Kilda to play home games at York Park and for North Melbourne to play at Hobart’s Bellerive ground, and local footy languished.

Dunstan once boasted that his organisation had more members than the Collingwood Football Club. Now, with uncertainty over an agreement to licence a Tasmanian team if the state underwrites a new stadium in Hobart, Dunstan’s call to “kick the footy habit” and join his AFL might seem to have renewed appeal.

The new Tasmania Devils team, though, boasts a foundation membership of more than 200,000, almost half of the island’s population. I’m one of that number. But three features of the plan — the AFL’s strongarm tactics, the prospect of spending in excess of $1 billion dollars on a venue marginally bigger than the Bellerive oval across the Derwent River from the proposed Macquarie Point site, and the state government’s determination to bypass established planning processes — have alarmed many Tasmanians, football fans or not.

The stadium proposal wasn’t mentioned in Labor opposition leader Dean Winter’s successful no-confidence motion against premier Jeremy Rockliff in Tasmanian parliament last week. Indeed, Labor’s position appears to have shifted, from outright opposition to the stadium under then leader (and now federal member) Rebecca White to support for an alternative stadium plan, at Regatta Point on the Derwent foreshore, under Winter.

Winter cited three reasons for toppling Rockliff: budget mismanagement, plans to privatise state assets, and an inability to deliver major projects. Winter had his sights on the botched procurement of new Bass Strait ferries, currently berthed in Scotland following the discovery that their Devonport wharf requires extension to accommodate them. For many Tasmanians, though, the issues highlighted by Winter crystallise around the stadium.

Opposition has been led by the high-profile No New Stadium group convened by Hobart lawyer Roland Browne. Objections focus on virtually every aspect of the plan: location and design, planning, finance and governance.

Macquarie Point, the site of Hobart’s former railyards and location of Dark Park during MONA’s Dark Mofo festival, is the city’s last available large riverine position. Future development requires significant site remediation, including relocation of an existing sewerage works. The stadium plan squeezes the structure into a corner of the nine-hectare site, bordered on the northern side by Hobart’s main arterial road and on the city side — looking towards Mount Wellington — by the low-rise sandstone warehouses of the Old Wharf, dating from the early 1820s. A good example of adaptive re-use, the Old Wharf precinct offers a glimpse of the mixed-use possibilities No New Stadium and other commentators see as a better pathway for the entire site.

The warehouses of Hobart’s Old Wharf were built where vessels disembarked many of the 67,000 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land from Britain, Ireland and other parts of the British Empire. Michael McShane, my third great grandfather, landed there with his brother Hugh in 1818. The few years prior had been especially tough for the two Derry farm labourers and their flax-weaving families. The demand for flax had collapsed with the end of the Napoleonic wars and advances in cotton-loom technology.

More dramatically, though, the northward drift of ash and sulphur clouds from the enormous eruption of Mt Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, had resulted in crop failures, livestock deaths and famine across Europe and North America. Eighteen-sixteen came to be known as the year without summer. The following year, the McShane brothers burgled a house, stealing food and a pistol. Their sentence to hang was commuted, and they were exiled as “lifers” in Van Diemen’s Land.

Such stories illuminate the global historical and cultural significance of this site. But we gain little appreciation of this in stadium planning documents, despite the commissioning of heritage impact assessments. The precinct is overshadowed in every sense by the fifty-four-metre-high stadium. For context, the highest span of Hobart’s Tasman Bridge is forty-six metres. Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium — another AFL-adjacent urban-regeneration project — is thirty-eight metres. Architectural renderings of the structure show how shockingly misplaced and insensitive the proposal is.

Badged as a multi-purpose structure, the stadium would likely involve unquantified cost- and burden-shifting onto the Hobart City Council, which could bear ultimate responsibility for the public safety, traffic management and urban amenity issues that will arise from the stadium’s scale and siting. Like politics, all urban infrastructure is local. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, perhaps Tasmania’s premier cultural organisation, has also been vocal in raising concerns about the siting of such an impactful public venue just 170 metres from the Federation Concert Hall and recording studio.

Objections to the proposed location of the stadium also need to be seen in a statewide context. Tasmanian senator Jacquie Lambie and the new independent member of the Tasmanian lower house, Craig Garland, both from the state’s northwest, have energetically supported locating the Devil’s home ground at the existing facility in Launceston. Might this be seen as yet another example of Tasmanian parochialism? Statewide football has been dogged by regional affiliations. In one famous episode, supporters of the northwest-coast team Wynyard removed goal posts at the end of the 1967 state premiership final to prevent North Hobart’s champion David “Dicky” Collins kicking the winning goal.

But the demographic and economic arguments for Launceston are compelling. Almost two-thirds of the state’s population live outside metropolitan Hobart, and Lambie, especially, has repeatedly drawn attention to the cost and road safety risks of attending live games in the south.

All these concerns about governance and decision-making deficiencies call up a history of corporate interests trumping democratic processes in the state. For many Tasmanians, the AFL now joins the salmon industry, Gunn’s forest industries and the Federal Group gambling and hospitality enterprise as political actors, with this recent private-sector influence overlaying earlier state capture by the Hydro-Electric Commission. The state government’s overriding of established planning processes ignores criticism by the Tasmanian Planning Commission and independent analysis of the state’s finances by economist Saul Eslake, and confirms for many a pattern of cosy relationships. As Lambie characterises it, this was an agreement made over a few frothies.

Since the project was first mooted, the cost of the stadium, and the Tasmanian government’s contribution, have risen significantly. They seem likely to spiral further, fuelled by rising construction costs and design changes. Projections of the state’s budget deficit alarm many, but more tangible evidence of misplaced priorities is evident now in the failing public health system, struggling to service the oldest and poorest population of the Australian states.

Indeed, one alternative use for the Macquarie Point site was a new public hospital, as part of redevelopment plans for the ageing Royal Hobart Hospital in the city centre. Development of affordable housing, too, has been suggested, against the backdrop of Hobart’s severe problem with affordable housing supply. It is more likely, though, that the stadium will be accompanied by high-end residences with a promise of magnificent views over the Derwent estuary.

Speaking after the no-confidence motion was carried by the Speaker’s casting vote, premier Jeremy Rockliff suggested that if you couldn’t build the stadium on what he described as a waste industrial site, you couldn’t build it anywhere. Reflecting on the deal struck for the stadium’s construction, many Tasmanians might flip that statement: if you can build the stadium on this site, you can build anything anywhere. •

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Play, as the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga argued in his landmark 1938 book Homo Ludens, is fundamental to the human condition. The right to play is inscribed in the 1989 UN convention on the rights of children, along with the right to freedom of expression, but young people’s right to construct their own playworld, to explore and experiment, is generally constrained. The insights of Friedrich Pestalozzi, Johann Fröbel, Maria Montessori, John Dewey and other early child-centred educational theorists — that learning is grounded in experience — seem increasingly challenged by intensive parenting and the wider apprehensions of a risk society.

These debates and concerns frame Joan Healey’s new book, The Cubbies, a joyous history of the adventure playground she helped establish in 1974 in Melbourne’s inner-suburban Fitzroy.

Healey grew up in nearby Westgarth. Like some of her contemporaries, she escaped what she saw as the conformity and predictability of 1950s Australia for more than a decade of wandering and working in North America and Europe. A job advertisement for a play leader in London’s counter-culture magazine Time Out led her to a vacant lot in Notting Hill that had been transformed into “a higgledy-piggledy forest of turrets and tyres, splashed wildly with paint, toppling over a wooden fence like a giant pumpkin plant, with kids clambering all over it.” Free to muck about however they wanted with whatever came to hand, the kids built forts and shelters, raced billy carts, played in mud, devised elaborate games, and generally relished the conditions. Returning to Melbourne, Healey resolved to establish a similar patch there.

The concept of an adventure playground is generally attributed to Carl Sorensen, a Danish landscape architect interested in creating opportunities for what Fröbel termed “natural play” in urban settings. The idea traded on the persistent contrast between the benefits of direct experiences of nature in rural areas and the corrosive environment of cities and, more recently, exposure to technology. Richard Louv’s immensely popular Last Child in the Woods (2005), diagnosing nature-deficit disorder in children, is a recent iteration.

Sorensen also argued that city children, like their rural counterparts, should become familiar with the use of tools and materials. In the late 1930s, working with local educationists, he set up a family and children’s park that rejected the functionalism of existing playgrounds in favour of providing materials for children to use in designing their own experiences.

Sorensen’s ideas crystallised further on seeing children playing in the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and in 1943 he and play leader John Bertelsen set up a “junk playground” on a deserted patch in Emdrup, Copenhagen.

After a visit that year to Emdrup, British landscape architect Marjory Allen, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, took the concept to London, setting up the playground on the Notting Hill bomb site where Healey was later to work.

Sorensen and Bertelsen’s advocacy of skrammlog or “junkology” was not universally welcomed. Criticism focused on aesthetics, discipline and risk. Sorensen responded to aesthetic concerns by screening the Emdrup site from its surrounds with dense plantings. Marjory Allen headed off perceptions of disorder and delinquency with a clever rebadging of the sites as adventure playgrounds. A long-time child welfare campaigner, she had overseen a wartime project to refashion the building rubble from bombsites into children’s toys. But risk-averse officials objected to her proposal to turn the bombsites themselves over to children. Her devastating riposte: better a broken bone than a broken spirit.

The Fitzroy site Healey eyed for Australia’s first adventure playground was a large vacant space owned by the Victorian education department, bordered by the Fitzroy town hall, a police station, a Catholic church and school, a creche and, looming on the southern border, high-rise public housing towers. In different ways, the first four institutions all found fault with the new facility along the lines that Sorensen and Allen encountered. But it was the children living in the high-rise, mostly from newly arrived communities and all lacking space, materials and sometimes parental licence for self-directed play, that Healey set her sights on.

She was buoyed by the optimism of the 1970s. New and innovative federal and state government departments dealing with youth, community development and recreation suggested political and funding support. But the enterprise scraped along precariously for years, with Healey and two co-workers operating in a cycle of short-term funding requiring the seemingly endless preparation of grant applications and acquittals. It’s a burden familiar to many community workers, but Healey’s notes and observations at the time provided an archive from which she has drawn creatively for the book.

If funding agencies were sometimes reluctant to support the vision succinctly articulated by John Bertelsen — that children need places to play in, not to play on — young people embraced the idea enthusiastically. Instinctively, it seemed, they began to scrounge material to build the cubby houses that gave the site its name. Local business donated crates and pallets, old tyres, carpet scraps and more, the staff distributed basic hand tools, and the youthful building cooperatives, mostly comprising boys, set to work. Structures might last only a few days, but it was the experience not the product that mattered.

Instinctively, too, it seemed, the children began to dig garden plots and bring animals onto the site, applying their new construction skills to make guinea pig and rabbit hutches, chook pens, pigeon coops and more. Some animals feature as memorably in the book as the children. Lambchop, brought from a distant sheep farm, quickly adapted to rough-and-tumble inner-city life, surviving a kidnap attempt, developing a craving for discarded cigarette butts and creating mischief in a nativity play staged at the Catholic church. It became such a fixture that its profile featured on the Cubbies’ logo.

The building enterprise branched out further when young Jesus, from the high rise, set about constructing a sailing boat. One Sunday, the boat, its coat of paint still wet, was hoisted, mast upright, atop Healey’s tiny Austin sedan and driven across the city for its maiden voyage. The members of the Black Rock Yacht Club had surely never seen its like on the launch ramp, and everyone but Jesus, it seemed, was amazed when it floated.

Among these anecdotes, Healey’s discussion of the social and economic context in which the Cubbies operated underscores the challenges of community and youth work and the responsibilities and affective labour required of people in those roles. Healey writes movingly of the dilemmas that the social context posed for the free-play ethic: it was deliberately not instrumental, not aimed at “improving” children, but could their welfare needs be ignored?

As well as dealing with disputes and occasional bullying, Healey was aware of some children’s exposure to poverty, domestic violence and drug use, of the vulnerability of children home alone or locked out until late because their parents were working. Links were gradually forged with local community and health organisations, placing the Cubbies within an ecosystem of social care and lifting some of the burden from its staff.

The Cubbies survived an early attempt to close the place down. And the adventure playground concept soon spread, with at least four others established across inner Melbourne and more across Australia. At times, the concept had powerful supporters. Healey namechecks both the Fraser government’s social security minister Margaret Guilfoyle and the Hawke government’s deputy prime minister Lionel Bowen as two champions who rescued the project from financial precarity with longer-term funding.

Much of The Cubbies is voiced through the young people involved, and in doing so Healey recalls a vernacular of young Australia that now seems lost. Generations of children moving through the playground reflected waves of settlement — southern European, central and south American, Southeast Asian, African — but all, at least on Healey’s telling, were quick to pick up the playground argot. The pressure to transform the site, to minimise its supposed risk (Healey’s catalogue of injuries is remarkably slight) was ever a factor.

Still badged as an adventure playground, the Cubbies continues to operate on the original site. But like many of its counterparts, the ethic of self-direction and build-your-own has receded in favour of manufactured play structures and experiences. Things in Fitzroy, it seems, are not quite as grouse as they once were. •

The Cubbies: The Battle for Australia’s First Adventure Playground
By Joan Healey | Monash University Publishing | $36.99 | 288 pages

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That quest resulted in A Very Secret Trade: The Dark Story of Gentlemen Collectors in Tasmania, a meticulously researched, beautifully written and deeply moving account of the shadow market in the skeletal remains of Tasmania’s first people.

“Looking for more” involved an international search of public and institutional archives and private papers. Pybus’s critical reading of these extensive sources revealed shadow accounts, code words and deliberate omissions in correspondence to museums, universities and private collectors, as well as the removal of written records from institutional archives. These techniques of subterfuge and concealment, she writes, were key to this “secret whitefella business.” But the surviving clues and archival traces helped her identify the roles key figures played in the mutilation of corpses, the plundering of graves and the trade in skeletal material.

Who were the members of this “worshipful society of body-snatchers,” as a newspaper of the time called it? Pybus details an extraordinary cross-section of Vandemonian society, from the highest social echelon of politicians, public officials, civil servants, land holders, academics, teachers, merchants and private collectors through to the “resurrection men” engaged in the dirty business of exhumation. The most conflicted of these characters — “the foxes in charge of the hen house” in Pybus’s words — were the officials appointed as the “protectors” or administrators of the settlements to which Indigenous Tasmanians were confined following the notorious “Black War” of 1830.

German colonisers of southwest Africa pursuing a similar policy of Indigenous removal labelled their settlements “concentration camps”: a more accurate description, says Pybus, but not attuned to English pretensions of rescue and redemption. No more satisfactory was “Aboriginal Establishment,” the official title of the settlements at Wybalenna on Flinders Island and, following its failure, at Oyster Cove in southeast Tasmania. But a greater contrast between the banality of that name and the treatment of the residents in life and death could not be imagined.

The best known of the Pybus’s cast of characters is the London-born builder and evangelical George Augustus Robinson, a friend of the author’s ancestor Richard Pybus (himself an English settler granted a huge tract of Bruny Island on his arrival in Van Diemen’s Land in 1829). Robinson was a determined social climber and place-seeker, his professed humanitarian concern for the first people impossible to disentangle from his desire for reputational and financial rewards. Pybus documents his “friendly mission” through Van Diemen’s Land, culminating in the confinement of the remaining first peoples at Wybalenna under his protectorate, in her biography of Truganini, who was one of Robinson’s companions on that sojourn.

Here, Pybus focuses on Robinson’s trading activities. Although he was never accorded the social status he desired, he managed to acquire through land speculation the substantial wealth that underwrote his extended travel in Europe after he retired and his villa near Bath, where he housed a collection of skulls taken from the Wybalenna burial ground. Following his death in 1866, his widow sold seven remaining skulls to the German anthropologist and museum director Felix von Luschan. So prized were these items that on his deathbed in 1923, writes Pybus, von Luschan was negotiating their sale to the American Museum of Natural History for a present-day sum of around US$730,000.

At the opposite end on the Vandemonian social scale, reputation-building in scientific circles was the central concern. Two standout characters in the book — both of them widely recognised names in present-day Tasmania — are the medico William Lodewyck Crowther and the man who probably wrote the letter that set Pybus on her quest, lawyer Morton Allport.

Both men were amateur naturalists, a pursuit that made no distinction between non-human and human specimens (an attitude legitimised by anthropology’s inclusion within the natural sciences at that time). Some of their interests are represented in the important Tasmaniana collections held in the Crowther and Allport libraries of the State Library of Tasmania.

William Crowther was a medical practitioner and consultant at Hobart’s general hospital, a businessman and a landholder, an amateur zoologist and, briefly, the colony’s premier. But he was nonetheless dogged by reputational problems, the legacy, Pybus says, of a father and several uncles “who might well have stepped from the pages of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.”

Crowther’s father, also a medico, had fled his creditors in Britain by accepting a position as surgeon on a ship bound for Hobart Town, the journey briefly interrupted when he was put ashore with his family in Rio di Janeiro for drunkenly horsewhipping a fellow passenger who happened to be the colony’s new solicitor-general, Alfred Stephen.

Following a Hobart schooling, Crowther Jr. studied medicine in London. But he was unable to secure a suitable position there after graduating and returned home. Pybus’s assessment of him as an Anglophile and a sycophant but also an outsider who saw himself stymied by officialdom provides context to his relentless pursuit of the skulls and skeletons of Indigenous Tasmanians. Their destination was the Hunterian Museum, established by celebrated Scottish surgeon and anatomist John Hunter and acquired by the London-based Royal College of Surgeons in 1799.

By the mid-nineteenth century, emerging interest in physical anthropology and comparative anatomy had created a thriving market for skeletons. Craniometry, a foundational technique for German anatomist Johan Blumenbach’s widely embraced theory dividing humans into five racial categories, was reliant on a ready supply of skulls, with those from first peoples in remote locations such as Van Diemen’s Land especially favoured. The dwindling population of Indigenous Tasmanians, ravaged by introduced disease and appalling treatment as prisoners of the state, added notes of urgency and, ultimately, scarcity to the business.

The fate of two Indigenous Tasmanians — “King” Billy Lanne and Truganini — is foregrounded in the tapestry woven so skilfully by Pybus. Billy, considered Truganini’s husband at Oyster Cove although he was thirty years her junior, crewed on whalers working in the Southern Ocean towards the end of his short life, periodically returning to port to be feted in Hobart’s streets as the last of his race and to find whatever comfort he might at the bottom of a pint pot.

Crowther was only one of the Hobart collectors with designs on Billy’s skeleton, which he had promised the College of Surgeons. How he came to be present in Billy’s favourite pub, the Dog and Partridge, at the moment Billy died in a room upstairs is unexplained, but Pybus suggests it typifies the scheming and malevolence associated with the trade.

The tug-of-war over Billy’s corpse between Crowther and members of the Royal Society of Tasmania, among them Morton Allport, resulted in Crowther removing Billy’s skull and members of the Royal Society removing his feet and hands while his corpse was supposedly under guard in the general hospital morgue. Billy was buried in St David’s Park shortly after, with a procession of Hobart worthies following the coffin through Hobart streets to honour the “last of his race.” But the grave was secretly dug up the following night and the body — minus the skull Crowther had borrowed from another corpse, which was left rolling around nearby graves — was returned to the morgue awaiting retrieval by the Royal Society.

Morton Allport, also a passionate naturalist, was Crowther’s determined opponent: an “insider” who was vice-president of the Royal Society of Tasmania, the body that established the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery. Allport sought to augment the museum’s collection of first people’s skeletons and win recognition from major museums and learned societies internationally through his trading.

By the mid-nineteenth century, although a partner in the flourishing Hobart law firm established by his father, Allport was not above turning a profit from the resurrection business. Pybus notes that in 1871, while eyeing membership of learned societies in Europe, he paid around $2000 in present value for three complete skeletons from Flinders Island, selling one to the Musée Royal d’Histoire Naturelle de Belgique for $5000.

William Crowther retained Billy’s skull until his death, but did not pursue the trade any further, perhaps sensing its threat to his political ambitions. But William Crowther’s son Edward purchased the Oyster Cove site, and he and his son, William Edward Crowther, exhumed a substantial number of bodies from the burial ground there. A long-time trustee of the Tasmanian Museum, William Edward Crowther donated the collection to the museum in 1963. Both the museum and the State Library, it must be noted, acknowledge the troubled associations of the collections.

If Billy Lanne showed little outward concern for his fate after death, Truganini was terrified of what might happen to her. Pybus recounts how she entreated Reverend Henry Atkinson, parish minister at Oyster Cove and one of her trusted friends, to row her from Oyster Cove towards Bruny Island, her country. Pybus quotes from Atkinson’s recollections, published some years later:

[T]o his surprise, she made him stop rowing in the middle of the channel. In a flood of tears, she told him all her people were dead and men in Hobart had taken their skulls. Now they would want her skull. Kneeling before him she clasped her arms around his legs and pleaded, “Bury me here, it is the deepest place. Promise me. Promise me.”

That was not to be, at least not initially. Following closure of the Oyster Cove establishment in 1874, Truganini’s final two years were spent in the Hobart house where Allport had installed Oyster Cove’s last superintendent, John Dandridge. After Dandridge’s sudden death, his wife Matilda, whose father, the artist John Skinner Prout, had given painting lessons to young Allport with limited success, had sole charge of Truganini. Allport hovered. “The last of the Mohicans still lives, but very dicky,” he wrote to a friend.

When Truganini died at the house in 1876, her body was taken to the general hospital. This time, though, mindful of the public outcry over Billy Lanne’s remains, the Tasmanian government refused the Royal Society’s request for immediate access to the body. Truganini was instead interred in the convict women’s gaol in South Hobart, in the shadow of Mount Wellington.

The Royal Society waited, and after two years gained approval from the Legislative Council to exhume her remains. Truganini’s skeleton was sent to the National Museum of Victoria to be articulated for display, returning to Hobart as a featured exhibit near the entrance of the museum’s new Tasmanian Room.

It wasn’t until 1945 that Henry Atkinson’s son, also a religious minister, wrote to Hobart’s Mercury newspaper to recall Truganini’s plea to be buried in D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Pressure built to remove her skeleton from public display, but the museum resisted calls for her wish to be fulfilled. Sydney University’s A.P. Elkin and other academic heavyweights high-handedly claimed that the prospective loss to science far outweighed the “wave of sentimentality” motivating the burial request — despite the fact, as Pybus notes, that almost no scientific research was undertaken on the remains.

The museum continued its fight to retain the skeleton, even as the Tasmanian parliament passed legislation in 1974 transferring “rights” to the remains to the state government. In 1976, following a long campaign by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Truganini’s remains were returned to the Aboriginal community. This act, in Pybus’s incisive words, was an assertion of that community’s Aboriginality and its resistance to the dominant narrative of possession and extinction. Truganini’s remains were cremated and her ashes scattered over the channel waters.

After his death in 1885 William Crowther achieved a significant measure of social recognition. His bronze statue in Hobart’s premier public space, Franklin Square, its classical contrapposto stance representing movement and vigour, is the final image in Pybus’s book. Just last month the statue was toppled and messages scrawled on its plinth: “What goes around” and “Decolonise.”

The wide national press coverage of the toppling contrasted with minimal publicity given to an event the previous week: the arrival of a police officer at the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre with four brown-paper evidence bags from the state coroner’s office. Inside were ancestral remains from two locations in the state. This was not the first time something similar had occurred, commented the centre’s campaign manager, Nala Mansell. “We’re at a loss as to how, after 220 years, the remains of Aboriginal people in this state continue to be treated with the utmost disrespect in a manner that we understand would not be OK if it was a non-Aboriginal person,” she was quoted as saying.

That episode underscores a summary observation in Pybus’s book. Why does Crowther claim all the outrage and not others? “The desecration of graves and mutilation of bodies,” she writes, “was not the work of one or two morally deficient individuals, but a systematic process baked into the colonial project from the beginning.” •

A Very Secret Trade: The Dark Story of Gentlemen Collectors in Tasmania
By Cassandra Pybus | Allen and Unwin | $34.99 | 336 pages

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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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Lake Pedder was a favourite destination, a place where Truchanas and his family camped and Hobart’s artistic salon convened for many summers. The jewel of Tasmania’s southwest, Pedder was first mapped in the 1830s; by the end of the nineteenth century it was being spruiked as a tourist drawcard. A walking track was cut through soon after, and the first light plane landed on its magnificent quartzite beach in 1946. Despite this, Truchanas felt that few Tasmanians were aware of the lake’s majesty or prepared to defend it in the face of an uncompromising political vision of hydro-industrialisation. Despite Pedder’s inclusion in a national park in 1955, the Hydro soon began investigating the catchment’s potential for power generation, and in 1967 state parliament legislated the lake’s destruction.

Truchanas once asked his friend, the Hobart artist Max Angus, for a painting of Lake Pedder. As Angus retells it, “He said to me one day, ‘I want a dream of Lake Pedder. Anybody can take a photograph.’” That request, with its portent that future generations might only dream about the lake, frames the narrative of Natasha Cica’s superb Pedder Dreaming: Olegas Truchanas and a Lost Tasmanian Wilderness.

Truchanas was born in 1923. A keen sailor, he was chosen for Lithuania’s sailing team in the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, but war and the occupation of his homeland by Soviet troops dashed his Olympic hopes. When his family fled Lithuania for Germany, Olegas remained behind to participate in resistance activities. He was reunited with his parents and sister at the end of the war but travelled alone to Australia as a displaced person. After a stint in Bonegilla Migrant Camp, he settled in Tasmania, serving his two-year labour contract with the Australian government in Hobart’s Electrolytic Zinc Works. His family joined him in Hobart.

Truchanas’s dangerous life had taken a psychic toll. One of his earliest Tasmanian friends recalls him looking nervously around when they first went bushwalking. Soon, though, he was at home in the rugged Tasmanian landscape. He climbed Federation Peak in 1952, in what was possibly the first solo attempt, and a few years later kayaked from Lake Pedder to Macquarie Harbour, navigating the Serpentine and Gordon rivers. Strahan residents were astonished to see the small kayak heading towards the wharf, propelled by wind in a makeshift sail, Truchanas steering with a cord attached to his toe while he reclined with a book. The kayak is now a prized part of the National Museum of Australia’s collection.

Truchanas cultivated his interest in photography through local camera clubs and soon had work published in Australian photographic journals. He worked in 35mm format, first in monochrome and later in colour, capturing the changes in light and tone that make southwest Tasmania such a dynamic landscape. We now associate Tasmanian wilderness photography with the precise, large-format work of Truchanas’s friend and protégé Peter Dombrovskis; Truchanas’s work is softer, perhaps more subtle, but his themes and composition were hugely influential.

In 1956, Olegas married Melva Stocks, Launceston born and a keen bushwalker. While it’s easy to romanticise Truchanas’s life, the job of raising a young family with Olegas frequently absent – bushwalking, campaigning, volunteering as a sailing instructor for the National Fitness Council – could be difficult, Melva told Cica. After fifteen years or so, Truchanas had assembled an unrivalled visual archive of Tasmania’s wilderness at his West Hobart home. In February 1967, when bushfires engulfed much of southeast Tasmania and fire raged through Hobart’s bush suburbs, Truchanas was at the Hydro office in the city centre. Pregnant with their third child, Melva attempted to control the flames, but fled as they took hold. The archive was lost, along with their home and possessions.

As new Hydro planning threatened the Gordon River area as well as Lake Pedder, Truchanas made numerous trips to re-photograph these areas. He also deepened his commitment to Tasmania’s nascent environment movement, and his growing profile as a conservationist put him at odds with his employer. Other Hydro employees, including Truchanas’s friend, engineer Ralph Hope-Johnston, were similarly conflicted. Cica discusses the surprisingly civil relations between the Hydro and conservationists at that time, describing how the Hydro’s long-serving chief executive Sir Allan Knight attended a fundraising exhibition of paintings and photographs for the Lake Pedder campaign in 1971 and bought a Max Angus watercolour of Pedder on Truchanas’s advice. But the conservationists posed no political threat to Knight at that stage. It was the formation of the movement’s political wing, the United Tasmania Group, which fought (albeit unsuccessfully) the 1972 Tasmanian election, that marked the turning point in the debate.

By the end of 1971, with work proceeding on the three dams that would eventually impound the largest inland body of water in Australia and submerge Lake Pedder, Truchanas commented to friends on his growing exhaustion. At the age of forty-eight he planned another arduous solo trip along the Gordon River. He had just been offered a job teaching photography, canoeing and bush skills at the new Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, and the prospect of leaving the Hydro’s employment delighted him. But he never took up the position. On 6 January 1972, preparing to launch his kayak into the Gordon River, he slipped, became trapped and drowned.

Cica notes that Truchanas’s artistic legacy became known to the wider Australian public through the 1975 publication of The World of Olegas Truchanas. The publication was compiled by the Tasmanian salon, undeterred by lukewarm responses from prospective publishers. The cosmopolitan Truchanas may have been amused by one publisher’s cringing advice not to include his name in the title. The first edition sold out in six weeks. In total, it sold a remarkable 40,000 copies and pioneered wilderness publishing in Australia.

Pedder Dreaming is a beautiful book, richly illustrated with Truchanas’s photography and the art and photography of his friends. Cica offers us much more than a biography; the book describes an important period in the development of Australian environmentalism, and it is a cautionary tale about the destructiveness of unchecked power. Truchanas escaped a brutal form of totalitarianism in Lithuania to find another, milder version in Tasmania. Has the susceptibility to a simple economic prescription changed? Contemplating the current battles over the Tamar Valley pulp mill, Cica recalls Truchanas’s speech at a Lake Pedder rally:

“If we can revise some of our attitudes towards the land under our feet; if we can accept the role of a steward, and depart from the role of the conqueror; if we can accept the view that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole – then Tasmania that is truly beautiful can be a shining beacon in the dull, uniform and largely artificial world.” •

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Thirty years ago two little-known American sociologists, Ramon Oldenburg and Dennis Brissett, coined the term “third place” to describe the locations – other than home and work – that make up our social habitat. They mourned what they saw as a loss of opportunities for informal socialising in a world where people shuttle between where they live and where they work, increasingly cut off from wider social contacts.

Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, extolled the virtues of hairdressing salons, coffee shops, bars, bookstores – the sorts of local places where “unrelated people relate.” If his catalogue of interests seemed eccentric at the time, it wasn’t long before writers like Michael Porter, Robert Putnam and Richard Florida began to take an interest in the ways in which social networks sustain economic, political and civic life. For these writers, though, third places were mostly a backdrop for larger stories of regional and national competitiveness, and the decline of trust and social capital.

Oldenburg saw threats to third places in the dynamics of urban planning and property markets, and in changing patterns of work and leisure. The chief culprits were suburbanisation, car dependency and chain retailing. But a powerful undercurrent is his criticism of the failure of many academics and government policy-makers to comprehend the value and vulnerability of local community facilities, pubs, corner shops and unplanned public spaces.

Two new books, The Australian Pub and Community: Building Modern Australia, can both be read as responses to Oldenburg’s challenge. These two scholarly but highly accessible books document significant parts of Australia’s local social and civic infrastructure. Remarkably – and underscoring Oldenburg’s concern – each is a pioneering work in its field.

Given the central place of the pub in Australian culture, it seems extraordinary that the last national history of Australian pubs – by the architectural historian J.M. Freeland – was published as far back as 1966. As The Australian Pub’s authors – cultural historians Diane Kirkby, Tanja Luckins and Chris McConville – write, Freeland’s interest in pubs was on the margins of Australian historical scholarship at the time, although his architectural focus chimed with emerging concerns about historical preservation. The Australian Pub is a richly detailed cultural and political history that demonstrates its authors’ claim that the pub is “at the heart of modern Australian history.”

Community’s editors, Hannah Lewi and David Nichols from the University of Melbourne’s architecture faculty, use the term “modern” more precisely to give their handsome publication its conceptual bearings. Modernism united politics and architecture to promote community welfare and social progress through a new language of public architecture. Community picks up the story in the 1920s, showing how new ideas about progressive education, public health and recreation fed a reaction to Victorian architectural styles and a new environmental sensibility. Modernist public architecture featured sun-seeking, stripped-down, efficient and hygienic built forms: kindergartens, schools, libraries and community health centres. Modernism in this form implied both a government commitment to providing services and a new architectural ethic of social responsibility. That combination produced fine examples of community facilities that, argue Lewi and Nichols, are under increasing threat because they represent the ordinary and the recent rather than the canon of architectural heritage.

At first glance, these two books seem to chart alternative visions of Australian social and civic life. Among the early rationales for providing local education, recreation and civic facilities was the desire to provide alternatives to the pub and create avenues for self-improvement and socialisation that would assist bright young members of the working class. Temperance advocates were important players. As The Australian Pub notes, the growth of Australian colonies, especially during the gold rush, coincided with the global spread of the temperance movement. In Australia, Melbourne became a focal point, hosting a world temperance convention in 1880. Municipal councils gave ratepayers a “local option” to legislate for “dry” suburbs, and coffee palaces and temperance halls provided new social outlets. The subsequent decline in mutual societies, together with a concern to provide universal, secular social services and improve local finances, meant that municipal councils – often in partnership with community groups – became more active in building local infrastructure.

But, as Kirkby, Luckins and McConville make clear, pubs have a longstanding role as providers of services. In colonial Australia, pubs provided a range of social services, including accommodation and sustenance for travellers, rudimentary street lighting, and postal services. In many districts the pub was the only public facility, meeting place, even place of worship. Many local governments were formed at public meetings in local hotels, and much business was conducted there. Pubs served as recruiting stations during war and refuges during peacetime civil emergencies. Licence conditions required publicans – who were often women – to live on the premises and, argue the authors, the availability of accommodation gave many Australian pubs a domestic character.

This portrayal of pubs as places of informal socialising and conviviality – a picture vividly painted by Oldenburg – is qualified by The Australian Pub’s discussion of policing and criminality. While temperance never hardened into US-style prohibition in Australia, restrictions on liquor sales and the policing of sly-grogging were reinforced by laws that closed pubs to casual drinkers after six o’clock in the evening and all day Sunday. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Licence Reduction Boards began to close “undesirable” pubs around Australia. Between 1880 and 1930 Australia’s population doubled while the number of pubs halved.

Six o’clock closing was introduced in most states during the first world war, and wasn’t completely lifted until the 1960s. There is, according to the authors, no evidence that early closing reduced alcohol consumption, which had been declining per capita in Australia since 1880. Instead, it boosted private, mostly home-based consumption and fed the culture of public binge drinking that nineteenth-century commentators such as Anthony Trollope found so abhorrent. Even J.M. Freeland appears to have misinterpreted its impact on pubs. Where he criticised the “disembowelling” of pubs to cater for the six o’clock swill, Kirkby and her co-authors argue that other factors were at play in changing pubs’ appearance and operation. In Victoria, for instance, the requirement that pubs have only one public bar inevitably meant that the bar was as big as possible.

Six o’clock closing also put an end to the free counter lunches that fiercely competitive hotels had increasingly been offering. In the late nineteenth century, the French critic Oscar Comettant expressed amazement that Australians paid for a glass of beer but ate for nothing. Threats by the breweries (who had been lobbied by smaller hotels) to withhold supplies to any hotel offering free lunches effectively killed off what had become an unsustainable practice. Soon, the rise of department store cafeterias catering for the city lunch trade introduced a new alternative to the monotonous fare of hotel dining rooms. When hotels re-introduced counter lunches after the second world war, quick service and a more varied cuisine signalled a transition to modern-day pub dining. By the late twentieth century, many Australian pubs had come full circle – no longer beer halls, they had become interesting places to eat and central to travelling and tourism in Australia.

Pubs were not the dangerous and vice-ridden places described by temperance advocates, but neither should they be idealised as cosy and sociable. The authors of The Australian Pub argue that the illegality centred on pubs may have been overstated, but their folklore does overlook recurrent violence at the margins. The loss of the domestic attributes of Australian pubs contributed to this reputation: new pubs in new suburbs often lacked the intimate scale and informal social controls of their inner-city counterparts, and the number of inner-city nightclubs with extended trading hours multiplied. Longer trading hours have seen an increase in pub violence, which has brought restrictions on “late night” (or early morning) trading. Yet, as the authors note, the most dangerous place in Australia is not the public bar but the private home.

The reputation of community facilities as over-programmed and over-regulated – reinforced, perhaps, by the negative connotations of the term “public works” and the petty officialdom portrayed in television series like Grass Roots and The Librarians – is also an oversimplification. As the contributors to Community argue, a self-help ethos lies behind much of Australia’s local infrastructure. Kindergarten and free library movements, swimming pool fundraising, public reserve committees of management and local building cooperatives played a central role in campaigning for, financing and, in some cases, building community facilities.

Here, too, there’s a risk of idealising a complex phenomenon. Lewi and Nichols are among many commentators who see the development of “community” as a new avenue for government control. Part of the modernists’ creed was an unquestioned faith in the expert, and community facilities – baby clinics and kindergartens, for example – included design features that reinforced the authority of newly emerged professions. These institutions promoted scientific knowledge and expert intervention over the knowledge of mothers, and reinforced class, gender and race distinctions. In the 1920s, for example, the Country Women’s Association answered the NSW government’s call to help provide rural maternal and child health services, eventually operating 138 sites. But racial tension flared in the late 1950s when the white membership of the association’s Kempsey branch refused to share the baby health centre with the Aboriginal members of the nearby Burnt Bridge–Greenhill branch.

As Hannah Lewi argues, the design and management of municipal swimming pools also promoted physical and moral safety, especially for young people. Segregated bathing for men and women had ended in Australia at the start of the twentieth century, but segregated changing rooms, costume standards and strict monitoring of behaviour reinforced existing social mores. Again, this is not a straightforward story. Progressive educators and local officials, especially after the second world war, recognised a need for young men and women to socialise in informal settings away from parental oversight. The municipal pool provided such a place.

Community facilities were also important sites for testing citizenship rights in Australia – for identifying what the “public” meant in local public settings. The informal racial segregation at some pools was famously exposed in 1965 by Charles Perkins and the University of Sydney “Freedom Riders” in the NSW town of Moree. Citizenship is also an important theme in The Australian Pub, particularly in relation to full access for women and Indigenous people. In the same year as the Moree pool protest, two University of Queensland academics, Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bognor, chained themselves to the bar of Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel, starting a wave of action to liberate pubs across Australia. The abolition of a colour bar has been more problematic, however. In the space of twenty years, argue Kirkby and her co-authors, the focus of attention shifted from the campaign to allow Indigenous people to drink in pubs to mechanisms for monitoring the impact of alcohol on Indigenous people. Giving Indigenous people the right to drink, they observe, did little to overcome persistent social and health issues.

In colonial Australia, sports clubs and sporting competitions were established in pubs, and sporting contests were often staged on open ground around pubs. Urban development and the growth and formalisation of sporting codes broke this link, and sporting organisations turned to local councils and public reserve managers. Sport became a key motivator in acquiring public parkland, and local authorities began to develop one of their most important roles by creating major facilities, such as swimming pools, and by providing sporting clubs with land and planning approval.

Community singles out lawn bowling clubs as a case study. While some of Australia’s leading architects made their names by designing major local facilities, the history of bowling features ordinary and often makeshift buildings and substantial voluntary commitment. Bowling, argues Hannah Lewi, played a significant part in ordering and greening the modern Australian neighbourhood, and its facilities are remarkable not for their architectural merit but as a catalyst for social networks. Bowling also had exclusive aspects that it has never fully shaken off. Until the middle of the twentieth century, women were excluded from club membership or assigned an auxiliary status. Bowling greens were a prominent feature of typical multi-use municipal parks, but – especially as the sport’s popularity declined – this privilege came to be questioned.

Just as Robert Putnam thought the lone ten-pin bowler indicated the erosion of social capital in the United States, the decline of lawn bowling says something about social and physical changes in Australian neighbourhoods. As bowling clubs close, opportunities for social contact and recreation, especially among older people, decline. (And, Lewi points out, research indicates that younger members of bowling clubs are not inclined to volunteer for the off-green roles that keep clubs running.) In the event of closure, the fate of club assets – land and buildings often financed by community contributions – has also been contentious.

Many factors have highlighted the vulnerability of the local public realm in recent years – pressure on local governments to reduce their outlays and “rationalise” facilities, the dynamics of urban planning and property markets, and changing patterns of work and leisure. As Australian cities’ populations become denser, pubs and community facilities are affected in different but equally significant ways. Publicans battle to continue staging live music amid growing populations in inner suburbs, but they also find new markets for more intimate, socially oriented spaces. Urban consolidation places stress on community facilities and public open space, underscoring the folly of some earlier decisions to dispose of public assets. The remarkable success of rail trails, with the cycling boom giving disused railway easements a new life, amply demonstrates the value of keeping public land in public hands.

The survival of local places requires intelligent and prudent public policy. But it also depends on the ability of these places to adapt and transform. Reinvesting in community facilities has been a key element of urban regeneration, but the single-purpose facilities of earlier times are giving way to multi-purpose sites. New design interests in flexible or “vague” community spaces echo Ramon Oldenburg’s plea for more informality and closer attention to the places in which social ecologies take root and flourish. The Australian Pub and Community: Building Modern Australia make substantial contributions to understanding the return of the local. •

The Australian Pub
By Diane Kirkby, Tanja Luckins and Chris McConville | UNSW Press | $49.95

Community: Building Modern Australia
Edited by Hannah Lewi and David Nichols | UNSW Press | $59.95

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Over the past decade Leigh, an economist, has collected a “mountain of data” about community life and social capital in Australia since the second world war. The book’s chapters work through volunteering, associational membership, work and workplaces, neighbourhoods, friendships, religious belief, and participation in sport and cultural activities to crunch the numbers on Australian social capital. With the exception of an upturn in volunteering around the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, they chart steadily downwards. This makes the reader’s task sound formidable, but Leigh’s conversational style produces an engaging text. “I don’t know about you, but in my own case, I don’t believe a claim unless I see the raw numbers. But it doesn’t hit me in the gut until I hear a story that backs it up,” he says.

Leigh underplays the effort involved in assembling the data on which the book is based, from census records to the membership patterns of “third sector” organisations – it’s been an on-again, off-again project, he says – but the end result is a rich vein of quantitative data that he mines profitably. But the brevity of this book hampers a nuanced treatment of both the concept of social capital and our understanding of its Australian context. The tension between Leigh’s wariness of nostalgia and his desire to rebuild earlier community forms is also apparent in other social capital literature, and an extended and more reflexive narrative might have fruitfully explored this conundrum.

As the earlier quote suggests, the primacy Leigh gives to statistics – his “belief” in raw numbers – means that qualitative data don’t have the same analytical standing in the book, but play a service role, embroidering the text with anecdotes. The limits of this approach are apparent when Leigh candidly acknowledges there is little data on informal socialising and social capital among Indigenous communities and “poor and migrant neighbourhoods.” But more troublingly, this gap raises a concern that social capital is a construct that normalises middle class values and diverts attention from structural factors that have widened inequality and social division in recent decades.

The analysis is perhaps at its thinnest when Leigh discusses information and communication technologies. Television was a social capital bogey for Robert Putnam; the internet is problematic for Leigh. While he is no technophobe, his conclusion that the internet could ultimately reduce community participation is countered by analyses – such as those of William Dutton, of the Oxford Internet Institute – of how the internet has been used to boost local connectedness. Dutton suggests that internet users are more socially connected than non-users, but that the dynamics of the internet are challenging sociological staples such as connectedness, neighbourhood and community. He also argues that the truly disconnected are those people who are “twice disadvantaged” through living in neighbourhoods that foster few social ties while also being on the wrong side of the digital divide.

And Leigh’s solutions for rebuilding social capital? These boil down to making everywhere in Australia pretty much like Canberra. The Australian Capital Territory tops most of Leigh’s social capital metrics aggregated at state level, and Leigh is clearly enthused by aspects of Canberra’s urban design that promote neighbourhood-level sociability. In this he follows giant footsteps. Canberra’s praises were also sung by Hugh Stretton in his landmark 1970 work Ideas for Australian Cities. But Canberra is atypical in important ways: wealthier, better educated, less ethnically diverse. Holding Canberra up as a model risks reinforcing the association between social and cultural capital that has troubled critics of social capital since the concept gained prominence in social analysis in the 1990s.

Setting aside these concerns, though, Disconnected is an accessible and lively discussion of a key issue in Australian society and deserves to be widely read. Andrew Leigh’s election as the Member for Fraser, ACT, in the 2010 federal election now puts him in a unique position to connect social analysis and social policy. •

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WALKING into the booklined room, the noise hits you like a wave. The raised voices of patrons, the clatter of chairs, the shuffle of bags and laptops. Staff are on patrol but seem oblivious to the chatter and ceaseless movement.

It’s a fair bet that State Library of Victoria managers would be disappointed if it was quiet in here. I’m sitting in Mr Tulk, the library’s vibrant, street-level cafe, which is audaciously named after the Melbourne Public Library’s severe and bookish first librarian. Books that might have once served the library’s primary aims are stacked horizontally up the walls, contributing to an ambience that is clearly popular in Melbourne’s competitive cafe economy.

As you walk further into the building, though, there seems little to distinguish the activities in Mr Tulk from those in the library’s reading rooms. People are tapping away at laptops, reading books, sending texts, talking – everything but drinking coffee.

At least this is the view of several correspondents to Melbourne’s Age newspaper over the past week. Melbourne academic and writer Leslie Cannold fired the first salvo, suggesting that the library’s magnificent domed reading room was too noisy for concentrated work. The room is a stop-off for school tours of the building, but it is the after-school atmosphere that particularly annoys Cannold. The lack of self-regulation by library patrons is compounded by the invisibility of staff. The reading room’s central raised desk, from where library staff once observed all corners of the room, is no longer used. The sign indicating that this is a place reserved for silent work and study is, on Cannold’s account, a case of false advertising.

The library’s CEO, Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, sprang to the institution’s defence by pointing out its success in boosting visitor numbers among young people. The paradox is that, despite complaints about noisy teenagers, this cohort is notoriously difficult to attract to public cultural institutions. Museums and libraries have devoted considerable resources to developing imaginative and engaging programs for teens and young adults, especially young males. Equity and access concerns, and the self-interest involved in building future audiences, lie behind this strategy. Critics accuse cultural managers of sacrificing their core audience in the chase for younger patrons, but research has demonstrated that early exposure to libraries is important in establishing a pattern of life-long use.

In one sense, librarians are trapped by their own noisy rhetoric. Libraries Are Loud (But Who’s Listening?) was the title of the inaugural conference of Public Libraries Australia, the peak body formed in 2005 as a focal point for sectoral advocacy. The motif resounds across the library world. Libraries Out Loud was a conference theme in 2010, this time hosted by the Illinois Library Association. Get it Loud in Libraries is a banner for a series of music concerts in British libraries, developed following a 2005 government report arguing that the 14–25 year old age group “don’t ordinarily use libraries, but love modern rock and pop music.” Simple – combine the two! Libraries Are Loud, a series of music performances by young people in New South Wales regional libraries, echoes the British program.

The rhetoric of loud libraries is the most in-your-face instance of a wider conversation about libraries and change initiated by librarians around the world. One part of this conversation circulates around the major impact of digital technologies and online information on library services and institutional forms. Another part focuses on the role and demeanour of librarians, and their interaction with library users. Sue McKenzie, head of Brent library service in north-west London, recently summarised the case for change thus: “people are fed up with what they say is an outdated image of libraries – humourless places staffed by strict officials demanding silence in the aisles.” But when the web managers of the Brent community information website, BRAIN, conducted a poll on the subject, 81 per cent of respondents “said NO to noisy libraries.”

Public libraries have never served a single public with a broadly shared outlook and code of behaviour. Major libraries, in particular, have a range of audience segments to cater for. The State Library of Victoria, for instance, has long had specialised reading rooms and collections, and has pitched to people with specialised information needs such as technical and business information. Now the activities of major libraries typically encompass online and in-person information services, seminars, exhibitions and other public programs, and a range of ancillary commercial activities. Changing information media and learning styles, too, influence the comportment of library users. The rearrangement of public reading rooms around group learning and wi-fi access is a signature of major city library regeneration, as visitors to the Victoria’s State Library and its newly renovated Queensland counterpart can observe.

But dynamic institutional developments like these won’t necessarily reassure the people who worry that libraries are becoming too noisy to perform their central function. Have we come to the end of the short historical moment in which silent reading took hold?

As the cultural studies scholar Ian Hunter reminds us, silent reading is a relatively recent development in the history of literacy. Emerging with the rise of Protestantism in Europe, the practice of intense, inward meditation on written texts was both a critique of rote learning and a strategy to promote self-regulation and personal development. The educational apparatus that developed with the rise of modern industrial states followed this pedagogical strategy. Museums and libraries paid particular attention to the civic ethos of their visitors – that is, to establishing and reinforcing behaviours appropriate to the public and institutional contexts. In the nineteenth century concern focused more on the newly literate working class than young people. The Melbourne Public Library installed a washbasin in its foyer for patrons prior to accessing the bookstock. The motif of cleanliness and personal uplift was extended to the collection, with Augustus Tulk and the library’s first chairman, Sir Redmond Barry, initially refusing to acquire current works of fiction.

Nor is noise in libraries uniformly registered. For example, the London Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera complained in 2009 that the British Library reading room was too quiet. In such an ambience, he suggested, sounds amplify, increasing the likelihood of distraction. For Sanghera, self-regarding behaviour rather than noise per se is the larger problem confronting public libraries. He, too, has a problem with young people invading the library cloisters, giggling and whispering, turning the place, in his salacious description, into “a petri dish of simmering lust.” No wonder he has trouble working there.

Rather than conduct a debate over decibel levels, behaviour in public libraries might better be analysed in terms of civility and public spiritedness. The political theorist Michael Walzer has long been concerned with what he sees as a decline of civility in liberal democracies. Walzer argues that cooperation and self-restraint are important practices of citizenship. The connections with silent reading are clear. But Walzer argues that civility should be based on active commitment to the public sphere rather than deference to authority. In Victoria, messages of civility and respect have a new political import with the development of a whole-of-government “respect agenda” to be overseen by the planning minister, Justin Madden. But a media strategy leaked from Madden’s office describing potential manipulation of the community consultation over the redevelopment of Melbourne’s landmark Windsor Hotel suggests the message has a way to go within government too.

Regulating behaviours and coordinating potentially conflicting activities is no doubt difficult in large and complex institutions. It is equally difficult in smaller municipal or regional libraries, many of which have less space to segregate programs. During the post-war phase of suburban growth, when much of Australia’s municipal infrastructure stock was built, separate “youth” facilities were common. Rationales included a desire to minimise program conflicts and provide young people with a chance to self-manage. Civic regeneration in recent years has reversed this trend, focusing on integration and multi-use facilities. Libraries are at the centre of this strategy. Additionally, Commonwealth and state school building programs increasingly favour shared school-community libraries. Such initiatives suggest that the question of conduct in public libraries, and in the wider public sphere, will require much wider discussion.

The State Library of Victoria’s domed reading room has been graced by some of Australia’s finest writers – and deserted by them, according to Cannold. Finding quiet or silent spaces is increasingly difficult in urban settings. In the 1980s the educator Ivan Illich proposed that silence be thought of as a commons – a resource that everyone shares and everyone has a responsibility to nurture. The library’s magnificent Swanston Street building is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register. The entry describes in detail the building’s evolution and architectural features, culminating with the construction of the reading room in 1913, rightly observing that the library is both an essential part of Melbourne’s culture and a site of national significance. But a quiet ambience is also part of the institutional heritage of major libraries, and just as palpable as the building fabric. Perhaps it is time to revise the building’s heritage listing to include its atmosphere, and give the silence of the reading room some statutory protection. •

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GOVERNMENTS place great emphasis on self-promotion, especially when it comes to announcing high profile public works. But no government has yet discovered which mysterious property in signs fixed to taxpayer-funded constructions seems to render them invisible to the public but a provocative eyesore to political opponents. So it is with the signs on school fences announcing the Commonwealth government’s $16 billion Building the Education Revolution program.

The symbolic content of the program is clearly important to the Rudd government, and it has been prepared to wear sustained criticism from the opposition over what the BER guidelines perhaps unwisely term “branding and recognition.” Under the guidelines, the signs must remain in place until March 2011, after the next federal election. The deputy prime minister and education minister, Julia Gillard, must be invited to the opening ceremonies of all new facilities. To synchronise this tour of duty with her significant parliamentary and other ministerial responsibilities, opening ceremony dates can’t be altered once locked in by her office.

Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne has been a persistent critic of the program’s publicity. He claimed a victory when the Australian Electoral Commission ruled that displaying the signs within six metres of school premises when they are being used as polling stations would contravene the Commonwealth Electoral Act. The government also accepted the AEC’s advice that authorisation may be required for the signs. Pyne claimed a victory, too, when the Australian National Audit Office announced in July that it would undertake a performance audit of BER.

Few deny that BER’s rationale is economic rather than educational. The program guidelines are issued under the banner of the National Building Economic Stimulus Plan, and contributing to economic recovery through rapid construction takes priority over provision of “learning environments” in the program objectives. Unless they have shovel-ready building plans, schools are instructed to use pre-set building designs to speed up construction. School principals need to seek Commonwealth approval to underspend BER funds allocated to them.

The program, and the crafting of its political message, has a value to the government that goes beyond demonstrating its capacity as an economic manager. Taking a more active Commonwealth stance in education policy – which is the province of state jurisdictions – was a central plank of Rudd’s 2007 electoral campaign. Achieving consensus and action through the Council of Australian Governments invests the Rudd government with authority in the federal sphere. And the scale and speed of BER also counters opposition criticism that Rudd leads an administration bogged down in inquiries and reviews.

But the focus on the instrumentality of the program raises the question: what happens after the revolution? What is likely to be the long-term legacy of BER? Will funds borrowed on the taxpayer’s credit card – as the opposition portrays the mechanics of stimulatory public finance – provide lasting educational and social benefits?

THE BER PROGRAM has three parts. The first provides primary schools with a new library, multipurpose hall or classrooms, or an upgrade of existing facilities. Funding allocations to individual schools are calculated on enrolments, from $250,000 for schools with up to fifty pupils to $3 million for schools with more than 400 pupils. All public and private primary schools, except those recently built and those slated for closure, are entitled to receive this grant.

The second part of BER is the provision of about 500 secondary school science or language learning centres. The cap on numbers means eligibility criteria are more tightly drawn, based on disadvantage, need and readiness to start construction. The third part, the National School Pride program, makes funds available for all schools to undertake minor capital works and maintenance.

It is the first part – the provision of new facilities to primary schools – that is the focus of opposition criticism and some dissatisfaction at school level. Minister Gillard has responded to criticism of generic building designs and of tendering and cost processes by pointing to the low number of complaints (forty-nine out of some 24,000 approved projects, on her figures). Concerns have been raised, too, that state education authorities – the funding conduits – are taking a slice off the top of project funds rather than passing the full amount on to school principals.

These issues are not new. Australian education departments responded to burgeoning school enrolments after the second world war by experimenting with modular designs and lightweight construction techniques. School facility planning and management is centralised because it requires technical expertise and coordination with other state planning agencies. Ensuring equity in the provision of educational goods is an important principal of public education, requiring central oversight.

Responding to criticism by several principals, the secretary of the Victorian Department of Education, Peter Dawkins, released a circular noting “the positive attitude and responsiveness of the overwhelming majority of our schools and principals.” Behind the scenes, though, department officials are struggling to resolve planning conflicts and fend off community cynicism. Victoria, along with other Australian states, has in recent years reversed the drain of funds from public schools and is in the midst of the largest school rebuilding program in the state’s education history. Combined in some areas with wider urban regeneration projects, the department has sought to consult with local communities, especially regarding the potential out-of-hours use of school facilities. While there are diverse opinions on how effective this consultation has been, officials are concerned that BER’s design runs interference with a wider, place-focused capital works program.

BER guidelines specify that facilities funded under the program will be available for use by community groups after school hours, for no or low cost. This chimes with state government policies aimed at encouraging flexible and extended use of school facilities. Although this laudable concept surfaces regularly in social and education policy, it is often caught in the snags of intergovernmental relations, especially as community infrastructure has traditionally been a local council responsibility. School facilities can stand empty for around a third of the year while many councils struggle to provide and maintain civic and recreation facilities in surrounding neighbourhoods.

Assuming a reasonable fit between school facility design and community need, the coordination and operational costs of extended use can be significant. Mundane issues such as security and cleaning are readily calculated. But how are long-term maintenance costs apportioned? Who liaises with the local council or community health service to promote the scheme and prioritise facility use?

Can more ambitious goals be set for BER that position “the community” as partners rather than clients or service consumers? The development of digital media hubs, providing training and developing local digital resources, and perhaps in the process re-engaging young people who have drifted out of formal schooling, could be one direction to explore. The US non-profit information technology company One Economy provides a useful model here. Such an initiative may help knit together the federal government’s broadband plans and state government thinking on digital schools, and bring libraries and other cultural resources into the picture as well.

The attitude to BER among state-level education officials and school principals I’ve spoken to in recent months can perhaps best be summarised as pragmatic rather than positive. As one education bureaucrat commented, given a choice between tax cuts and school infrastructure spending as means of stimulating the economy, I’d choose the latter. The chance for a wholesale upgrade of school facilities comes along once a generation.

But in the absence of a coherent long-term vision, backed by policy, funding and administrative support, the chance may well be squandered. Local schools may be saddled with additional maintenance costs that eat into salary or equipment budgets. Once the economy stabilises, the crisis rhetoric of BER and other economic stimulus programs may give way to the set-and-forget mentality that contributed to the run-down of public assets, particularly at local level, over the past few decades. Is this a fate we want for the children of this education revolution? •

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IN A POWERFUL passage in his report on the 1939 Black Friday bushfires in Victoria, Royal Commissioner Leonard Stretton highlighted the failure of public memory to convey the threat posed on that day. “Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy,” he wrote. “But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.”

Stretton recommended a public education campaign to promote awareness of fire prevention and forest protection. Five years later, the Save the Forests Campaign Council was formed, aiming to build a “forest conscience” that focused on revegetation and forest management. But did this essentially bureaucratic response achieve Stretton’s aim of inscribing the lessons of the 1939 fire in public memory?

The desire to learn from events like the 1939 fires has been echoed in a campaign by Melbourne’s Sunday Age for a museum to commemorate the bushfires in February. The campaign reflects the key role that museums play in such a task, and it also signals the changing ways in which we publicly recognise major events.

After the first world war the excesses of Victorian monumentalism gave way to simpler, personalised memorials to represent the local and national sacrifices during that conflict. Architectural modernism and a desire for “useful” structures gave us war memorial town halls, parks and swimming pools after the second world war. The rise of social history from the 1960s brought museums and their focus on lived experience to the fore. The Northern Territory’s Cyclone Tracy display, cited as a model by the Sunday Age, shows how museums can use personal narratives to convey the impact and significance of larger events, especially natural disasters. Canberra’s National Museum of Australia featured the 1939 Victorian bushfires amongst its 2001 opening exhibitions, with the ordinariness of the display’s centrepiece, charred items retrieved from the ashes of a house, providing a poignant reminder of the affective power of museums.

While the bushfire museum is a commendable suggestion, the idea of a single structure based in one of the townships most severely affected by the fires inevitably raises the question of representativeness. Who speaks on whose behalf in recording the terrible events of 2009? This core problem for museums has increasingly been approached through the idea of co-curatorship. Here, museum curators step away from their expert role to provide resources and guidance for communities to tell their own story. But the campaign also raises the less publicised issue of sustainability. The interpretive, educational and research functions sketched for the bushfire museum are ambitious, generally beyond the scope of a local community museum. But building the museum in a “neutral” location, perhaps serviced by existing research resources, runs the risk of disenfranchising local memory.

The role of local museums is to engage with their surrounding histories, cultures and environments. They seek to interpret and reflect on the local past and deepen understanding of the present. They collect and preserve significant aspects of a region’s material and visual culture. They provide a window on the creative talents and cultural expressions of a region. If they are truly connected with their surrounding community, they operate as fora for public debate and reflection.

Their reach and impact, though, may extend well beyond local environs. Studying the local can illuminate global themes. Think of the ceramic peacock saved from the 1878 shipwreck of the Loch Ard, displayed at Warrnambool’s Flagstaff Hill maritime museum. Or the fragment of Eureka flag held by the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. These objects tell significant stories about local pasts but also highlight themes of trade and democracy that are major currents of nineteenth century history.

The stewardship of collections is a core activity of local community museums. The value and significance of the material heritage held by local museums – the largest museum sector in Australia – is immeasurable. Yet these collections are often kept in substandard and vulnerable conditions. Heightening awareness of local museums’ role in preserving their collections, and providing material assistance to better protect collections from disasters, is an additional response to the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Counter-disaster preparedness is a task that confronts all collecting institutions, whether in fire-prone areas or not. And with predictions that climate change will bring more extreme weather events and new risk factors, it is a task that is becoming more urgent.

The month of May is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on this issue. Blue Shield, the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross, is calling on Australian collecting institutions to conduct a MayDay campaign by enhancing the protection of their collections from disaster. The blue shield is the symbol specified in UNESCO’s 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property to identify cultural sites and protect them from attack in the event of armed conflict. Blue Shield Australia suggests that local museums improve their counter-disaster preparations through measures such as identifying the most significant items in their collections, getting to know local firefighters and police, and finding partner organisations to assist in emergencies. Counter-disaster preparations, ranging from staff and volunteer training through to improved storage facilities, can significantly help to preserve local cultural heritage. They can also make local communities better aware of the value and vulnerability of their museums.

Cultural infrastructure projects in Australia have an unfortunate set-and-forget history. Construction funding can be relatively easy to obtain, especially if state or federal governments are looking for “shovel-ready” projects to stimulate a sluggish economy. Finding funds to pay for recurrent expenses, which can quickly surpass original building costs, can be more difficult. Local councils are often left to pick up the tab for community facilities built through concerted local campaigns, or government partnerships, that have failed to plan for the long term.

It is important for local museums, especially in affected areas, to reflect on the events of 2009 in Victoria in ways that resonate with their local communities. But it is also important to recognise the significance of the 2009 bushfires for all collecting institutions – museums, galleries, libraries. The MayDay initiative provides a decentralised option that can commemorate the bushfires by assisting all museums to better discharge their role as trustees of our cultural heritage. •

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