Interrogating Placedness: Tasmanian Disconnections

Abstract

This paper sets out to interrogate Tasmanianness and its placemaking. The cultural landscape and social realities lived out in Tasmania are constructed around contested and contentious imaginings of place and the histories, the stories, that belong to it. In the end the question hanging in the air is to do with place and culture and ‘culture’s role’ in shaping ‘place’ – landscapes, artmaking, museums, etc. Tasmania, ringed as it is with water offers a model of containment that allows for the kind of prodding and poking not easily done elsewhere. Also, it has a history of a kind that is not easily found elsewhere. Nonetheless, like places elsewhere Tasmania has idiosyncratic stories that seem to wet everything all at once and all the time.