From Habitat to Wilderness: Tasmania’s Role in the Politicising of Place

In wildness is the preservation of the world'. Thoreau's much quoted words, delivered at the Concord Lyceum in 1851, raise complex questions of particular relevance to Tasmania, the southernmost state of Australia. The terms 'wildness' and the now more fashionable 'wilderness' do not define a fixed entity 'out there', but represent a dynamic construct fashioned by socio-political and ideological factors and by the discourse of power, which gives them currency. Once established in a particular context, each 'wilderness' paradigm resists new interpretations for a time and can be used as a political tool to silence dissenting views and alternative discourses before it, in turn, is overthrown. Over the last 200 years, Tasmania has had attributed to it a series of diverse, even contradictory, cultural constructions of wilderness. In most cases, these have been naturalised and legitimised by art, literature and photography, as well as by political rhetoric, and their successive overthrow has usually been painful and divisive for supporters and opponents alike.