CONTEXTUAL GEOGRAPHY

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Given Tasmania’s relatively large areas of unsettled and relatively unexploited natural environment Tasmania has been promoted as 'A World Apart' and as a kind of paradise since its colonial past. With large tracts of land held in reserves, national parks and as heritage sites, Tasmanians believe they can afford to imagine their place in the world differently to most people elsewhere.

The Tasmanian mainland is 364 kilometres long and 306 kilometres wide at its widest point. The island has a population of just over half a million people and Tasmania’s Aborigines have populated it for at least 35,000 years. Currently their culture is well understood as being one of the oldest surviving cultures on the planet. 

When rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia about 10,000 years ago the island's natural environment evolved in distinctive ways. By the time of British colonial settlement in 1803, the island presented opportunities for the colonists to exploit Tasmania’s islands and in ways that was without precedence. Tension to do with all this are present in Tasmanian communities still.

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Tasmania, because of its size, the distribution of its population and its colonial and contested histories, it has musingplaces that hold within them a myriad of layered stories. Consequently they are settings for the kind of research and storytelling that gives substance to the cultural landscapes to be found on the island. In a way they are simultaneously a part of Tasmania’s 'placescaping' and the mirrors of the social cum cultural dynamics that shape place. 

For the most part, current Tasmanian musingplaces are reflective and focused upon what was rather than what is or what might be. Alongside this there are paradigm shifts at work outside them that call into question musingplaces’ relevance to current understandings. 

Information technologies are in part fulfilling the roles physical musingplaces once played and in other ways these new digital knowledge transfer systems are the catalysts for dynamic change within musingplace programming, administrations and their various networks. 

In significant ways institutions, communities, regions and nations have cultural capital invested in musingplaces. The memories and stories: knowledge and belief systems; the skills and education; the social advantages; are that which gives someone identity, status and authority in society. In essence it was all this that was translated into power and status in the Kunstkammers and Wundekammers of 15th C Europe. 

Much of this is still at work in 21st musingplaces but the paradigm in which it is played out is driven by new imperatives. Indeed, public musingplaces in a 21st C context are not simply those places with ‘museum’ or ‘art gallery’ at their entrances. In various ways they include specialist collections, heritage buildings, libraries, gardens, cemeteries, landscapes, streetscapes and placescapes, arboretums and currently websites too. More to the point, included in the list is that myriad of private places in the public domain that have layers of people who claim membership of some Community of Ownership and Interest (COI)or other. 

Almost inevitably, attached to these places there are collections of all kinds that have been amassed for not so very different reasons as the ‘public collections’. These collections have a role to play in various research projects. 

Having them networked in some way with public collections would exponentially increase the public musingplaces' potential. 

Possibly, many of the objects in these collections will inevitably find their way into public collections in time.