TASMANIAN PUBLIC MUSINGPLACE NETWORK: PURPOSE & OBJECTIVES

NETWORK PURPOSE

The purpose in designating Tasmanian places, as musingplaces is to provide Tasmanians with opportunities to celebrate their placedness, and together with their visitors, with the possibility to:
  • Develop new knowledge and new understandings;
  • Study and research human histories and cultural realities over time;
  • Contemplate geographies and natural histories; and
  • Muse upon Tasmania’s place in the world.

 NETWORK OBJECTIVES 

Context: Collectively Tasmanian musingplaces have a demonstrably important part to play in community cultural life. Typically via their ‘expression’ and/or the collections they hold, they are keeping places invested with Tasmanians’ cultural and intellectual property. The stories that are invested in them belong to ‘place and places’ and the various ways in which place is understood. 

Ideally, musingplace should be safe keeping places for contentious, contested and dangerous ideas. In a regional context they exist: 

1. To provide safe keeping places for Tasmania’s Aboriginal people’s cultural and intellectual property, plus the communities’ stories and histories, in order that they may be both ‘cared for’ and better understood within the Aboriginal community and the wider community – Tasmania, nationally & internationally. 
2. To be repositories for cultural material that holds memories and the evidence of all those things that lend meaning and substance to cultural life in Tasmania. 
3. To be places where ideas can be openly interrogated and freely tested in historic, cultural, scientific and other contexts as they emerge over time. 
4. To build collections, and upon collections, that collaboratively and cooperatively are documented and networked in ways, ideally rhrizomaticly, to make them accessible to musers wherever they may be. 
5. To be keeping places for scientific material in support of ongoing research and critical investigations relevant to Tasmania in a global context. 
6. To be participatory and cooperative community centres that proactively facilitate the development of Communities of Ownership & Interest (COI) towards the advancement of interfacing social networks and social capital – in the wider community – Tasmania, nationally & internationally. 
7. To be facilitating the development of musingplaces in Tasmania that are cooperative community cultural cum social enterprises that are sustainable over time.