SUMMARY

Foreword

The three points of discussion below, and the background discussions in the paper more generally, have evolved out of several years of investigation focused upon 'musingplaces'  –museums & art galleries: cultural, scientific & historic plus heritage buildings and sites – and their Communities of Ownership & Interest (COI). 

While Tasmania has been a focus, and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery a case study, even so the investigation is ongoing and its mindful of the diversity of museums, art galleries, heritage buildings and sites sprinkled around the State. Tasmania is in so many ways an ideal place to do research.

The research  here is rather more concerned with the paradigm shifts appearing in international discourses and their 'trickle down impacts'. Musingplaces have changed and are changing.

Nonetheless, local concerns and issues might well be imagined as a fraction that might well  represent the whole.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR TASMANIA

1. In a 21st Century context Tasmania has both an incentive to, and the potential to, network its musingplaces :

A. In regard to incentive, the State is seeking employment opportunities and is looking to tourism – cultural tourism potentially – to provide at least some of those potential jobs and enterprise opportunities. Employment in museums, art galleries, heritage buildings, etc. – musingplaces – and the development of the venues' infrastructure and operational models has advantages beyond the venues themselves – out into hospitality sector and well beyond that. 

B. Networking musingplaces grows their potential to deliver more extensive dividends – tangible & intangible –  to the local communities they are a part of. 

i. From a cultural development perspective opportunities could be expected to grow exponentially through new intrastate, interstate and international connection and relationships;

ii. From an economic perspective it could be expected that opportunities to develop new enterprises that interface with musingplaces thus increasing or securing employment, plus expanding educational and social benefits;
iii. From a research perspective – cultural, scientific, historic, etc. – such networking has the potential to interface with interstate and international networks thus raising Tasmania's profile and opportunities in the relative fields of research.

2. Given the substantial investments communities, individuals and the corporate sector have in public musingplaces – via rates & taxes, donations, sponsorships & volunteered skills plus time – the case for the formal regularisation and accreditation of musingplaces in Tasmania in line with the Associations Incorporation Act, Tasmanian Museums Act, Collections Australia's standards and the International Council of Museums' protocols is becoming increasingly compelling.
A. From the perspective of musingplaces' COIs formal accreditation would offer the assurance of: appropriate and best practice governance; credible policy and planning determination processes; sustainable management structures; and better access to conditional funding via various Govt. funding agencies, the corporate sector and philanthropic sources.
B. From the perspective of State and Local Govt. rate and tax payers, formal accreditation would offer the assurance of appropriate, functional and enforceable accountability commensurate with funding commitments.
C. From the perspective of sponsors and donors, formal accreditation would offer improved assurances that their gift/investment – cash, objects, in-kind support – has been applied to the purposes they intended for – short and long term.

3. Given the the increasing need for funding to facilitate changing/growing expectations, and the competition for funding, there is increasingly a compelling case for musingplaces – State funded & Local Govt. funded particularly –  to explore new operational models in line with 21st C needs and aspirations.
A. From the perspective of major institutions holding public collections that might generally understood as being a part of the 'National Cultural Estate' operating in the new museology paradigm a sustainable entrepreneurial operational model would open up new opportunities for these institutions.
B. From the perspective of institutions holding public collections, proactively pursuing an sustainable entrepreneurial operational model would open the institution up to new programming opportunities and the ability to secure, and earn, research funding. The flow on being enhanced development, employment and income opportunities.
C. From the perspective of institutions holding public collections pursuing 'satellite' for-profit enterprises in order to develop more sustainable and/or more risky programming and research in line their purpose for being.

Note: Altogether this Community Cultural Enterprise operational model paradigm offers some relief from potentially unchecked rates and taxes being levied. Moreover, it is more likely than its 'cost centre' alternative to deliver direct and indirect employment and income opportunities in the wider community.

Timeframe: Given that in many instances what is being proposed here would represent a major change for some institutions they are here in the context that if implemented, it would only be practicle to do so within a staged timeframe over time – say three to five years.

Furthermore, the change would need to be implemented in collaboration and cooperation with individual and networked institutions Communities of Ownership & Interest.

TASMANIAN MUSINGPLACE NETWORK

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Tasmanian musingplaces are many, diverse and dispersed all around the State. Throughout the histories played out on the group of islands now known as Tasmania, people are continually being alerted to their placedness. 

The islands’ original inhabitants clearly placescaped the land to fit their purposes and they belonged to it as much as they imagined the land as being theirs for Milena. 

Currently, it better understood that Tasmania’s Aboriginal people were able to sustain themselves quite easily. In turn this gave them the time to muse upon the world they were in and contemplate the meaning to be found in the world around them.

The landscape is rich with 'places' that it possible to imagine operating as musingplaces of a kind well before European histories’ 15th C Wunderkammers and Kunstkammers. 

Since colonial times, Tasmania’s history and heritage has played a part in the island’s current placescaping even if elements of its colonial history tarnish ‘the remembering’ that otherwise are somewhat glorious imaginings. Aboriginal presence in Tasmania's has become blurred  with 200 plus years of colonial settlement and exploitation.

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These occasional ‘inconvenient truths’ can be pointed to in ways that are somewhat analogous to pointing to Al Gore's climate change alerts. The tensions present in Tasmanian musingplaces have a kind of 'placedness' at work that is almost idiosyncratically 'Tasmanian'. It is at once global and idiosyncratically local and Tasmanian. 

While you can google Tasmania and discover quite a lot you did not know, what you experience could hardly match the experiences to be found in Tasmania's over 130 musingplaces. Neither have all that many stories held in musingplace collections found their way to the Internet – that's a work in progress.

Albeit that Tasmanian museums, art galleries, heritage sites, etc. are not yet proactively networked, and as they might well be, the potential to do so is clear. Networked, these venues and sites would be able to offer their COIs, visitors, researchers et al 21st C understandings and imaginings belonging to places – Tasmania  and its cities, towns, cultural landscapes, natural environments, etc.

Flinders Island

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.

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.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES: NETWORKED MUSINGPLACES

Foreword: In connection with her work as a museum ethnologist, Dr Andrea Hauenschild  asked herself a question, prompted by Dr. Herbert Ganslmayr, Director of the Übersee Museum, “whether and how local and regional museums as adult educational institutions could contribute to societal development, that is to coping with everyday life and to improving the conditions of life.” In her exploratory research she "discovered" ‘new museology’, a trend in modern museum practice in which the concept of the museum appeared to hold an answer to her question.

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In protest against attempts to change established, stagnating, museum practice in the 1980s there was the formation of an association of museum workers called the International Movement for New Museology (MINOM). New museology had its foundations in the 1970s and it informed NINOM. 

The American ’museologist’ Nina Simon might well be regarded as a trailblazer here and her book The Participatory Museum is something of a standard text for current scholars in the area. 

New museology is an idea of the museum as an educational tool with participatory programming in the service of social development. 

Its an idea that essentially says that musingplaces should be one of the most highly perfected tools that society has available to formulate and attend musingplaces own transformation. 

Importantly new museology embraces concepts such as returning looted cultural property, the acknowledgement of cultural realities, the appreciation of competing histories, community cultural enterprise, placedness, decentralization, cultural and scientific collaboration, community participation and not the least equity and equality in regard to all this. 

At the heart of new museology is the concept that musingplaces should be safe places for dangerous ideas. Or put another way, the base stations for transient truths and inconvenient memories. 

Aboriginal Cultural Knowledge and Property

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As the original people belonging to this once remote place, Tasmania’s Aboriginal people are owed acknowledgement of, and respect for, their cultural and intellectual property. Tasmanian Aboriginal people are themselves the custodians of an ongoing culture that dates back at least 30,000 years. Tasmanian Aboriginal communities’ stories and histories are rich with insightful visions of place and overflowing with perceptions that need to be better understood within the Aboriginal community and other communities – Tasmania, nationally & internationally. 

Tasmanian musingplaces need to be more proactive in their engagement with the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. This needs to be as 200 years plus of colonial settlement Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural realities are poorly understood and the effort to turn that around needs to be increased in collaboration with the community. 

A key objective of a networked Tasmanian musingplace should be, in some respect, pay closer attention to Aboriginal cultural knowledge systems. 

Musingplace Collections

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Musingplaces’ collections are the repositories of cultural material filled with the kind of memories and evidence that lend meaning and substance to not only cultural life but community wellbeing also. Albeit the methodologies available to store these things are undergoing a paradigm shift via emerging digital technologies the collections, in whatever format, remain important cultural property. 

Typically musingplaces’ collections are imagined as “cultural objects”, and then as such, they are then imagined as being a part ‘artistic endeavours’. What is seemingly forgotten is that much of musingplaces’ collections’ value is in the scientific information and knowledge vested in them – and in multifarious and multidimensional ways. Indeed, siloing collections, and siloing musing, is inappropriate in the context of ‘new museology’ and the 21st C. 

Cultural research takes scholars, and musers, into every aspect of the world we live in, and all at once and all the time. Knowledge systems are generally careless about the silos it is often placed in when the research leads the investigators elsewhere. 

A key function of a musingplace is to build collections of things that enable other, present and future, to muse upon the world in the context of the cultural knowledge we leave in our wake. 

Albeit outside the scope of this paper, it has to be said that the credibility of a musingplace is very much to do with the integrity, appropriateness and sustainability of its ‘collection environment’ – infrastructure integrity, climate control, security arrangements, conservation protocols, management systems, etc.

NETWORKED MUSINGPLACES: RESEARCH & COLLECTION BUILDING

Research relevant to networked musingplace collections and their Communities of Ownership & Interest (COI) research is a key component of a musingplace’s cultural and social relevance. Indeed, unless musingplaces collections are being proactively studied and researched their status and relevance as a community cultural asset is debatable. 

Importantly, musingplaces not actively engaged in research aught not be a part of a musingplace network. Nor should such a collection be able to: 

•  Hold public property in their collection; 
•  Be in receipt of public funding for any aspect of the musingplaces operation; or 
•  Be able to receive donations of cultural material of any kind or tax benefit of any kind relevant to cultural or scientific material that attracts any kind of tax benefit when donated. 

Research networks are at their best when they are rhizome like – rhizomatic – an imagining based on the botanical rhizome and an idea that assumes multiplicities rather than singularity. Also, serendipity is assumed to be more likely. Community networks, and dynamic collections, tend to be organic/rhizomatic.

Furthermore, given a collection’s research potential and program, and the significance of that, any research should be conducted in accord with best practice ethical standards that comply with appropriate international standards. 

Conditional upon gaining access to a collection all research outcomes should be made publicly available and within an agreed timeframe. Ideally the publication of research outcomes should be via the collection’s governing institution/body and most importantly, openly accessible. The researcher(s) should retain intellectual property (IP) in any publication unless they are staff members and IP is a component of their employment agreement. 

Collection Building 

Consistent with: 

•  The concept that Tasmania’s public collections belong in ‘lore’ to Tasmanians, and by extension to the nation; 
•  The institutions/organisation that holds them are properly accountable: and 
•  The collection is being proactively researched;

the building of a collection is an important cultural and social pursuit. However, if a network of collections is envisaged as a whole the network’s significance expands exponentially.

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Against this background the necessity for disciplined collecting becomes more of an imperative. Yet, collections will/should contain incongruous material, otherwise serendipitous research opportunities are less likely to present themselves.

Consequentially, public collections need to be built thoughtfully and in response to policy sets determined by the collection’s governing body – a body peopled by a membership with appropriate domain knowledge. Ideally these people will be appointed rather than elected and again appointed by a body with appropriate domain knowledge. For public collections aligning the appropriate personnel is a non-trivial issue if the integrity of the collection is to be maintained. 

 Another important issue is the qualifications and experience of collection managers, curators and researchers. Currently there are tertiary institutions graduating people with various skill sets with various levels of appropriateness relevant to the collections they manage and care for. Nonetheless, matching people to collections and programs is ever likely to be problematic and a subjective exercise. 

For this reason as much as any other, it is an imperative that institutions/operations become formally accredited in some way. This is especially important if they are to be in receipt of public funds – Local, State or Federal – and/or be afforded taxation concessions. Unavoidably subjective and objective assessments will need to be made on the assessments of a musingplace's accountability. 

Scientific Research and Critical Enquiry 

Public musingplaces hold a largely unfulfilled promise of being centres for productive critical discourses and enquiries. None of this lessens the need for appropriately constituted, fully accountable and rigorously administered public institutions/operations. 

The fact that these collections hold material that has the potential to offer serendipitous opportunities to allow new knowledge and/or understandings to be acquired, by itself, this makes these collections important. 

The ‘civilising’ potential of a musingplace as an institution in recent times has been downplayed – particularly so in regard to their COIs. The rate of social and cultural change facilitated by digital technologies has been are large factor in this. These institutions have a role yet to play in navigating a way through this ongoing phenomenon of change – and where appropriate facilitating change. 

Again, all this simply adds weight to the importance of public musingplaces’ accountability and it being independently oversighted from outside the institution or organisation. 

On top of this, as research institutions, there needs to be verifiable assurances that musingplace research meets appropriate ethical standards and that researchers and administrators involved are appropriately qualified to assure that this be the case.

PARTICIPATION: THE MUSINGPLACE AS ENTERPRISE

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Traditionally museology was structured around the premise that in the musingplace visitors are largely the passive receivers of information. Conversely new museology practice shifted the emphasis from curators doing the interpreting to it being the province of ‘the visitor’. 

Political and economic pressures have forced musingplace professionals to shift their attention from their collections towards visitors. 19th C musingplaces, and up to the 1970s,  tended to be exclusive and elitist. 

A progressive opening-up and demands for greater accessibility have appeared. A climate of increasing self reflection within the profession is being identified as a ‘new museology’. Curators and directors argue that the movement towards a more visitor centred ethos can entail a corresponding paradigm shift in the identity of, and relevance of, musingplaces. Musingplace professionals’ role is shifting from a kind of ‘legislator’ to one of being a kind of ‘interpreter’ charged with navigating cultural meaning/s and the currency of scientific understandings.

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Museology intellectuals are being redefined, and arguably this process is in transition, and it is by no means complete. Nonetheless, musingplace personnel are often resistant to these forces of change given that they challenge entrenched and a more comfortable order of things. It might also be the case that their qualifications may come under scrutiny. 

Musingplace autonomy and their insulation from their Communities of Ownership & Interest (COI) is increasingly untenable and especially so when ethics and accountability come into play. Increasingly, audiences and visitors are being imagined as 'participatory'. 

This becomes more so as COI members of public musingplaces assert an authority based upon their cultural, social and fiscal investments in the institution. Increasingly COI memberships, individually and collectively, they are looking for tangible and intangible dividends to be delivered. 

These dividends are beginning to be delivered via participatory programming, citizen curatorship, independent scholarship, open engagement, etc. 

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The Musingplace as Enterprise 

In the paradigm of new museology the demands upon musingplace programming grows exponentially. Quite possibly demand goes far beyond the level of funding typically provided for traditional passive musingplace programming – the museum and galleries with static displays and the visitor being the passive receiver of information.

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Musingplaces must come to terms with their past. They have been one of the important ways communities have made sense of their histories, the realities of their culture, the ecologies they are a part of, and more still. In a 21st C context they need to tear down the cultural barriers that impede communities participating in their activities. 

Moreover, they need to be more responsive to their COI. The ‘museologists’ working in them need to be seeking the approval to their COI's rather than their fellow museologists – they need to be gate openers rather than privileged gatekeepers. 

Musingplaces with museologists talking only to museologists, in a 21st C sense, would be something like Sir Humphrey Appleby’s Hospital  in the TV comedy ‘Yes Minster’.  The thing is, just like it is with the TV show, its far from just being just funny. 

After that we might then consider the ‘dignity for all’ idea and the issue of 'Rankism' that Robert Fuller tells us about in “Somebodies and Nobodies: Understanding Rankism”  .... “An assertion of superiority. It typically takes the form of putting others down. It’s what “Somebodies” do to (their chosen) “nobodies.” ... Robert Fuller When museums were imagined as the purveyors of the 'official' point view they were the province of somebodies talking to nobodies. Happily, its an idea that has had its day as has sexism and racism!

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COST CENTRE MUSEOLOGY & NEW MUSEOLOGY

Typically, traditional museology delivered static ‘displays’ and passive programming – not to mention the elitism and exclusivity that comes with the paradigm. This paradigm is/was well enough served by the cost centre funding model – a model where income generation is only coincidental. So long as budgets are not over extended the funding method works well enough and comfortably enough. 

However, with audiences demanding more aggressive programming, even seeking more audacious programming, the calls on budgets grow accordingly. Moreover, it requires a level of risk taking that is almost untenable in the cost centre model as cost centres tend to presume a non income generative stance. 

This is well explained by the research quest. If a researcher knew the outcome of their investigation at the outset, why do the research? In the cost centre model outcomes are deliberately predetermined but the question of relevance is rarely asked. The imperative is to maintain the status quo at any cost and with little or no room for serendipitous moments – the muser’s quest. 

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Currently, the capacity to increase budgets by means of broad based punitive rates, taxes and levies is diminishing as real costs climb. Thus the competition for funds for musingplace budgets has become more intense as incomes stagnate or diminish and the call on people’s incomes diversifies. 

The consequential chain of events under a cost centre model is ever likely to lead to diminished performance and productivity levels with falling or stagnating visitor numbers – and so on. Under closer scrutiny, pressure is ever likely to be pushing for the delivery of more and more from less and less attainable levels of productivity and performance. 

The New Museology 

In the world of musingplaces there is a quiet revolution in progress and that is informed by the ‘new museology’ mode of operation. That is a paradigm where the shift is on and is moving from ‘giving it to them’ to ‘doing it, musing, with them’ – musingplaces’ Communities of Ownership & Interest that is. 

A mark of an institution's engagement with new museology would be its participatory programming.

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Opportunity dividends need to be sought in order to meet these expectations and for musingplaces to operate sustainably. There is little evidence that this might be on many agendas or that many musingplaces are trying to imagine what they might look like. 

To break this nexus it would appear that there is a need for some Govt. mechanism to be put in place to regulate musingplaces in the way charities, education facilities and not-for-profit enterprises are. 

These instrumentalities are oversighted and regulated to protect the public from their potential failings,  their possible administrative excesses and their being functionally unaccountable.

FUNDING THE MUSE

Contingent on there being a paradigm shift in regard to how musingplaces are imagined and understood in the wider community, new funding methods, indeed a whole new funding paradigm, needs to be explored. 

Once you put aside old/traditional museology models, entrepreneurial opportunities are opened up. Under the closed loop cost centre funding model it was virtually untenable for musingplaces to be income generative except for charging tokenistic entrance fees typically designed to meet peripheral costs.

Often this tactic backfired with visitor numbers falling and programs being judged more critically, more harshly even when they fell short of their mark. 

If musingplaces equip themselves to operate in the open market, and in competition with all players, there are untapped, unexplored and unimagined opportunities to be explored. This once no-go area needs to be revisited – and with gusto. Musingplaces have rich storehouses to be ‘put to work’ – not plundered – and with the 21st C new museology paradigm increasingly making it an imperative,  entrepreneurship need to be enthusiastically embraced. This might well go to standalone for-profit businesses being established to generate profits that subsidise aspects of a musingplace's non-income generative activity.

Crowdfunding is gaining favour as funding method for a diversity of projects especially those devised to kick-start an ‘enterprise’. Interestingly successful funding under this model comes with peer group assessment of a kind that government instrumentalities could not replicate. Indeed, public funding agencies are beginning to use crowdfunding as an element in their funding mechanisms and assessment procedures.

Congratulated by crowdfunding it becomes politically more palatable to fund something, or an aspect of it, but not from the ‘public purse’.

Elsewhere in the world the lottery mechanisms, rather than taxation, are used to underwrite aspects of cultural development funding. In fact the Sydney Opera House was funded by a lottery and in Western Australia Lotterywest plays a significant role in arts funding. Likewise, MYlotto has played an important role in New Zealand’s arts funding since 1987.

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Musingplaces might well imagine themselves as Community Cultural Enterprises – a version of social enterprise. While being ‘risk aware’ such enterprises offer ever expanding frontiers to be explored, interrogated, drawn upon, delved into even. Interestingly, new enterprise models seem to be emerging facilitated and/or articlated by the Internet – B corporations among them.

The binary of the unsustainable cost centre and the sustainable enterprise, survival against success, becomes somewhat compelling evidence in favour of success – just so long as the risks are mitigated – and a need for change to meet contemporary circumstances.

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Accordingly, the development of a network of musingplaces in Tasmania that are cooperating community enterprises seems to be a productive, and enriching, proposition. It is one that outshines the simple survival of the ever diminishing prospects of cost centre thinking and the counterproductive ‘cargo cult management’ mindsets. All too often this kind of folly comes with the cost centre paradigm in the time warped beliefs that nurtures these dollar-induced worldviews. Nonetheless, all this does offer us something to muse upon.