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