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

'[I]n 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. 'Wildness', and the now more fashionable 'wilderness', do not so much name existing realities as reflect current soda-political and ideological notions which may benefit some people and disadvantage others. Once established in a particular context, each concept of 'wilderness' 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 two hundred 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 overthrows have usually been painful and divisive for supporters and opponents alike.