‘Tasmania is the end of the known world’: Nicholas Shakespeare, Amanda Lohrey and Anna Krien on Tasmania

In Small Place, Big Ideas, Nicholas Shakespeare, ‘a Pom’, recalled something written about Tasmania: ‘Tasmania is the end of the known world. Travel any further and you are on your way home again.’ Tasmania, famed for its beauty and its controversies, is often defined by outsiders as many contradictory things: a state with an island mentality, a microcosm for the rest of the world, a parochial backwater, a Labor stronghold, a beloved symbol of Australian wilderness.

‘I’m a Tasmaniac’, says Nicholas Shakespeare, whose latest book is Inheritance, ‘rather than being Tasmania born’. He fell in love with Tasmania – its people, its light – and so did his father, who initially flew out to the island to stop Shakespeare from buying a house there. There’s a small town in Tasmania called Kindred – ‘because everyone there is related’ – and Shakespeare found family history there from both sides of his family, including a distant relative who had left her 40-acre farm only twice in her life.

Anna Krien was sent some footage of men smashing a car with tools; inside that car were logging activists. Krien went to Tasmania in search of a story and was supposed to stay for only five days, but stayed for four weeks: ‘it won’t let you go’. Instead of just a logging dispute, she found ‘so much history’, which she wrote about in her book Into the Woods.

Amanda Lohrey, author of several acclaimed novels, two Quarterly Essays and short story collection Reading Madame Bovary was the panel’s only born Tasmanian. In her run-down of the history of the state, she mentioned that Tasmania was home to the world’s very first ‘green’ party – the United Tasmania Group, founded in 1972. (The national Greens Party started in 1992.) For Lohrey, this signified that Tasmania is ‘the canary in the mine’ – it has a remarkable, utopian, progressive political history.

Although Tasmania is small, it’s also full of contradictions. Lohrey noted that in Krien’s telling of the logging debate, there are some villainous people, but there are also people working in the industry who are essentially decent, which makes it a complex picture: ‘It’s hard to generalise across the whole place at any one time’. But because it’s small, the impact of change on Tasmania can be very great. Lohrey said that changing economies impact strongly on the island because it has limited opportunities for employment.

As outsiders, Krien and Shakespeare were able to see and comment on Tasmania differently to how Tasmanians might see themselves. Krien suggested that Tasmania ‘needs to reconnect with the rest of the world a little bit more.’ Lohrey reminded us, though, that Tasmania will be controlling the Senate in a few weeks time.

I’ve only been to Tasmania once – when I was eleven years old. I have one really strong memory of it: sitting in the back of the car while my father drove around the roads near Cradle Mountain, irretrievably lost. These three writers only scratched the surface of this small but proud state, and I would love to revisit it, to get lost again.