It's a strange thing to be suddenly reminded of what life was like nearly 30 years ago. Sometimes it's a photo that takes you back. Or a smell. Or a letter found at the back of a drawer.
Sometimes it's a pandemic.
On March 20, 2020, in an attempt to keep out Covid-19, Tasmania closed its borders to the rest of the world.
“We've got a moat,” trumpeted the front page of the Mercury, “and we're not afraid to use it.”
The effect was startling. Tourists and business travellers no longer arrived. There were fewer people on the streets and fewer cars. For the first time in years, finding parking in the city was a cinch.
“This is what Hobart used to be like,” I said to a friend. “Before it became fashionable.”
In 1994, when the 40-something photograph of me was taken, we prided ourselves on the fact that morning rush-hour consisted of an extra 20 or so cars. People who arrived from the mainland hurried everywhere for the first few weeks, then gradually tuned in to the pace of life and adjusted accordingly. There were plenty of people who hated “Slow-bart”, but just as many of us loved it. I remember when members of a local a cappella group moved to Sydney and were interviewed on ABC radio. They were still in shock at the change, and said so.
The interviewer laughed, rather unkindly. “Welcome to the real world.”
But for us, this was the real world. And if the mockery of Sydneysiders was one side of the coin, our untouched coasts and wilderness were the other.
Tasmania has always been the poorest state. An interpretation panel in the convict room of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery used to read. “Of all the colonies, Tasmania had the highest proportion of drunkards, paupers, lunatics, orphaned or abandoned children, invalids and prisoners.”
In 1994, we still had high levels of illiteracy, ill health and welfare dependence. The multiculturalism that had enriched mainland cities had been slower to take hold here, and male homosexuality was still illegal. But although wages were lower than the mainland cities, so were costs, and housing prices were laughable in comparison. And precisely because of our comparative poverty, the developers who had ruined so many other beautiful places had not yet cast their lustful gaze our way.
On a personal level, I was trying to establish myself as a writer. I had written a couple of children's plays for Terrapin Puppet Theatre, but my aim was to write for adults, and I was halfway through a rather pretentious literary novel.
I wanted to write plays for adults, too. So when Annette Downs, Terrapin's artistic director, decided to challenge the perception of puppetry as “kiddie stuff”, I jumped at the chance to be involved. Annette was (and is) one of those big-hearted people who like making opportunities for others. There were four writers for the show that came to be called Desires: Belinda Bradley, Andrea Lemon, Peta Murray and me. From what I remember, we had no brief except to make something short-ish and interesting.
Writing for puppetry is very different from writing for human actors. Any emotion has to come through movement and metaphor, rather than facial expression and language. You can use dialogue with puppets, but it's often unconvincing, and brings the focus back to the puppeteers, which is precisely where you don't want it.
So it was no great surprise that all four writers came up with something non-verbal. What was more interesting was that our pieces had a common thread – dislocation from the self.
My piece was a black comedy called Corpus Nullius, which told the story of a ballerina striving for perfection and control, while being constantly undermined by her wilful shadow. The designers, Greg Methe and Ruth Hadlow, created small, exquisite bunraku figures for the ballerina and her shadow; the set was modelled on the proscenium of the Theatre Royal.
I remember the day we had our publicity shots taken. Belinda Bradley was standing behind me while we waited our turn. “I thought your hair was black,” she said, “but when the sun shines on it you’ve got red highlights.”
I laughed. “It’s henna. That’s where I’m going grey.”
In 1996, Desires travelled to the International Festival of Puppetry in Budapest, Hungary, before returning for another season in Hobart.
In 1999, I had a story published in the NSW Education Department’s School Magazine, the world’s longest-running literary magazine for children. That was the beginning of the end for my dream of writing literary novels. It turned out that what I really liked writing was children's fantasy adventure.
In 2001, millionaire David Walsh founded the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities, the precursor to his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Tasmania was changing, and so was I. That first pretentious novel is still in a cupboard somewhere. Never finished, and just as well. It's an echo of an earlier time. A pre-MONA time, when I wanted to write literary novels. When our state had plenty of problems, but peak-hour traffic wasn't one of them.
When Tasmania was still unfashionable.
Lian Tanner has been dynamited while scuba diving and arrested while busking. She once spent a week in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, hunting for a Japanese soldier left over from WWII. Her best-selling Keepers Trilogy has been translated into 11 languages, and won two consecutive Aurealis Awards for Best Australian Children’s Fantasy. Her first picture book "Ella and the Ocean", illustrated by Jonathan Bentley, won the NSW Premier’s Award for Children’s Literature. Her latest children’s novel is "A Clue for Clara", a puzzling and hilarious mystery about a small chook and a big crime. More about Lian and her writing can be found at liantanner.com.au.
