Pete Hay
Pete Hay grew up on the north-west Coast of Tasmania, and has worked as schoolteacher, storeman, truckie’s offsider, youth worker and political adviser at both state and federal tiers of government. But it was as an academic in Victoria and Tasmania that he has spent most of his waged life. He retired as Reader in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania at the end of 2008, and turned his focus to creative writing. He has published multiple volumes of poetry and personal essays, and has twice been shortlisted for the Tasmanian Book of the Year. His book of essays, Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island’s Soul, was named the Small Press Network 2020 Book of the Year.
Pete Hay grew up on the north-west Coast of Tasmania, and has worked as schoolteacher, storeman, truckie’s offsider, youth worker and political adviser at both state and federal tiers of government. But it was as an academic in Victoria and Tasmania that he has spent most of his waged life. He retired as Reader in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania at the end of 2008, and turned his focus to creative writing. He has published multiple volumes of poetry and personal essays, and has twice been shortlisted for the Tasmanian Book of the Year. His book of essays, Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island’s Soul, was named the Small Press Network 2020 Book of the Year.
TASMANIAN VOICES

Historical amnesia, communal ecology, and my father’s watch

by Pete Hay
11 Oct 2021

On the island of Corfu, technically part of Greece, there is a town called Palaiokastritsa that is the island’s epicentre of wild teenage tourism and tasteless Russian money. It has a monastery built in 1225, and is a beautiful sequence of enclosed bays and lucent blue water – hence all that overfed Russian flesh, and the unrestrained revelry of the beauteous young.

TASMANIAN VOICES

Finding history in the land

by Pete Hay
08 Apr 2021

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once famously observed, “it’s not even past.” Quite so. In complex ways that we can only dimly comprehend, the past moves inexorably into the present, and on into barely imaginable times to come. It shapes the now of our life and times; it remains present, in other words, in the present. But there is a more particular sense of the past’s presence in the now that I find myself increasingly inclined to challenge.

TASMANIAN VOICES

Sensing Tasmanian time

by Pete Hay
22 Dec 2020

“Time”, apparently, is the most commonly used noun in the English language – at least that’s what the Irish theorist, Ciarán Benson, reports having heard on SBS News. It may be so – nevertheless, for all its ubiquity, I simply can’t get my head around it. Physicists assure us that space and time enfold each other; that without one there cannot be the other. Indeed, before the Big Bang, there was no space and no time – or, rather there was no space-time. There was nothing. I’m pleased that this presents no conceptual difficulty for those large-brained scientists, because it certainly does for me. My brain simply refuses to conceive of a pre-universal “nothing”.