Returning to Tasmania after a year living in shotty Scotland, I was able to catch in one go the whole rebranding episode, viz., I met the symbol with shutterspeed exposure, and naturally that’s the only chance a little symbol gets.  I’m a collector of badges- I have ten though I’ve looked at thousands.  The focus has to be ridiculously efficient, the symbol has to be both feminine and masculine (like a Jungian lolly) and as elemental as Scorpius in the sky, that is, the eye won’t want to join more than seven or ten dots. 

Goethe has the best theory about colour; he also has the most beautiful handwriting.  The palette for ‘explore the possibilities,’ black/ white/ peuce/ cobalt’ is unforgivable, as is the fact that it passed by the eye of the designer, then by a phalanx of paid official discriminators.  I accept that it’s going for a native grass/ Southern ocean two part harmony, which is at least earnest, but these two things are supported by billions of other colours and are themselves rarely the same colour twice on a given day, that’s why we symbolise, that’s why we love the red tailed black cockatoo.

One of the suggestions of the ‘tiger peeking through the grass’ is that what is good and unique about Tasmania might, in our fantasies, survive despite the measures of expedience always brought to bear by our potato headed public officials, and their accession to the interests of greed (those freckly little pharoahs smoking in a boardroom somewhere in Launceston).

History, when played back on the reel to reel, is speeded up and garbled; we only see the heat of the main engagements, and when the field is cleared, the toll and consequences.  What would happen if, in isolation, as an experiment, you populated a remote paradisiacal island, having already a long established indigenous population, with the congenital criminal classes of a whole civilisation and some Irish rebel singers.  Who would rise to the top as a ruling elite after two hundred years, and what would be their expertise?  The traditional industries in Tasmania that are so precious to governmental rhetoric and philosophy, are industries of pure exploitation.  How do you represent on a twenty cent piece Tasmania the beautiful and Tasmania the firebombed?

You’d have to keep the thylacine, because it works like a tiger on our Eurasian minds; beautiful, only partly understood and destructive if not treated respectfully.

I agree with Southsouthwest Admin that the importance of the struggle for symbolic territory should never be underestimated.  If the branding is compelling, the nature of the product will change because people will be led on, or roused.  If you were rebranding your noble family (The Van Diemen- Maynards’s) and you knew that a branch of the family were out every day gutting the place, hacking up the estate, you’d be in a tricky position.  Maybe that’s a selling point: we’ve got it all, the best and the worst people in the world.

Myth is powerful because it treats with the intellect at its source of molten collusion with the emotional and the bodily, less with refined products of the self-fancying rational mind.  Where these products seem abstract, as in shreds of a story or a little myth about a place or a track or a boat, they might be merely units waiting for a chain of greater meaning; but this is precisely where myth puts its maggots and breeds, multiplies, pulses.  A red blundstone walking boot unused for ten years in the shed is as much a mythical object as an eighty eight year old row-boat at Franklin is related to the Stuffed Thylacine in the Hobart Museum & the bit of jewellery you lost at Eddystone point.

There are scenes in your personal history that bleed meaning, that you participate in innocently, but become the archetype of some experience that you will try to recapture for the rest of your life: the science of nostalgia is part of mythification.  Remember the longest day of the year, still some light at 11 at Coles Bay, that Zeehan exists as a pub in a bubble of permanent fog, that lime milkshakes are made with cordial in Queenstown, UFO traffic in the midlands, statues of English Kings astride horses with bins on their heads, Tasmania’s answer to revolution. Most public shared myths in Tasmania are harrowing; Alex. Pierce, Port Arthur, The Black Line, Wybalena, Lake Pedder.  Anyone fancy working in an Osmiridium miner’s camp on the West Coast in 1900?  Anyone interested in hauntology should go to Tasmania.  People are interested in the macabre, in places where things happened,  and this scenic gothic is rightly exploited.  The good myths of Tasmania are mostly personal, or are about an ecstatic isolation: an unpopulated beach, ‘wilderness,’ a trip to seclusion with friends.

Music plays the same nervous system; images are embossed like Queenie’s head on a coin, but in the mind they are not static.  How do they move?  How are they recollected?   Having a central stock of images- branding- works best if it is available for customisation by the people for whom it is intended.  If you see wonky home-made copies, it has worked.  People loved the insignia and heraldry of Royal families and footy teams, they love less the signatures of bureaucracy.

I don’t at all mind that this might be partisan or bi-polar; get a Tasmanian away from home skedaddled on whiskey, and you’ll get either ‘it’s the greatest most beautiful place in the world, best people, crayfish, fungi, tall gums…’ or you’ll get ‘it’s a place that’s uncannily determined to destroy itself, it’s haunted to buggery, three quarters is already gone to chip and hydro, it’s  heartbreaking…’. Or you’ll get both at once.  This zebrafication, this patterning of the positive and negative, is what most suits Tasmania and its contradictions, and because of the sexiness of stripes I suspect the Thylacine, though extinct, has become immortal.