BACKGROUND NOTES

In the 20th Century colonial expansion fuelled by the capitalist industrialisation of the Western world seemed to reach a turning point at the end of WW2 and the early exchanges in the Cold War. Likewise towards the end of the century, and the apparent end of the Cold War, local social and cultural realities, arguably, have taken on an importance that challenges the assumed primacy of the First World – the democratic, capitalistic and USA aligned states. The imperative of the First World enterprise focused upon globalising and the blending (homogenising?) of economies and societies – the social cum cultural imperatives plus knowledge and belief systems.

Places like Launceston embody most of the value systems of what is now understood as the First World. Clearly Launcestonian sensibilities by-and-large still spring from the circumstances of the colonisation of Tasmania. Launceston was amongst the earliest colonial settlements to successfully embrace the concept the Mechanics Institute that has since been translated into its library, museum, art gallery and the various manifestations further education in the city and region.

Against this background local imperatives and local understandings of ‘place’ have taken on more importance as First World imperatives – typically determined and defined remotely – are questioned and challenged.  Launceston and the Tamar Region is close to being a quintessential exemplar of a place where 19th/20th Century understandings of place and the world are contestable in a 21st C context. Yet Launceston seems to imagine itself as comfortably isolated, and insulated to some extent, from the tensions and conflicts being played out globally – albeit that Tasmania is an epicentre of a kind in regard to conflicting, and emblematic, discourses to do with ‘the environment’.

In Nevil Shute’s novel ‘On the Beach’ Melbourne was envisaged as being simultaneously at the edge and the end of the world as a consequence of a nuclear holocaust and ‘The First World’  and ‘The Second World’  simultaneously losing the Cold War. It’s conceivable that Launcestonians, indeed Tasmanians,  might see themselves as being somewhat more safely placed – and in a splendid isolation of a kind notwithstanding the perceived  inescapability of ‘Climate Change’.

In contrast, towards the end of the 20th C the specialisation of knowledge systems began to be questioned and to be increasingly challenged aided and abetted by the democratisation of knowledge and the ubiquitous Internet.

As the complexity of the ways the world’s interfacing knowledge systems became more obvious their significance, individually, and in isolation, became less and less homogenised – less blended, less blanded. Once the siloing of academic disciplines was championed but at the end of the first decade of the 21st C it increasingly presents as an outmoded idea with questionable application and sometimes of dubious value – universally at least.

In the 19th C places like Launceston – colonial outposts and located somewhat at the periphery – were nonetheless relatively quickly shaped/reshaped by the social, economic and cultural imperatives of the enlightenment, European colonial expansion and the ultimately the Industrial Revolution with its consequent industrialisation of the colonised world in particular – and oftentimes celebrated in the context of Launcestonian placedness. Against this background it is unsurprising that Mechanics Institutes became an integral part of a region’s cultural landscape and the social sensibility of the time.

Mechanics' Institutes in Tasmania, and later Australia, took their inspiration from the first institute founded in Edinburgh in 1821. Australia's first Mechanics' Institute was established in Hobart Town just six years later in 1827 but unable to repay its debts it folded in 1871.

Interestingly, Tasmania’s most successful Mechanics' Institute was established in Launceston 15 years later in 1842 with the support John West  – Congregational minister, journalist, editor of The Examiner and later the Sydney Morning Herald and historian. Eleven years later a branch of the Royal Society of Tasmania was formed in Launceston in 1853. It lapsed but was reconstituted in 1921 and has continued since then.

Even in its relative isolation Launceston, perhaps better thought about in its historic and colonial context as say the Tamar region, ‘the place’ has never in fact been truly insulated from the imperatives of the times.  Rather, from Launceston’s earliest days there has been a community of  'innovators’ in the region who were far from being disconnected from social and scientific advances elsewhere.

William Russ Pugh (1806–97) being an exemplar of Launcestonians connectivity given that on June 7 1847 he is credited with administering the first surgical anesthetic in the southern hemisphere. An enthusiastic experimenter, he produced coal gas to light his house, and the ether for his anesthetics.

Interestingly, Pugh’s use of ether  in surgery was less than a year after the first published demonstrations of its use in the USA in dentistry and surgery at Massachusetts’ ‘Ether Dome’. Arguably, Pugh was not only up with the pace in his field but also a leading innovator internationally, albeit from the extremities of empire, at the cusp of what might be thought of as the first wave of globalisation as European colonial expansion was reaching its zenith. 

Along with the specialisation of knowledge systems Mechanics Institutes and Schools of Arts took on new forms and changed into public libraries; museums and art galleries; public institutions delivering technical and further education; and democratised universities – all of which have tended to advocate the siloing of specialised knowledge systems. All of this is evident in Launceston along with the evolution of place specific groups with interests in celebrating the region’s histories (natural & social), geography, heritage, etc.

the region defined by its geography and social cum cultural realities.

Internationally, the lessons that might be learned from the Tragedy Of The Commons – a term coined by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968 – seem not to heard or heeded. Tasmania seems to offer a laboratory of a kind within which this and kindred issues can be interrogated – especially so in relation to the 'environment' and 'wilderness' debates that have been raging in Tasmania for decades.

Immediately there may be some profit in exploring sustainability issues via a 21st C institute that is a network of networks auspiced by organisations and institutions that have evolved in the region. Such an ‘institute’ might well be a coalition and/or alliance of groups engaged in an exchange of ideas focused on place – its geography plus social cum cultural realities.