THE FRACTURE IN OUR PSYCHE
Essayist Pete Hay doesn’t pull his punches in examining what he describes as the main fault line in Tasmanian society — the old and new thinking
With his felt hat, white moustache and searching gaze, Pete Hay looks quite a lot like the late bushman R.M.Williams. Who knows if Hay can crack a whip, but the Hobart poet and essayist’s words certainly reverberate.
The title of Hay’s new book of personal essays about Tasmania is Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island’s Soul.
“I sort of liked the idea of poking my nose into little obscure parts of the island where few people go,” he says, explaining his choice of title.
“I used to live in the bush, pretty much,” he says of his frequent forays from civilisation, as if his clobber weren’t quite the clue.
The author is also at home in well-heeled Battery Point, where we meet at a Hampden Rd cafe. He lives nearby in a Georgian cottage full of books. One essay, Books Are The New Zucchini, describes his challenge of trying to cull his library.
Hay, 72, was an academic for most of his working life, first a political scientist then a geographer, at the University of Tasmania and elsewhere. Long ago, he spent a couple of stints working for the Labor Party. And there was a brief, early period as a school-teacher. He has always written. A decade ago, he left academia to focus on creative writing.
“I was sick of footnotes and bibliographies so I retired,” he says.
“Academic writing is linear. You start with a proposition and work through all the possible answers to the conundrum you are exploring, and you systematically shut down alternative explanations until you are left with a triumphant [“thus it has been demonstrated”] QED at the end.
“What I love about personal essays is they are exactly the opposite. It is speculative. It’s closer to poetry. It shimmers and it has enigma and you don’t try to shut down every possible meaning.”
Hay’s essays are arranged chronologically, spanning the past 20 years, and some of the content is themed around the North-West Coast, where he is from. Each sheds light on a certain aspect of Tasmanian life.
What he describes as the “dissident” Van Diemonian spirit is well explored, including in the second-last essay, Schismatic Tasmania and the Politics of Writing.
“I write about what seems to be the main fault line in Tasmanian society, the old and new thinking,” he says. “It centres around how we view the natural world: whether it has meaning in and of itself, or whether it’s a resource that has no meaning or value until we turn it into commodity.
“I think creative Tasmania, even when it’s not specifically aware of what it’s doing, objects to that latter view.
“The tragedy is that creative Tasmania has no capacity to speak to that other, earlier way of thinking, which came here in the First Fleet and which looks out at the livingness of Tasmania and says ‘what can we do with this?’
“There’s no capacity for those who see Tasmania in new and different terms to connect with a Tasmania that doesn’t want to know about this, and is only aware of it as some vague notion of something green they don’t approve of. I would like to know how to resolve this, for there to be a dialogue.”
But isn’t that the way of the world everywhere?
“I think the more complex a society is the less likely it is to apply,” he says. “The island factor is supremely important here.
“We have a much more heightened sense of the possible meanings of Tasmania because we are girt by sea in a much more profound and immediate way than the big island to the north is. It concentrates us.
“You wouldn’t be aware if you were an artistic producer in Sydney that your message was silent, that your audience was a silo, because out there is a large complex community,” he says.
“That you are not speaking to the dominant voice within society is completely comprehensible in Tasmania.”
He is worried that the Van Diemonian trope seems less compelling to Tasmanian artists today. “Through the ’70s and ’80s, this project — how to be in Tasmania, how to be Tasmanian — was the most significant preoccupation of artistic Tasmanians. It has ceased to be, I think. I think it’s tragic because we still haven’t worked that all through.
“We haven’t worked out what it is to be descended from a society of underfed exiles from the slums of Britain, and we haven’t worked out what it meant to engage in an act of genocide with the original peoples here, nor to have exterminated the world’s most charismatic marsupial carnivore.”
Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island’s Soul, Pete Hay, Walleah Press, $22