Writers centre
I AM very surprised to see the Tasmanian Writers Centre is at risk of imminent closure due to having its funding axed by the Tasmanian Government. Over the past 21 years the centre has helped connect Tasmanian writers to a wider audience and has helped Tasmanian readers better engage with writing from here and abroad. I urge the Government to provide emergency funding to keep the doors open.
Shelter from cold
WITH tourism numbers booming and the need for inexpensive housing at crisis levels, how sad that three years after Glenorchy City Council called for Expressions of Interest for the Treasure Island Caravan Park that it remains a virtual derelict wasteland and fodder for vandals.
I grew up watching tourists enjoying the facilities at the Treasure Island Caravan Park in Berriedale and it even provided a cheap home to some of my school friends whose parents couldn’t afford a house to live in. It wasn’t flash, but it was a happy place to stay.
Sadly, those days are over. Now it sits empty except for desperate people pitching tents in the cold with their worldly goods and pets vulnerable to the weather, at least until they were told to move on by the same Glenorchy City Council.
In his book Bone of Fact, philanthropist and Mona owner David Walsh wrote: “we would like to take over a nearby caravan park and get artists to jazz up the caravans and the little huts so that we would have accommodation at the lower end of the price scale”. Is this the Expression of Interest’ the Council desired?
Gun laws
IF ever there was a glaring reason to ensure that gun laws are not in any way weakened, it is demonstrated by the senseless slaying by gun of that beautiful white stag — a person’s pet, in an enclosure. Some moron has that gun, and to believe that there aren’t others like that person out there, would be naive in the extreme. Friends of ours who have a shack at Tooms Lake tell us of the many incidents of weekend drunken “campers” with guns who regularly shoot anything that moves.
The argument by the pro-gun lobby that these are “just minor tweaks” needs to be recognised for what it is — the thin end of the wedge: more “minor tweaks” invariably follow those minor tweaks, until they, by stealth, insidiously become big changes and then it’s too late to halt the rot. The argument that “other states have done it” is no argument whatsoever.