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West Australian
5 days ago
- Politics
- West Australian
The Snitch: What losing Tasmania as 19th AFL club could mean for Fremantle Dockers
The Snitch is a proud 'yes' man. I only ever vote yes in referendums despite our country's historical lean to a no. It's just my positive nature. Ask Mrs Snitch. I always find it hard to say 'no' to anything my dear lady requests, whether it was the peculiar mix of Penfolds Grange and Devils on Horseback at our wedding reception at El Caballo Blanco, or her insistence we ride to the chapel in a racing green Dymaxion replica. So I have been flummoxed with with all of this pushback from Tasmanians on having an AFL team. It's all so negative and small-town minded. The thought of missing out on a stadium, and therefore a team, because of political squabbling and local myopia, has brought Tasmanian's finest footy players to tears this week. Why wouldn't you want an AFL team in your State? Yes, Tassie's greatest tourism asset lies in its diverse landscape and rich history, from Cradle Mountain to Port Arthur, but this would surely ramp it up a notch. If I am honest, only one good thing will come from a team not landing in Van Diemen's Land and that would be the likelihood Alex Pearce would remain at Fremantle for the duration of his career. Alex has Palawa heritage and grew up in Ulverstone on Tassie's north coast. He'll be 31 by Tasmania's intended AFL debut in 2028, but would be just the type of experienced and balanced footballer and all-round good chap the Devils would be looking for to lead their inaugural team. The transformation of the ugly Macquarie Point Sewage Treatment Plant into a boutique stadium worth a few Tassie truffles short of $1 billion has poured new salt on to old north v south wounds in the State. On Thursday, Tasmania's Liberal Party Premier Jeremy Rockliff lost a vote of no confidence over a looming $1 billion budget deficit and will now call a snap election. The deficit and now the election mean the AFL team is in doubt given the league has made the new roofed stadium a condition of a 19th licence. Media giant Eddie McGuire summed it up best when he said: 'What Tasmania doesn't need is every week to have an advertisement that they are a second-rate state. I think Tasmania deserves to be finally seen for the great state that it is.' He's right. If they want to remain blissfully second rate, then we have to let them. It's their call. They are busy subversives Tasmanians, just like West Aussies, after all. Remember, Tassie is an actual island. We are like one given our distance from the east. Which brings me to my favourite Tassie story and a perfect segue out of this misery. Back in 1982, the Commonwealth Games opened in Brisbane to great fanfare. Matilda the giant kangaroo was the centrepiece as she circled the QEII Stadium, winked and opened her pouch to enable hundreds of kids to pour out and form a human map of Australia. The Snitch was one of those kids – with my aptly named best mate Cliff – positioned to form the Nullarbor Plain. It was all going splendidly until we realised there was a gaping error. We'd left Tasmania off the human map. I recall talking to the one kid who was solely responsible for that role. He mumbled something about eating too many apples and sprinted to the nearest toilet and, you guessed it, missed the cut when we boarded Matilda. The outrage was loud from Tasmanians. It was another slap in the face from the mainland. Realising the gravity of his absence when he emerged from the lav to find we had all left without him, 'Tassie' leapt the fence in a futile effort to address the geographical gaffe, but sadly, we'd already broken away. A bit like Tassie right now. Say no to the AFL and you deserve to be permanently cut adrift, leaving you to float south where you will somewhat ironically bump into Macquarie Island before clattering into the frozen pole of Antarctica.
News.com.au
27-05-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
‘Time to move on': Flinders Island councillor pushes to scrap Welcome to Country
A councillor on Flinders Island in Tasmania has called for the end of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country, saying the ceremonies have 'served their purpose and it is now time to move on'. Flinders Island, part of the Furneaux Group in the Bass Strait off Tasmania's northeast tip, has a population of 800 people and the second-highest proportion of Aboriginal residents in the state at around 16 per cent. Councillor Garry Blenkhorn has put forward a resolution to be voted on at Wednesday's meeting for Flinders Council to 'cease reciting all references to Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country in any event or publication involving the council including, but not limited to, meetings of the council, meetings of special and subcommittees of the council, public meetings organised by or involving the council and the publishing and presentation of reports of the council including Annual Reports'. Mayor Rachel Summers told the ABC that she was disappointed Cr Blenkhorn had not raised the issue before submitting his notice of motion. She warned that the proposal would 'take us back 50 years, 100 years even'. 'It's literally 30 seconds, 60 seconds, when we just acknowledge the contribution the Aboriginal community has made over their time as custodians of the land,' Cr Summers said. The Palawa people of the Trawulwai Nation are recognised as the traditional owners of the Furneaux Islands. Flinders Island is also the site of the old Wybalenna Mission where Indigenous Tasmanians were sent in the early 1800s, many dying from disease and poor conditions. Cr Blenkhorn said there had 'recently been an increase in discontent throughout Australia regarding the use of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country at public events'. 'The use of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country is seen as divisive, unnecessary and not contributing to reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and others,' he wrote. 'I believe the two protocols have served their purpose and it is now time to move on. These protocols are not historical and have only existed for around 50 years … It is not a long-held tradition and should not be regarded as such.' Cr Blenkhorn highlighted the 2023 defeat of the Indigenous Voice Referendum by a 60-40 margin. Flinders Island recorded a slightly stronger yes vote at 45.6 per cent, but Cr Blenkhorn said the overall result was 'a vote against constitutional recognition for Indigenous peoples throughout Australia'. 'There can be many interpretations put on the result … but the major certainty is that Australians do not want separatist development,' he wrote. 'That is called apartheid. Many will recall or have read of the White Australia policy which was developed after World War II. We do not want to go back to those days where your future in Australia was determined by your race. Those days have gone and should never return.' Flinders Council general manager Warren Groves raised concerns about the motion, saying the Flinders Island Aboriginal Association Incorporated (FIAAI), the Cape Barren Island Aboriginal Association (CBIAA) and the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania (ALCT) were all 'strongly opposed'. 'I am concerned that any such action will cause potentially significant offence and affront to those associations and the communities they represent,' he wrote. 'An Acknowledgement of, or Welcome to Country, is a relatively short expression of respect, acknowledging, amongst other matters, the strong ongoing connection of the Aboriginal people to Australia for more than 40,000 years.' Flinders Council has used the Acknowledgement of Country since 2019, and in 2014 'took what was reportedly viewed as a progressive step, to support an inclusive celebration of being Furneaux Islanders on a date separate to Australia Day'. 'This change has since been widely celebrated for its inclusive and progressive perspective,' Mr Groves wrote. 'I have significant concerns that removing the Welcome to or Acknowledgement of Country from Council events may be seen as a retrograde step and offensive to our Aboriginal community, as well as reputationally and socially damaging for council both within and outside our island communities.' CBIAA chair Aaron Maynard told the ABC 'words can't really explain how disgusting and just how disrespectful this is to everyone'. 'Our people on this land in Australia are the oldest living race in the world at 65,000 years old, and we're still not celebrating that to our full capacity,' he said. Debate over the use of Welcome to Country ceremonies has grown since the Voice Referendum, with the Liberal frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price previously warning people are 'sick if it'. 'There is no problem with acknowledging our history, but rolling out these performances before every sporting event or public gathering is definitely divisive,' she said. 'It's not welcoming, it's telling non-Indigenous Australians 'this isn't your country' and that's wrong. We are all Australians and we share this great land.' Reconciliation Australia, the national peak body dedicated to reconciliation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the wider community, says the ceremonies are an important sign of respect. 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have experienced a long history of exclusion from Australian history books, the Australian flag, the Australian anthem and for many years, Australian democracy,' it says. 'This history of dispossession and colonisation lies at the heart of the disparity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and other Australians today. Including recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in events, meetings and national symbols contributes to ending the exclusion that has been so damaging.'
The Guardian
08-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Jurassic-era trees have grown in Tasmania for millions of years. Now they face their biggest threat: fire
Steve Leonard finds it hard when he goes bushwalking in Tasmania's high country these days. 'I look at a stand of pencil pine and I wonder: 'how long will you be there?'' The ecologist is just back from a rapid survey of the cost to ancient trees of the latest lightning-strike fires across the island's drying landscapes. Among the losses he found near the overland track, an alpine walking trail through central Tasmania, were groves of pencil pine. 'We saw a couple of stands that were quite severely burned,' says Leonard, from the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service. 'Others where the fires had taken out single trees.' This wizard-bearded scientist spoke the fears of many: that tree-by-tree natural antiquity is being consumed. Only found in Tasmania, pencil pine dates back to the late Jurassic, 140 million years ago. It is from the small Athrotaxis genus, with King Billy pine and a third species that crosses between them called the Lax-leaf. If allowed, these trees can live a thousand years. Unlike eucalypts, they are hypersensitive to fire; if burned around the trunk, they die. And Tasmania is in a new age of fire. Pencil pine has an absorbingly varied character which reflects its landscape, shaped by wind, ice and snow. The bark is soft and yielding, its waxy leaves kind to running fingers. I have seen it outlined at sundown, making a trail along a watercourse like a clan on a centuries-long journey. Marvelled on a mountain plateau where the trees' windward stems have been ice-stripped of bark, yet shelter stems of new life. And I've been held spellbound on a glacial shelf where a pine crawls up a boulder, live branchlets rising barely a hand's breadth above the rock. I have imagined pencil pines sculptural groves offering permanence through generations of Palawa who have lived on the island for thousands of years, the shelter across riskier altitudes they would have offered. After invasion it was regarded as so 'remarkably handsome' that its first colonial name was pine of Olympus. Woodlands of pencil pine are now rare. The tree persists in rock-guarded fortresses like the walls of Jerusalem and the labyrinth; a reminder of what once stood before wide-scale burning. Mostly now pencil pines live as remnants, finding just enough nourishment to huddle in fireproof boulder fields or to edge wet shorelines. A century ago the poet Marie Pitt, who lived through bushfire on a mountain mining hamlet, wrote of people unleashing 'A gallop of fire': I loose the horses, the wild, red horses I loose the horses, the mad, red horses And terror is on the land. The burning was to clear Tasmanian land for access and prospecting, and later to encourage livestock grazing. Pitt's words stand eerily today as a description of the red horses of global heating, which have brought lightning-started fires across whole Tasmanian landscapes in 2013, 2016, 2020, and now in 2025. These latest fires, now burning into a fifth week, are again exceeding our ability to protect these ancient trees. A tree like Huon pine, renowned for its long-lasting scented timber, can more often be found today confined to pockets of landscape that are less likely to burn: south-facing hillsides, for example, sheltered from the predominant northerly wind-blown fires. In his 21 February helicopter survey, Leonard flew west to the Harman River, where deep concern was held for a Huon pine stand that included a tree ring counted to 2,500 years of annual growth – not including its rotten centre, which might have held another 500 rings. Fire had burned to the edges of this stand in a steep river valley. 'It's a tall, single stem tree. It sticks up out of the canopy in the rainforest. It's a really nice looking tree. It was unharmed.' Other, big, Huon further downriver did burn, leaving a ghastly catalogue for Rob Blakers, a nature photographer, to record. Touchstones from the deep past such as the Huon and pencil pines give each of us pause to contemplate our own temporary existence. I was drawn to these trees during my recovery from stage 4 metastatic lung cancer, our joint struggles for life an inspiration to me. I have the medical breakthrough of immunotherapy to thank for my second life. Surely human ingenuity can be turned to protect this rich heritage of trees too. On the afternoon of 3 February, 1,227 lightning strikes hit the ground in a sweep across the island. Nineteen fires lit up within hours in the north-west but one in the south of the state didn't. It stayed smouldering near Mount Picton for a few days, then burst into flame. Within minutes its smoke was reported by a remote AI-trained camera set on a nearby mountaintop; a little swarm of Fire Boss water bombers flew out to it and began dumping. Helicopters followed and winched down remote area firefighters. Together they stopped the burn at a few hectares. But this is just a hopeful sign. The 2025 fires have left a patchwork of burnt ground across 98,500 hectares of wild country. Richard Dakin, the deputy incident controller with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, says the fire which took out the pencil pine near the overland track was nearly held back by Fire Bosses – fire fighting float planes – skimming water out of nearby Lake St Clair. Lakes and coastal bays are on the side of the ancients. But Tasmania is an island in the southern ocean. Strong winds and cloud are usual, and the skimmers could not hold the fire's perimeter. Instead, the fire headed north toward more rich flora, including a very old King Billy pine forest and – in the distance – Cradle Mountain itself. 'We had to throw everything at it,' Dakin sais. NSW fire service large air tankers dropped a 2.5km fire-retardant line; water bombers campaigned from the lakes; and remote firefighters worked at arduous, grimy 'old-school' firefighting, flailing and digging at the perimeter. 'The combination of the three led to success,' Dakin says. Their campaign rolls on, the full losses of the ancients yet to be tallied. But already we know for certain that after millions of years on Earth, and living only in Tasmania, these trees will need our help if they are to have a place in a heated future. Andrew Darby is the author of The Ancients, published by Allen & Unwin and available now
