Tasmanian Time

Abstract

History is the what that has happened as well as the study of that which has been and gone, passing before our eyes as students and lived subjects of the past. This chapter tackles the uses of history in a minor place. It unties knots of cliché like the extinction thesis and the civilisational clean break and cross-cultural depopulation anxiety. It rests finally on the paranoid repetition of justice threats that haunt the heirs of the social extinguishment of aboriginality in Tasmania. The archive drive need not lead us to crypto-fascist obscurantism. Tasmania also has a common-sense narrative core that tells the story of water, dams, factories, society and economy. There is always room in philosophical historiography for these literal, de-pressured tales of place and people.