As tourism collapses an island rediscovers local
Suddenly, it stopped. The ferries. The traffic. The crowds. Popular campgrounds were emptied. The mountains were vacated of hikers. The beaches were once again the province of locals. All went quiet as Australia’s southernmost state went into Covid 19 hibernation, cut off not only geographically from the mainland (as Tasmanians call Australia) but physically as well.
Taswegians bunkered down. Some learned to cook. Others learned to garden. Non-hybrid vegetable seed went into short supply as seed companies shut down their internet sales to cope with the deluge of orders. Emptied of its more than 800,000 annual tourists and deprived of its AU$1.3 billion tourist income, the island reverted to its residents.
I see this out here on the coast. Only locals visit the single grocery shop in town. Only locals are seen on the shore of Tiger Head Bay. Only local walk the streets to get their exercise. Only locals come out into the backstreet for a session of well-spaced communal exercise. The occasional vehicles passing by with surfboards on its roof rack, like the old, yellow T2 Kombi that I frequently see, are those of locals. Every morning, the man across the road loads his malibu board and takes off to the local beach. Yes, people are rediscovering the local.
Bruny’s isolation breeds local self-reliance
This is no more so than on Bruny Island. Stand on the summit of Kunanyi-Mt Wellington and you see Bruny to the south as a bumpy landmass close to the Tasmanian mainland, surrounded by water. The vehicle ferry is the vital connection to and from the island, bringing locals back and forth and visitors to the wooded mountains of its southern extension.
Now devoid of visitors, Bruny has fallen onto its own resources. A piece on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) news online paints a vivid picture on what life is now like on the island. Entitled Coronavirus delivers islanders a quiet piece of paradise, I’ve linked to the story below. It makes interesting reading about our post-tourism times. A couple excerpts reveal the flavour of the story and life on Bruny:
“The people that live on Bruny are the type that go fishing for their food, grow their own veggies and raise their own goats.
“We’ve even had someone who would go and organise their own salt from the seawater.”
Local, Jen Creighton, was quoted: “It’s amazing how resourceful we can all be when we choose to use the produce on the island.
“I actually hear people say: ‘Wow, isn’t it amazing how connected we all are at the moment?’
“I think it’s important that when we emerge from this, we don’t forget it,” she said.
How different will post-Covid life be?
If there is one thing Civid 19 is teaching us, it is the value of what lies close at hand, of what is local.
Will this continue into post-Covid times? The old economy, the old society, the old mentality of individualism will exert a strong pull as it tries to take us back to what was. Forces economic and political will try to tug us back to the socio-economy we had before.
Bloggers and social media commentators write of their hopes for a different society and economy to emerge post-Covid. Some are very optimistic. I hope they are right, however I know that to change a system you need a sufficiently strong deflecting force applied at the right time. I don’t know if sentiment for something new will be that force. That takes strategy, a well-structured campaign and an organisation capable of doing the job.
Those of us practicing permaculture and engaging in the community-based tactics like those David Holmgren describes in the pages of his 2018 book, Retrosuburbia, are creating ripples of personal change within our circles of influence. The challenge is working out how to expand that into our circles of concern. Sure, small scale change works but it takes time. Were it to build momentum and attract the numbers, perhaps we could see the retrosuburbia idea grow beyond its early adopters into early mass adaption, to borrow a concept from Rogers Ideas Diffusion theory. What the ABC article hints at is that, on Bruny Island at least, some of the peconditions of such a transformation are being laid during the pandemic. The same is happening elsewhere.
I guess we wait and see what evolves in the post-Covid world. Sure, I anticipate some things will be different but whether they do what that Bruny Island woman hopes, well, I don’t know. Her saying: “I think it’s important that when we emerge from this, we don’t forget it,” is the hope of all who want a better life for themselves and their families.
Read the ABC News story about Bruny Island: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-24/bruny-island-in-covid-19-lockdown-builds-community/12178190
Retrosuburbia in flipping book format is now available on a pay-what-you-can-afford basis: https://holmgren.com.au/retrosuburbia-online-innovation-in-digitalpublishing/fbclid=IwAR3zszFqy5ZoHqAdMmbR_UuGsyG2KboQLb6Vpe-aKh9pbnyP022WKu3uS8I
Find Retrosuburbia, the print edition here: https://melliodora.com/catalogue/retrosuburbia/
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