I confess that I love Tasmania. I lived and worked there for 6 years, I still walk and fish in the Central Highlands every summer, so I can appreciate the author's love for the place and his lament for the loss of a part of it.

However, the problem with this sort of 'spirituality' is that it inspires the sort of head-in-the-sand thinking evident in akash's post expressing concern over the continued presence of a 'nature as resource paradigm' Just how do humans live if they don't treat nature as a resource? Would aboriginals have survived if they hadn't thought the same way?

It is this type of romanticism that inspires environmental activism to oppose virtually all natural resource use without thinking through the implications.

If we aren't going to revert to living in caves, we only have one option which is to manage natural resources and the environment. This requires pragmatism and an acceptance that we can't maintain everything in a pristine state.

It may mean mistakes are made such as Lake Pedder, but on the whole we in Australia have been able to strike a far better balance between resource conservation and use than most other places, largely because we've become affluent through utilising resources.

There is a crying need for Australians to think hard about what they are doing to global environmental outcomes by supporting activists campaigning to pull apart natural resource management in this country.

Clownfish

You are wrong. Only shallow water has the capacity to give a mirror image of the background. Your comment, and a couple of others which imply that I am on a cloud somewhere, makes me feel even more fortunate that I get so much out of nature.

rpg

Domestic violence is irrelevant to the substance of the article. I referred to the spiritual life of Aborigines of millenium ago. Today's Aborigines may not be that spiritual after we took their way of life away from them.

MWPOYNTER

I tend to agree
My 'nature as resource' paradigm comment referred to the paradigm that sees nature purely in resource terms and cannot see any other value in nature. It is this paradigm that leads to 'mistakes' such as Lake Pedder.

I too saw Lake Pedder for the first time in early 1972 but from a slightly different perspective. As a NSW bushwalker and climber, the visions I encountered in Tasmania were beyond description in their beauty and Pedder was the most beautiful.
At the time we were travelling around cheaply,hitch-hiking and staying in youth hostels when in the big city of Hobart. There I encountered a number of blokes my age (21) who were working on the hydro construction. Here we were, a bunch of no-hoper pretend hippies out for a good time, confronted by a bunch of construction workers trying to make a living. It was just before we were due to be balloted and drafted (yep, not that long ago we had a thing called 'national service') so things were pretty chaotic.
What I remember is the great beauty and spriritualness of Pedder, but also the argument put by the construction blokes about jobs in Tasmania. It was a turbulent time.

Overall, I like Australia as a country. However, the views of many of the posters here underline the main thing I dislike about the place - and that is the spiritual emptiness of most of its population.

I have often pondered this void, especially when travelling overseas and encountering the inner richness of many other societies - often far worse off materially. (Ditto, Aboriginal society.)

I suppose the best theory I've been able to come up with is that white Australian society did not grow gradually from an ancient culture within an ancient land and move gradually into the modern era. It was transplanted here readymade from somewhere else.

"Only shallow water has the capacity to give a mirror image of the background."

I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's a load of cobblers. Nothing that I can recall from my High School physics would support that argument, nor did a couple of science teachers I queried today think so, either. Experience of the reflections on the rather deep portions of the Gordon River and Macquarie Harbour would also seem to give the lie to your claim.

I get a lot out of nature, too. I hike regularly in Tasmania, where I live, and I love this island. What I don't get out of it is a load of woolly, nature-worshipping hippy drivel.

I also made no reference at all to domestic violence. What I was saying was that Aborigines of 1,000 years ago didn't float around on some sort of permanent spiritual high: I'm sure they would have laughed, cried, hugged, fought, ate, hungered, wondered, quarrelled, smiled and cried, just as any human being does, or ever has.

What I strongly suspect they didn't do was have an absurdly sentimental view of nature.

I also find your claim that Aborigines today may be less spiritual than their ancestors to be incredibly condescending and insulting.