Abstract
This article traces a concern with excess and waste, landscape and identity in a town on the western periphery of Tasmania. Queenstown’s bald hills have been a popular tourist drawcard since the turn of the century, sold in travel guides and brochures as a spectacular ‘moonscape’. A combination of a severe bushfire in 1896 and the emission of sulphurous gases from the pyritic smelting process at the Mt Lyell Copper Mine have resulted in Queenstown’s weird denuded landscape. But the locals have grown attached to the hills and want to preserve their baldness. Here, the impulse to preserve a grotesque landscape registers a culture surviving on desecration to stave off its own disappearance.
Highlights
Approaching the town of Queenstown you can’t help but be taken aback by the sight of the barren hillsides, hauntingly bare yet strangely beautiful
Says Taussig, is in some way a defacement, a tearing away at an object that ends up working its magic on the critic and forging a ‘curious complicity’ between object and critic.[2]
‘Like montage or collage, it operates through a poetics of and by citation that can only “grasp” its “object” by following its interpretative moves into their tense and varied effects
Summary
Approaching the town of Queenstown you can’t help but be taken aback by the sight of the barren hillsides, hauntingly bare yet strangely beautiful.
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