Van Diemonian Time

Abstract

Tasmanian modernity is a shimmering, mirror-phase frustration logic that is belittled and celebrated, neurotically defended and expansively embraced. This clash of concepts and behaviour occurs when each instance of temporal abstraction named by the term “modernity”, is folded back onto the general map of singular and multiple modernities. Comparing the Tasmanian genocide to the Holocaust tempers this jagged union and proves that social time can be consonant and clashing. Modernity has played a hide and seek game with Tasmania. Richard Flanagan’s novels articulate this wishing for a stable iteration of social progress narratives in Tasmania. His work, and especially the novel, Gould’s Book of Fish presents a thorough-going working through of the problems of thwarted futurism, solipsistic islandness and fantasies of offhand despotic planning and desire.