Tasmania's Creative Economy: The Cultural Island

Tasmania's creative economy has grown substantially in the decade since MONA's opening created the cultural identity that has attracted artists, designers, craftspeople, and the creative businesses that serve the growing arts tourism market to the island. The combination of the relatively affordable studio and residential space, the inspiring natural and heritage environment, and the growing community of creative practitioners who have chosen Tasmania for its qualities rather than its size has created a creative ecosystem of surprising depth for a state of half a million people.

The design sector, including the furniture makers, jewellers, ceramicists, and the textile designers who have established studios in Hobart's inner suburbs and in the rural properties of the island's various regions, provides the handmade and limited edition products that the luxury design market demands and that Tasmania's craft tradition, rooted in the cabinetmakers and the blacksmiths of the island's colonial trades, provides the skills base for. The Tasmanian timber traditions, using the Blackwood, Huon Pine, and Sassafras of the island's forests in furniture and objects of exceptional quality, sustain the maker community whose work commands the prices that skill, material quality, and cultural identity justify.

The Tasmanian College of the Arts, the art school component of the University of Tasmania, provides the formal education infrastructure that sustains the creative pipeline from student to practitioner. The college's programs in visual arts, design, and the applied arts produce the graduates who choose to remain in Tasmania, adding to the critical mass of creative practitioners that a viable creative community requires. The college's connections to the professional arts community, including the involvement of established artists as teachers and mentors, provide the professional network that student artists need to transition to commercial practice.

The arts festival calendar that has grown around MONA's anchor events, including the Wooden Boat Festival in Franklin, the Junction Arts Festival in Launceston, and the various community arts events that the state's cultural organisations run through the year, provides the public programming that sustains arts participation across the state and that creates the events calendar that arts tourists organise their visits around.

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