One of Tasmania’s great, distinctive voices. Pete Hay illuminates the island in remarkable fashion, enriching our understanding of its history, culture, politics and environment.
Tim Bonyhady
Pete Hay is pre-eminent among the guardians of Tasmania’s island’s spirit, his fierce intelligence and compassionate heart resisting those who would ravage, exploit and appropriate its natural beauty, cultural creativity and fraught history for profit and power. Animals and ancestors, people and plants, the lost and the loved, the humus and the human, the artist and the artefact, the books and the birds, the sadness and the stillness, the past and the possible, the humour and the horror all find voice in ‘Forgotten Corners’.
For Pete Hay, ‘home matters’. He might be descended from a Point Puer boy and be the son of a legend of the 2/40th Battalion, the ‘Tasmanian’ battalion, but he does not claim belonging as a birthright: “You don’t inherit place”, he tells us, “you commit to it”.
James Boyce