Tasmania is being asked to accept another top-down, corporate megaproject—this time a stadium shaped more by AFL interests than community wellbeing. Drawing on the legacy of Scenario Two – Powering Regeneration, this article offers seven alternative visions rooted in Designing with Country, justice, imagination and local place-making. These scenarios show how investing outside Hobart’s CBD, into Glenorchy, Bridgewater/Gagebrook, Shorewell Park, Risdon Vale or a retrofit on the outskirts, creates regeneration rather than displacement. First Nations leadership, diverse sports, food-growing, arts, youth programs and wellbeing ecosystems become the real legacy. Scenario Two reclaims public investment for the highest good of all Tasmanian’s, proving a stadium can uplift rather than extract.

This Scorpio New Moon brought a revelation that quietly rearranged the inside of my life. I have always known I was born in ‘that village’ during Ash Wednesday. The stories of fire and vigilance were part of the atmosphere I grew up in, like a mythos that lived in the soil. I was a child who watched the sky, who tightened inside when the wind swung around, who wanted us to leave early on fire-danger days. That instinct lived within me… One major reason is because I was always aware that 18 CFA firefighters died only one kilometre from where I grew up, taken by the Ash Wednesday firestorm. And soon after, another truth surfaced: I was conceived just two months later, in a landscape still smoking, grieving, and trying to regrow itself.

Tasmanians deserve more than top-down slogans. We need a genuine, strategic vision, Scenario Two: A Living Island of Renewal grounded in community ownership, climate resilience, and economic dignity. Imagine a $1 billion public interest fund (matched by the Commonwealth to $2 billion) powering food hubs, care infrastructure, and publicly owned renewable energy projects. This isn’t a boom-and-bust model: it’s about durable, locally rooted jobs: green energy technicians, regenerative farmers, care workers, and cultural craftspersons. By redefining progress beyond GDP and megaprojects, we can build a Tasmania that flourishes in body, mind, and spirit.

A Call for Justice and Regeneration in Australian Universities is both a reckoning and a renewal. Drawing on two decades within the university system and the insights of a national inquiry, Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne reveals a crisis not just of contracts, but of conscience. Behind the statistics lies something deeper: the erosion of dignity, creativity, and care in places once imagined as sanctuaries for learning.

Yet this is not only a critique…it is a vision. The article offers a pathway for transformation rooted in truthfulness, courage, and responsibility. It imagines universities not as factories of credentialism, but as living communities of knowledge and moral purpose. Here, education becomes an act of regeneration, of land, people, and the future. Tasmania, with its spirit of independence and possibility, could lead this renewal.

Wayfinding Patterns Through the Eras is a reflective Solstice piece by Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne that draws on ancient cosmologies, particularly Chinese Feng Shui to make sense of our current global moment. Exploring two full 180-year cycles, Emily reveals how the final fire phase we are now in (Period 9) offers not only cultural reckoning but the opportunity to compost 360 years of modernity. With love, courage, and cosmic guidance, this article invites us to dream forward a new Period 1 rooted in life systems remembered from ancient, land-connected cultures across the globe.

By Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne

Right now, Tasmania’s future is being shaped by a single, homogenous energy narrative “Battery of the Nation” designed and decided by a small group of stakeholders. This narrow vision risks sidelining the diverse voices, knowledge systems, and community-led solutions that are essential for a truly resilient future. In such a defining moment, we must ask: Who gets to imagine the future? A thriving Tasmania requires many scenarios, not just one. Scenario Two is an invitation to co-create not dictate what regeneration looks like, place by place.