THE VILLAGE WE ARE LOSING

An Island Almanac Essay on the Shadow of Gossip, Belonging and Cultural Renewal in Tasmania
by Dr. Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne)

1. A Blizzard, a Dream and a Message From the Land

There are moments when the rhythm of this Island shifts and the deeper story reveals itself. The blizzard that moved through our valley this week carried more than weather. It brought a message woven through several events at once: a neighbour passing quietly next door, a letter from local government questioning the very portfolio of conviviality and cultural renewal I have dedicated my life to, and a fleeting morning dream in which I imagined taking my boys to Italy, a place my blood remembers, where village life is still a living architecture, not a nostalgic wish.

When I woke, the dream lingered, but so did the conviction that leaving is not the answer. The work is here. The future of my boys, their light, their soulful way of being, is here. And the cultural healing this island requires is not something to be witnessed from afar. It is something to be created with courage and heart, right here in the soil and soul of Tasmania.

2. A Valley of Quiet Watching

I live in a valley that is exquisitely beautiful. The sun rises with a hush that feels ancient; the mist kisses the land and the rivulet; the trees hold the memory of older worlds. But beneath this beauty lies a pattern that is more difficult to speak about, though it shapes nearly everything: a quiet watching instead of warm engagement, a reflex toward gossip instead of conversation, a discomfort with difference that sits beneath the surface like a low, persistent hum.

This pattern is not malicious, but it is consequential. It is a kind of rural panopticism not created by technology, but by habit, fear, and inherited cultural norms. People see but do not speak, judge but do not ask. In the absence of real connection, stories fill the gaps, and the stories almost always bend toward suspicion rather than generosity.

3. When Innovation Meets Rural Fear

I felt this acutely when building our cob house, when shaping Magical Farm into a place of creativity and regeneration. Instead of curiosity there was scrutiny. Instead of dialogue, rumours. Instead of relationality, distance. Rather than being about any one person, these responses reveal a deeper cultural discomfort with anything that operates outside the established rural template.

Magical Farm, in many ways, functions as a prototype of new relational possibilities: a living, experimental lab exploring creativity, regeneration, shared responsibility and convivial social design. I have seen similar dynamics emerge in other community-based initiatives, such as the Huon Valley Food Hub, where innovative relational models were met with uncertainty or resistance simply because they departed from familiar council norms. These projects are not threats; they are invitations. Yet in a culture that has not yet rebuilt its village, even invitations can be misunderstood.

4. The Missing Village: Children, Heritage and the Roseto Mirror

This struggle becomes even clearer when I think about the heritage my boys carry through Mum and Dad. Our family line holds Mediterranean warmth, a tradition of reflective minds and imaginative hearts, Celtic fierceness and a creative instinct that never fits neatly within the boundaries of anglo-settler emotional restraint. My children are spirited, perceptive, full of imagination and movement! The kind of children who flourish in a village culture, not in a culture of quiet judgment. They need to be seen, not managed; supported, nor scrutinised.

This absence of village life is not unique to our valley; it reflects a broader pattern on the island. The Roseto study, which Malcolm Gladwell later popularised in Outliers demonstrated something profound about human health and community life. In the 1960s, researchers discovered that the people of Roseto, a small Italian-American town in Pennsylvania, had remarkably low rates of heart disease and chronic illness. What startled the medical world was that these outcomes had nothing to do with diet, wealth, genetics, or geography. The Rosetans smoked, drank wine, cooked in lard, and worked physically demanding jobs, yet they were thriving. Researchers were astonished to discover that the people of Roseto were thriving not because of diet or wealth, but because of the density of their relational life: daily visits, multigenerational households, rituals, shared responsibility and unpretentious hospitality.

Tasmania mirrors the Roseto story in reverse. We have beauty but not belonging. Geographically close but emotionally distant. Small in population yet fractured in connection. An island where people endure hardship quietly because speaking openly feels too vulnerable and where gossip travels faster than truth.

The Missing Village

5. Gossip and the Settlement of Silence

Compounding this is the pervasive presence of gossip, a force that many brush off lightly but which erodes the very conditions required for community. Gossip behaves like a subtle weather system. It moves through kitchens and driveways, shaping reputations before conversations ever occur. It reduces real people into caricatures and provides the illusion of connection without the reality of it. Gossip is not community; it is the shadow of community.

It thrives where emotional literacy is thin, and Tasmania’s settler-colonial inheritance has long carried the residue of communities built not on relational foundations but on survival, authority and silence. Convicts torn from homeland, guards enforcing order, settlers navigating isolation without elders or ritual, these histories shaped a culture where vulnerability feels unsafe and difference feels disruptive.

In such climates gossip becomes a stand-in for real communication. People lean away instead of leaning in. They create narratives rather than ask questions. They preserve distance rather than build bridges. And over time, this quiet avoidance erodes the informal relational systems that hold the village together.

From a Con Viv lens, this is where our social architecture collapses. The relational layer is too weak to support difference or metabolise conflict. The everyday rituals, shared stories, and intergenerational exchanges that sustain a village have eroded leaving communities reactive instead of resilient.

6. The Relational Wisdom of the First Peoples

Yet the antidote is not abstract. It exists in the relational wisdom of the First Peoples of this island, whose communities flourished for over 80,000 years. Aboriginal relational culture was and remains grounded in reciprocity, kinship, shared responsibility, ceremony, storytelling and collective intelligence. Children were raised by many hands. Conflict was navigated through dialogue and ritual. Knowledge flowed intergenerationally in ways that created stability, belonging and coherence.

Viewed through the Con Viv framework, Aboriginal community life embodied all seven relational elements: ritual, routine, relationship, conversation, new knowledge, skill-building and storytelling. These elements formed a cultural immune system, a village muscle, strong enough to prevent gossip from becoming corrosive, because tensions were addressed before they hardened into fracture.

Tasmania’s healing lies in honouring this older, wiser architecture of community. Rebuilding the village is not nostalgia; it is a return to relational practice.

7. A New Paradigm Emerging

The letter from council this week, asking that I formally acknowledge their involvement in my Con Viv portfolio, despite the fact that I personally seeded the work, stayed up until three in the morning writing the application, and then had to beg directors to submit it because my role was no longer funded, revealed far more than administrative misunderstanding. It revealed a pattern in colonial institutions: the impulse to claim or contain community-led innovation while erasing the labour and cultural depth that birthed it.

Yet even this awkward moment holds possibility. The fact that institutions feel compelled to engage with ideas outside their familiar frames suggests the membrane is softening. They are noticing relational philosophy, ecological imagination and community-led design, even if they cannot yet articulate why. This is where renewal begins: in the tremor before understanding.

If institutions can move from claiming to collaborating, from surveillance to reciprocity, from extraction to relationship, then something new becomes possible on this island.

Stay or go? For me the answer is clear. Tasmania does not need abandonment. It needs renewal: gentle, honest, courageous and heart-led. Cultural renewal begins with conversation, not gossip. With curiosity rather than fear. With celebrating difference rather than containing it. With restoring the village not as nostalgia, but as necessity.

I write this for my children, for those whose creativity has been misunderstood, for families carrying lineages that sit outside the anglo-normative frame, for Aboriginal communities whose wisdom is essential, and for every person who has ever felt watched when what they needed was to be welcomed.

Tasmania has the potential to become a living Roseto, a place where emotional warmth, relational courage and cross-cultural intelligence form the backbone of shared life on this heart shaped Island. What we lack is not beauty. What we lack is connection. And connection is something we can reweave, valley by valley, neighbour by neighbour, if we are willing to begin.

Con Viv & With Love,

Emily / Dr Demeter