Arts space … MONA's David Walsh. Credit:Scott Gelston One of the farthest places is the north-west coast. Not that long ago, when the roads were poor, Bass Strait was the highway along the coast. Farmers would transport their produce down from the dynamic soils of the hills and fill the holds of coastal sailing vessels. Small ships would load up with rocks in Port Phillip Bay for ballast, cross Bass Strait, dump the rocks in places like the Inglis River in Wynyard, then filled with sacks of delicious Tasmanian spuds, sail back to the Melbourne markets. As a consequence, scattered along a short stretch of picturesque coast are tiny towns - Penguin, Preservation Bay, Sulphur Creek, Blythe Heads, Burnie, Cooee, Somerset, Wynyard, Boat Harbour. This mix of northern gaze, isolation, independence and relationship with the sea is what gives the north-west coast its distinctive feel and culture. With globalisation and the ''flattening'' of the world, the coast is coming into its own. It faces into the clearest, brightest sunshine on the planet, with rain so free of pollution it is sold in New York for $20 a bottle. Tiny airports along the coast can whisk you to Melbourne in less than an hour. You can be in a meeting in Collins Street faster than a peak hour crawl from Sorrento. It is this northern aspect combined with the buffer of Bass Strait that makes the coast a dream lifestyle for the emerging century with its new life/work practices.

You make your own opportunity here. You look out over that horizon and follow your dreams. Kids have to leave the nest and come and go from the oyster of the world. That's a good thing, and it's one of the great privileges of island life. Nationally, arts and culture generate a similar slice of gross domestic product as agriculture. Tasmania has long been a food bowl, so perhaps this bodes well, two economies working together - a food bowl for thought. In the language of government arts administration, this would be perfect for the ''Tasmanian Brand''. However branding becomes self-defeating when it attempts to harness arts and culture. Brands exist to motivate purchase and manipulate loyalty. The lack of authenticity in ''branding'' works against the spontaneous pull that Tasmania is enjoying. Culture is not primarily about commodity. People purchase the pearl, not the lengthy process of ''aggravation'' that creates it. When impatient arts policy discussions merge with tourism discussions, they mistake the cultural process and try to manipulate it, to help drive the economy. Ultimately this kills the process, diminishes the art, stunts careers, and there goes the oyster that laid the pearl.

What Tasmania has, precisely because it is so small, is the chance to defeat this stultifying way of thinking. There is simply not enough arts clout in government to do much damage, so the organic cultural process continues to happen haphazardly, almost magically - like the annoying way truffles need to grow, underground, in the dark, left to their own devices. How lucky for Tasmania that MONA [David Walsh's Museum of Old and New Art] bubbled up, almost unhindered by government, nestled in unlikely Glenorchy, run by the class-clown who gambles for a living and collects classy art/porn, pays for it himself and doesn't feel like he is owned by anyone. Would this lovely eccentric boutique museum/playground have happened if government-funded or arts policy driven? Not a chance. Culture is the whole of life, it is the flow of time and ideas and practice, in which we live and breathe, while reflecting on the past and inventing the future. It creates the rich soil in which society thrives. Artists are the worms in that soil, blind, slimy and producing shit to help fertilise. This independence, non-interference and under-the-radar activity in Tasmania is also driving the artisan migration. Hopefully we can avoid the branding, bad policy, and bean-counting, and let this utopia thrive. Scott Rankin is a writer/director and the creative director of Big hART. He lives and works from the north-west coast of Tasmania. This is an extract from his essay in Griffith Review 39: Tasmania - The Tipping Point?