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It is difficult to point to another example in Tasmania where
the social and cultural capital invested in something like The
Bothwell SPINin has had the payoffs the SPINin
has had. Tasmania's spinners, weavers and dyers plus other fibre
artists and designer makers – living all over Tasmania
– and the Bothwell community together have achieved significant
things that haven't been acknowledged all that well –
and achievements that are not repeated elsewhere.
For
the textile people the SPINin's social and cultural
dividends are many and varied. Important among them there are
the <PEOPLEnetworks> that so many people
have established over the years. They feed into their daily
lives, and their cultural practices, in a myriad of ways. This
is not to mention the personal friendships and collegiality
that has developed between unlikely people from unlikely places
and the personal networks that, by now, reach far beyond Tasmania's
shores.
This
is the kind of thing that engenders the wellbeing that people
need to sustain themselves once they have provided for the necessities
of life.
For
Bothwell, as a place, the social and cultural dividends are
also many and varied. The social capital that has developed
and evolved over the years within the Bothwell community is
quite remarkable. Also, the economic and cultural dividends
for the community are not insignificant. Small communities all
so often find it difficult to express their cultural realities
in the way Bothwell has via the SPINin. Bothwell
no longer has this difficulty and the place is the richer for
it in that it has found a mechanism – alongside others
– to allow itself to talk about, and develop, its placedness
– its sense of place in the world.
This
is the very thing that engenders that sense of wellbeing within
a community that communities depend upon to be viable and vibrant
places – and to be places actually worth living in.
Without
doubt, when the SPINin won the National Bank Award
for volunteering in the field of art and culture the award's
judges – outsiders all of them – must have
sensed all this. In a special way the award seems to acknowledge
not only the SPINin's cultural dimension
but also the social dynamics that have been at work for so many
years and that has kindled such a sense of shared wellbeing.
This is something that continues to grow as time passes.
So
long as all this remains the case it is hard to imagine either
Bothwell without the SPINin or textile artist's,
makers and appreciators in Tasmania without the SPINin.
They have become inextricably linked. The SPINin's
'community of ownership and interest' is ever likely to
go on imagining Bothwell as 'their place' in so many
ways. And this is so no matter where it is the individuals within
the SPINin's cultural network actually live.
Of
course every community of Bothwell's size can claim something
within its cultural reality that 'something or other'
that "works like the SPINin." It is
just that Tasmania's 'textile people' – indeed many
world wide – have developed such a relationship with
Bothwell, as a place, that all of this together has become a
part of Bothwell's placedness and to some extent plays a part
in defining it.
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