West Coast, Tas. | 2014 & 2015

West Coast, Tasmania

Presented with support from illuminate Education Australia, Hydro Tasmania, MMG, TasTAFE & the University of Tasmania

Queenstown sits on Tasmania’s West Coast, a landscape shaped by mining, weather and the kind of distance from everywhere else that produces a particular kind of community – tight, resilient and not used to being the subject of external attention. The town had experienced real economic shocks. illuminate delivered a program there at no charge to the school.

The first year’s theme was local jobs – what they were, where they had gone and what a viable economic future for the West Coast could look like. The students who worked through that challenge were not doing an exercise about employment. They were working on the reality of the town their families lived in, in the weeks after that reality had shifted significantly. What the illuminate framework gave them was a structured way to think about it, a professional context to develop ideas within, and an audience – community leaders and local decision-makers – who were genuinely there to listen.

The program was filmed for the ABC’s Backroads series and broadcast nationally. On the night it aired, 850,000 people watched. For a program running in a school on the West Coast of Tasmania, that reach said something – not just about the students, but about what people recognised when they saw young people in a regional community being taken seriously.

The second year brought Hydro Tasmania into the partnership. Their involvement was not incidental – it reflected a genuine commitment to community engagement around the electricity network and the lakes and infrastructure that have defined the West Coast for generations. Hydro Tasmania brought major power users on board as additional partners, strengthening the program and connecting students directly to the industrial and environmental context of the place they live.

The second year also expanded the reach. Rosebery joined Queenstown, meaning every high school student across the region participated. The theme shifted to the lakes – the hydro infrastructure, the lakes system, and the relationship between that landscape, the electricity network and the community’s economic identity. Students who had grown up alongside that landscape were given a framework to think about it as a system they could understand, contribute to and shape.

Two years. One remote community that rarely makes the national news for reasons that feel good. One television broadcast seen by 850,000 people. And a second year that went back because the first year had shown what was possible.