Nothing
demonstrates the fragility of life more than the unexpected loss of it. When
lives are interrupted, the human capacity for sympathising with tragedy reaches
across the ages as generations remember and retell the histories of those
affected by sudden and devastating disasters. These events fracture families
and communities changing them forever. The lives no longer lived continue to be
sustained through the narratives of those who recount what a life stood for,
who a person was, how they died. In a death is a lesson, is a purpose, and a
place. A combination of elements that construct a history peppered with
prosperity and hardship, spoils and irreversible misfortune, Queenstown in
Tasmania’s west is one place that yields a tinderbox of excesses that make and
break, leaving behind scars that are both symbolic of its future and of its
past.
