Tasmania (Visitors Information)

It was not until 1798 that Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the island, and his discovery of the Bass Strait reduced the journey to Sydney by a week. In 1803, after the French had been observed nosing around the island’s southern waters, it was decided to establish a second colony in Australia. (The first had been established at Sydney Cove in 1788.) Lieutenant David Bowen was dispatched to Van Diemen’s Land, settling with a group of convicts on the banks of the Derwent River at Risdon Cove. 

Tasmania did not experience the postwar industrialization that transformed the mainland. A small, isolated and neglected state, it even missed out on postwar immigration and consequently remains predominantly Anglo-Saxon in character, with an insular – often conservative – population. Its natural resources include forests – covering forty percent of the island – and water, and the mountainous terrain and fast-flowing rivers meant that hydroelectricity schemes began early here, under the auspices of the huge Hydro Electricity Commission (HEC). The flooding of Lake Pedder in 1972 led to the formation of the Wilderness Society, a conservation organization whose successful Franklin Blockade in 1982 managed to save one of the last wild rivers. Controversy over these issues still divides the state into “Greens” and a pro-logging, pro-dam working class worried about their jobs. By voting for the Tasmanian Greens in 1989, enough ordinary Tasmanians showed that they didn’t want Tasmania’s natural assets destroyed, and the party held the balance of power in the state’s parliament until 1992; in early 1996 the Greens again held the balance of power, with a Liberal state government. Before the 1998 state elections, the two major opposing parties, Labor and Liberal, conspired together to change the electoral structure, voting to reduce the number of members in the Lower House from 25 to 15, purposefully making it more difficult for the Greens to win seats. The Labour government was voted in, and the sole Green Member of Parliament in the Lower House has little chance of exercising any influence. The Tasmanian Green party is represented federally by one senator, the Tasmanian environmental activist Dr Bob Brown.

Recent campaigns have been aimed at stopping logging in particularly sensitive areas, and ending woodchipping (pulping trees for paper) for export to Japan; currently ninety percent of the wood taken from Tasmania’s forests ends up this way, with Tasmania the only state in Australia that woodchips rainforests. It’s claimed that the state government is subsidizing the industry, selling woodchips off at a third of the going rate to keep Tasmanians employed. The high-profile conservation issue stirring up media interest nationally is that of the Western Explorer, the “tourist road” crossing the wild Tarkine area on the west coast north of Zeehan, which was constructed hastily and finished in January 1996. A year before, an incredibly vast and ancient Huon pine was found in the area, as big as a city block and thought to date from around 8000 BC. Conservationists are sceptical that “the road to nowhere”, as they’ve called it, is being used as a cover to open up the area (currently state forest) to logging, thereby destroying its ability to be put forward for World Heritage listing.