01-04 Tasmania 2008

“Welcome to Tassie, our name for Tasmania. Most of you will not know much about our State, but most of you will remember the famous actor from Tasmania, Errol Flynn.”
It was a clever introduction from our guide as we prepared for a full day tour of the island state of Australia. Our cruise had stopped in Sydney, Melbourne and now we were in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.
It was a beautiful rugged island with an even more rugged history. The British sent close to 76,000 convicts there, and the photo is of one of the many historical sites where they were housed.
The convicts, mostly from Ireland and England, were often there for minor crimes, and a lot of the convicts were women. And according to our guide they were a source of free labour for settlers.
Tasmania is famous for its apples and its lavender. But what intrigued me most were stories about its history. The total collapse of its indigenous population, for example. It was a case of settlers waring with the locals. And diseases like chicken pox and measles finishing the job. A local photo shows the last of these people.
It was a story we had heard in many parts of the world, where white European settlers killed off the indigenous populations with their greed, their technology and their diseases.
And, an even more interesting story was about the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger. It was a marsupial that raised its young in a pouch. The stripes gave it its name, but it looked more like a dog. It was killed off by the settlers because it developed a taste for sheep.
Most people have heard of the Tasmanian Devil, which is a cute but nasty little fellow. They are suffering from a form of cancer that is being passed on genetically, because of inbreeding. So now they are being carefully raised in zoos.
The luncheon was at a huge apple farm and we were given smoked salmon caught off their shores. Seafood is a serious export from Tasmania. I have been to many wonderful parts of the world. And Tasmania is one of them.