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HISTORY |
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The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted the west coast of the island
in 1642. Landing a party on its east coast, he named it Van Diemen's
Land in honour of the Governor of the Dutch East Indies. Early maps show
it connected to the mainland, and several eighteenth-century French and
British navigators, including William Bligh and James Cook, who claimed
it for the British, did not prove otherwise. 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. In the same year,
Lieutenant-Colonel John Collins set out from England with another group
to settle the Port Phillip district of what would become Victoria; after
a few months they gave up and crossed the Bass Strait to join Bowen's
group. Hobart Town was founded in 1804 and the first penal settlement
opened at Macquarie Harbour in 1821, followed by Maria Island and Port
Arthur; they were mainly for those who had committed further offences
while still prisoners on the mainland. Van Diemen's Land, with its harsh
conditions and repressive, violent regime, became part of British
folklore as a place of terror, a prison-island hell. Collins was
Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land until his death in 1810, but it
is Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur (1824-36) who has the most
prominent position in the island's history. His ideas were an influence
on the prison settlement at Port Arthur and he was in charge at the time
of the Black Line , the organized white militia used against the
indigenous Aboriginal population.
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 old-growth logging in
particularly sensitive areas, and ending woodchipping (pulping trees for
paper) for export to Japan; currently some 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. At the time of
writing a new campaign had begun to stop a woodchip-fuelled power
station being built just south of Hobart. Another high-profile issue is
genetically engineered (GE) farming. After much campaigning, the
Tasmanian Government has defied the rest of Australia and announced a
one-year moratorium on GE crops . The majority of the Tasmanian people
want this moratorium extended indefinitely and many would like to see
Tasmania market itself as a clean, green, organic state.
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