IN TASMANIA

The following is an excerpt from the book 'In Tasmania' by Nicholas Shakespeare....I loved this book, I've read it twice!

Separated from the Australian mainland by 140 miles of the treacherous pitch & toss of the Bass Strait, Tasmania is a byword for remoteness. As with Patagonia, to which in geological prehistory it was attached, it is like outer space on earth & invoked by those at the “centre” to stand for all that is far-flung, strange & unverifiable.

Tasmania is in myth & in history a secret place, a rarely visited place. Those few who did make the journey compared it to Elysium, or sometimes to Hades. For the first 50 years of its settlement, it was, with the notorious Norfolk Island, Britain’s most distant penal colony & under the name of Van Demien’s Land was open panopticon to 76,000 convicts gathered from many pockets of the Empire, the majority of them thieves. The average sentence for the transportees was seven years – to a destination that was described by English judges as “beyond the seas” & might take eight months to reach. “They call it the end of the world,” was one convicts verdict, “and for vice it is truly so. For here wickedness flourishes unchecked.” Reports & fables of depravity & cannibalism sometimes made of Van Demien’s land a synonym for all kind of terror & dread….


It was In Tasmania I finally got up the strength to go vegetarian....
It was In Tasmania I finally dedicated myself to the protection of beings without a voice through joining the Greens; the Wilderness society; & PETA.....
It was In Tasmania that I finally found a home........