final solution down under

The final solution down under. ” I regret the death of the last of the Tasmanian aborigines,” wrote one of the pious mourners when the race had finally become extinct,”but I know that it is the result of the fiat that the black shall everywhere give place to the white” …

For many years after the European discovery of Australia, no one realized that Tasmania was an island. To the early navigators it seemed only a protrusion from the southeast corner of the continent, and it was assumed that its flora, and its fauna must be more or less the same as the rest.

Read More:http://helenhopcroft.wordpress.com/tag/tasmanian-tiger/

Read More:http://helenhopcroft.wordpress.com/tag/tasmanian-tiger/

Yet it was in many ways a particularly insular island. Separated from the mainland only be the 150 miles of the Bass Strait, it possessed a character all its own. It was a hilly island, about the size of Sri Lanka or West Virginia, covered with dense forests of pine, beech, and eucalyptus, sometimes so thickly interwoven with creepers that a man could walk suspended on a web of foliage far above the ground.

---The way we were ... John Glover’s famous painting of Tasmania’s original inhabitants dancing at Brighton---click image for source...

—The way we were … John Glover’s famous painting of Tasmania’s original inhabitants dancing at Brighton—click image for source…

In the east there was fine rolling downland, fresh and green in the antipodal morning, mauve or golden as the sun went down. In the west impenetrable forest land, tangled with undergrowth, fell away from the central mountains in gorges and fjords to the sea. In many parts the soil was rich. The climate was wet but fresh, rather like Britain’s; and indeed there were some corners of the island that looked astonishingly like northern Europe.

Most of the weird marsupials of the mainland were present in Tasmania: kangaroos and wallabies in countless herds, duck-billed platypuses, the black swans that, loitering strangely in the creeks of the southeast, sometimes gave the landscape an inverted look, like a photographic negative. But there were also creatures not found anywhere else. There was the Anaspides tasmaniae, the shrimp that lived in the high mountain pools of the island and was known elsewhere only as a fossil.

---Michael McWilliams The centre of attention 2005 Acrylic Overall winner Waterhouse prize for natural history art 2005 Reproduced courtesy of the South Australian Museum---Read More:http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/publications/significance2-0/part-2/thylacine.html

—Michael McWilliams
The centre of attention 2005
Acrylic
Overall winner Waterhouse prize for natural history art 2005
Reproduced courtesy of the South Australian Museum—Read More:http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/publications/significance2-0/part-2/thylacine.html

There was the huge Tasmainian crayfish, and the minute pygmy possum, like a little gray dormouse with its babies in its pouch, and the water hen, and the yellow wattlebird. There was the Tasmanian devil which looked like a venomous badger, and the Tasmanian tiger which looked like a great striped dog, walked on its toes, made a noise halfway between a bark and a miaow, carried its babies backward in a pouch beneath its stomach, and could open its jaws so wide that at full stretch they formed almost a straight line from top to bottom.

Strangest of all there existed a race of human beings altogether unique…( to be continued)…

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