…Once it was realized that Tasmania was an island, it acquired a peculiar usefulness to the Europeans- more specifically, to the British, the pacemakers of European progress then and the most irrepressible expansionists the world has known. When the war of American independence lost this vigorous people their possessions in the west, they turned to Australia as a usefully remote destination for their castoffs and ne’er-do-wells, and since 1788 they had maintained a penal colony at Port Jackson in New South Wales, the site of Sydney. For this sad settlement, it seemed to the British, Tasmania would be a convenient outstation.
—In 1899 and 1903 Fanny Smith recorded songs on wax cylinders that are now held in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (from where the photograph below also comes). These are the only recordings ever made of Tasmanian aboriginal songs and speeches—Read More:http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter52/3-Tasmania-destruction/destruction.htm
Tasmania had been discovered in 1642 by the Dutchman Abel Tasman, who called it Van Dieman’s Land- a name it was to keep until 1855- and three French expeditions had visited the island; but in September, 1803, a small party of Englishmen, convicts under military guard, sailed from New South Wales to the southeastern coast of the island, and planted a settlement on the east bank of the Derwent River, hoisted the Union Jack and claimed the area for their own.
Risdon Cove, where Lieutenant John Bowen, his soldiers, and his criminals pitched their tents, remains much as it was then, and its character is relevant to our narrative. Across the river the city of Hobart, approached today by a high-humped concrete bridge, cheerfully surrounds its harbor. There are yachts here and attractive white suburbs. Incongruously amid this cheerful scene stands Risdon Cove. Once the city tried to make a memorial park of it, but now it has been abandoned and the muddy water of a creek, oozing through the grassy bottom, makes it all dank.
—Sydney artist Rodney Pople, who won the $35,000 Glover Prize, defended his controversial painting saying that as an artist he saw it as his role to sometimes bring issues up that were uncomfortable, the Hobart Mercury reports.
“There are too many artists just doing things for the market and I tend to want to do work that has a bit more of an edge to it,” he said.
Mr Pople said he was living in Sydney on April 28, 1996, when 35 people were murdered.
A Hobart detective, who spent 24 hours at the scene of the massacre and twice interviewed Bryant, is outraged over the art award.
Former Tasmania Police inspector John Warren said: “I can’t comprehend how someone can be so insensitive to all the victims and people who have been scarred for life.
Read More:http://www.news.com.au/national-old/martin-bryant-painting-prize-outrage/story-e6frfkvr-1226295735502
It is not a scene that speaks of enterprise or adventure; it is a low-spirited place, enervated still, one fancies, by the miseries and squalors of its origins. ( to be continued)…
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