Tasmania
Tasmania is an island state of the Commonwealth of Australia. It is located 240 km to the south of the Australian mainland, the state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, and the surrounding 334 islands. The state has a population of around 519,100, just over forty percent of which resides in the Greater Hobart precinct, Tasmanias area is 68,401 km2, of which the main island covers 64,519 km2. Though an island state, due to an error the state shares a land border with Victoria at its northernmost terrestrial point, Boundary Islet. The Bishop and Clerk Islets, about 37 km south of Macquarie Island, are the southernmost terrestrial point of the state of Tasmania, the island is believed to have been occupied by Aboriginals for 40,000 years before British colonisation. It is thought Tasmanian Aboriginals were separated from the mainland Aboriginal groups about 10,000 years ago when the sea rose to form Bass Strait. The conflict, which peaked between 1825 and 1831 and led to more than three years of law, cost the lives of almost 1100 Aboriginals and settlers.
The near-destruction of Tasmanias Aboriginal population has been described by historians as an act of genocide by the British. The island was part of the Colony of New South Wales. In 1854 the present Constitution of Tasmania was passed and the year the state received permission to change its name to Tasmania. In 1901 it became a state through the process of the Federation of Australia, the state is named after Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who made the first reported European sighting of the island on 24 November 1642. Tasman named the island Anthony van Diemens Land after his sponsor Anthony van Diemen, the name was shortened to Van Diemens Land by the British. It was officially renamed Tasmania in honour of its first European discoverer on 1 January 1856, Tasmania was sometimes referred to as Dervon, as mentioned in the Jerilderie Letter written by the notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in 1879. The colloquial expression for the state is Tassie, Tasmania is colloquially shortened to Tas, especially when used in business names and website addresses.
TAS is the Australia Post abbreviation for the state, the reconstructed Palawa kani language name for Tasmania is Lutriwita. The island was adjoined to the mainland of Australia until the end of the last glacial period about 10,000 years ago, much of the island is composed of Jurassic dolerite intrusions through other rock types, sometimes forming large columnar joints. Tasmania has the worlds largest areas of dolerite, with many distinctive mountains, the central plateau and the southeast portions of the island are mostly dolerite. Mount Wellington above Hobart is an example, showing distinct columns known as the Organ Pipes
Flinders Island
Flinders Island, the largest island in the Furneaux Group, is a 1, 367-square-kilometre island located in the Bass Strait, northeast of Tasmania, Australia. Flinders Island is situated 54 kilometres from Cape Portland and it is located on 40° south, Flinders Island was first inhabited at least 35,000 years ago, when people made their way from Australia across the then-land bridge which is now Bass Strait. A population remained until about 4,500 years ago, succumbing to thirst, in February 1798 British navigator Matthew Flinders charted some of the southern islands, using one of the schooner Francis open boats. James Cook named the islands Furneauxs Islands, after Tobias Furneaux, Flinders named the largest island in the group Great Island. He named a group of mountains on Flinders Island, the Three Patriarchs, the small island just to the east, Flinders named Babel Island from the noises made by the seabirds there. Phillip Parker King named the largest island Flinders Island, after Matthew Flinders, Flinders named Mount Chappell Island after his wife Ann née Ann Chappelle.
In the late 18th century, the island was frequented by sealers and Aboriginal women. Seal stocks soon collapsed, causing the last sealing permit to be issued in 1828, many sealers families chose to stay in the Furneaux Group, subsisting on cattle grazing and muttonbirding. From 1830, the remnants of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population were exiled to Settlement Point on Flinders Island and these 160 survivors were deemed to be safe from white settlers here, but conditions were poor, and the relocation scheme was short-lived. The Municipality of Flinders Island was instituted in 1903, the island forms part of the state of Tasmania, and part of the Municipality of Flinders Island local government area. Flinders Island is only one of the islands included in the Municipal area. Of these islands Flinders Island is the island with more than one permanent settlement. The island is about 62 kilometres from north to south, and 37 kilometres from east to west, with a total land area of 1,333 square kilometres.
Mount Strzelecki in the south west is the islands highest peak at 756 metres, about a third of the island is mountainous and rugged with ridges of granite running the length of the island. The coastal areas are dominated by sandy deposits often taking the shape of dunes, many coastal lagoons punctuate the eastern shore, formed by dunes blocking further drainage. This drainage is provided by many small streams, few of them permanently flowing directly leading to the waters of Bass Strait or such a lagoon. The coastal areas are covered in scrub or shrubs, whereas the vegetation at a higher elevation consists of woodland. The total number of plant species in the Furneaux Group well exceeds 800, native bird species include the Cape Barren goose and the short-tailed shearwater
James Cook
Captain James Cook FRS RN was a British explorer, navigator and captain in the Royal Navy. Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager and joined the Royal Navy in 1755 and he saw action in the Seven Years War, and subsequently surveyed and mapped much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege of Quebec. This helped bring Cook to the attention of the Admiralty and Royal Society, in three voyages Cook sailed thousands of miles across largely uncharted areas of the globe. He mapped lands from New Zealand to Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean in greater detail, as he progressed on his voyages of discovery he surveyed and named features, and recorded islands and coastlines on European maps for the first time. He displayed a combination of seamanship, superior surveying and cartographic skills, physical courage, Cook was attacked and killed while attempting to kidnap the native chief of Hawaii during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific in 1779. He left a legacy of scientific and geographical knowledge which was to influence his successors well into the 20th century, and numerous memorials worldwide have been dedicated to him.
James Cook was born on 7 November 1728 in the village of Marton in Yorkshire and baptised on 14 November in the church of St Cuthbert. He was the second of eight children of James Cook, a Scottish farm labourer from Ednam in Roxburghshire, in 1736, his family moved to Airey Holme farm at Great Ayton, where his fathers employer, Thomas Skottowe, paid for him to attend the local school. In 1741, after five years schooling, he work for his father. For leisure, he would climb a hill, Roseberry Topping, enjoying the opportunity for solitude. Cooks Cottage, his parents last home, which he is likely to have visited, is now in Melbourne, having moved from England and reassembled, brick by brick. In 1745, when he was 16, Cook moved 20 miles to the village of Staithes. Historians have speculated that this is where Cook first felt the lure of the sea while gazing out of the shop window. After 18 months, not proving suitable for work, Cook travelled to the nearby port town of Whitby to be introduced to friends of Sandersons, John.
The Walkers, who were Quakers, were prominent local ship-owners in the coal trade and their house is now the Captain Cook Memorial Museum. Cook was taken on as a merchant navy apprentice in their fleet of vessels. His first assignment was aboard the collier Freelove, and he spent several years on this and various other coasters, sailing between the Tyne and London. As part of his apprenticeship, Cook applied himself to the study of algebra, trigonometry and his three-year apprenticeship completed, Cook began working on trading ships in the Baltic Sea
Abel Tasman
Abel Janszoon Tasman was a Dutch seafarer and merchant, best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644 in the service of the Dutch East India Company. In 1633 he sailed from Texel to Batavia in the service of the Dutch East India Company, Tasman took part in a voyage to Seram Island, the locals had sold spices to others than the Dutch. He had a escape from death, when in an incautious landing several of his companions were killed by people of Seram. In August 1637 he was back in Amsterdam, and the year he signed on for another ten years. On 25 March 1638 he tried to sell his property in the Jordaan, in 1639 he was second-in-command of an exploration expedition in the north Pacific under Matthijs Quast. The fleet included the ships Engel and Gracht and reached Fort Zeelandia and this expedition used two small ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen. According to Marco Polo, Locach was a kingdom where gold was “so plentiful that no one who did not see it could believe it”, Beach was in fact a mistranscription of Locach.
Locach was Marco Polo’s name for the southern Thai kingdom of Lavo, or Lop Buri, in Chinese, Lavo was pronounced “Lo-huk”, from which Marco Polo took his rendition of the name. In the German cursive script, “Locach” and “Boeach” look similar and they seem to have drawn on the map of the world published in Florence in 1489 by Henricus Martellus, in which provincia boëach appears as the southern neighbour of provincia ciamba. Book III of Marco Polo’s Il Milione described his journey by sea from China to India by way of Champa, Locach, after a chapter describing the kingdom of Champa there follows a chapter describing Java. Locach, located between Champa and Sumatra, was likewise misplaced far to the south of Java, by some geographers on or near an extension of the Terra Australis. Gerard Mercator did just that on his 1541 globe, placing Beach provincia aurifera in the northernmost part of the Terra Australis in accordance with the faulty text of Marco Polo’s Travels. Following Mercator, Abraham Ortelius showed BEACH and LVCACH in these locations on his map of 1571.
Confirmation that land existed where the maps showed Beach to be had come from Dirk Hartog’s landing in October 1616 on its west coast, which he called Eendrachtsland after the name of his ship. In accordance with Visschers directions, Tasman sailed from Batavia on 14 August 1642 and arrived at Mauritius on 5 September 1642, the reason for this was the crew could be fed well on the island, there was plenty of fresh water and timber to repair the ships. Tasman got the assistance of the governor Adriaan van der Stel, because of the prevailing winds Mauritius was chosen as a turning point. After a four-week stay on the island both ships left on 8 October using the Roaring Forties to sail east as fast as possible. On 7 November snow and hail influenced the ships council to alter course to a more north-eastern direction, on 24 November 1642 Abel Tasman reached and sighted the west coast of Tasmania, north of Macquarie Harbour
Body of water
A body of water or waterbody is any significant accumulation of water, generally on a planets surface. The term most often refers to oceans and lakes, a body of water does not have to be still or contained, streams and other geographical features where water moves from one place to another are considered bodies of water. Most are naturally occurring geographical features, but some are artificial, there are types that can be either. For example, most reservoirs are created by engineering dams, most harbors are naturally occurring bays, but some harbors have been created through construction. Bodies of water that are navigable are known as waterways, some bodies of water collect and move water, such as rivers and streams, and others primarily hold water, such as lakes and oceans. The term body of water can refer to a reservoir of water held by a plant, note that there are some geographical features involving water that are not bodies of water, for example waterfalls and rapids. Arm of the sea - sea arm, used to describe a sea loch, arroyo - a usually dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain, or seasonally.
Artificial lake or artificial pond - see reservoir or impoundment, barachois - a lagoon separated from the ocean by a sand bar. Bay - an area of water bordered by land on three sides, similar to, but smaller than a gulf, bayou - a slow-moving stream or a marshy lake. Bight - a large and often only slightly receding bay, or a bend in any geographical feature, billabong - see Oxbow lake, a pond or still body of water created when a river changes course and some water becomes trapped. Boil - see Seep Brook - a small stream, canal - an artificial waterway, usually connected to existing lakes, rivers, or oceans. Channel - the physical confine of a river, slough or ocean consisting of a bed. See stream bed and strait, earth scientists generally use the term to describe a circular or round inlet with a narrow entrance, though colloquially the term is sometimes used to describe any sheltered bay. Basin - a region of land where water from rain or snowmelt drains downhill into another body of water, such as a river, creek - an inlet of the sea, narrower than a cove.
Delta - the location where a river flows into an ocean, estuary, distributary or distributary channel - a stream that branches off and flows away from a main stream channel. Draw - a usually dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain, fjord - a submergent landform which has occurred due to glacial activity. Glacier - a large collection of ice or a river that moves slowly down a mountain. Glacial Pothole - see Kettle Gulf - a part of a lake or ocean that extends so that it is surrounded by land on three sides, similar to, but larger than a bay, headland - an area of water bordered by land on three sides
Australian English
Australian English is a major variety of the English language, used throughout Australia. Although English has no status in the Constitution, Australian English is the countrys de facto official language and is the first language of the majority of the population. Australian English began to diverge from British English after the founding of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788 and was recognised as being different from British English by 1820. It arose from the intermingling of early settlers from a variety of mutually intelligible dialectal regions of the British Isles. Australian English differs from other varieties of English in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, the earliest form of Australian English was first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the colony of New South Wales. This first generation of children created a new dialect that was to become the language of the nation, the Australian-born children in the new colony were exposed to a wide range of dialects from all over the British Isles, in particular from Ireland and South East England.
The native-born children of the created the new dialect from the speech they heard around them. Even when new settlers arrived, this new dialect was strong enough to blunt other patterns of speech, a quarter of the convicts were Irish. Many had been arrested in Ireland, and some in Great Britain, many, if not most, of the Irish spoke Irish and either no English at all, or spoke it poorly and rarely. There were other significant populations of convicts from non-English speaking part of Britain, such as the Scottish Highlands, anthony Burgess writes that Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era. According to linguist Bruce Moore, the input of the various sounds that went into constructing the Australian accent was from south-east England. Some elements of Aboriginal languages have adopted by Australian English—mainly as names for places and fauna. Many such are localised, and do not form part of general Australian use, while others, such as kangaroo, budgerigar, other examples are cooee and hard yakka.
The former is used as a call, for attracting attention. Cooee is a distance, if hes within cooee. Hard yakka means hard work and is derived from yakka, from the Jagera/Yagara language once spoken in the Brisbane region, of Aboriginal origin is the word bung, from the Sydney pidgin English, meaning dead, with some extension to broken or useless. Many towns or suburbs of Australia have influenced or named after Aboriginal words. The best-known example is the capital, named after a local word meaning meeting place
South East Cape
The South East Cape is a cape located at the southernmost point of the main island of Tasmania, the southernmost state of Australia. South East Cape is the southernmost point of the mainland of Tasmania, the Maatsuyker Islands and the Pedra Branca island group, just offshore, are part of the state of Tasmania, and lie further south than South East Cape. The state of Tasmania includes Macquarie Island, which is about 1,600 km SE of South East Cape, South East Cape is one of the five southernmost capes that can be rounded by Southern Ocean sailors. The cape is a point for sectors of the southern coastline of Tasmania. Much sea traffic passes near it, and many ships and boats have been wrecked or grounded there
Waipapa Point
Waipapa Point is a rocky promontory on the south coast of Foveaux Strait, the South Island of New Zealand. It is located 10 kilometres southeast of the mouth of the Mataura River, the coastline of the Catlins is notoriously dangerous, and there have been many shipwrecks in the region. A lighthouse was built on the point in response to the tragedy, with its sibling, the retired Kaipara North Head lighthouse, this was one of the last two wooden lighthouses built in New Zealand. It is still active, and was automated in 1976
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states.
The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia.
The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828.
Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia
Crossing the Ditch
They arrived at Ngamotu Beach, in New Plymouth, New Zealand on 13 January 2008. The expedition holds the record for the longest trans-oceanic expedition in a double kayak by two expeditioners. A significant aspect of this undertaking was the use of the internet to allow the public to track the progress of Lot 41 in real time and podcasts from the crew were made available just hours after they had been transmitted from the craft. The crew of Lot 41 were James Castrission and Justin Jones and they attended school at Knox Grammar School together and kayaked across Bass Strait, as well as being the first to paddle the length of the Murray River, a distance of 2,560 kilometres. In addition to the crew of the kayak, many others, the kayak Lot 41 was designed for the trans-Tasman crossing by Rob Feloy, who had designed the kayak for Peter Brays trans-Atlantic Crossing approximately six years earlier. The Lot 41 design includes two cockpits, a cabin at the stern of the craft, a water tank. An array of panels was incorporated into the design in order to charge the batteries used to power communication systems, bilge pumps.
The fibreglass kayak was built in Australia in 2005, and was fitted with support systems including emergency beacons, satellite phone, global tracking system and Jonesy departed Forster, Australia at 1,30 pm AEST on 13 November 2007. By 2 December, they had reached the halfway point,1,039.5 kilometres from Forster and 1,058.24 kilometres from Auckland. Their distance over land, which measures the path travelled by the kayak. One of the difficulties faced by Lot 41 were strong headwinds and these winds on their own would have made the crossing more difficult, however the design of the cabin at the stern of the kayak compounded the issue. When the winds blew from behind, the cabin presented a smooth, in contrast, headwinds met a nearly vertical cabin entrance, which acted as a large sail fighting against the paddlers. The initial plans for the crossing had Lot 41 making port at Auckland, conditions encountered during the crossing, including strong winds and currents, saw them travel in circles for some time and added almost 1,200 kilometres to their journey.
As they approached the New Zealand coastline, the decision was made to head to New Plymouth instead and Jonesy paddled into New Plymouth harbour on 13 January 2008, landing on Ngamotu Beach at 12,20 pm NZST. The crossing took 60 days,20 hours and 50 minutes, Lot 41, along with a collection of associated artifacts, was donates by the adventurers to the Australian National Maritime Museum. The Tasman Sea has for years been referred to as The Ditch by Australians. The exact etymology for this term is uncertain, however when traveling between Australia and New Zealand, it is referred to as crossing the ditch. Lot 41 is named after the lot number of the race horse Phar Lap, widely considered to be Australia
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the worlds oceans with a total area of about 106,460,000 square kilometres. It covers approximately 20 percent of the Earths surface and about 29 percent of its surface area. It separates the Old World from the New World, the Atlantic Ocean occupies an elongated, S-shaped basin extending longitudinally between Eurasia and Africa to the east, and the Americas to the west. The Equatorial Counter Current subdivides it into the North Atlantic Ocean, in contrast, the term Atlantic originally referred specifically to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the sea off the Strait of Gibraltar and the North African coast. The Greek word thalassa has been reused by scientists for the huge Panthalassa ocean that surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea hundreds of years ago. The term Aethiopian Ocean, derived from Ancient Ethiopia, was applied to the Southern Atlantic as late as the mid-19th century, many Irish or British people refer to the United States and Canada as across the pond, and vice versa.
The Black Atlantic refers to the role of ocean in shaping black peoples history. Irish migration to the US is meant when the term The Green Atlantic is used, the term Red Atlantic has been used in reference to the Marxian concept of an Atlantic working class, as well as to the Atlantic experience of indigenous Americans. Correspondingly, the extent and number of oceans and seas varies, the Atlantic Ocean is bounded on the west by North and South America. It connects to the Arctic Ocean through the Denmark Strait, Greenland Sea, Norwegian Sea, to the east, the boundaries of the ocean proper are Europe, the Strait of Gibraltar and Africa. In the southeast, the Atlantic merges into the Indian Ocean, the 20° East meridian, running south from Cape Agulhas to Antarctica defines its border. In the 1953 definition it extends south to Antarctica, while in maps it is bounded at the 60° parallel by the Southern Ocean, the Atlantic has irregular coasts indented by numerous bays and seas. Including these marginal seas the coast line of the Atlantic measures 111,866 km compared to 135,663 km for the Pacific.
Including its marginal seas, the Atlantic covers an area of 106,460,000 km2 or 23. 5% of the ocean and has a volume of 310,410,900 km3 or 23. 3%. Excluding its marginal seas, the Atlantic covers 81,760,000 km2 and has a volume of 305,811,900 km3, the North Atlantic covers 41,490,000 km2 and the South Atlantic 40,270,000 km2. The average depth is 3,646 m and the maximum depth, the bathymetry of the Atlantic is dominated by a submarine mountain range called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It runs from 87°N or 300 km south of the North Pole to the subantarctic Bouvet Island at 42°S, the MAR divides the Atlantic longitudinally into two halves, in each of which a series of basins are delimited by secondary, transverse ridges. The MAR reaches above 2000 m along most of its length, the MAR is a barrier for bottom water, but at these two transform faults deep water currents can pass from one side to the other
Mid-ocean ridge
A mid-ocean ridge is an underwater mountain system formed by plate tectonics. It consists of various mountains linked in chains, typically having a known as a rift running along its spine. This type of mountain ridge is characteristic of what is known as an oceanic spreading center. The production of new results from mantle upwelling in response to plate spreading. The buoyant melt rises as magma at a linear weakness in the oceanic crust, a mid-ocean ridge demarcates the boundary between two tectonic plates, and consequently is termed a divergent plate boundary. Mid-ocean ridges are geologically active, with new magma constantly emerging onto the floor and into the crust at. The crystallized magma forms new crust of basalt and gabbro and they are formed by two oceanic plates moving away from each other. The rocks making up the crust below the seafloor are youngest along the axis of the ridge and age with increasing distance from that axis, new magma of basalt composition emerges at and near the axis because of decompression melting in the underlying Earths mantle.
The oceanic crust is made up of much younger than the Earth itself. Most oceanic crust in the basins is less than 200 million years old. The crust is in a constant state of renewal at the ocean ridges, moving away from the mid-ocean ridge, ocean depth progressively increases, the greatest depths are in ocean trenches. As the oceanic crust moves away from the axis, the peridotite in the underlying mantle cools. The crust and the relatively rigid peridotite below it make up the oceanic lithosphere, by contrast, fast spreading ridges like the East Pacific Rise are narrow, sharp incisions surrounded by generally flat topography that slopes away from the ridge over many hundreds of miles. The overall shape of ridges results from Pratt isostacy, close to the ridge there is hot. As the oceanic plates cool, away from the axes, the oceanic mantle lithosphere thickens. Thus older seafloor is underlain by denser material and sits lower, there are two processes, ridge-push and slab pull, thought to be responsible for the spreading seen at mid-ocean ridges, and there is some uncertainty as to which is dominant.
Ridge-push occurs when the bulk of the ridge pushes the rest of the tectonic plate away from the ridge. At the subduction zone, slab-pull comes into effect and this is simply the weight of the tectonic plate being subducted below the overlying plate dragging the rest of the plate along behind it
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