Tasmania
Tasmania is an island state of Australia. It is located 240 km to the south of the Australian mainland, separated by Bass Strait; the state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, the surrounding 334 islands. The state has a population of around 526,700 as of March 2018. Just over forty percent of the population resides in the Greater Hobart precinct, which forms the metropolitan area of the state capital and largest city, Hobart. Tasmania's area is 68,401 km2, of which the main island covers 64,519 km2, it is promoted as a natural state, protected areas of Tasmania cover about 42% of its land area, which includes national parks and World Heritage Sites. Tasmania was the founding place of the first environmental political party in the world; the island is believed to have been occupied by indigenous peoples for 30,000 years before British colonisation. It is thought Aboriginal Tasmanians were separated from the mainland Aboriginal groups about 10,000 years ago when the sea rose to form Bass Strait.
The Aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 3,000 and 7,000 at the time of colonisation, but was wiped out within 30 years by a combination of violent guerrilla conflict with settlers known as the "Black War", intertribal conflict, from the late 1820s, the spread of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity. The conflict, which peaked between 1825 and 1831, led to more than three years of martial law, cost the lives of 1,100 Aboriginals and settlers; the island was permanently settled by Europeans in 1803 as a penal settlement of the British Empire to prevent claims to the land by the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. The island was part of the Colony of New South Wales but became a separate, self-governing colony under the name Van Diemen's Land in 1825. 75,000 convicts were sent to Van Diemen's Land before transportation ceased in 1853. In 1854 the present Constitution of Tasmania was passed, the following year the colony 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 Diemen's Land after his sponsor Anthony van Diemen, the Governor of the Dutch East Indies; the name was shortened to Van Diemen's Land by the British. It was 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," 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 world's largest areas of dolerite, with many distinctive mountains and cliffs formed from this rock type; the central plateau and the southeast portions of the island are dolerites. Mount Wellington above Hobart is a good example. In the southern midlands as far south as Hobart, the dolerite is underlaid by sandstone and similar sedimentary stones. In the southwest, Precambrian quartzites were formed from ancient sea sediments and form strikingly sharp ridges and ranges, such as Federation Peak or Frenchmans Cap. In the northeast and east, continental granites can be seen, such as at Freycinet, similar to coastal granites on mainland Australia. In the northwest and west, mineral-rich volcanic rock can be seen at Mount Read near Rosebery, or at Mount Lyell near Queenstown. Present in the south and northwest is limestone with caves; the quartzite and dolerite areas in the higher mountains show evidence of glaciation, much of Australia's glaciated landscape is found on the Central Plateau and the Southwest.
Cradle Mountain, another dolerite peak, for example, was a nunatak. The combination of these different rock types contributes to scenery, distinct from any other region of the world. In the far southwest corner of the state, the geology is wholly quartzite, which gives the mountains the false impression of having snow-capped peaks year round. Evidence indicates the presence of Aborigines in Tasmania about 42,000 years ago. Rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia about 10,000 years ago and by the time of European contact, the Aboriginal people in Tasmania had nine major nations or ethnic groups. At the time of the British occupation and colonisation in 1803, the indigenous population was estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000. Historian Lyndall Ryan's analysis of population studies led her to conclude that there were about 7,000 spread throughout the island's nine nations. J. B. Plomley and Rhys Jones, settled on a figure of 3,000 to 4,000, they engaged in fire-stick farming, hunted game including kangaroo and wallabies, caught seals, mutton-birds and fish and lived as nine separate "nations" on the island, which they knew as "Trouwunna".
The first reported sighting of Tasmania by a European was on 24 November 1642 by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who landed at today's Blackman Bay. More than a century in 1772, a French expedition le
South East Mutton Bird Islet
South East Mutton Bird Islet is a steep unpopulated islet located close to the south-western coast of Tasmania, Australia. Situated 2 kilometres south of where the mouth of Port Davey meets the Southern Ocean, the 0.52-hectare islet is one of the eight islands that comprise the Mutton Bird Islands Group. The South East Mutton Bird Islet is part of the Southwest National Park and the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Site; the islet is part of the Port Davey Islands Important Bird Area, so identified by BirdLife International because of its importance for breeding seabirds. Recorded breeding seabird species are the short-tailed shearwater, fairy prion, black-faced cormorant and silver gull. List of islands of Tasmania
Australia
Australia the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area; the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea and East Timor to the north. The population of 25 million is urbanised and concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, its largest city is Sydney; the country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians for about 60,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, it is documented. After the European exploration of the continent by Dutch explorers in 1606, who named it New Holland, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day; the population grew in subsequent decades, by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established.
On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories. Being the oldest and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils, Australia has a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres. A megadiverse country, its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east and mountain ranges in the south-east. A gold rush began in Australia in the early 1850s, its population density, 2.8 inhabitants per square kilometre, remains among the lowest in the world. Australia generates its income from various sources including mining-related exports, telecommunications and manufacturing. Indigenous Australian rock art is the oldest and richest in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years and spread across hundreds of thousands of sites. Australia is a developed country, with the world's 14th-largest economy.
It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth-highest per capita income. It is a regional power, has the world's 13th-highest military expenditure. Australia has the world's ninth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 26% of the population. Having the third-highest human development index and the eighth-highest ranked democracy globally, the country ranks in quality of life, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights, with all its major cities faring well in global comparative livability surveys. Australia is a member of the United Nations, G20, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Pacific Islands Forum and the ASEAN Plus Six mechanism; the name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis, a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times. When Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as "New Holland", a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts; the name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth". The first time that Australia appears to have been used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known by that name; the first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office. Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under". Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", "the Wide Brown Land".
The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country". Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun around 65,000 to 70,000 years ago, with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia; these first inhabitants were the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continual civilisations on earth. At the time of first European contact, most Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers with complex economies and societies. Recent archaeological finds suggest. Indigenous Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime; the Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited s
Wilderness
Wilderness or wildland is a natural environment on Earth that has not been modified by human activity. It may be defined as: "The most intact, undisturbed wild natural areas left on our planet—those last wild places that humans do not control and have not developed with roads, pipelines or other industrial infrastructure." The term has traditionally referred to terrestrial environments, though growing attention is being placed on marine wilderness. Recent maps of wilderness suggest it covers one quarter of Earth's terrestrial surface, but is being degraded by human activity. Less wilderness remains in the ocean, with only 13.2% free from intense human activity. Some governments establish them by law or administrative acts in land tracts that have not been modified by human action in great measure; the main feature of them is that human motorized activity is restricted. These actions seek not only to preserve what exists, but to promote and advance a natural expression and development. Wilderness areas can be found in preserves, conservation preserves, National Forests, National Parks and in urban areas along rivers, gulches or otherwise undeveloped areas.
These areas are considered important for the survival of certain species, ecological studies, conservation and recreation. Wilderness is valued for cultural, spiritual and aesthetic reasons; some nature writers believe wilderness areas are vital for creativity. They may preserve historic genetic traits and provide habitat for wild flora and fauna that may be difficult to recreate in zoos, arboretums or laboratories; the word wilderness derives from the notion of "wildness"—in other words, that, not controlled by humans. The mere presence or activity of people does not disqualify an area from being "wilderness." Many ecosystems that are, or have been, inhabited or influenced by activities of people may still be considered "wild." This way of looking at wilderness includes areas within which natural processes operate without human interference. The WILD Foundation states that wilderness areas have two dimensions: they must be biologically intact and protected; the World Conservation Union classifies wilderness at Ia and Ib.
Activities on the margins of specific wilderness areas, such as fire suppression and the interruption of animal migration affect the interior of wildernesses. In wealthier, industrialized nations, it has a specific legal meaning as well: as land where development is prohibited by law. Many nations have designated wilderness, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. Many new parks are being planned and passed by various Parliaments and Legislatures at the urging of dedicated individuals around the globe who believe that "in the end, inspired people empowered by effective legislation will ensure that the spirit and services of wilderness will thrive and permeate our society, preserving a world that we are proud to hand over to those who come after us." Looked at through the lens of the visual arts and wildness have been important subjects in various epochs of world history. An early tradition of landscape art occurred in the Tang Dynasty; the tradition of representing nature as it is became one of the aims of Chinese painting and was a significant influence in Asian art.
Artists in the tradition of Shan shui, learned to depict mountains and rivers "from the perspective of nature as a whole and on the basis of their understanding of the laws of nature… as if seen through the eyes of a bird." In the 13th century, Shih Erh Chi recommended avoiding painting "scenes lacking any places made inaccessible by nature."For most of human history, the greater part of the Earth's terrain was wilderness, human attention was concentrated in settled areas. The first known laws to protect parts of nature date back to the Babylonian Empire and Chinese Empire. Ashoka, the Great Mauryan King, defined the first laws in the world to protect flora and fauna in Edicts of Ashoka around 3rd Century B. C. In the Middle Ages, the Kings of England initiated one of the world’s first conscious efforts to protect natural areas, they were motivated by a desire to be able to hunt wild animals in private hunting preserves rather than a desire to protect wilderness. In order to have animals to hunt they would have to protect wildlife from subsistence hunting and the land from villagers gathering firewood.
Similar measures were introduced in other European countries. The idea of wilderness having intrinsic value emerged in the Western world in the 19th century. British artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner turned their attention to capturing the beauty of the natural world in their paintings. Prior to that, paintings had been of religious scenes or of human beings. William Wordsworth’s poetry described the wonder of the natural world, viewed as a threatening place; the valuing of nature became an aspect of Western culture. By the mid-19th century, in Germany, "Scientific Conservation," as it was called, advocated "the efficient utilization of natural resources through the application of science and technology." Concepts of forest management based on the German approach were applied in other parts of the world, but with varying degrees of success. Over the course of the 19th century wilderness became viewed not as a place to fear but a place to enjoy and protect, hence came the conservation movement in the latter half of the 19th century.
Rivers were rafted and mountains were climbed for the sake of recreation, not to determine th
The Guardian
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust; the trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to shareholders; the current editor is Katharine Viner: she succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main newsprint sections have been published in tabloid format; as of November that year, its print edition had a daily circulation of 136,834.
The newspaper has an online edition, TheGuardian.com, as well as two international websites, Guardian Australia and Guardian US. The paper's readership is on the mainstream left of British political opinion, its reputation as a platform for liberal and left-wing editorial has led to the use of the "Guardian reader" and "Guardianista" as often-pejorative epithets for those of left-leaning or "politically correct" tendencies. Frequent typographical errors in the paper led Private Eye magazine to dub it the "Grauniad" in the 1960s, a nickname still used today. In an Ipsos MORI research poll in September 2018 designed to interrogate the public's trust of specific titles online, The Guardian scored highest for digital-content news, with 84% of readers agreeing that they "trust what see in it". A December 2018 report of a poll by the Publishers Audience Measurement Company stated that the paper's print edition was found to be the most trusted in the UK in the period from October 2017 to September 2018.
It was reported to be the most-read of the UK's "quality newsbrands", including digital editions. While The Guardian's print circulation is in decline, the report indicated that news from The Guardian, including that reported online, reaches more than 23 million UK adults each month. Chief among the notable "scoops" obtained by the paper was the 2011 News International phone-hacking scandal—and in particular the hacking of the murdered English teenager Milly Dowler's phone; the investigation led to the closure of the News of the World, the UK's best-selling Sunday newspaper and one of the highest-circulation newspapers in history. In June 2013, The Guardian broke news of the secret collection by the Obama administration of Verizon telephone records, subsequently revealed the existence of the surveillance program PRISM after knowledge of it was leaked to the paper by the whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In 2016, The Guardian led an investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing then-Prime Minister David Cameron's links to offshore bank accounts.
It has been named "newspaper of the year" four times at the annual British Press Awards: most in 2014, for its reporting on government surveillance. The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen, they launched their paper after the police closure of the more radical Manchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. Taylor had been hostile to the radical reformers, writing: "They have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence, they do not toil, neither do they spin, but they live better than those that do." When the government closed down the Manchester Observer, the mill-owners' champions had the upper hand. The influential journalist Jeremiah Garnett joined Taylor during the establishment of the paper, all of the Little Circle wrote articles for the new paper.
The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty warmly advocate the cause of Reform endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures". In 1825 the paper merged with the British Volunteer and was known as The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer until 1828; the working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser called the Manchester Guardian "the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners". The Manchester Guardian was hostile to labour's claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill, the paper doubted whether in view of the foreign competition "the passing of a law positively enacting a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture in this kingdom would be a much less rational procedure." The Manchester Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators: " if an accommodation can be effected, the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone.
They live on strife "The Manchester Guardian was critical of US President Abraham Lincoln's conduct during the US Civil War, writing on the news that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated: "Of his rule, we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty " C. P. Scott ma
Mole Creek Karst National Park
Mole Creek Karst is a national park situated in the North of Tasmania, Australia, 168 km northwest of Hobart. It is located on the slopes of the Great Western Tiers to the east of the town of Mole Creek, it is the only national park in Tasmania created to protect karst landforms. It is part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Site; the National park comprises twelve separate blocks of land, some of which are surrounded by cleared, private land, many of which whose karst features and cave entrances are located outside the bounds of the park. The Mole Creek Karst National Park is characterised by its numerous and spectacular cave networks, which attract many tourists each year. Two of these particular caves. Many of the caves within the National Park remain underdeveloped and are not promoted, although they are visited by the occasional recreational caver. Many other caves are located on private land, therefore pose an issue in regards to management and conservation; the national park was declared in 1996 to provide protection for an extensive system of over 300 known caves and sinkholes, including Marakoopa and King Solomons Cave.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature classifies the Mole Creek Karst National Park as a Category II protected area, for the purpose of both recreation and ecosystem protection. The Mole Creek Karst National Park features a wide range of flora and fauna, of varying conservation status; these species are contained both in the caves, in the surrounding forests within the National Park. Many of the species present in the caves, are endemic to the area, therefore are important in regards to conservation and protection. There are many animal species present in the Mole Creek Karst National Park that are both unique to the Karst system, listed as protected cave species; the glow worms Arachnocampus tasmaniensis inhabit many of the caves present in the Mole Creek Karst National Park, provide one of the main tourist attractions to the area. The Marakoopa Cave houses one of the most spectacular glow-worm displays in the entire system, is a major tourist attraction on the guided cave tours.
The karst system is home to many other protected cave species, such as crickets Micropathus cavernicola, Parvotettix geode. Three species present in the system, listed on the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act 1995, are endemic to the area and confined to the cave systems. Tasmanotrechus cockerilli, a beetle present in the cave systems is a rare and cave modified beetle, having evolved to live in a dark cave environment, its eyes have become vestigial. T. cockerilli belongs to the Tribe Trechinae and is listed as vulnerable on the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act 1995. Pseudotyrannochthonius typhlus, is known as the Mole Creek Cave Pseudoscorpion, is an rare animal that makes its home in caves within the Mole Creek karst system, it is known from only about a dozen specimens, is rarely sighted. It is listed as rare on the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act 1995. Hickmanoxyomma gibbergunyar known as the Mole Creek Cave Harvestman is a troglobite species, present in many of the cave systems in the Mole Creek area, is endemic to the Mole Creek Karst.
This species is listed as rare by the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act 1995. There’s a variety of bacteria and fungi associated with the caves which are believed to be involved in crystalline and amorphous speleothem germination and growth; the following is a list of some of the species within the Mole Creek Karst National Park. The following species are considered endangered and rare by the Threatened Species Protection Act 1995. Accipiter novaehollandiae Endangered Parameles gunnii gunnii Vulnerable Aquila audax fleayi Endangered Pseudotyrannochthonius typhlus Rare Astacopsis gouldi Vulnerable Tasmanotrechus cockerilli Rare Hickmanoxyomma gibbergunyar RareThe Giant Freshwater Crayfish species Astacopsis gouldi is considered vulnerable by the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. There is a diverse range of flora in the park, suited to many different habitats due to the wide variance of different habitats and conditions present in the park. Forested areas of the park are dominated by “brown-top stringybark, white-top stringybark, swamp gum, black gum E. white gum, black peppermint and silver wattle ”, while the underbrush of the forests is shrubby.
Some of the park has been affected by its surrounding rural environment, as blocks of flora have been modified by fire regimes and grazing on private land. Due to this some of the more burnt areas are open and dominated by ferns. There are many sinkholes present in areas of the park, many of these are associated with Sphagnum peatlands that are found scattered amongst eucalyptus forests
