The most recommended books about Tasmania

My husband and I met in the newsroom at the Houston Post newspaper. On paper, I guess you could say we had the same job: writing for the newspaper.

But like Lawson Gale and Jack Brighton in this book, both of whom work to preserve the environment, our jobs weren’t the same at all. He was a political reporter while I was an arts reviewer. We have completely different passions.

When lepidopterist Lawson travels to Tasmania to find and protect an endangered butterfly, he’s escorted by Parks and Wildlife officer Jack and his Border collie. I’ll admit I wasn’t very excited to read this book, but did because a friend said it was “good”.

Since I have almost no interest in endangered butterflies and environmental problems, I was hoping for “goodish mediocre”. What I got was brilliance. The book is funny, suspenseful, playful, and romantic.

The bottom line is even… show more.

This genre-busting debut novel by Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott defies all attempts to describe or classify it. The writing is vibrant and beautiful. It’s a book that fills your lungs with a blast of fresh air, the scents of the cool southern rainforests and dazzles you with clouds and sun and rain and fire. It seamlessly blends realism with a spirit world, binding the human to the animal in an evocatively magical and disturbing story that brings Australian nature and animals into focus in an entirely new literary landscape. I defy anyone to read this book and not fall in love with the Rakali and weep a little the next time it rains. Quite the most remarkable book I’ve read.

This gently-paced and richly atmospheric story is a real experience to read.

It is filled with myths and wonders, raw sadness, and exquisite beauty. The main character Esther is not always easy to like. She can be self-centred and destructive. But her journey over the course of this novel is deeply moving.

Esther is grieving for her elder sister Aura who is missing presumed drowned. The story begins a year after her disappearance as Esther returns to her childhood home in coastal Tasmania for Aura’s memorial. There her parents ask her to do something she isn’t sure she can manage.

They want her to travel to Denmark, where Aura spent time before she died, to find out what happened there and why she returned home such a different person.

This book dissects Tasmania, an island state of Australia, to reveal hybrid geology, diverse scenery, and exotic inherited origins. Its parental rocks once abutted North America and Antarctica in the Precambrian Super Continents Nuna and Rodinia. They split away and collided with the Paleozoic Super Continent, Gondwana. There they shared mountain building and mineralizing events with Australia. When Gondwana began to split, vast sheets of molten dolerite rock invaded across South Africa and Antarctica to enter Tasmania and buttress its highlands.

A remnant of Gondwana, carved by rivers, seas, and ice and host basaltic lavas, it is called a geological paradise. The author’s masterly explanations of its geology, superb photography of wilderness, highlands, coasts, rocks, and minerals, and clear diagrams, all combine in a mind-opening publication.  

I have been intrigued by the story of Truganini since living in Tasmania. There are many myths about Truganini, including that she was the last Aboriginal Tasmanian. This is her full story, based on eyewitness accounts researched by a writer whose ancestors had a connection to her subject. It depicts a devastating time for Aboriginal Tasmanians, including the Nuenonne clan of Bruny Island which Truganini was from. Truganini was a survivor who experienced profound upheavals and many personal tragedies. She was part of the team of guides for missionary George Augustus Robinson’s trip around Tasmania and with other Aboriginal survivors was exiled to a Christian settlement on Flinders Island for a time. This was part of a broken agreement with surviving Tasmanian Aboriginal people removed from their homelands. Returning to Oyster Cove and dying in 1876, Truganini was not put to rest until 1976 when her ashes were scattered in… show more.

This is a novel about the savagery of convict life in the Australian penal colony.

It made me realize that the idea of escape is often better than the reality. That sometimes you are better off with the misery you have than the consequences of trying to escape it. This was particularly relevant to me as I was planning a prison escape around this time. Had I followed through with that escape my life would not be what it is today.

How did my ancestry help define me? My great-grandfather created a dairy farm outside of Tacoma, and my mother grew up impoverished in Indiana during the Great Depression. These experiences shaped my family, but how far into the past do such influences arise?

I have been fascinated by history and genealogy since childhood, and even my professional role as a paleoanthropologist is an extension of that interest in prehistory. Christine Kenneally addresses in direct language the implicit questions I was seeking–what roles did genes, ancestry, and history play in shaping me and the populations around me? It is not hard for me to identify with the values of the Puritan farmers from whom I descended, but before I read this book, I didn’t appreciate the persistence of historical experiences in shaping a community. For example, the slave trade instilled a modern community's suspicion of strangers in the worst affected areas… show more.

Remarkable accounts from nineteenth-century newspapers, letters, and diaries reveal that most Australian colonists realized that their invasion of the vast continent whose fringes they inhabited was not unfolding peacefully. Warfare broke out between the white invaders and Aboriginal peoples as the frontier shifted further from the coastline, and it was not until 1870 that the last of the British soldiers left the Australian colonies. Shockingly, over time many descendants of the British chose to forget about Australia’s frontier wars and even denied that frontier conflict had ever taken place. John Connor’s book provides significant insights into the militarized Australian frontier from the time of first settlement in the late eighteenth century through until the late 1830s. It’s an important reminder about the struggles that took place as First Nations people contested the incursion of the British into what became Australia. Connor writes back clearly and concisely against notions of the… show more.

The Settlement describes a dystopian world set not in the future, but in the past. The 1830s, to be precise.

The misguided evangelist George Augustus Robinson sets himself the task of rounding up the last remaining original inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania, to save them from slaughter. Under his care, they are convinced to surrender and are relocated to desolate Flinders Island in the Bass Strait.

This is a finely-wrought historical novel of great compassion that brings to life the extinction of a race.

Van Diemen’s Land is the former name for the island at the bottom of Australia now called Tasmania. The British who invaded the island changed the colony’s name after the place became infamous. Not only was it home to the British Empire’s most feared convict stations, but it also had a fearsome reputation as the location of one of the most brutal genocides in the Empire’s history. Nick Brodie draws on extensive, yet previously ignored, archival documents to refute the long-standing myth that the Vandemonian War was fought between hapless convict shepherds at the far reaches of the island colony and the island’s Aboriginal inhabitants. He demonstrates instead how this significant conflict was an orchestrated campaign in which the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony used military and para-military forces to prosecute his war against Aboriginal people. Ultimately, the British won the Vandemonian War and then purposefully covered up the military nature… show more.