Western Tasmania (book)
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Western Tasmania (book)
Charles Whitham was the author of the oft-reprinted ''Western Tasmania: A land of Riches and Beauty'', which was a comprehensive study of the geographical features of West Coast, Tasmania and the conditions of the region in the 1920s. Early life Charles Whitham was born in India in 1873. He and his parents travelled to Tasmania in 1886. His first book was published in 1917. ''Western Tasmania'' The book was originally published in 1924 and reprinted in 1949 and in 1984. Extracts from the book were reproduced in ''The Mercury'' in the 1930s. The book is a mix of geographical and historical information about the west coast, and includes sections on Macquarie Harbour and the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company. Whitham had personally travelled to many of the locations and features that he described as well as to most of the peaks of the West Coast Range. His photographs in the State Library of Tasmania attest to some of the places that he had visited. It was not until ...
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West Coast, Tasmania
The West Coast of Tasmania is mainly isolated rough country, associated with wilderness, mining and tourism. It served as the location of an early convict settlement in the early history of Van Diemen's Land, and contrasts sharply with the more developed and populous northern and eastern parts of the island state. Climate The west coast has a much cooler and wetter climate when compared to the east coast. Frequent low pressure systems hit the west coast causing heavy rain, snow, and ice. The West Coast Range blocks these systems from impacting the east, therefore making the West Coast a rain catchment with some areas receiving over of rain a year. In winter temperatures at sea level hover around , and when not raining, morning frost is common. The temperatures are much lower inland from the coast with maximums in winter often failing to surpass . Typically, the snow line in winter is around 900 metres (3000 ft), however sea level snow falls several times each winter as ...
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The Mercury (Hobart)
''The'' ''Mercury'' is a daily newspaper, published in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, by Davies Brothers Pty Ltd (DBL), a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, itself a subsidiary of News Corp. The weekend issues of the paper are called ''Mercury on Saturday '' and ''Sunday Tasmanian''. The current editor of ''The'' ''Mercury'' is Craig Warhurst. History The newspaper was started on 5 July 1854 by George Auber Jones and John Davies. Two months subsequently (13 September 1854) John Davies became the sole owner. It was then published twice weekly and known as the ''Hobarton Mercury''. It rapidly expanded, absorbing its rivals, and became a daily newspaper in 1858 under the lengthy title ''The Hobart Town Daily Mercury''. In 1860 the masthead was reduced to ''The Mercury'' and in 2006 it was further shortened to simply ''Mercury''. With the imminent demise of the ( Launceston) ''Daily Telegraph'', ''The Mercury'', from March 1928, used the opportunity to increase their penetration th ...
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Macquarie Harbour
Macquarie Harbour is a shallow fjord in the West Coast region of Tasmania, Australia. It is approximately , and has an average depth of , with deeper places up to . It is navigable by shallow-draft vessels. The main channel is kept clear by the presence of a rock wall on the outside of the channel's curve. This man-made wall prevents erosion and keeps the channel deep and narrow, rather than allowing the channel to become wide and shallow. A reported Aboriginal name for the harbour is ''Parralaongatek''. The harbour was named in honour of Scottish Major General Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth Colonial Governor of New South Wales. History James Kelly wrote in his narrative ''First Discovery of Port Davey and Macquarie Harbour'' how he sailed from Hobart in a small open five-oared whaleboat to discover Macquarie Harbour on 28 December 1815. However, different accounts of the journey have indicated different methods and dates of the discovery. In the commentary to the ''Historical ...
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Mount Lyell Mining And Railway Company
Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company was a Tasmanian mining company formed on 29 March 1893, most commonly referred to as ''Mount Lyell''. Mount Lyell was the dominant copper mining company of the West Coast from 1893 to 1994, and was based in Queenstown, Tasmania. Following consolidation of leases and company assets at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mount Lyell was the major company for the communities of Queenstown, Strahan and Gormanston. It remained dominant until its closure in 1994. The Mount Lyell mining operations produced more than a million tonnes of copper, 750 tonnes of silver and 45 tonnes of gold since mining commenced in the early 1890s – which is equivalent to over 4 billion dollars worth of metal in 1995 terms. History In the early stage of operations, Mount Lyell was surrounded by smaller competing leases and companies. Eventually they were all absorbed into Mount Lyell operations, or were closed down. In 1903 the North Mount Lyell Copper Co ...
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West Coast Range
The West Coast Range is a mountain range located in the West Coast region of Tasmania, Australia. The range lies to the west and north of the main parts of the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. The range has had a significant number of mines utilising the geologically rich zone of Mount Read Volcanics. A number of adjacent ranges lie to the east: the Engineer Range, the Raglan Range, the Eldon Range, and the Sticht Range but in most cases these are on a west–east alignment, while the West Coast Range runs in a north–south direction, following the Mount Read volcanic arc. The range has encompassed multiple land uses including the catchment area for Hydro Tasmania dams, mines, transport routes and historical sites. Of the communities that have existed actually in the range itself, Gormanston, is probably the last to remain. Geographical features These are determined by a number of factors - the southerly direction of glaciation in the King River V ...
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State Library Of Tasmania
The State Reference Library is the reference library in the state of Tasmania, Australia. It is part of Libraries Tasmania. Libraries Tasmania includes a state-wide network of library services, community learning, adult literacy and the State’s archives and heritage services. History The first "Tasmanian Public Library" opened in 1849, in a house in Hobart, funded by a government grant and yearly subscription of members. It became accessible to the public in 1860, but was forced to close in 1867 owing to debts. In 1870 a new, free public reference library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vi ... opened in the Hobart Town Hall. American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the move to new premises in 1907, with the requirement that a free lending service should be esta ...
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Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Norman Blainey (born 11 March 1930) is an Australian historian, academic, best selling author and commentator. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including '' The Tyranny of Distance''. He has published over 40 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years. In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He received the 1988 Britannica Award for 'exceptional excellence in the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind', the first historian to receive that awardEncyclopædia Britannica,"Book of the Year, 1988", Chicago, p. 15 and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000. He was once described by Graeme Davison as the "most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the ...
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The Peaks Of Lyell
''The Peaks of Lyell'' is a book by Geoffrey Blainey, based on his University of Melbourne MA thesis originally published in 1954. It contains the history of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, and through association, Queenstown and further the West Coast Tasmania. It is unique for this type of book in that it has gone to the sixth edition in 2000, and few company histories in Australia have achieved such continual publishing. Blainey was fortunate in being able to speak to older people about the history of the West Coast, some who had known Queenstown in its earliest years. The book gives an interesting overview from the materials and people Blainey was able to access in the early 1950s, and the omissions. Due to the nature of a company history, a number of items of Queenstown history did have alternative interpretations on events such as the 1912 North Mount Lyell Disaster, and there were residents of Queenstown living in the town as late as the 1970s who had sto ...
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The Advocate (Australia)
''The Advocate'' is a local newspaper of North-West and Western Tasmania, Australia. It was formerly published under the names ''The Wellington Times'', ''The Emu Bay Times'', and ''The North Western Advocate and The Emu Bay Times''. Its readership covers the North West Coast and West Coast of Tasmania, including towns such as Devonport, Burnie, Ulverstone, Penguin, Wynyard, Latrobe, and Smithton. the newspaper is published by Australian Community Media, located at 39-41 Alexander Street, Burnie, Tasmania. Early history On Wednesday 1 October 1890 Robert Harris and his sons, Robert and Charles published the first issue of ''The Wellington Times'', Burnie's first newspaper. It was named after the county in which Burnie and Emu Bay were located and was first published only on Wednesdays and Saturdays. With a circulation around 2000 its four broadsheet pages cost 1.5 d. The original ''Burnie Wellington Times'' office in 1890 stood on a site in Cattley Street and employ ...
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Tasmanian Historical Research Association
The Tasmanian Historical Research Association is a Hobart based Tasmanian historical group and publisher in existence since 1951. Earlier groups concerned about history and historical preservation occurred in the 1890s and 1920s. The Tasmania Society in the 1930s (then the Historical Society of Tasmania in the 1940s) was another group that preceded the association. The Launceston Royal Society became the Launceston Historical Society in 1988. The association has been a publisher of a long lasting ''Papers and Proceedings'' (short name: ''Tas. Hist. Res. Assoc.'') and various books on Tasmanian history. The THRA is a constituent member of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies The Federation of Australian Historical Societies (FAHS) is the peak body for historical societies throughout Australia.The Federation of Australian Historical Societieshome page Retrieved 24 August 2010.Cathy Pryor, "A force for the regions", .... Publications * ''Papers and Proceed ...
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History Of Tasmania
The history of Tasmania begins at the end of the most recent ice age (approximately 10,000 years ago) when it is believed that the island was joined to the Australian mainland. Little is known of the human history of the island until the British colonisation in the 19th century. Indigenous people Tasmania was inhabited by an Indigenous population, the Aboriginal Tasmanians, and evidence indicates their presence in the territory, later to become an island, at least 35,000 years ago. At the time of the British occupation and colonisation in 1803 the Indigenous population was estimated at between 3000 and 10,000. Historian Lyndall Ryan's analysis of population studies led her to conclude that there were about 7000 spread throughout the island's nine nations; Nicholas Clements, citing research by N.J.B. Plomley and Rhys Jones, settled on a figure of 3000 to 4000. The combination of the so-called Black War, internecine conflict and, from the late 1820s, the spread of infectious ...
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