Cape Grim, officially Kennaook / Cape Grim, is the northwestern point of
Tasmania,
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
. The
Peerapper name for the cape is recorded as ''Kennaook''.
It is the location of the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station and of the
Cape Grim Air Archive which is operated by the Australian
Bureau of Meteorology in a joint programme with the
CSIRO
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government
The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentar ...
. The station was established in 1976 and has been operating ever since.
Geography
Cape Grim's isolated geographic location makes it unique. The next land mass directly west of Cape Grim is not Africa, but the southern tip of Argentina. Winds that make their way to Cape Grim from Antarctica and the Indian Ocean hit no significant land mass. Air pollution values collected at Cape Grim are the closest attainable representation of a global average.
History
The headland was first charted and named Cape Grim by
Matthew Flinders
Captain Matthew Flinders (16 March 1774 – 19 July 1814) was a British navigator and cartographer who led the first inshore circumnavigation of mainland Australia, then called New Holland. He is also credited as being the first person to u ...
on 7 December 1798, as he sailed from the east in the
''Norfolk'' and found a long swell coming from the south-west, confirming for the first time that
Van Diemen's Land was separated from the Australian mainland by a strait, which he named
Bass Strait
Bass Strait () is a strait separating the island state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland (more specifically the coast of Victoria, with the exception of the land border across Boundary Islet). The strait provides the most direct waterwa ...
.
In 1828, ''Victory Hill'' at Cape Grim was the site of the
Cape Grim massacre
The Cape Grim massacre was an attack on 10 February 1828 in which a group of Aboriginal Tasmanians gathering food at a beach in the north-west of Tasmania is said to have been ambushed and shot by four Van Diemen's Land Company (VDLC) workers, w ...
of thirty
Peerapper people by four shepherds.
[Lyndall Ryan, pp135-137, ''The Aboriginal Tasmanians'', ]Allen & Unwin
George Allen & Unwin was a British publishing company formed in 1911 when Sir Stanley Unwin purchased a controlling interest in George Allen & Co. It went on to become one of the leading publishers of the twentieth century and to establish an ...
, 1996,
Cape Grim received dual naming in March 2021.
See also
*
Woolnorth Wind Farm
Woolnorth Wind Farm is a wind power complex, comprising two wind farms — Bluff Point and Studland Bay. They are located at the Woolnorth property at Woolnorth (which includes the location known as Cape Grim), in the far north-west of Tasmania, ...
References
North West Coast of Tasmania
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