Tasmania Quotes

When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do. ~ Robert Plant

Despite its convict history, the Australian state of Tasmania is no longer associated only with austerity and privation. Nowadays it's a sybarite's nirvana surrounded by some of the most untouched nature on the planet. "Mainland Tassie," as the Tasmanians who live on the outer islands call it, covers 35,000 square miles, and 45% of that is preserved in bio-reserves, national parks or World Heritage sites. On the other 55%, there are just 515,000 people. ~ Anonymous

Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation.
The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks's mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer. ~ Richard Flanagan

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were. ~ Richard Flanagan

I remember something Bran said when we were hiking in Tasmania, about how people believe they see the same river but the water is always different. I am that river. ~ Lia Riley

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British. ~ Nancy Pearl

Stop ye travellers as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, soon you shall be -
Prepare yourself to follow me.

Graffiti response:
To follow you
I am not content --
How do I know
which way you went? ~ Tombstone Epitaph In Tasmania Australia

The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation's unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There's no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased - much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues. ~ James A. Michener

I was born in the small city of Hobart in Tasmania, Australia, in 1948. My parents were family physicians. My grandfather and great grandfather on my mother's side were geologists. ~ Elizabeth Blackburn

At any time in history, gazillions of lives are being lived simultaneously. In Zimbabwe, Thailand, Tasmania, and Borneo, in the poorest hovel and the richest palace, in the sky and on the moon, the lives of ants, plants, gorillas, and people are going on. But we are generally fixated on that infinitesimal thing in the scope of the universe, ourselves. ~ Kelly Easton

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world. ~ Richard Flanagan

Towns like Launceston, Longford, Evandale and other current-day hubs of poppy production in north and central Tasmania had been settled by tens of thousands of British and Irish convicts transported here in the early 19th century as a cheap alternative to prisons in the British Isles. They were followed by thousands of so-called free settlers, who built communities with main streets still lined by two- and three-story pink sandstone buildings. ~ Anonymous

Is it an endearing quirk among European explorers to imagine that every geographical feature they clap eyes on for the first time is in need of a new name, or is if just a plain silly one? As far as I understand, humans have been knocking around this part of Africa for - give or take a birthday candle- three million years. The existence of a large wet patch smack in the middle of them had not gone unnoticed. How large? Bigger than Lake Michigan, bigger than Tasmania, bigger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island all rolled into one. It is so big that people on one side gave it one name, people on the other side gave it another, and people in between gave it several more. But that didn't matter to Dr Livingstone. Along he came and he didn't ask the locals what they called this large lake at the top end of the Nile. He gave it yet another name, in honour of the elder of a tribe of white people on a small island five thousand miles away. ~ Nicholas Drayson

We calculate the amount spent [by Brethren and other anti- Green groups] was between $500,000 and $1 million - that's a huge amount for a state election campaign in Tasmania. ~ Bob Brown

I came to Tasmania in search of an elusive species. And I found it. But never in my wildest dreams did I expect to find you. And I believe I found a type of butterfly that exists only in my belly which makes itself known when I think of you. ~ N.R. Walker

In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out. ~ Richard Flanagan