THE SOUTHEAST MARINE REGION
The South-east Marine Region spans almost two million square kilometres of Commonwealth waters from Bermagui on the far south coast of New South Wales to Cape Jervis near Kangaroo Island in South Australia. It includes Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean around Tasmania and Macquarie Island. The Region extends seaward 200 nautical miles (370km) from the outer edge of state waters to the limit of Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and beyond areas of ‘extended continental shelf ’ claimed by Australia under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
In 2007, the Region was the first to be proclaimed in the Australian Network and contains 14 marine parks in itself, covering more than 388,000sqkm — Apollo, Beagle, Boags, East Gippsland, Flinders, Franklin, Freycinet, Huon, Macquarie Island, Murray, Nelson, South Tasman Rise, Tasman Fracture, and Zeehan.
THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
The Region’s physical landscape was shaped by tumultuous geological events that occurred over hundreds of millions of years, including the break-up of the great supercontinent Gondwana and the movement of oceanic and continental tectonic plates. A dominant feature of the south-east shelf is the Bass Strait, formed by a shallow depression about 250km wide linking the Australian mainland and Tasmania, with islands at its eastern and western margins.
Outside the Strait, the continental shelf is about 200km wide across the Lacepede Shelf offshore from the mouth of the Murray River, but elsewhere is generally narrow — especially around the coast of Tasmania and southern New South Wales. Multibeam sonar surveys by Geoscience Australia have revealed the Region’s complex seafloor terrain in spectacular detail, including rocky reefs, deep canyons,
