JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

Close your eyes and imagine the experiences of the first people who traversed Tasmania’s wild landscape. Who were they? Were they a handful of desperado convicts smashing their shackles and making a break for freedom? Were they the first colonists who headed into the island’s unchartered territory in the hope of striking it rich through mineral exploitation? Or how about Matthew Flinders who, at the tender age of 24, circumnavigated Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1798 and thus proved it to be an island. Even earlier, Abel Tasman sighted the Western coast of Tasmania in 1642.

But who was here before this? Humans first arrived around 37,000 years ago. When the land bridge between Tasmania and the mainland washed away around 12,000 years ago, Tasmania became an island, lashed by the Roaring Forties and subject to punishing weather patterns swirling out of Antarctica.

Certainly modern Tasmania has changed