Posts from — June 2007

Forestry Tasmania has confirmed four trees in the Arve Valley, discovered last summer, will be classified as ‘giants’. As a result, they will be added to the Giant Trees Register and protected from all forestry activity.

Flickr Friday this week can’t go past this frosty scene on the top of Mt Wellington by somebody who goes by the pseudonym ‘Chronic Fatigue Boy’

A new addition to Tasmania’s Great Walks appears likely. A feasibility study into a proposed Three Capes Track has strongly endorsed the development of a coastal bushwalk on the Tasman Peninsula.

Tasmania’s critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrots had welcome news on two fronts today, with more than $500,000 allocated for the redevelopment of their breeding facility in Taroona, and the birds given a clean bill of health after a major disease scare.

Most of south-eastern Australia will spend six months of the year on daylight saving from next year. Victoria, NSW, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT have agreed to harmonise daylight saving time and extend it by 28 days.

In an era before air transport, the port of Hobart was the city’s ‘gateway to the world’ including Antarctic and sub-antarctic regions.

Waterman’s Dock was a hub of port activity from the mid-19th century for many decades. Here, goods and passengers ferried to and from larger vessels moored in the Derwent River were loaded and landed.

When the Dock was built in 1854, people, timber and food were being shipped every week out of Hobart to gold rushes in mainland Australia and California, so it quickly became a centre of city life.

Today it is a reminder of the city’s strong and enduring economic links with the Antarctic and Southern Ocean.

There’s more fascinating information about Tasmania’s Antarctic connection on the PolarPathways website.

DNA extracted from 50-year-old animal dung could reveal whether the Tasmanian Tiger survived beyond its reported extinction. Researchers will extract the DNA from droppings found in the 1950s and 1960s and preserved by the Tasmanian Museum.

FOI emails show timber company Gunns warned the Lennon Government that it would “get grumpy” if forced to improve plans to monitor air emissions, noise and effluent from its proposed Tasmanian pulp mill.

Paul County portfolio

From Before we eat …

Paul County is a fifth generation Tasmanian who grew up in Hobart.

A statement which is nowhere as lively as the piece Bernard Lloyd wrote on the back flap of their book Before we eat … a delicious slice of Tasmania’s culinary life:

Lamb chops and three veg seems an unlikely entrée for the founder of an historical culinary research organisiation but that is because it leaves out Dino Bonifacio, the Italian next-door neighbour who offered him bitter black olives over the back fence: a playmate’s father, a Lebanese butcher, who hung meat to cure in the back shed; and the heady smell of chocolate wafting from the Cadbury factory.

Add a mother with a love of books and a father who kept the family’s history alive with stories of Paul’s colourful ancestors (one who charted the rugged west coast in the 1820s, another who operated the first private sawmill in Tasmania on the Huon River and a third who played violin in Martin Cash’s bushranging gang) and you have Paul County, teacher and cook as well as a photographer and storyteller, who still loves roast lamb with three veg.

The end result of the exercise was a stunning exhibition — and we feature a selection in this Paul County portfolio.

Read our reviews here

The Deck

Devonport

Peppered Springfield Farm Venison on a Tart of Polenta and Quince with Pickled Ginger and Sherry Vinegar Glaze

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