Category — Wild Tasmania

Here’s one of the best videos we’ve found that features Tassie’s greatest surfing destination – the irrepressible Shipsterns Bluff.

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Tasmanian artist Belinda Kurczok has won the People’s Choice Award in Adelaide’s 2007 Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize for her lifelike gouache painting of two white-bellied sea eagles.

Named after Frederick George Waterhouse, the South Australian Museum’s first curator, the Waterhouse Art Prize is Australia’s richest prize for natural history art.

Kurczok, 28, received her $5000 prize and a ticket to Malaysia at a presentation ceremony at the museum last night.

The top prize was won by Victorian artist Heather Marsh.

Wild weather and huge downpours continue to flood three major valleys in Tasmania, triggering car crashes, fires and a dangerous landslide.

The number of roads underwater continue to climb as emergency crews work around the clock to save homes from flooding.

Tasmania Police media spokesman Sgt Pat Lee said the floodwaters had threatened the Derwent Valley, where seven key roads, including the Lyell Highway, had been severely hit.

While townships are yet to report significant water damage to homes, Sgt Lee said emergency crews were setting up shelters for residents.

More:

Police say a major rockfall on the Murchison Highway in Tasmania’s north-west could take up to three days to clear. Thousands of tonnes of rubble have fallen onto the highway, two kilometres south of Rosebery.

Be awed by Stuart Gibson’s Shipstern Bluff portfolio.

By Emily Davey | Tasmania, of late, is realising its potential in the surfing world, and rightly so. After years of being kept a very good secret — our waves, our environment, our island and, most importantly, our surfers, are being exposed for what they really are: absolutely classic.

One thing that is consistently evident throughout our island state is the down-to-earth nature of the surfing community.

This is expressed through wide appreciation of Tasmania’s natural beauty. Local photographer Stuart Gibson has captured this beauty time after time and is now sharing our state’s best breaks with the world.

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This delightful study of a Tasmanian echidna comes from the camera of a Flickr poster with the moniker Sir Francis Canker Jones.

We found it interspersed between shots of his wedding, breaching whales in Sydney Harbour, and sheep in New Zealand!

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In 2003, the Devonport Regional Gallery established a commission program that sought to provide emerging Tasmanian artists with the support to develop a solo exhibition. Hobart-based Richard Wastell was the first artist invited to participate in the program.

Not far from here was the outcome — an exhibition of paintings that capture the essence of the Tasmanian wilderness, its extraordinary beauty and also its vulnerability and the desecration wrought upon it by man.

The exhibition was shown at the Devonport Regional Gallery, and then the Bett Gallery Hobart, in March 2005. It was a sell-out.

And a tribute to the young Richard Wastell’s determination to live by his art once he had graduated with a degree in Fine Arts (Honours) from the University of Tasmania in 1996. As Jane Stewart, director of the Devonport Regional Gallery wrote, after his recent exhibition in Sydney and enthusiastic national reviews, he is now getting the recognition he deserves.

The works in Not far from here are oil and marble dust on linen.

Following yesterday’s giant squid find on a Tasmanian beach, how could we go past ’substitute anchor’ posted by James975 in his Tasmania collection.

The caption reads: An Octopus holding onto our anchor in Coles Bay, East Coast, Tasmania.

Editor’s note: If you would like to be featured here, simply upload your photographs to Flickr [signing up is free] and we’ll find them. We check for new entries tagged with ‘Tasmania’ every week.

Belinda Bauer, of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, packs up the giant squid found on a Tasmanian beach.

A giant squid washed up on Tasmania’s west coast has scientists in a frenzy.

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery senior curator of invertebrate zoology, Genefor Walker-Smith, leads a team of scientific experts who will investigate the find at Ocean Beach, near Strahan.

Curiously, of the four known giant squid to have washed up on Tasmanian shores (1986, 1992, 2002 and 2007), all have been found in the month of July.

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Rob Blakers is a nature and wilderness photographer, who uses Hobart as a base from which to explore wild Tasmania. He is passionate about its protection and sees the continuing inroads into Tasmanian wild country and ancient forests as an appalling tragedy of our time.

Images from Rob’s collection have been used extensively for nature conservation. He has also edited and published many photographic books based on Tasmania. These images come from his latest book Freycinet — available at all good local bookstores.

View Rob Blakers’ amazing Freycinet portfolio.

For more images visit Rob Blakers web site.

By MARIA FLETCHER | One of the world’s most deadly ants, Myrmecia pilosula — better known as the Jack Jumper, is native to Tasmania. The Jack Jumper (also called the Hopper) ant exists only in Australia and a close encounter can prove deadly to the more than 60,000 people who are allergic to its sting.

It is estimated that around 10 per cent of the Tasmanian population may be allergic to the Jack Jumper, with around 3 per cent suffering life threatening anaphylaxsis if attacked by the ant.

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