In Tasmania Read Online Free PDF Page A

Tasmania’s position as it nuzzled between Australia and Patagonia. Tasmania had then waltzed south at seven centimetres a year and gradually fragmented from the supercontinent. Ice formed in the space that opened up to the south, creating Antarctica.
    But what sprang off the page was the situation of Hobart 600 million years ago. It was more than eight degrees north of the Equator. ‘The farther we go back in time, the farther north it is,’ Quilty said. ‘Australia was near the North Pole at 1.6 billion years.’
    It heartened me to think that Tasmania at one time existed where Africa now is, since I frequently had to correct people who believed this still to be the case. An early Lieutenant Governor, George Arthur, was so enthusiastic about its location – midway between India and South America – that he was confident ‘it must become the Alexandria of these seas’. Its present position confused the National Geographic : commissioned by the magazine to write an article on Tasmania, I received an email to thank me for my piece on Tanzania.
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    Darwin compared in his diary ‘the older strata at Hobart Town and the bottom of the sea near T. del Fuego’. I knew Tierra del Fuego from when I lived in Argentina. The similarities I had observed on a trek along the Overland Trail had a geological explanation. Near Cradle Mountain botanists had dug up fossils of conifer, Fitzroya tasmanensis , of which the only living examples were in Chile. Quilty told me that some of the flora I may have noticed in the Andes were to be found elsewhere only in Tasmania – notably southern beech and leatherwood – and that insects like the Tasmanian cave spider were the sole family known outside Chile. ‘And they recently found a platypus tooth in Patagonia that’s 100 million years old.’
    Tierra del Fuego broke away from the South American continent at the time that Tasmania moved south of the Australian mainland, becoming a sanctuary for flora and fauna. This is what had excited Darwin. But what no-one knew until the Beagle docked in Hobart was that for the first three decades following British settlement Tasmania also existed in its own time zone.
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    A chance remark by the poet Andrew Sant led me to look up a Hobart periodical, the issue of Bent’s News for March 5, 1836 – and there I read a little-known story that, to me, shed light on an aspect of Tasmania’s character. While Darwin was chiselling out 260-million-year-old fossils on Mount Wellington, two officers from the Beagle with less to do politely offered to check the town clocks using their chronometers. Heckscher, the ‘first-rate machinist’ in charge of the city’s three clocks, had worked for the Emperor of Russia, and was delighted to show off his trusted machines to Captain Fitzroy and Lieutenant Stokes. What they discovered astonished them. The town was faster than the Beagle by one minute 45 seconds. For its first 33 years, the established position of Hobart, given as 43 degrees by six south, 147 by 38 east, was incorrect by 27 miles.
    Fitzroy was swift to advise Heckscher that it was seriously important for ships to be made aware of this fact ‘as the consequences may be most fatal’. Captains setting their clocks for longitude as they left harbour risked being out by four nautical miles – and so adding to the thousand or more shipwrecks along Tasmania’s coast, the positions of the huge majority of which remain unknown.
    In the months ahead, I came to believe that George Fitzroy had discovered a unique local phenomenon, a crack in time and space that accounted for so many things that I observed about Tasmania. Into it disappeared ships, novelists, cities, UFOs, archives, promises. ‘Yes, I’ll be there tomorrow. To service your car, build your house, clean the possums out of your roof …’ Returning 40 years on to his childhood home at the foot of