Tasmania has some of the best preserved colonial buildings in Australia. Set in beautiful surroundings, these World Heritage Sites hide a dark history from the times when convict labour was vital to the economy of the Australian colonies. The volcanic islands in the southern oceans are the locations of Australia’s only active volcanoes, and provide geologists and other scientists with information about the way the Earth’s molten interior is still coming to the surface to create new land on Australia’s territorial islands. ABOUT THE WORLD HERITAGE SITES IN AUSTRALIA SERIES The titles in World Heritage Sites in Australia cover magnificent natural locations, precious historic buildings and places that contain rare archaeological remains. Australians treasure their heritage sites, and this series reveals where each site is located and what makes it so special. Find out how UNESCO chooses World Heritage Sites, and what listings mean for the countries involved. Included in this series are sections on Indigenous culture, sustainability, environmental management and the importance of place, all of which will support the Australian Curriculum for primary schools.

Author's copy. Printed, with MS. corrections and annotations by the author. Handwriting identical with that in a letter from West to Edward Wise, 5 June 1864 in ML MSS. 1327/3, pp. 315-317. 1. pp. 209-340 are missing, with blank pages inserted at the back used for annotations. 2. identical with other copies of the volume.

'Essays from Near and Far' is a first collection of literary essays on wide-ranging topics by Tasmanian James Dryburgh, with a foreword from poet and environmentalist Pete Hay.

"In his compelling dialogue with a sparky adolescent living in a now-vanished Tasmanian mining town a hundred years ago, Dryburgh gives us a powerful sense of the forces that still do battle to shape our existence in this country, and on this earth.The glimpses Sylvia gives us of her too-short life were framed by far vaster forces - of migration, colonisation and settlement, of mining interests and endeavours to exploit the wilderness, of nature itself that she encountered in its near-unsullied state along the Frankland River. Her life was shadowed, too, by the things she does not mention - violence against the land's original inhabitants, by the wars that were building far away.In Dryburgh's sensitive engagement, this small female voice, so solitary that it sought connection through missives to a newspaper editor hundreds of miles away, reminds us that the settlers' place on this continent was never a given, and that sustainable existence on it requires acknowledgement of its fragility, and our own."Caroline Brothers, author of The Memory Stones and Hinterland.

James Fenton (1820-1901) was born in Ireland and emigrated to Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) with his family in 1833. He became a pioneer settler in an area on the Forth River and published this history of the island in 1884. The book begins with the discovery of the island in 1642 and concludes with the deaths of some significant public figures in the colony in 1884. The establishment of the colony on the island, and the involvement of convicts in its building, is documented. A chapter on the native aborigines gives a fascinating insight into the attitudes of the colonising people, and a detailed account of the removal of the native Tasmanians to Flinders Island, in an effort to separate them from the colonists. The book also contains portraits of some aboriginal people, as well as a glossary of their language.