To the convicts arriving in Van Diemen's Land' it must have felt as though they'd been sent to the very ends of the earth. In Tasmania's Convicts Alison Alexander tells the history of the men and women transported to what became one of Britain's most notorious convict colonies. Following the lives of dozens of convicts and their families' she uncovers stories of success' failure' and everything in between. While some suffered harsh conditions' most served their time and were freed' becoming ordinary and peaceful citizens. Yet over the decades' a terrible stigma became associated with the convicts' and they and the whole colony went to extraordinary lengths to hide it. The majority of Tasmanians today have convict ancestry' whether they know it or not. While the public stigma of its convict past has given way to a contemporary fascination with colonial history' Alison Alexander debates whether the convict past lingers deep in the psyche of white Tasmania.

A composite of accounts of whaling and sealing, including the A.L.Meston essay on 'Half-castes of the Furneaux Group'. They came from across the globe in tall ships, in billowing sails, iconic of an era hell-bent on supplying the colonies and the giant cities of the northern hemisphere with their insatiable industrial needs. The many out of print publications to which I have referred, are conservative in their appraisal of the sealing and whaling hey-day of Tasmania, particularly the expansive bays and estuaries of the south and the islands of Bass Strait, the Furneaux Group. But it was the universal expression of the day of those authors, not to paraphrase in any emotional terms, the end result of that period of exploitation.They came, they slaughtered and regarded their new-found paradise as no more than their 'happy hunting-grounds' & moved on...for no other reason than that of the industrial pragmatic...there was nothing left. This publication salvages works otherwise lost to posterity.

The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.