Most people probably know the Tasmanian devil as the iconic animal from Australia’s island state of Tasmania. Fewer know that, up until a few thousand years ago, devils were widespread across mainland…
Australia won’t be building anything as big as the Gordon Dam any time soon.
JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons
The agricultural green paper released last week proposes 27 new water and irrigation projects, which the government claims will be necessary for Australia’s agricultural expansion. The emphasis is firmly…
Apollo Bay in Victoria. Australia’s coastal towns are vulnerable to changes in the surrounding seas.
ccdoh1/Flickr
Australia’s coastal towns, many built around fisheries and tourism, are particularly vulnerable to climate change. South east and south west Australia are marine hotspots — they are warming much faster…
The repeal could pave the way for logging in Tasmania’s tall forests, after a six-year moratorium.
TTaylor/Wikimedia Commons
Tasmania’s government has repealed the state’s forestry “peace deal”, removing around 400,000 hectares of forests from reserves across the state and potentially leaving them open to future logging. The…
Tasmanian forests will be opened for logging for “special timbers”.
Ta Ann Truths/Flickr
Tasmania’s parliament yesterday passed new forestry laws to undo the state’s forest “peace” deal. The laws are the most significant step so far in delivering the Liberal government’s pledge to “tear up…
Parts of Tasmania’s World Heritage area will not be delisted – but the forests will still need management and protection.
ngaur/Flickr
Tom Fairman, The University of Melbourne and Rod Keenan, The University of Melbourne
The 74,000 hectares of Tasmania’s controversial World Heritage extension will not be delisted as requested by the Tasmanian and federal governments. At the meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee…
Much of Tasmania’s World Heritage has been sculpted by ice. The extension to the area (currently under debate) adds to all these values.
Simon Lieschke/Flickr
The debate around Tasmania’s controversial World Heritage extension, under review this week at international talks in Doha, has centred on forests. But the area includes far more than “just” trees — including…
Clear-felling and burning is not the future for Tasmania’s forests, no matter what happens with a looming World Heritage wilderness decision.
Ta Ann Truths/Flickr
The Tasmanian forestry industry is already thinking beyond the federal and state governments’ plans to abolish the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement, which include trying to remove 74,000 hectares of forest…
Caught: a female swift parrot emerging from her tree-hollow nest.
Dejan Stojanovic
Swift parrots are one of Australia’s most endangered birds, but until very recently we didn’t know why. New research shows that they’re being eaten by sugar gliders at their breeding grounds in Tasmania…
Nowhere was resistance to white colonisers greater than from Tasmanian Aborigines, but within a generation only a few had survived the Black War.
Robert Dowling/National Gallery of Victoria
Tasmania’s Black War (1824-31) was the most intense frontier conflict in Australia’s history. It was a clash between the most culturally and technologically dissimilar humans to have ever come into contact…
Logging native forests is no longer the way forward.
Ta Ann Truths/Flickr
The new Tasmanian government has announced the first steps in delivering on its pledge to reinvent the forest industry. Interestingly, this includes not allowing logging for at least six years in 400,000…
While the forest industry might hope that business is open, shifts in the wood market suggest otherwise.
Ta Ann Truths/Flickr
There are many jubilant Tasmanians this week celebrating the death of the Tasmanian Forests Agreement now that the forest industry has endorsed the government’s mandate to tear up the deal. I am not one…
Victory by the Liberals in Saturday’s Tasmania state election was widely anticipated, but what are the challenges now for Will Hodgman’s new government?
AAP/Rob Blakers
On Saturday, the winds of change took on the proportions of a Bass Strait gale to deliver the Liberal Party an emphatic victory in the Tasmanian state election. The Liberals, under long-serving leader…
The “intangible benefits” of arts are absent from the policy documents of the three main parties.
(Mural by Hobart artist Robert O'Connor). petahopkins
This Saturday’s Tasmanian election is the first since Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) opened on January 21 2011, and it’s no surprise that the creative arts and industries have featured heavily…
The WA Environmental Defenders Office was involved in the legal challenge to planned gas processing at James Price Point.
Cortlan Bennett/AAP Image
When residents from the tiny town of Bulga won a three-year court battle to stop Rio Tinto expanding an open-cut coalmine beside them, it was hailed as a victory for David over Goliath. Yet the type of…
Liberal leader Will Hodgman casts his vote in the 2010 Tasmanian election. But just how is Tasmania’s lower house elected?
AAP/Julian Smith
After trading blows around predictable topics, the only issue of consensus in a recent televised debate between the leaders of the Tasmanian Liberal and Labor parties, Will Hodgman and Lara Giddings, was…
Lake Judd, in Tasmania’s Southwest National Park.
JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons
Prime Minister Tony Abbott this week told a timber industry dinner that he doesn’t think national parks should be a growth industry: “We have quite enough national parks. We have quite enough locked up…
Cost-of-living pressures in Tasmania’s poorest households are intensifying, according to a new report. Researchers examined…
There has been an uninspiring and vacuous lead-up to the Tasmanian election, likely to be won by the Will Hodgman-led Liberal opposition. Why?
AAP/Rob Blakers
A YouTube video appeared earlier this month with a suspiciously familiar Tasmanian candidate named “Fast Freddy”. The video perfectly encapsulates Poe’s law, which states that it is impossible to distinguish…
In February last year fires came to within 20 km of Hobart.
Flickr/AB Creative Edge Tasmania
With another week of hot weather in southeast Australia, we’re all on watch for the outbreak of bushfires. Fire warnings and bans are currently out for Tasmania, Victoria, and South Australia, with a potentially…