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Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world.


The statue of Abel Tasman stoically looks upon the Dutch flag on a sunny Hobart day. Of course, this morning it is raining yet again, and Abel is enjoying the chance to have the bird poo washed off his lovely Lutjegasti head.
Abel seemed like a good bloke, even if he was a bit of a suck. Upon being the first European to stumble upon this fine island, he promptly named it Van Diemen's Land, in honour of his boss – Anthony van Diemen – head honcho of the Dutch East Indies, a bloke with big dreams and deep pockets who had visions of a grand Dutch empire that would extend into the “Great Southern Land”.

So he sent Abel down here in 1642, a good year for most not named Charles I. Despite its obvious charms, the Dutch didn’t think much of the joint. Lazy buggers, the Dutch East India Company reckoned Tasman's explorations were a letdown: he had neither found a promising area for trade nor a useful new shipping route.

With no existing thriving communities to leach upon – the Dutch (and Portuguese and Spanish and French) way – they said “bugger it”, and for over a century, until the poms were looking for a place a long long way away to dump their human refuse, Tasmania and New Zealand were not visited by Europeans.

But that is another story...
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Comments

smudgeon said…
I always found it kind of funny that Tasman came down the west coast in search of trading & shipping routes, failing to recognise one of the richest mineral provinces in the southern hemisphere...
9 September 2009 at 12:17
Kris McCracken said…
Me, that because the Dutch required a source of labour to exploit those resources.
9 September 2009 at 12:26
Roddy said…
Aren't we fortunate?, as we could now all be speaking a form Tasrakaans. Is this a corruption of Afrikaans?
9 September 2009 at 22:00
yamini said…
Nice tidbit of history of Tasmania though I became sad on hearing the exploitation stories, something similar happened in India too, although at a much larger scale, courtesy our own messy affairs and the East India Company.
10 September 2009 at 18:22
Kris McCracken said…
I for one am glad that I'm speaking English...

Maybe the Dutch should have concentrated more on wooing the Mughals?
14 September 2009 at 10:19
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