Hello!
We are back at it again here for our fifty-fifth installment. - thank you to all who have made donations and sent in stories in the last few weeks. Special special thanks to Gaye Winders, who really has set the standard with her remarkably kind donation!
There have been quite a few changes behind the scenes here. We've gotten out our virtual hammers and nails and saws to construct a few new ideas over at Tasmanian Geographic. You'll be the first to know about them as they come online.
First and foremost is creating the structure to put together a Nature Institute. This is directly following on from the educational and citizen science excursions we're doing over at Giant Tree Expeditions, and will be a framework for fieldtrips close to home and farther where we can learn more about the world around us.
Second, we're strengthening our ties with small-medium enterprises around Tasmania through a Tasmanian Geographic Selections list - it'll be our traveller-focused way of shining a light on some other businesses that we think are worth checking out. Over the years, the wide range of articles on this site has become a reliable magnet for web traffic, and we'd like to use that platform to help entrepreneurship and local business within Tasmania.
So, on to issue 55. What do we have? There's the original pages of Rodway's ground-breaking guide to Tasmanian Wildlflowers. It's a different style to a modern photographic guide, but you'll surely find that the Olive Barnard's exquisite drawings bring the character of a plant better than any photograph.
One of Tasmania's most notable internet mountaineering journalists - Becca Lunnon aka Rock Monkey - has shared her amazing photographs of the remote and jagged Du Cane Range. It may inspire you to plan another long and arduous walk....
We've also got some of the foundational European charts of the Australian continent, with the sketches and maps made by the ships Resolution and Discovery on Cook's third voyage. This is also notable because it's when the first Eucalyptus was sampled by European scientists.
Finally, there's a gallery of images from rafting the famous and wild Franklin River with Water By Nature. This river never fails to amaze, with an amazing variety of rainforest terrain and surreal geology.
I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoyed gathering them!
Enjoy!
All the best,
The Editor