Danielle Wood

Ralph Crane

A handsome full-colour book pairing unique items from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery with selections of original writing about the southern island. Indigenous dispossession, a cruel penal history, gay-rights battles; exceptional landscapes, unusual wildlife, environmental activism; colonial architecture, arts and crafts, a thriving creative scene—all are part of the story of Tasmania. And they find their expression in the unparalleled collection of Hobart’s TMAG. In Island Story, Ralph Crane and Danielle Wood select almost sixty representative TMAG objects: from shell necklaces to a convict cowl, colonial scrimshaw to a thylacine pincushion, contemporary photography to a film star’s travelling case. Each is matched to texts old and new, by writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Marie Bjelke-Petersen, Helene Chung, Jim Everett, Heather Rose and Ben Walter. This is the perfect gift for anyone interested in the island everyone is talking about. Ralph Crane is the author or editor of more than twenty academic books. He lives in Hobart and is Professor of English at the University of Tasmania. Danielle Wood is the author of The Alphabet of Light and Dark, Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, Mothers Grimm and two non-fiction books on Marjorie Bligh, and co-author of the Angelica Banks series. She lives in Hobart and teaches at the University of Tasmania. ‘While the twenty-four stories in this beautiful anthology range from colonial to contemporary times, they have a common theme—a pervading sense of the landscape.’ Age on Deep South ‘The collection is strong...The editors pull no punches.’ Sun-Herald on Deep South ‘Offers readers a glimpse into the imagery and symbolism that has come to shape how outsiders perceive the island.’ Australian on Deep South

Tasmania in Object and Text

Island Story

Lisa Fletcher

Shortlisted for the Tratman Award 2015 To enter caves is to venture beyond the realm of the everyday. From huge vaulted caverns to impassable, water-filled passages; from the karst topography of Guilin in China to the lava tubes of Hawaii; from tiny remote pilgrimage sites to massive tourism enterprises, caves are places of mystery. Dark spaces that remain largely unexplored, caves are astonishing wonders of nature and habitats for exotic flora and fauna. This book investigates the natural and cultural history of caves and considers the roles caves have played in the human imagination and experience of the natural world. It explores the long history of the human fascination with caves, across countries and continents, examining their dual role as spaces of both wonder and fear. It tells the tales of the adventurers who pioneered the science of caves and those of the explorers and cave-divers still searching for new, unmapped routes deep into the earth. This book explores the lure of the subterranean world by examining caving and cave tourism and by looking to the mythology, literature, and art of caves. This lavishly illustrated book will appeal to general readers and experts alike interested in the ecology and use of caves, or the extraordinary artistic responses earth’s dark recesses have evoked over the centuries.

Nature and Culture

Cave

While concerns about climate change have focused negative attention on the coal industry in recent years, as descendants of the industrial revolution we have all benefitted from the mining of the black seam. Coal has significantly influenced the course of human history and our social and natural environments. This book takes readers on a journey through the extraordinary artistic responses to coal, from its role in the works of writers such as Émile Zola, D. H. Lawrence, and George Orwell; to the way it inspired the work of painters, including J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh; to the place of coal in film, song, and folklore; as well as the surprising allure of coal tourism. Strikingly illustrated, Coal provides engaging and informative insight into the myriad ways coal has affected our lives.

Coal

Lisa Fletcher, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania

The first book length study of the conceptualization and representation of islands in popular fiction.

Ralph Crane

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