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February 22, 2010
If Cradle Mountain was a real eye opener as a mass tourist icon, then the Southwest National Park was a delight; especially around Recherche Bay. This is wilderness that deserves to be preserved from development in the form of logging.
Only Recherche Bay is not wilderness. It has a cultural history of French discovery, scientific expeditions and encounters with the aboriginal population and private landholding of the land that dates back to the early twentieth century, if not earlier. It is a cultural landscape.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, hut, Recherche Bay, 2010
The private land exists outside the national park which is a popular camping site for Tasmanians. During the 1830s and 1840s it was the site of a bay whaling station he main commercial activities in the later 1800s and into the early 1900s were timber-gathering and coal mining.
The history of this part of rural Australia has been a boom and bust story of employment, as rural industries prosper then fold.
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