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Furneaux Group) and a large promontory to the west (its tip now King Island). Unlike previous inundations, this flooding of the plain was to have major consequences for both the people and the thylacine.
    Abel Tasman was not the only mariner fooled by the mountainous, formidable bulk of the place he named Van Diemen’s Land in 1642. The French and English expeditioners and adventurers who called in to its shores over the next century and a half were equally ignorant of the fact that it was an island. It seems inconceivable today that the 200 kilometre wide Bass Strait could have been missed by those sailors. But that was the nature of maritime voyaging, a hazardous European occupation undertaken in the names of science, trade and national ambition.
    The establishment of a convict colony at Sydney Cove in 1788 meant that the east coast strip of Terra Australis Nullius , together with its mysterious southern part, became the formal possession of Britain, as did Norfolk Island, further east in the Pacific Ocean. Within ten years George Bass and Matthew Flinders had proved that Van Diemen’s Land was in fact an island and plans were made to settle it at once. France and England were at war and French captain Nicolas Baudin’s scientific expedition to the island was considered to be evidence of Napoleon’s designs in the area.
    There were other reasons. Seals and whales abounded in the cold waters. Timber was plentiful, for shipping back to England for building ships and houses. And another profound technological development—industrialisation—had produced as a spin-off decidedly uncivilised crime-ridden cities, London, Birmingham and Liverpool in particular. Poverty, opportunism and draconian laws against even the most insignificant theft or misdemeanour resulted in vast numbers of convictions. Excess convicts could no longer be sent to the North American colonies, because of the outbreak of war, while hulks moored in the Thames as floating prisons could only ever be a temporary solution. Hence the settlement at Sydney Cove, followed by the even more satisfactory revelation of the existence of a whole island, ideally suited to become a prison.
    In September 1803, a ship bearing 49 people, of whom about half were convicts, hove to in Storm Bay, where the Derwent River meets the Southern Ocean. Under the command of Lieutenant Bowen, they set up camp a few kilometres upriver at a site known as Risdon Cove. 1
    The party soon moved across the river to a more suitable base at the foot of the Table Mountain, subsequently Mount Wellington, where there was plentiful water, good timber and an islet in Sullivan’s Cove where ships could be loaded and unloaded. This move was on the orders of Lieutenant-Governor David Collins, now in charge of the fledgling settlement. Collins had relocated from Port Phillip, later renamed Melbourne, which he had declared unsuitable as a settlement.
    Accompanying the Collins party was the Reverend Robert Knopwood. Just a few months after Hobart’s establishment he bluntly recorded a sighting of a thylacine in his journal account of the plight of some escaped convicts:
    Engaged all the morn upon business, examining the 5 prisoners that went into the bush. They informed me that on the 2 of May when they were in the wood, they see a large tyger; that the dog they had with them went nearly up to it, and when the tyger see the men which were about 100 yards from it, it went away.
    Knopwood’s journal is the most complete account of the mud and toil of the tiny, convict-built settlement at the southernmost edge of the world. Getting about on a little white pony, he was a ‘quaint character, fond of shooting and fishing, especially fond of good living and the society of boon companions’. 2
    The island remained almost wholly unknown, its interior a formidable challenge. By night, fearsome screams came out of the thick woods. The earliest settlers were not to know that