Kennaook / Cape Grim | |
---|---|
Coordinates: 40°38′31″S144°43′33″E / 40.64194°S 144.72583°E | |
Location | Tasmania, Australia |
Offshore water bodies | Southern Indian Ocean Bass Strait |
Cape Grim, officially Kennaook / Cape Grim, [1] is the northwestern point of Tasmania, Australia. The Peerapper name for the cape is recorded as Kennaook. [2]
It is the location of the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station and of the Cape Grim Air Archive [3] which is operated by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology [4] in a joint programme with the CSIRO. The station was established in 1976 and has been operating ever since.
Cape Grim's isolated geographic location makes it unique. The next land mass directly west of Cape Grim is not Africa, but the southern tip of Argentina. Winds that make their way to Cape Grim from Antarctica and the Indian Ocean hit no significant land mass. Air pollution values collected at Cape Grim are the closest attainable representation of a global average. [5]
The headland was first charted and named Cape Grim by Matthew Flinders on 7 December 1798, as he sailed from the east in the Norfolk and found a long swell coming from the south-west, confirming for the first time that Van Diemen's Land was separated from the Australian mainland by a strait, which he named Bass Strait. [6]
In 1828, Victory Hill at Cape Grim was the site of the Cape Grim massacre of thirty Peerapper people by four shepherds. [7]
Tasmania is an island state of Australia. It is located 240 kilometres (150 miles) to the south of the Australian mainland, separated from it by the Bass Strait, with the archipelago containing the southernmost point of the country. The state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, and the surrounding 1000 islands. It is Australia's least populous state, with 569,825 residents as of December 2021. The state capital and largest city is Hobart, with around 40 percent of the population living in the Greater Hobart area.
Bass Strait is a strait separating the island state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland. The strait provides the most direct waterway between the Great Australian Bight and the Tasman Sea, and is also the only maritime route into the economically prominent Port Phillip Bay.
Mount Wellington ) is a mountain in the southeast of Tasmania, Australia. It is the summit of the Wellington Range and is within Wellington Park reserve. Hobart, Tasmania's capital city, is located at the foot of the mountain.
King Island is an island in the Bass Strait, belonging to the Australian state of Tasmania. It is the largest of three islands known as the New Year Group, and the second-largest island in Bass Strait. The island's population at the 2016 census was 1,585 people, up from 1,566 in 2011. The local government area of the island is the King Island Council.
Flinders Island, the largest island in the Furneaux Group, is a 1,367-square-kilometre (528 sq mi) island in the Bass Strait, northeast of the island of Tasmania. Today Flinders Island is part of the state of Tasmania, Australia. It is 54 kilometres (34 mi) from Cape Portland and is located on 40° south, a zone known as the Roaring Forties.
The Furneaux Group is a group of approximately 100 islands located at the eastern end of Bass Strait, between Victoria and Tasmania, Australia. The islands were named after British navigator Tobias Furneaux, who sighted the eastern side of these islands after leaving Adventure Bay in 1773 on his way to New Zealand to rejoin Captain James Cook. Navigator Matthew Flinders was the first European to explore the Furneaux Islands group, in the Francis in 1798, and later that year in the Norfolk.
Tasmania, the largest island of Australia, has a landmass of 68,401 km2 (26,410 sq mi) and is located directly in the pathway of the notorious "Roaring Forties" wind that encircles the globe. To its north, it is separated from mainland Australia by Bass Strait. Tasmania is the only Australian state that is not located on the Australian mainland. About 2,500 kilometres south of Tasmania island lies the George V Coast of Antarctica. Depending on which borders of the oceans are used, the island can be said to be either surrounded by the Southern Ocean, or to have the Pacific on its east and the Indian to its west. Still other definitions of the ocean boundaries would have Tasmania with the Great Australian Bight to the west, and the Tasman Sea to the east. The southernmost point on mainland Tasmania is approximately 43°38′37″S146°49′38″E at South East Cape, and the northernmost point on mainland Tasmania is approximately 40°38′26″S144°43′33″E in Woolnorth / Temdudheker near Cape Grim / Kennaook. Tasmania lies at similar latitudes to Te Waipounamu / South Island of New Zealand, and parts of Patagonia in South America, and relative to the Northern Hemisphere, it lies at similar latitudes to Hokkaido in Japan, Northeast China (Manchuria), the north Mediterranean in Europe, and the Canada-United States border.
Cape Barren Island, officially truwana / Cape Barren Island, is a 478-square-kilometre (185 sq mi) island in the Bass Strait, off the north east coast of Tasmania, Australia. It is the second largest island of the Furneaux Group; Flinders Island lies to the north, with the smaller Clarke Island to the south. The highest point on the island is Mount Munro at 715 metres (2,346 ft). Mount Munro is probably named after James Munro, a former convict and then sealer, who lived from the 1820s for more than 20 years with several women on nearby Preservation Island.
The Bass Strait Triangle is the waters that separate the states of Victoria and Tasmania, including Bass Strait, in south-eastern Australia. The term Bass Strait Triangle appears to have been first used following the disappearance of Frederick Valentich in 1978 although the region had a bad reputation long before that.
The Clarke Island, part of the Furneaux Group, is an 82-square-kilometre (32 sq mi) island in Bass Strait, south of Cape Barren Island, about 24 kilometres (15 mi) off the northeast coast of Tasmania, Australia. Banks Strait separates the island from Cape Portland on the mainland.
Preservation Island is a low and undulating granite and calcarenite island, with an area of 207 ha, in south-eastern Australia. It is part of Tasmania’s Preservation Island Group, lying in eastern Bass Strait south-west of Cape Barren Island in the Furneaux Group, and is an important historic site.
Cape Portland, officially Luemerrernanner / Cape Portland, is both a geographical feature and a locality near the north-eastern tip of Tasmania, Australia. The cape points west across Ringarooma Bay, where the Ringarooma River empties into the Tasman Sea.
The Forsyth Island, part of the Passage Group within the Furneaux Group, is a 167-hectare (410-acre) granite island, located in Bass Strait south of Cape Barren Island, in Tasmania, in south-eastern Australia. With the Passage and Gull islands, the Forsyth Island forms part of the Forsyth, Passage and Gull Islands Important Bird Area (IBA), identified as such by BirdLife International because it supports over 1% of the world populations of little penguins and black-faced cormorants.
Vansittart Island, also known as Gun Carriage Island, is a granite island with an area of 800 hectares. The island is part of Tasmania's Vansittart Island Group, lying in eastern Bass Strait between Flinders and Cape Barren Islands in the Furneaux Group.
The Babel Island, part of the Babel Group within the Furneaux Group, is a 440-hectare (1,100-acre) granite island, located in Bass Strait, lying off the east coast of Flinders Island, Tasmania, south of Victoria, Australia. The privately owned island was named by Matthew Flinders from the noises made by the seabirds there.
The Cape Grim massacre was an attack on 10 February 1828 in which a group of Aboriginal Tasmanians gathering food at a beach in the north-west of Tasmania is said to have been ambushed and shot by four Van Diemen's Land Company (VDLC) workers, with bodies of some of the victims then thrown from a 60-metre (200 ft) cliff. About 30 men are thought to have been killed in the attack, which was a reprisal action for an earlier Aboriginal raid on a flock of Van Diemen's Land Company sheep, but part of an escalating spiral of violence probably triggered by the abduction and rape of Aboriginal women in the area. The massacre was part of the "Black War", the period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Australians in Tasmania from the mid-1820s to 1832.
Robbins Island is a 9,900-hectare (24,000-acre) island located in Bass Strait, lying off the northwest coast of Tasmania, Australia. The island, separated from the Tasmanian mainland by a highly tidal area known as Robbins Passage, lies south to the adjacent Walker Island.
Woolnorth / Temdudheker is a rural locality in the local government area of Circular Head in the North-west and west region of Tasmania. The locality is about 37 kilometres (23 mi) north-west of the town of Smithton. The 2016 census has a population of 112 for the state suburb of Woolnorth.
Tasmania, as an advanced economy with a globally high standard of living, uses a great deal of energy. Distinctive features of energy use in Tasmania include the high fraction of hydroelectricity usage, the absence of coal-fired electrical generation, relatively light usage of natural gas, particularly for domestic use, and a wide use of domestic wood-burning stoves. Energy production through hydroelectricity has been politically contentious, and conflicts over Tasmanian hydroelectric projects were integral to the formation of Green parties in Australia and across the world.
The Cape Grim Air Archive (CGAA) is a facility of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station, Tasmania, that aims to collect air samples starting from 1978. The archive is a facility of CSIRO agency. The place was chosen for sampling because air masses there are unaffected by landmasses, with wind coming from the Southern Ocean.
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