Just Tassie Books

A Tasmanian writer's thoughts on the human condition.

The Excella was a Hobart-built passenger and excursion vessel, launched in 1912, carrying up to 647 passengers on the River Derwent. She was a popular vessel for regattas and race days on the harbour.

In the 1870s, as Port Arthur penal settlement was closing, someone photographed the remaining convicts. Those photographs survived. This book reproduces them — the actual faces of men transported to Van Diemen's Land from Britain and Ireland between the 1820s and the 1850s. Not paintings, not drawings, not reconstructions — photographs. You are looking at the real people.

C.J. Binks's history of the exploration of western Tasmania, focusing on the people who explored the region from the earliest European contact through to the opening up of the west coast mining country — Jorgenson, Hellyer, Frankland, Gould, Wedge, Goodwin and others who pushed into some of the most difficult terrain in Australia.