Just Tassie Books

Kathleen Fitzpatrick's scholarly biography of Sir John Franklin's tenure as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1837 to 1843 — published by Melbourne University Press in 1949 and still the standard academic account of Franklin's Tasmanian years. Franklin is better known for his fatal 1845 Arctic expedition searching for the Northwest Passage — the expedition from which neither he nor any of his 128 men returned, and whose fate remained one of the great mysteries of Victorian exploration for over a century. But his six years in Van Diemen's Land as Lieutenant-Governor were also significant.