Recherche Bay
- 43.547777777778146.90277777778Koordinaten: 43 ° 32 ' 52 " S, 146 ° 54' 10" E
Recherche Bay is a bay on the south coast of Tasmania in Australia. The entrance to the bay is from the east. Recherche Bay is only about six nautical miles north of the southeast (English South East Cape ) located, the extreme southern spur of Tasmania and thus the most southern point of Australia (apart from Antarctica part).
It was the first Tasmanian anchorage of the search expedition by Bruni d' Entrecasteaux to find the missing explorer La Pérouse. It is named after one of the two ships of the expedition of La Recherche. The name of the other ship was L' Espérance and a similar bay, about 18 nautical miles north- north-east, was named after the latter ship Port Esperance.
French research
The researchers built a small camp, a garden and a scientific observatory on the shores of Recherche Bay. These devices were used in April 1792 for 26 days and then again in January 1793 for 24 days. Both visits were made to recover and replenish inventories, however, much time was devoted to scientific investigations. The botanist Jacques Labillardiere, Claude Riche and Étienne Pierre Ventenat collected, described and cataloged nearly 5,000 plants, including the Blue Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) the later the plant emblem of Tasmania was. The expedition met in 1793 on the Tasmanian Aborigines living there and there ensued a friendly contact.
The scientific observatory in Recherche Bay was the site of the first planned scientific experiment on Australian soil. In this Observatory of Geoscientists and later Rear Admiral Élisabeth -Paul- Édouard Rossel was able to conduct a series of experiments proved that the Earth's magnetic field changed with decreasing or increasing latitude.
Colonization by the British
Recherche Bay was exposed to quite isolated from the main settlements of Europeans in Tasmania and by its geographical situation the eastern storms. The difficult terrain and the nature of the soil kept from the Europeans of agriculture. Therefore, the area around Recherche Bay by the British colonization of Van Diemen's Land was affected only slightly. During the 1830s and 1840s, a whaling station was established (as in the north and sheltered Port Esperance). Also was in Recherche Bay, a pilot station whose pilot the ships the D' Entrecasteaux Channel up and brought to Hobart. Whalers came later sporadically in the bay to process whales, where two ships that were destroyed Mary Orr in 1846 and the Offley in 1880 of storms in the bay. The main commercial activity in the late 1800s and the 1990s, the timber industry, mainly around the village Leprena, and coal mining mainly around the village Catamaran. The Catamaran Coal Company used the former barque James Craig a coal in this area.
Current controversies
In 2003, the private owner of the local forests were looking for permission for felling trees, which led to a large-scale campaign to protect the area against the forestry change.
In January 2006, the organization Tasmanian Land Conservancy announced plans to buy the woods for a price of 1.3 million Australian dollars from the private owners. The businessman Dick Smith donated AU $ 100,000 for the purchase.
Quote
"It's difficult to describe my feelings about this secluded harbor, located at an extreme point of the globe, so perfectly enclosed that one feels secluded from the rest of the universe. Everything is influenced by the wildness of the untamed landscape. At each step, one sees the beauty of unspoiled nature, be reached by signs of decay, the trees a very great height, and have a corresponding extent, without branches on the trunk, however, crowned with everlasting green. Some of these trees seem as old as the world itself, and they are intertwined with each other so that they are impenetrable. "