TheFurneaux Group is a group of approximately 100islands located at the eastern end ofBass Strait, betweenVictoria andTasmania, Australia. The islands were named after British navigatorTobias Furneaux, who sighted the eastern side of these islands after leavingAdventure Bay in 1773 on his way to New Zealand to rejoinCaptain James Cook.[1] NavigatorMatthew Flinders was the first European to explore the Furneaux Islands group, in theFrancis in 1798, and later that year in theNorfolk.[2]
The largest islands in the group areFlinders Island,Cape Barren Island, andClarke Island. The group contains five settlements:Killiecrankie, Emita,Lady Barron, Cape Barren Island, andWhitemark on Flinders Island, which serves as the administrative centre of theFlinders Council. There are also some small farming properties on the remote islands.
After seals were discovered there in 1798, the Furneaux Group of islands became the most intensively exploitedsealing ground in Bass Strait.[3] A total of 29 islands in the Furneaux Group have been found to have some tangible link with sealing in the 19th century.[4]
TheAboriginal matriarch,Dolly Dalrymple, was born on the Furneaux Islands. Her mother was one of two Aboriginal women who had been kidnapped from northern Tasmania by the sealer George Briggs.[5]
King Island, at the western end of Bass Strait, is not a part of the group.
The islands contain granite from theDevonian period, as well as unconsolidated limestone and sand fromCenozoic periods. During thelast ice age, a land bridge joined Tasmania to the Australian mainland through this group of islands.
^Cumpston, J. S. (1973).First visitors to Bass Strait. Canberra: Roebuck Society.ISBN0-9500858-8-X.
^Flinders, Matthew (1801).Observations on the coasts of Van Diemen's, Land on Bass's Strait and its islands, and on part of the coasts of New South Wales; intended to accompany the charts of the late discoveries in those countries.
^Kostoglou, Parry (1996).Sealing in Tasmania historical research project (First ed.). Hobart: Parks and Wildlife Service. pp. 90–1.
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