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.[1] 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.[2]
The largest islands in the group are
Flinders Island,
Cape Barren Island, and
Clarke Island. The group contains five settlements:
Killiecrankie, Emita,
Lady Barron, Cape Barren Island, and
Whitemark on Flinders Island, which serves as the administrative centre of the
Flinders 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 exploited
sealing 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]
The
Aboriginal 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.
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The islands contain granite from the
Devonian period, as well as unconsolidated limestone and sand from
Cenozoic periods. During the
last 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.