Cousin Jack

Tasmania

Bruny Island

The Tasmanian landscape was the constant backdrop to the first 20 years or so of my life. It is stunningly beautiful, awesome, rugged, wild, and primaeval, torn northward from Antarctica as ancient Gondwana broke apart. The climate is driven by…
Tasmania

There’s gold in ’em hills

Gold! Today, a Mineral Resources Tasmania researcher sent me a copy of this 1879 survey map showing John Ellis’s 10-acre lease in Salisbury Gorge at the south end of the Cabbage Tree Range, at Brandy Creek in the West Tamar…
Convicts, Tasmania, Van Dieman's Land

Currency lads and lasses

The first generation of children born of convicts in the Australian colony were called 'currency lads and lasses' to distinguish them from the free settlers (Sterlings) who were born in the British Isles. Tasmanians have played down the achievements of…

I was born a stranger in a land down under Downunder, a descendant of generations of Cornish miners and thousands of years of Celtic culture.
This history was lost to me until recently and has become something of an obsession. I’ve been delving into matters ancestral for a while now, researching both ends of the mystery of how I came to be born and raised at the far end of the antipodes.

It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
As I research, I come across all kinds of interesting snippets, thoughts and ideas. One of which is to make a page to share some of them with a broader audience.

I’m a Cousin Jack.