Island Hopping in Tasmania's Roaring Forties

This is the story of an English naturalist who spent three summers on the Bass Strait and other small islands around Tasmania helping with research into the viability of the Mutton Bird Industry and its relationship with grazing, burning and other forms of land management. It is an anecdotal account of adventures on small boats and small planes and an extended tour on the lighthouse relief ship, SS "Cape York", long since replaced by helicopter servicing. Encounters with wildlife, both on and offshore, are described, with emphasis on the sea birds and especially the mutton birds (short-tailed shearwaters) and the stalwart characters who spend part of each summer roughing it on the islands to harvest them - for meat, fat, oil and feathers. The main research base was a two-roomed but on a two-acre island off Flinders Island, the largest of the Furneaux Group in Eastern Bass Strait. Two final chapters deal with a similar community to that of Flinders - of ex-soldier settlers, farmers, fishermen and birders - on King Island in the Western strait.
Other islands visited range north across Bass Strait along the coast of Victoria and around the east, south and west coasts of Tasmania - terrain very different from the often forested interior described by most travellers to this beautiful temperate Island State. Most of the action takes place during 1958-1960, but the main regions have been re-visited in the late 1980s and early 1990s and changes recorded. The author was born in a London suburb, and served in the Women's Land Army for five years during World War IL She became a postwar student in the University of Wales atAberystwyth and Bangor, and gained a degree in Agriculture, a first-class honours in Botany and a doctorate in Island Ecology. Now retired, she spent a quarter of a century lecturing in the Adult Education Department of the University of Wales at Cardiff; and also lectured in the universities of Exeter (Devon), Massey (New Zealand), Melbourne (Australia) and Kano (Nigeria). Field work has occupied an important place in her teaching and research activities, and she has led parties of naturalists on many field excursions at home and abroad.
Her major research projects have been around the coasts of West Wales, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and she was one of the first four women to join an Antarctic expedition.