Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania

Since we’re featuring Tasmania’s spectacular Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park in this month’s newsletter, we thought we’d offer an additional reason to visit Australia’s green island state.

In late March, when the arctic beeches, the imported deciduous trees and the heath begin to take on their fall colors, Tasmania will be an irresistible place. The Tasmanians know this and have decided to put on a massive state-wide cultural festival called Ten Days on the Island.

The festival, which will run from March 28, 2003 through April 6, 2003, will feature everything from opera, music and theater to fine dining, puppetry, lectures and dance.

There’s a wry sense of humor at work, too. One event, an “Urban Safari,” will take participants into “the deep urban jungle” to contemplate the “discovery” of a series of whimsical metal dinosaurs left over from the breakup of Gondwanaland.

An original opera, “Tesla – Lightning in His Hand,” will honor the life and work of the great Serbian-American inventor, Nikola Tesla, inventor of a coil that allows electricity to be sent short distances through the air without wires.

The movie festival portion will offer films from Ireland, Greece, Cuba, New Zealand and Hawaii, then pay a homage to Tasmania’s most famous native son, the late actor Errol Flynn, who was the personification of the movie swashbuckler in the 1930s and 40s.

Not content with the sheer range of their offerings, festival organizers have selected 16 venues, from Hobart in the southeast to Smithton in the far northwest, for their programs. Visitors sampling the festival’s events will find themselves taking a geography lesson as they move around the island. Fortunately, unlike its sister states on the Australian mainland, Tasmania is a relatively small 26,000 square miles (about the size of West Virginia). Good all-weather roads criss-cross the state, and travel times aren’t long.  

The festival has a beautifully constructed web site that is a marvel of simple design, easy navigation, good writing and a very sophisticated look. If the web site is any indication of the quality of the Ten Days festival, visitors can look forward to one helluva time.

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— Patrick Totty