#in tasmania which is in places even worse than the already despicable treatment across australia

[missnoirr]

I want the low down on your Tasmanian beef

Maybe you sent this and thought I’d go “haha they suck babe.” Maybe you don't know me very well. Maybe I wrote an essay length dissertation on why I hate them. That's how it goes sometimes, babe!

Australia is the land of “sunburnt country,” “it’s beauty rich and rare,” where you can find “a home among the gumtrees” as it is, after all “a place that I adore.” However, Tasmania was most famously described as a land of “dregs, bogans and third-generation morons” by Leo Schofield - and you can take his word for it, because Schofield lived in Tasmania for a decade.

You may think “Tiana, if he lived there for ten years surely he actually liked it” Nope! When asked what it was like to live there and Schofield said “I think I came very close to either a nervous breakdown or suicide.”

That’s right, Tasmania = so shit it literally almost killed a man

Of course, its understandable why its so fucking shit! While the rest of Australia moved on from the whole “sending convicts to die” thing pretty quickly and instead saw the growth of towns like Melbourne (sexy bitch) and Sydney (boo we hate your pussy), Tasmania was established later (1803 compared to 1788) and just never fucking developed. Other cities banned penal transportation in the mid 1800s but Tazzie just... didn't. Which means that 40% of ALL convicts sent to Australia were - you guessed it - sent to Tasmania.

Please remember that Tazzie is the SMALLEST state in Australia by a long fucking shot. The only thing that comes close to how small Tasmania is would be the ACT, which is not a state (it’s a territory we’re real weird about the difference it’s a whole thing) and was literally only invented because Sydney (bitch) and Melbourne (bitch <3) almost started a civil war over who got to be the capital of Australia. 40% is an absolutely insane number for it to be.

Penal transportation wasn’t abolished until 1853 and even then it was almost entirely due to Victorians complaining about reoffenders from Tazzie coming in and drinking their espresso martinis.

Tasmania is also widely mocked for being inbred bigots.

Where did this joke come from? Maybe from a story of Tasmanian soldiers requesting two pillows for their bunks instead of one during WW1. Possibly because of a lack of iodine in Tazzie in the 1800s which led to goitre - which induced large mumps like deformities on the neck and sprouted jokes about “the two headed Tasmanian’s,” which are pretty funny actually. Maybe just because the gene pool in Tasmania is weirdly small - 60% of Tasmanians can trace their roots back to the first 10,000 families to live in Tazzie.

And the bigotry thing? Tazzie refused to decriminalise homosexuality up until 1997, making it the last Australian jurisdiction to do so. The impetus for decriminalisation? The United Nations told them they had to. and the High Court basically said “bro you’ve gotta.” All of which came after the world's news media quite literally referred to them as “bigots island,” which was also my pet name for them! Love that.

They had the highest rate of imprisonment for gay sex for 100 years (one has to imagine that it at least somewhat backfired on them) and were the last British colony to repeal the death penalty for sodomy.

In the 80s Tasmania’s premier stated on the record that homosexuals were “unwelcome” (no one wants to come to your shitty island anyway, Robin) and in the 90s a local politician said they should be “tracked down and wiped out "which they achieved by having the police tag number plates seen at gay events and arresting 120 people at a gay market.

(I’m not a total asshole so I will give them the credit that the criminal records of those who were arrested for homosexuality have been expunged and something like 60% of Tasmanians voted in favour of gay marriage during the 2017 plebiscite. Fair game, full credit. Go fuck yourselves tho)

also: its cold as shit. they killed all the tigers but not the tasmanian devils which, yes, are real and yes, are awful. when i was two my mum accidentally pushed dropped me in the ocean in tasmania. my least favourite uncle lives there. the spirit of tasmania is just a boat. like its literally just a boat. grow up. it isn't even attached. what, are we gonna claim new zealand next? no. throw them back to the sea and let them fend for themselves. my brother split his head open on a pier in tasmania when he was a kid and we didn't get to have ice cream bc they took him to the hospital. did i mention that its cold. like its really cold.

And to close, my favourite quote of all time

“I sensed that here was a society haunted by ghosts from the past... I sensed then some contradiction between that gaiety in the very air, and some darkness in men’s minds.” - Manning Clark on Tasmania