Jorgen Jorgenson returns yet again

Jorgen Jorgenson was a Danish adventurer who travelled to Tasmania twice, first in the founding party of Hobart and then as a convict. Between visits, he had been bestowed with the title of the first King of Iceland. He wrote many books, including a study of Tasmanian aborigines. His life sustains a ongoing link between the northern and southern extremes, which has come to prominence again with his upcoming bicentenary.

This story is being taken up by Kim Peart. Here is Kim’s response to south in a Tasmanian context:

When I consider "south" and as one who grew up in southern Tasmania in the path of the roaring forties, I think of the winds that blow around Antarctica in a continual gale that drives the ocean waves and currents in a rhythm and a hum of bounding breakers that now grow ever stronger with global warming in a giant vortex of ever marching waves that rise up like mountains to swallow anything that dares swim too low into their gaping chasm or send them flying off into the upper atmosphere should the howling winds take hold and swirl them from the frothing foam at their peak to sail upon the gathered smoke of the Victorian bushfires, made fiercer like an atomic furnace in a slowly heating world, now floating high above the great frozen sea of ice that is south.

• Peart’s article in the Tasmanian Times.
• The exhibition Haven where Jorgenson’s life was turned to art