State of Tasmania

Distinguished and Famous people from State of Tasmania

🏏 David Boon

David Boon brought a famously determined presence to Australia's batting order, with a career grounded in Tasmanian cricket. Across 107 Tests he scored 7,422 runs, including 21 centuries, and his 75 in the 1987 World Cup final earned the player-of-the-match award as Australia defeated England. His achievements included four Ashes series victories and an unbeaten 184 in the 1988 Bicentenary Test. After playing county cricket for Durham, he returned to work with the Tasmanian Cricket Association and became an Australian selector. Launceston recognised its cricketing son by naming a major stand at the city's ground after him.

🎬 Errol Flynn

Errol Flynn was born in Hobart, where his father Theodore became a university zoologist. The future actor's school years were unsettled, followed by work in New Guinea as a plantation overseer, schooner-business partner and gold prospector. His sailing experiences supplied material for Beam Ends, published in 1937. Film eventually brought him international fame, particularly through the adventurous screen roles with which he became associated. Tasmania belongs to the beginning of this restless life: a Hobart childhood before the succession of overseas occupations, voyages and acting opportunities that carried him far beyond the island.

📖 Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan grew up in the west-coast mining town of Rosebery after being born at Longford. Outdoor adventures began early, and he left school at sixteen to work as a labourer before returning to study. A first-class honours degree at the University of Tasmania led to a Rhodes Scholarship and further study at Oxford. Back in Tasmania, he wrote non-fiction before publishing Death of a River Guide in 1994. His later novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the 2014 Man Booker Prize. The distance from a mining-town childhood to international literary recognition is considerable, but Tasmanian landscapes and histories remained central to his writing.

🌿 Bob Brown

Doctor, environmental campaigner and politician Bob Brown became a leading figure in the struggle to protect the Franklin River from dam construction. The blockade brought thousands of people into Tasmania's wilderness in 1982–83 and helped turn the river into a national political issue. Brown subsequently served in Tasmania's Parliament and the Australian Senate. His donation of campaign material to the National Museum preserves a more immediate view of that history through photographs, objects and records of organising. The island's rivers were central to both his campaigning life and the political career that followed.

🎙️ Fanny Cochrane Smith

Fanny Cochrane Smith's recordings preserve an extraordinary meeting of cultural knowledge and early sound technology. Between 1899 and 1903 she recorded Tasmanian Aboriginal songs and language on wax cylinders, leaving some of the earliest sound recordings made in Australia. These are especially significant for her descendants as a record of family oral history and inherited knowledge. Their inclusion in the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register recognised the importance of the surviving recordings. A fragile cylinder can carry far more than its size suggests: in this case a person's voice and knowledge reaching listeners more than a century later.