Lobster Tales
Terry Mulhern is a Melbourne writer and academic who is obsessed with Tasmania’s giant freshwater crayfish, Astacopsis gouldi. This wonderful creature appears regularly in the written and oral history of the state, and there are many tales to tell about it. Here are just some of them.
Terry Mulhern is a Melbourne writer and academic who is obsessed with Tasmania’s giant freshwater crayfish, Astacopsis gouldi. This wonderful creature appears regularly in the written and oral history of the state, and there are many tales to tell about it. Here are just some of them.
Lobster Tales

Gould’s Creek

by Terry Mulhern
05 Aug 2021

Until a couple of summers ago, I’d never seen a wild platypus. Considering the time I’ve spent sloshing around in the creeks of northern Tasmania, it’s quite absurd. But I guess the platypuses saw me coming. Sometimes I’d see bubbles, or a splash, but it always turned out to be a fish or waterfowl. That was, until I camped by Saddle Creek between Legerwood and Branxholm in the hills east of Scottsdale. It wasn’t platypus I was here to find. I was searching for traces of Charles Gould (1834-1893), the man honoured in the scientific name of the lobster, Astacopsis gouldi. According to the original survey map from 1864, this stream was once called Gould’s Creek.

Lobster Tales

Inside the mountain

by Terry Mulhern
12 May 2021

On Christmas Day, while most people had their feet up and were digesting their lunch, I found myself on kunanyi, clambering down a precipitous boulder field below the towering rock pillars of the Lost World, high on the mountain’s northern slopes. I was in pursuit of invertebrate biologist Niall Doran.

Lobster Tales

Literary lobsters

by Terry Mulhern
18 Oct 2020

Freshwater crayfish lurk beneath the surface of Tasmanian literature. All three stream-dwelling Tasmanian freshwater crayfish are represented: Astacopsis gouldi – lutaralipina, the giant freshwater crayfish from the north; Astacopsis franklinii – tayatitja, the small freshwater crayfish from the south and east; and Astacopsis tricornis – the medium-sized freshwater crayfish from the west, for which the Aboriginal name has been lost.

Lobster Tales

lutaralipina

by Terry Mulhern
12 Aug 2020

Freshwater crayfish were part of the traditional diet of Tasmanian Aborigines. The evidence comes from two first-hand reports from the early colonial period. The first is from February, 1827.

Lobster Tales

Ellen Clark

by Terry Mulhern
12 Aug 2020

In the mid-1930s, for a woman to be a scientific expert was unusual. But Ellen Clark was a world-renowned expert on freshwater crayfish at age 21.

Lobster Tales

Lobster a la library

by Terry Mulhern
12 Aug 2020

Few people realise there are giant Tasmanian freshwater lobsters hiding in the State Library of New South Wales. They aren’t live lobsters or even preserved specimens. They can be found in the diary of colonial surveyor John Helder Wedge (1793-1872). 

Lobster Tales

Calder v. Hull

by Terry Mulhern
12 Aug 2020

On Monday morning, December 12, 1881, James Erskine Calder, the Tasmanian Parliamentary Sergeant-at-Arms, made his way down Murray Street, Hobart, towards Parliament House. He was seething. Calder couldn’t believe what he had just read about himself in an “anonymous” letter to the editor of Launceston’s The Examiner.