The Tarkine (indigenous name: takayna), officially takayna / Tarkine, is an area containing the Savage River National Park in the north west Tasmania, Australia, which contains significant areas of wilderness. The Tarkine is noted for its beauty and natural values, containing the largest area of Gondwanan cool-temperate rainforest in Australia, as well as for its prominence in Tasmania's early mining history. The area's high concentration of Aboriginal sites has led to it being described by the Australian Heritage Council as "one of the world's great archaeological regions". Location The Tarkine is gazetted by the Tasmanian government as unbounded locality in north-west Tasmania The generally accepted definition is the area between the Arthur River in the North, the Pieman River in the south, the ocean to the west and the Murchison Highway in the east. It was first officially recognised in May, 2013, following a recommendation by the Nomenclature Board of Tasmania which was accepted by Bryan Green. He declared that the name applied to the whole north-west region of Tasmania, but this interpretation was rejected by the Cradle Coast Authority, which had requested the official naming. The name does not appear in maps, but in recent decades has featured prominently in the Australian media as a subject of contention between conservationists and mining/logging interests. The Tarkine can be entered from several points, with the most common being via Sumac Road from the north, Corinna in the south, Waratah in the west and Wynyard from the north-east. Wynyard has an interstate airport and sealed road access into the Tarkine. Etymology The name "Tarkine" was coined by the conservation movement and was in use by 1991. It is a diminutive of the name "Tarkiner", which is the anglicised pronunciation of one of the Aboriginal tribes who inhabited the western Tasmanian coastline from the Arthur River to the Pieman River before European colonisation. Natural and archaeological values The Tarkine contains extensive high-quality wilderness as well as extensive, largely undisturbed tracts of cool temperate rainforest which are extremely rare. It also represents Australia's largest remaining single tract of temperate rainforest. It contains approximately 1,800 km² of rainforest, around 400 km² of eucalypt forest and a mosaic of other vegetation communities, including dry sclerophyll forest, woodland, buttongrass moorland, sandy littoral communities, wetlands, grassland and Sphagnum communities. Significantly, it has a high diversity of non-vascular plants (mosses, liverworts and lichens) including at least 151 species of