TRACY BOWDEN., PRESENTER: The story of the establishment of the State of Israel is one of the most hotly contested events of the 20th century that historians have written thousands of books on the subject.

But one chapter in this story that's been forgotten is at the height of the Nazi slaughter of European Jews a Melbourne businessman was drawing up plans to establish a Jewish Homeland on the remote south-west coast of Tasmania.

Now the little known story of the Critchley Parker Junior, and his plans for a 'new Palestine' at Port Davey are attracting attention with an American professor and one of Australia's best novelist turning this extraordinary tale into a book.

Conor Duffy reports from Hobart.

CONOR DUFFY: Port Davey in Tasmania's far south-west lies on the lonely edge of the world. Its home to stunning mountains, thick untamed rainforest, wild rivers and unspoilt coastline.

RICHARD FLANAGAN, AUTHOR: The odd thing is that Port Davey, to this day, remains one of the remotest, wildest places on Earth. That um, it never really changed.

CONOR DUFFY: But this wilderness could also have been the unlikely site of a Jewish homeland. In the early 1940s the son of a wealthy Melbourne businessman Critchley Parker Junior fell in love with a Jewish journalist Caroline Isaksson. Struck by the plight of Jews in Europe he became a champion of their cause.

ADAM ROVNER, UNIVERSITY OF DENVER: Originally as a child he was sickly, young man. He looked like he was kind of a man trying to find himself and at some point he met Caroline Isaksson, who was at the time a fairly well-known journalist in Melbourne, she worked for 'The Age', and he became enamoured of her and interested in the plight of Jewish refugees and the idea of creating a Jewish state or at least some kind of territorial homeland.

CONOR DUFFY: It's a story that's gone untold for decades. But now Professor Adam Rovner from the University of Denver is investigating, and he's unearthed documents in the Tasmanian archives that show Critchley Parker Junior managed to attract the interest of Tasmania's then Premier Robert Cosgrove.

ADAM ROVNER: So you could see right here in the Premier's office, this is a docket and it says, "Subject: The possibility of establishing in this state..." - that is Tasmania - "...A settlement of Jewish refugees from Europe".

CONOR DUFFY: The record shows a tour of Port Davey was carried out in 1941 and the Premier had some sympathy for the idea.

ADAM ROVNER: Cosgrove writes, "My Government accepts in principle the proposal that a settlement of Jewish migrants should be established in Tasmania".

CONOR DUFFY: So the Premier is on board basically?

ADAM ROVNER: He's on board, I mean obviously he wants financial guarantees that Tasmania doesn't have to care for a bunch of indigent DPs - displaced persons.

CONOR DUFFY: Ultimately though Critchley Parker's dream would end in tragedy. In 1942 Critchley Parker returned to Port Davey on his own to survey the boundaries for the new state. Struck down by pleurisy he was found dead four months later, the victim of exposure and hunger.

RICHARD FLANAGAN: When they found that terrible vision of his corpse in his sleeping bag in the middle of this south-west wild land, he's surrounded by all these notes of his diaries, with plans...detailed plans for the economy, for the buildings - the buildings to be designed he writes "by LeCorbusier (who else)". Fully, you know... this mad, crazed, cracked dream of this city state.

CONOR DUFFY: Despite the harshness of the terrain and the many doubters who said this plan was a pipe-dream, Adam Rovner has developed sympathy for the hapless Critchley Parker.

ADAM ROVNER: That terrain is mountainous but there's some smooth valleys, there's lots of water channels. I think that it would have been no less improbable a setting for a Jewish Homeland than what became Israel. You have to understand Israel is in a desert region, for the most part. It is...was infested with mosquitoes in the beginning.

CONOR DUFFY: Adam Rovner also managed to track down one of the two last surviving relatives of Critchley Parker Junior, Robyn Lewis.

ADAM ROVNER: Hi Robyn.

ROBYN LEWIS: Hi, nice to meet you.

ADAM ROVNER: Adam, nice to meet you to.

ROBYN LEWIS: Yeah, welcome to Tasmania.

ADAM ROVNER: Thank you very much.

ROBYN LEWIS: They did send out a search party and it turned around, I mean it's almost the classic Burke and Wills story really, and they turned the search party, turned around about two kilometres away. Whether he was actually dead then or not, we'll never know.

CONOR DUFFY: Robyn Lewis became fascinated by the tale of her long lost cousin and hopes to pass the history on to her daughter she says Critchley Parker has never got the recognition he deserves and his memory should be honoured.

CONOR DUFFY: Are you proud of Critchley?

ROBYN LEWIS: I think so, year, yeah. I would have gone with him if I'd been alive, definitely, you know he wouldn't have been dead under a bush if I'd been there hopefully. I think he was, perhaps, slightly impractical, maybe didn't have enough matches, but you know, that's life.

CONOR DUFFY: Greater recognition may be on the way. World renowned Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan has spent a year working on a novel after stumbling across the story.

RICHARD FLANAGAN: I was having a drink in a pub in Salamanca one night and in the way of hotels, I met a stranger who told me that he'd read Isaac Steinberg's book, 'The Unpromised Land' and then he told me this whole quite extraordinary story of how the 'new Palestine' nearly ended up at Port Davey in Tasmania.

CONOR DUFFY: Richard Flanagan says he's captivated by the doomed vision of Critchley Parker Junior.

RICHARD FLANAGAN: What I find most moving about it is that in the summer of the great slaughter, in the European summer of 1942, as they're dropping the first cyclone B canisters down the shoots at Auschwitz, you have, and as world Jewry is assembled or European Jewry is assembled to die, you have this languid at the end of the world being rode across this most beautiful desolate harbour with an ambition of trying to save world Jewry.

CONOR DUFFY: As the story of Critchley Parker Junior travels out, from the lonely wilds of south-west Tasmania, it may be that he'll be honoured all around the world.

ADAM ROVNER: I think it's important that Jews remember and maybe in particular Israelis remember that the...there were people who were trying to help them in the dark days of the mid-20th century.

RICHARD FLANAGAN: There is, to me, a great poetic beauty about his quick stoic and ultimately doomed quest. But there is something very beautiful about it.

TRACY BOWDEN: Conor Duffy with that report.