So last night we were playing Cranium (a game of many things including trivia) with a bunch of people. We had: 3 Kiwis, 2 French, 2 Americans, and one each of Canadian, Brit, German, and Swede. (That sort of diversity seems typical for our circles of friends here.) The question that came up was:

At this point everybody laughed because everybody knows the answer is going to be New Zealand. Everybody who lives here knows that, especially if you're originally from somewhere else!

1. South Africa
2. France
3. Great Britain
4. Tasmania

We quickly realised that the although the question did not mention the earliest country, it could still be valid because the implication was "of these four choices, which was the earliest?" We quickly eliminated South Africa, and Tasmania (which as far as we knew was never actually a country). We chose Great Britain, but the "correct" answer according to the game was Tasmania! A brief look at an encyclopedia (the physical paper kind) during the game was unenlightening.

When I got home I looked on wikipedia, and neither the History of Tasmania article nor the Women's suffrage article mentions anything of the sort. Tasmania was apparently never even a country, and furthermore didn't have full suffrage for men until 1900 (before that, only property owners had the right to vote). We figured that the game designers had just thought "oh, it was some island off the coast of Australia, must have been Tasmania!" without even bothering to look it up. It makes one wonder what other trivia they might have messed up. At least, we won't trust their grasp of New Zealand related trivia next time!