Tasmania travel guide

Tasmania’s Aboriginal past & present
It is thought that Tasmania was once joined to mainland Australia, but that rising sea levels after the Ice Age formed the Bass Straits which separated the two. Consequently, Aboriginal people, or Palawa, may have lived on these lands for as long as 40,000 years.

Modern records of Aboriginal communities started with the arrival of European explorers, the first being Dutchman Abel Tasman in 1642. By the time the British arrived in 1773 to exploit the seal and whaling resources, it is thought that there were as many as 10,000 Aboriginal people living on the island. Following what many now call an act of genocide, although that is still controversial, as well as exposure to non-indigenous diseases, by the early 1800s there were only 500 Aboriginal people left .

This period is known as the Black Wars, as people sought to protect their lands when British colonists laid claim to them. After years of rebellion against the colonists, a small remaining population of Aboriginal people was finally exiled to Flinders Island, forbidden to maintain their traditional, spiritual culture, and most died from new diseases.

Flinders Island was named after an English sea captain Matthew Flinders who charted these waters, and the Aboriginal settlement at the time was at Wybalenna, where a historic chapel still remains, as well as unmarked graves of those who died. There were 47 survivors of these dreadful times, and they were brought back eventually to Oyster Cove, near Hobart, the last person dying in 1905.

For many years it was assumed that Aboriginal Tasmanian people were extinct, but a great deal of work by campaigners has done much to identify people of Aboriginal descent, and to ensure that elements of their culture, including fragments of their languages, continue. Visitors can support this work by travelling with Aboriginal guides on nature walks, and reading up on the history of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and their struggle for survival and recognition.

According to the Tasmanian census, almost 26,000 people identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, descending from the 48 Ancestral groups and nine nations of the precolonial era. In the meantime, visit the museum on Flinders Island, as well as the nearby island of Cape Barren, now officially Aboriginal lands with a population of 70.

Colonists & convicts
In order to stop the French moving into Tasmania to control sealing and whaling industries, the British established a settlement in Hobart in 1804. A huge penal colony was subsequently set up at Port Arthur, and is now one of the island’s most-visited and important historic sites. It was closed as a prison in 1877. There were, over time, 65,000 convicts sent to Tasmania, accounting for 40 percent of those sent to Australia.

Tasmania was known as Van Diemen’s Land by European colonists, named after the Anthony van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies Company who had sent its first explorer, Abel Tasman, there. But with so many negative associations from this time, the name was changed to Tasmania in 1856. By this time it was a colony in its own right, established in 1825. It became part of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

Rainforest & environmental history
There is a long-standing environmental movement in Tasmania. The dam proposed for the Franklin River in 1978 was protested against until the project was finally abandoned in 1983. Starting in the 1990s, there was a 30-year bitter, and often violent, battle between environmentalists and the forestry industry in Tasmania, fought both on the ground and up in the canopies while also causing huge rifts in Tasmanian society. It finally came to an end in 2012, when a peace deal was struck in the form of the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement (TFA) when the leading logging company withdrew.

There have been recent parliamentary discussions of opening up sections of forest to logging and mining again, and the environmental movements are keeping a close eye. Meanwhile, natural destruction in the form of forest fires wiped out some of the ancient temperate forest.

Although these fires are a natural occurrence, and have always been a feature of these forests (some trees such as the blackwood needing fire so that its seeds germinate), they are becoming more frequent with climate change. But recent forest fires only affected one per cent of forest, and in very remote, inaccessible areas.