A History of Tasmania

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Land Before Humans: Tasmania's Geological Formation
• Chapter 2 The First Peoples: Aboriginal Life and Culture
• Chapter 3 European Discovery and Early Exploration
• Chapter 4 The Founding of Van Diemen's Land: A Penal Colony is Born
• Chapter 5 The Black War: Conflict and its Aftermath
• Chapter 6 Convict Life and the Assignment System
• Chapter 7 The Rise of Whaling and Sealing Industries
• Chapter 8 From Penal Colony to Free Settlement
• Chapter 9 The Growth of Agriculture and Pastoralism
• Chapter 10 The Tasmanian Gold Rush and its Impact
• Chapter 11 Federation and Tasmania's Place in the New Australia
• Chapter 12 The Apple Isle: The Rise of the Fruit Industry
• Chapter 13 Tasmania and the Great War
• Chapter 14 The Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression
• Chapter 15 Tasmania's Role in World War II
• Chapter 16 Post-War Reconstruction and the Hydro-Industrialisation Era
• Chapter 17 The Controversial Damming of Lake Pedder
• Chapter 18 The Franklin Dam Controversy and the Rise of the Greens
• Chapter 19 Economic Challenges and the Decline of Traditional Industries
• Chapter 20 The Port Arthur Tragedy and its Legacy
• Chapter 21 The Digital Age and a Changing Economy
• Chapter 22 The Rise of Tourism and the MONA Effect
• Chapter 23 Contemporary Tasmanian Society and Culture
• Chapter 24 Environmental Conservation in the 21st Century
• Chapter 25 Tasmania Looks to the Future: Challenges and Opportunities

An island at the edge of the world, Tasmania is a place of contradictions. It is a land of spectacular natural beauty, with rugged coastlines, pristine wilderness, and ancient forests. It is also a place with a dark and often brutal history, a history shaped by isolation, hardship, and conflict. For much of its past, it was a remote outpost of the British Empire, a penal colony designed to house the unwanted refuse of a distant society. To the British, it was Van Diemen's Land, a name that became synonymous with terror and despair. Yet, out of this harsh beginning, a unique and resilient society has emerged, one that continues to grapple with the legacy of its past while forging a new identity in the 21st century.

This book tells the story of Tasmania, from its deep geological origins to its present-day complexities. It is a story that begins long before the arrival of humans, in a time when the island was part of the great southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Over millions of years, geological forces shaped the island's distinctive landscape, creating the mountains, valleys, and coastlines that we see today. The world's largest exposure of diabase, or dolerite, gives many of its mountains a unique and imposing character. Rocks from every period of Earth's history since the Middle Proterozoic are present, a testament to a remarkably diverse geological journey that includes volcanic activity, multiple ice ages, and the slow drift of continents.

For tens of thousands of years, this land was home to the Palawa, or Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Evidence suggests their presence dates back at least 42,000 years, a time when a land bridge connected Tasmania to mainland Australia. When the glaciers of the last ice age retreated, rising sea levels flooded the Bassian Plain, and Tasmania became an island, isolating its inhabitants from the rest of the world for millennia. Over this vast expanse of time, they developed a rich and complex culture, intimately connected to the land and sea. They were the most southerly people on Earth, adapting and thriving in the island's unique and often challenging environments. Theirs was a world of deep spiritual beliefs, intricate social structures, and a profound understanding of the natural world.

The arrival of Europeans in the 17th century marked the beginning of a new and tumultuous era. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight the island, naming it Van Diemen's Land in honour of his sponsor, the Governor of the Dutch East Indies. More than a century would pass before the next significant European contact, with French and British expeditions visiting its shores in the late 1700s. These early encounters were fleeting, but they foreshadowed the dramatic changes that were to come. The British, concerned by French interest in the region, established the first permanent settlement in 1803 at Risdon Cove on the Derwent River. This was not a colony of free settlers, but a penal settlement, an island prison intended to be a place of punishment and exile.

The establishment of Van Diemen's Land as a penal colony had a profound and devastating impact on the Aboriginal population. The arrival of the British led to violent conflict over land and resources, a period that would become known as the Black War. Dispossession, violence, and the introduction of new diseases decimated the Palawa people, whose numbers plummeted catastrophically in the decades following European settlement. This tragic and violent period remains one of the most painful and contested aspects of Tasmanian history, a legacy of trauma and loss that continues to resonate today.

For half a century, Van Diemen's Land was defined by the convict system. Approximately 80,000 convicts were transported to the island, their forced labour used to build the colony's infrastructure and develop its industries. The names of its penal stations, such as Macquarie Harbour and the infamous Port Arthur, became bywords for brutality and suffering. Convict life was harsh and often cruel, a system designed to break the spirit as much as to punish the body. Yet, the convicts also left an indelible mark on the island, their presence shaping its social fabric, its economy, and even its physical landscape. The roads, bridges, and buildings they constructed are a tangible reminder of this formative period in Tasmania's history.

The mid-19th century brought significant change. The practice of transportation ceased in 1853, and the colony began to transition towards a society of free settlers. In 1856, in a symbolic break from its dark past, the colony officially changed its name to Tasmania. This period saw the growth of new industries, such as whaling, sealing, agriculture, and mining. The island's rich natural resources were exploited to fuel economic growth, with timber, wool, and minerals becoming key exports. The discovery of tin and gold sparked mining booms, bringing new waves of prospectors and investment to the island.

The turn of the 20th century saw Tasmania join the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. The new century brought with it both progress and challenges. The state became known as the "Apple Isle," a nod to its flourishing fruit industry. It also embarked on an ambitious program of hydro-industrialisation, harnessing the power of its rivers to generate electricity and attract heavy industry. This drive for development, however, came at a cost. The damming of rivers and the flooding of valleys sparked fierce opposition from a burgeoning conservation movement, giving rise to some of the most significant environmental battles in Australian history.

The controversies over the damming of Lake Pedder in the 1970s and the Franklin River in the early 1980s thrust Tasmania onto the national and international stage. These campaigns galvanised the environmental movement and led to the formation of the world's first green political party, the United Tasmania Group. The Franklin Dam dispute, in particular, became a landmark struggle, pitting the state government against environmental activists and the federal government. The ultimate victory for the conservationists in blocking the dam was a watershed moment, one that reshaped the political landscape and cemented Tasmania's reputation as a heartland for Green politics.

In more recent times, Tasmania has undergone another profound transformation. The decline of traditional industries in the late 20th century presented significant economic challenges. However, the 21st century has seen a remarkable reinvention of the island's identity. The opening of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in 2011 has been a catalyst for a cultural and tourism boom, an phenomenon often referred to as the "MONA effect." This "subversive adult Disneyland," as its founder David Walsh calls it, has helped to put Tasmania on the global cultural map, attracting a new generation of visitors to the island.

Today, Tasmania is a place of complex and sometimes competing identities. It is a state that proudly showcases its pristine wilderness and its "clean, green" image, yet continues to grapple with the legacy of its industrial past. It is a place with a thriving arts and culture scene, a burgeoning food and wine industry, and a growing reputation for high-quality, boutique products. It is also a society that is becoming increasingly diverse, with a rich cultural tapestry woven from the contributions of people from all over the world.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive and engaging account of Tasmania's long and often turbulent history. It seeks to explore the key events, people, and forces that have shaped this unique island state. From the deep time of its geological formation and the ancient culture of its First Peoples, to the brutal realities of its convict past and the passionate debates over its future, this is the story of Tasmania in all its complexity and contradiction. It is a story of a place that has been, by turns, a prison, a paradise, and a battleground. And it is a story that is far from over.

To comprehend the story of Tasmania, one must first grasp a sense of time so immense it defies human experience. The island's story does not begin with the arrival of people, nor with the first ships that breached its shores. It begins in the deep past, in a world of shifting continents and grinding ice, a slow and violent ballet of geological forces that stretched over more than a billion years. The rugged mountains, the serene lakes, and the fertile valleys that define Tasmania today are the final paragraphs of an epic tale written in stone. It is a history that starts when Tasmania was an indistinct piece of a nascent supercontinent, long before the first complex life crawled upon the land.

The absolute oldest rocks in Tasmania, found mainly in the west and on King Island, date back to the Proterozoic Eon, more than 1.27 billion years ago. These were originally sediments—sands, muds, and silts—laid down in a shallow sea. Over unimaginable spans of time, immense pressure and heat transformed these humble materials into the hard, crystalline quartzites and schists that now form the bedrock of the island's wild southwest. These metamorphic rocks, such as those forming the formidable peaks of Frenchmans Cap and the Frankland Range, are Tasmania’s ancient, hardened core, a foundation built when life on Earth was little more than a single-celled aspiration.

The pace of change picked up, geologically speaking, during the Cambrian Period, around 510 million years ago. This was a time of immense volcanic activity, particularly along what would become Tasmania's west coast. A chain of submarine volcanoes erupted, spewing lava and ash onto the seabed. This created a belt of rocks known as the Mount Read Volcanics, a formation that stretches in a wide arc from Elliott Bay in the south to beyond Cradle Mountain in the north. This volcanic belt is not just a geological curiosity; as the super-heated fluids associated with the eruptions circulated, they deposited rich concentrations of minerals, including copper, lead, zinc, silver, and gold. In doing so, they unwittingly created the mineral wealth that would one day draw miners from across the globe to places like Mount Lyell and Rosebery.

Following the volcanic fireworks of the Cambrian, the Ordovician Period (around 490 to 440 million years ago) was a much calmer affair. Much of the landmass that would become Tasmania was submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea, situated much closer to the equator than it is today. This tropical marine environment was perfect for the accumulation of shells and other marine debris, which over millions of years compacted to form vast deposits of limestone. These thick limestone sequences, known as the Gordon Group, are now found in areas like the Florentine and Gordon River valleys and around Mole Creek, where groundwater has since carved them into extensive and spectacular cave systems.

The relative tranquility was shattered in the Devonian Period. A massive tectonic event known as the Tabberabberan Orogeny subjected the region to immense east-west compression. This colossal squeeze folded and faulted the existing rock layers, thrusting ancient Precambrian blocks upwards and creating the primordial skeletons of Tasmania's mountain ranges. It was during this period of geological upheaval that the two distinct halves of Tasmania—the ancient western part and the younger eastern section which was once part of a volcanic island arc—are thought to have collided and fused together along a deep fault line marked today by the Tamar Valley. Molten rock also pushed up from deep within the crust, cooling slowly to form large bodies of granite in the island's northeast and on the west coast.

By the Permian Period, some 290 million years ago, the landmass had drifted south, closer to the polar regions. The climate cooled dramatically, plunging Tasmania into a prolonged ice age. Great ice sheets spread across the landscape, grinding and scouring the rock beneath them. The evidence of this ancient glaciation can still be seen today in the form of tillite—a rock formed from consolidated glacial debris—and dropstones, which are rocks that were carried by icebergs and dropped into marine sediments as the ice melted. As the climate eventually warmed and the glaciers retreated, the land was exposed, and vast swamps formed, creating the organic deposits that would later become Tasmania's coal seams.

The Triassic Period, beginning around 252 million years ago, was warmer and wetter. Rivers flowed across sandy plains, depositing thick layers of sediment that would eventually form the island's characteristic golden-hued sandstones. These Triassic sandstones are a prominent feature in the landscape of eastern and central Tasmania and were later quarried extensively for many of Hobart's historic buildings. The mudstones layered within these sandstones sometimes contain the fossilised remains of the plants and animals of the time, including ferns, early reptiles, and amphibians, providing a window into the ecosystems that existed just before the age of dinosaurs.

Then, in the Jurassic Period about 183 million years ago, came the single most defining event in Tasmania’s geological history. As the supercontinent of Gondwana began to shudder and crack apart, huge volumes of magma surged up from the Earth's mantle. Rather than erupting from volcanoes, much of this molten rock, a type of diabase known locally as dolerite, forced its way between the horizontal layers of the Permian and Triassic sedimentary rocks. It spread out into immense underground sheets called sills, some hundreds of metres thick, covering over a third of Tasmania. This massive intrusion was part of one of the planet's largest known magmatic events, the Karoo-Ferrar Large Igneous Province, which also affected parts of Antarctica, South Africa, and South America.

As this colossal volume of dolerite cooled and solidified, it contracted, creating the distinctive vertical columns and angular jointing that are so characteristic of the rock. Dolerite is incredibly hard and resistant to erosion. Over the subsequent millions of years, the softer sandstone and mudstone that once covered these intrusions were gradually worn away by wind, rain, and ice. This process of differential erosion has left the dolerite exposed, forming the dramatic cliffs, fluted columns, and flat-topped plateaus of many of Tasmania's most famous mountains, including kunanyi/Mount Wellington, Cradle Mountain, and Ben Lomond. The iconic "Organ Pipes" on Mount Wellington are a textbook example of this process, a stark monument to the fiery Jurassic invasion from below.

The long, slow process of Gondwana's disintegration continued. Around 80 million years ago, the landmass that would become New Zealand began to pull away, opening up the Tasman Sea. Then, starting around 45 million years ago, Australia and Tasmania finally began their separation from Antarctica. This tectonic stretching and faulting further shaped the landscape, creating major valleys and basins. During this time, known as the Tertiary Period, another, more modest, phase of volcanic activity occurred. Basalt lavas flowed across parts of the north of the island, particularly in the northwest, weathering over time to form the rich, red agricultural soils for which the region is now famous.

The final, and perhaps most dramatic, sculpting of the Tasmanian landscape took place much more recently, during the Pleistocene Epoch—the series of ice ages that spanned the last 2.6 million years. Although the Permian glaciation had been extensive, it was these more recent ice ages that carved the finer details of the alpine scenery we see today. During multiple glacial phases, up to a third of Tasmania was periodically covered by ice. Ice caps formed on the Central Plateau and the West Coast Range, feeding massive glaciers that flowed down valleys, relentlessly carving and reshaping them.

The power of this moving ice was immense. It plucked rocks from mountainsides, sharpened ridges into knife-edge arêtes, and gouged deep, bowl-shaped basins known as cirques into the slopes. When the ice eventually retreated, these cirques often filled with water, forming the hundreds of picturesque tarns and alpine lakes that dot the highlands, such as Lake Dove and Crater Lake at the foot of Cradle Mountain. The glaciers transformed V-shaped river valleys into the characteristic broad, U-shaped troughs seen throughout the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. At their terminus, they dumped vast piles of rock and debris, creating ridges known as moraines that mark the furthest extent of the ice.

During the peaks of these ice ages, so much of the world's water was locked up in continental ice sheets that global sea levels were more than 120 metres lower than they are today. This exposed the sea floor of Bass Strait, creating a broad land bridge of grasslands and scrub heath, known as the Bassian Plain, that connected Tasmania to mainland Australia. This plain was not a fleeting connection; it appeared and disappeared multiple times with the fluctuating cycles of ice ages, allowing plants and animals to move back and forth.

The end of the last glacial period, around 12,000 years ago, marked the final step in Tasmania’s physical formation. As global temperatures rose, the ice caps and glaciers melted for the last time. The liberated water flowed back into the oceans, and the sea level began its inexorable rise. The low-lying Bassian Plain was slowly inundated. The rising waters crept across the plains, filling the shallow basin until, finally, the last sliver of land connecting Tasmania to the continent slipped beneath the waves. Tasmania, for the last time, became an island. Its long and violent geological childhood was over, and it now stood isolated, a uniquely sculpted land awaiting the arrival of its first human inhabitants.