50 Fun Facts About Tasmania

What is the capital city of Tasmania?

Hobart began in 1804, when the first camp at Risdon Cove was judged a bad site and the settlement shifted across the river to a better harbour at Sullivans Cove.

Which body of water separates Tasmania from mainland Australia?

Bass Strait is shallow, so wind and tide throw up short, steep seas, and its reefs have wrecked hundreds of ships.

Tasmania is named after an explorer of which nationality?

Dutch navigator Abel Tasman claimed it in December 1642; the surf was too rough for the boats, so his ship's carpenter swam ashore to plant the flag.

What was Tasmania called before it was officially renamed on 1 January 1856?

Van Diemen's Land had become a byword for convict misery, so the colony's own Legislative Council petitioned the Queen for a new name to close the door on its penal past.

Which swashbuckling star of Hollywood's golden age was born in Tasmania?

Errol Flynn was born there in 1909, the son of a biology professor, and was expelled from school before he shot to stardom as the pirate hero of Captain Blood in 1935.

Which bushranger referred to Tasmania as 'Dervon' in his 1879 Jerilderie Letter?

Ned Kelly had a family tie to the island: his Irish father, 'Red' Kelly, had been shipped there as a convict for stealing two pigs.

How did the first people reach Tasmania, around 40,000 years ago?

On foot, across a land bridge: seas were then so low that a wide plain joined the two coasts, until rising water drowned it and left the islanders cut off for thousands of years.

Which pair sailed through the strait north of Tasmania in 1798-99, proving it an island?

Matthew Flinders and George Bass sailed the sloop Norfolk right around it; a year earlier Bass, in an open whaleboat, had guessed from the swell and tides that open water lay there.

Tasmania's capital is named after whom?

The British Colonial Secretary of the day gave the town his name in 1804, after its founder, Lieutenant-Governor Collins, had given up on a first settlement on the bay where Melbourne now stands.

Which river does Tasmania's capital sit on?

Derwent whales were once so thick that the colony's first chaplain is said to have warned it was dangerous to take a boat upriver unless you kept very near the shore.

Tasmania took convict ships until 1853; which of these colonies never took any?

South Australia was founded in 1836 for free settlers only and never took a convict ship.

Which of these was a notoriously harsh Tasmanian penal colony?

Port Arthur sat on a peninsula whose only land exit was a narrow neck, guarded day and night by a line of fierce dogs chained from shore to shore.

The violent conflict between settlers and Aboriginal Tasmanians that peaked in 1825-31 is known as what?

The Black War ended with the island's first peoples all but gone from their country: by 1835 nearly every survivor had surrendered and been shipped to an offshore mission.

In 1830, how did thousands of Tasmanian colonists try to drive Aboriginal people onto a single peninsula?

With a human chain, which pushed across the settled districts for weeks yet captured just two people and killed two, while most others slipped back through the gaps.

Where were most surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians moved after 1832?

Flinders Island's Wybalenna settlement was sold as a sanctuary but proved deadly: by 1847 only 47 people were left alive to be moved back to the main island.

Who, dying in 1876, was long but wrongly described as the 'last' Aboriginal Tasmanian?

Truganini feared the museum wanted her body, and she was right: her skeleton was dug up two years after her burial and hung on public display from 1904 to 1947.

Until 1825, Tasmania was governed as part of which colony?

New South Wales lost its southern outpost in December 1825, when the incoming governor, Ralph Darling, stopped off on his way to Sydney and proclaimed a separate colony.

Where were Australia's first electric street lights switched on in 1886?

Waratah, Tasmania, a remote tin-mining town, lit its streets two years before Tamworth, which still claims the honour because its 1888 lamps covered the whole town on a council-run supply.

Flooding which lake for hydro power in 1972 sparked what is widely called the world's first green party?

Lake Pedder's defenders formed the United Tasmania Group to fight that year's state election; it never won a seat, but it grew into the Tasmanian Greens and then the Australian Greens.

Which Tasmanian became the first woman elected to Australia's House of Representatives in 1943?

Enid Lyons walked into Parliament House in 1943 beside Dorothy Tangney, the first woman senator, and a photograph of that moment is now cast as twin bronze statues in Canberra.

What struck the Tasman Bridge in 1975, causing its collapse?

A bulk ore carrier, the Lake Illawarra, tore a 127-metre gap in the roadway and sank within minutes; twelve people died, and the bridge stayed shut until October 1977.

In 1968, Tasmanians voted in a statewide referendum to allow Australia's first legal what?

Casino: backers promised it would bring in tourists, the yes vote won, and Wrest Point opened its doors in February 1973.

The 1996 massacre at a former penal settlement prompted which national response?

New gun ownership laws were announced within two weeks: the states agreed to restrict rapid-fire weapons, and a compulsory buyback took more than 600,000 guns out of circulation.

Which philanthropist opened MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, in 2011?

David Walsh made his fortune as a professional gambler, with a betting system for horse racing, and his museum has since been credited with a sharp lift in tourism.

What is Tasmania's tallest mountain?

Mount Ossa, at 1,617 metres, stands just off the Overland Track, so hikers on the six-day walk can climb the state's highest peak as a side trip.

Tasmania sits squarely in the path of which globe-circling winds?

The Roaring Forties blow so hard because almost no land stands in their way south of 40 degrees; in the age of sail, ships rode them east at breakneck speed.

Which rock forms the towering columns of the 'Organ Pipes' on Mount Wellington?

Dolerite, magma that welled up in the Jurassic as Gondwana began to break apart, cooled into the columns that give Cradle Mountain and many other peaks here their shape.

The Tarkine, in Tasmania's north-west, holds Australia's largest expanse of what?

Temperate rainforest: the Tarkine's mossy tract is the largest left in the country, and campaigners for a national park there have spent decades fighting mining and logging interests.

Which famous bay in Freycinet National Park is a landmark of Tasmania's east coast?

Wineglass Bay's white crescent is best seen from above: walkers climb to a lookout in the Hazards, the line of jagged granite peaks behind it, for one of the state's most celebrated views.

Which famous tiered waterfall lies a short walk inside Mount Field National Park?

Russell Falls was given its own reserve in 1885, three decades before the national park around it was declared, and in 1899 the colony put the falls on a pictorial postage stamp.

Where did the last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, die in 1936?

A zoo, on a September night; its remains were assumed thrown away until 2022, when two researchers reported tracing a skin and skeleton in a museum's education collection to it.

What has made the Tasmanian devil an endangered species?

A contagious facial cancer spreads when devils bite one another, as they often do while feeding; the tumours grow around the mouth and are almost always fatal.

Tasmania is home to the world's only three migratory what?

Parrots rarely migrate, but the orange-bellied, swift and blue-winged parrots all breed here and cross open sea to winter on the mainland; the orange-bellied, critically endangered, is topped up each year with captive-bred birds.

Roadside alarms trialled in Tasmania to cut roadkill are set off by what?

Car headlights trip the roadside units, which flash and sound an alarm to warn wildlife off the road before the car arrives.

The Tasmanian Wilderness is World Heritage listed for traces of whom?

Ice Age cave dwellers: Aboriginal people here were the most southerly people on Earth during the last glaciation, and their cave deposits help the area meet seven of UNESCO's ten listing criteria.

Which cricketers, both former Australian captains, hail from Tasmania?

Ricky Ponting and Tim Paine both came through the state side; Paine was handed the Test captaincy in 2018, when Steve Smith was banned over the ball-tampering scandal in South Africa.

Which side won the NBL basketball championship in 2023-24, only their third NBL campaign?

Tasmania JackJumpers, named after a venomous jumping ant found across the state, beat Melbourne United on the road in the deciding fifth game, two years after losing the final in their debut season.

On which day does the famous yacht race from Sydney to Tasmania start each year?

The Boxing Day start dates from 1945, when what was planned as a casual cruise south turned into a race; the course runs for more than 600 nautical miles.

Tasmania's AFL club needed a deal with which entertainment giant before it could call itself the Devils?

Warner Bros. holds trademarks on the name through Taz, its cartoon Tasmanian Devil; the club, granted the AFL's 19th licence in 2023, unveiled the Devils name in March 2024 only once the two sides had reached an agreement.

A traditional Tasmanian scallop pie is flavoured with what?

Curry powder is the essential seasoning, ideally a local one: Joseph Keen began blending Keen's Curry in Tasmania in the 1850s, and it became a pantry staple across the country.

Which Tasmanian island lends its name to a cheese brand found in supermarkets across Australia?

King Island's dairy, more than a century old, was marked for closure by its Canadian owner in 2024, until new Australian owners bought it the following year and kept it running.

Which two Tasmanian beer brands are known across mainland Australia?

Tasmania also produces wasabi, saffron, truffles and leatherwood honey.

The Australian Antarctic Division is headquartered in which Tasmanian town?

Kingston's headquarters holds more than desks: its laboratories include a research aquarium where scientists keep and study live Antarctic krill.

Which name is popularly given to the last known thylacine?

Benjamin, though a researcher who traced the animal's remains said in 2022 that the last thylacine was a female, not the male the name is attached to.

Which festival is held in Queenstown on the West Coast every two years?

The Unconformity takes its name from geology, a break in the rock record where two masses meet, which suits a mining town; its finale is a football match on the local gravel oval.

What is the name for the main island of Tasmania in the reconstructed palawa kani language?

Lutruwita comes from palawa kani, one language pieced together since the early 1990s from old European word lists and a few early recordings, after the island's original tongues had lost their last speakers.

Which lieutenant founded the first British outpost in Tasmania at Risdon in 1803?

John Bowen, a naval lieutenant in his early twenties, landed with a party of just 49, convicts, soldiers and free settlers; eight months later he handed the struggling camp over to David Collins.

Where in Tasmania did the local council open its own hydro-electric power station, Duck Reach, in 1895?

Launceston's council ran Duck Reach, tucked into Cataract Gorge, from 1895; wrecked by the great flood of 1929 and rebuilt, it kept supplying the city until 1955 and is now a museum.

Two Tasmanian soldiers each gave up his horse to a wounded comrade in one Boer War ambush, earning which honour?

Victoria Crosses went to John Bisdee, who put a wounded officer on his own horse and got him out under heavy fire, and Guy Wylly, who, wounded himself, gave a corporal his horse and covered the retreat from behind a rock.

Which English navigator named Adventure Bay after his ship when he anchored there in 1773?

Tobias Furneaux got here before his own commander: separated from Cook's Resolution, he anchored HMS Adventure and drew the earliest British chart of the coast, and Cook and Bligh later used the same anchorage.