Tasmania Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Tasmania trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tasmania trivia for Tassie locals, mainlanders planning a Spirit of Tasmania crossing, and anyone whose picture of the island is a cartoon devil. The quiz starts with the basics: Bass Strait, Hobart and the Derwent, Mount Ossa, the Roaring Forties, the dolerite Organ Pipes above the capital and the 1,000-odd islands that make up the state. Then it works through the history: Abel Tasman's sighting in 1642, the naming of Van Diemen's Land, the 1803 penal settlement, the 75,000 convicts sent to Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour, the Black War and the removal to Flinders Island, the renaming of 1856, and Australia's first electric street lights. Later rounds cover the thylacine and the devil, the world's only migratory parrots, Lake Pedder and the world's first green party, the Franklin blockade, the Tasman Bridge collapse, Port Arthur in 1996, David Walsh's MONA, David Boon and Ricky Ponting, the JackJumpers, King Island cheese and Keen's curry. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Australia, Australian animals and Melbourne quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital city of Tasmania?
Hobart
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.
Q 02Which body of water separates Tasmania from mainland Australia?
Bass Strait
Bass Strait is shallow, so wind and tide throw up short, steep seas, and its reefs have wrecked hundreds of ships.
Q 03Tasmania is named after an explorer of which nationality?
Dutch
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.
Q 04What was Tasmania called before it was officially renamed on 1 January 1856?
Van Diemen's Land
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.
Q 05Which swashbuckling star of Hollywood's golden age was born in Tasmania?
Errol Flynn
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.
Q 06Which bushranger referred to Tasmania as 'Dervon' in his 1879 Jerilderie Letter?
Ned Kelly
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.
Q 07How did the first people reach Tasmania, around 40,000 years ago?
On foot, across a land bridge
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.
Q 08Which pair sailed through the strait north of Tasmania in 1798-99, proving it an island?
Matthew Flinders and George Bass
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.
Q 09Tasmania's capital is named after whom?
The British Colonial Secretary
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.
Q 10Which river does Tasmania's capital sit on?
Derwent
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.
Q 11Tasmania took convict ships until 1853; which of these colonies never took any?
South Australia
South Australia was founded in 1836 for free settlers only and never took a convict ship.
Q 12Which of these was a notoriously harsh Tasmanian penal colony?
Port Arthur
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.
Q 13The violent conflict between settlers and Aboriginal Tasmanians that peaked in 1825-31 is known as what?
The Black War
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.
Q 21What struck the Tasman Bridge in 1975, causing its collapse?
A bulk ore carrier
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.
Q 22In 1968, Tasmanians voted in a statewide referendum to allow Australia's first legal what?
Casino
Casino: backers promised it would bring in tourists, the yes vote won, and Wrest Point opened its doors in February 1973.
Q 23The 1996 massacre at a former penal settlement prompted which national response?
New gun ownership laws
Q 14In 1830, how did thousands of Tasmanian colonists try to drive Aboriginal people onto a single peninsula?
With a human chain
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.
Q 15Where were most surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians moved after 1832?
Flinders Island
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.
Q 16Who, dying in 1876, was long but wrongly described as the 'last' Aboriginal Tasmanian?
Truganini
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.
Q 17Until 1825, Tasmania was governed as part of which colony?
New South Wales
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.
Q 18Where were Australia's first electric street lights switched on in 1886?
Waratah, Tasmania
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.
Q 19Flooding which lake for hydro power in 1972 sparked what is widely called the world's first green party?
Lake Pedder
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.
Q 20Which Tasmanian became the first woman elected to Australia's House of Representatives in 1943?
Enid Lyons
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.
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.
Q 24Which philanthropist opened MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, in 2011?
David Walsh
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.
Q 25What is Tasmania's tallest mountain?
Mount Ossa
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.
Q 26Tasmania sits squarely in the path of which globe-circling winds?
The Roaring Forties
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.
Q 27Which rock forms the towering columns of the 'Organ Pipes' on Mount Wellington?
Dolerite
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.
Q 28The Tarkine, in Tasmania's north-west, holds Australia's largest expanse of what?
Temperate rainforest
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.
Q 29Which famous bay in Freycinet National Park is a landmark of Tasmania's east coast?
Wineglass Bay
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.
Q 30Which famous tiered waterfall lies a short walk inside Mount Field National Park?
Russell Falls
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.