Geography

Consultant: Nicholas Harris

History of Tasmania

40,000–30,000 years ago
Tasmania is occupied by indigenous peoples, making their way across the land bridge from mainland Australia that existed while sea levels are lowered during the Pleistocene Ice Ages

12,000 years ago
Aboriginal Tasmanians are separated from the mainland Aboriginal groups after the sea levels rise to form Bass Strait. They live by fire-stick farming (burning down forests both to make it easier to hunt animals forced into the open and encourage the spread of grazing animals), hunting game, including kangaroo and wallabies, and catching seals, mutton-birds, shellfish and fish

1642
Dutch explorer Abel Tasman makes the first reported European sighting of the island on 24th November. Tasman names the island Anthony van Diemensland after the Governor of the Dutch East Indies, who funded his voyage

1772
French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne becomes the first European to set foot on the island

1773
Tobias Furneaux becomes the first Englishman to land in Tasmania when he arrives at Adventure Bay, which he names after his ship.

1777
James Cook lands at Adventure Bay

1798–99
British explorers Matthew Flinders and George Bass sail through Bass Strait, establishing for the first time that Tasmania is an island

1803
New South Wales Governor Philip King sends Lieutenant John Bowen to establish a small military outpost at Risdon on the eastern shore of the Derwent River in order to head off French claims to the island

1804
A penal settlement is established by Captain David Collins in Sullivans Cove on the Derwent estuary. It becomes known as Hobart Town, later shortened to Hobart, after the British Colonial Secretary of the time, Lord Hobart. Other convict-based settlements are soon established, including the harsh penal colonies at Port Arthur in the southeast and Macquarie Harbour on the west coast

1820s
Lured by the promise of land grants and cheap convict labour, free settlers arrive on the island in large numbers. The rapid colonization transforms traditional kangaroo hunting grounds of the indigenous Tasmanians into farms with walled or fenced fields and grazing sheep and cattle

1825–31
Violence between colonists and natives breaks out in what becomes known as the "Black War". The Aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 3000 and 7000 at the time of colonization, but is almost wiped out by a combination of conflict with settlers, inter-tribal warfare—and from the late 1820s, the spread of infectious diseases to which they have no immunity

1825
Initially part of the Colony of New South Wales, the island becomes a self-governing colony under the name of Van Diemen's Land

1826
Governor George Arthur declares that colonists are free to kill Aboriginal Tasmanians when they attack settlers or their property. He declares martial law in 1828, giving soldiers the right to shoot on sight any Aboriginal in the Settled Districts

1831
After Aboriginal Tasmanians give up their fight against the settlers, the island government forces almost all the remaining indigenous population, around 140 people, to move to Flinders Island. Many die of disease there

1853
Penal transportation ceases. Approximately 75,000 convicts have been sent to Van Diemen's Land since the first settlement of 1803

1856
The island is officially renamed Tasmania in honour of its first European discoverer, Abel Tasman. The newly elected parliament sits for the first time, establishing Tasmania as a self-governing colony of the British Empire

1901
Tasmania unites with the five other Australian colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia, of which it is now a state

1975
(5th January) Tasman Bridge disaster occurs in Hobart, when the bulk carrier, the Lake Illawarra, travelling up the River Derwent, collides with the bridge. This causes a large section of the deck to collapse. Twelve people are killed, including the ship's crew and the occupants of four cars which drive off the bridge. Hobart is cut off from its eastern suburbs for three years.

1996
Port Arthur massacre: a lone gunman shoots and kills 35 people, injuring 21 others