An isolated island
About 12,000 years ago: Sea level rises, separating Tasmania from the mainland
An isolated island
About 12,000 years ago: Sea level rises, separating Tasmania from the mainland
National Museum of Australia
In a snapshot
The island we now call Tasmania was connected to mainland Australia by a land bridge for thousands of years. This allowed the Aboriginal peoples who lived in these regions to travel back and forth. About 12,000 years ago, sea levels rose and separated Tasmania from the Australian mainland, preventing this movement of people.
Can you find out?
1. How were First Nations people able to travel between what we now call Victoria and Tasmania?
2. Why were convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land?
3. What was the impact of colonisation on Tasmania’s First Nations people?
How did Tasmania become an island?
Tasmania was and continues to be known as Lutriwita by the First Nations people who live there.
Scientists say the first people arrived in Tasmania on foot around 40,000 years ago. They could travel this way because, for tens of thousands of years, as sea levels dropped, present day Tasmania and Victoria were connected by a narrow land bridge. Now Bass Strait separates the two.
About 30,000 years ago an ice age began. A lot of seawater froze in ice sheets and glaciers, and sea levels dropped by about 120 metres. This created a continuous land mass between present day Papua New Guinea and Tasmania. Aboriginal peoples lived on previously submerged land, now known as the Bassian Plain, and could travel easily between territory to the North and South.
When the ice melted — which took about 6,000 years — a bass strait formed. By about 12,000 years ago, it had become a wide and rough body of water that isolated people on the island for thousands of years.
‘They were alone for five hundred generations, knowing no other people in the world, living with the knowledge and beliefs derived from those they had known before the sea surrounded them.’
When did Europeans colonise the island?
In the 1640s the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to visit and map parts of Tasmania. He named the island Van Diemen’s Land after Anthony van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies.
In 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip set up a British convict settlement at Sydney Cove. But the Europeans hadn’t explored much of Australia yet. In 1797 George Bass explored the southeast coast and became convinced that there was a strait separating Van Diemen’s Land from the mainland. Late in 1798 he and explorer Matthew Flinders sailed south from Sydney. Over three months they circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land, proving that it was an island. Bass Strait was named after him.
Research task
How do First Nations cultural practices and languages continue in Tasmania today? Do some research to find out.
In 1803, 49 people were sent to set up a British settlement on the Derwent River in Van Diemen’s Land. This settlement grew and later became Hobart.
Soon convicts were transported to Van Diemen’s Land. Most came straight from Britain, but some were sent from New South Wales for committing a crime there. The penal settlement set up at Port Arthur operated between 1833 and 1853.
in 1856, three years after the British stopped transporting convicts to Van Diemen’s Land, the island’s name was changed to Tasmania.
National Library of Australia nla.obj-334686747
How did colonisation affect First Nations peoples in Tasmania?
Some of the worst clashes between white colonists and First Nations people happened on the island. In 1830 thousands of white colonists formed a ‘Black Line’; a human chain that crossed the settled districts. This line of people moved south over many weeks and tried to frighten, capture and relocate the remaining Aboriginal people.
The ‘Black Line’ did not achieve its goal, but the campaign did frighten many First Nations people, who later surrendered to the colonists. Around 200 Aboriginal Tasmanians were removed to Flinders Island in Bass Strait, where many died from the extremely poor living conditions.
Because of this resettlement, many white colonists believed that First Nations people of Tasmania had died out. But Aboriginal identity and culture survived through the children of First Nations women and white sealers who lived on the Furneaux Group islands in Bass Strait.
Research task
Find out about Truganini, who actively worked for the advancement of First Nations people in Tasmania and was often erroneously considered to be the last Tasmanian Aboriginal woman. Write a short summary of her life that includes information about when and where she was born, her family, how colonisation affected her, the challenges she faced, and what she achieved in her lifetime.
Read a longer version of this Defining Moment on the National Museum of Australia’s website.
What did you learn?
1. How were First Nations people able to travel between what we now call Victoria and Tasmania?
2. Why were convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land?
3. What was the impact of colonisation on Tasmania’s First Nations people?
