Tasmania historical timeline

Origins

Aboriginal Tasmanians have been here at least 40,000 years, isolated from the mainland when rising seas flooded Bass Strait around 10,000 years ago — one of the longest periods of human isolation known anywhere.

Turning points

British settlement from 1803 brought the Black War, a frontier conflict of extraordinary violence that, with introduced disease, destroyed most of the Aboriginal population within three decades. The survivors were removed to Flinders Island. The palawa community endures, and the persistent claim that Tasmanian Aboriginal people became extinct is untrue.

Influential people

The campaign to stop the damming of the Franklin River in the early 1980s — blockades, thousands of arrests, and a High Court case — saved the river and effectively founded the modern Australian environmental movement.

Cultural evolution

Port Arthur operated as a penal station from 1830 to 1877 and is now World Heritage-listed. In 1996 a gunman killed 35 people there, which led within twelve days to the national firearms agreement that reshaped Australian gun law.

Present-day significance

MONA, opened in 2011 by a private collector, transformed Hobart's economy and reputation almost single-handedly — an unusual case of one museum changing a state's trajectory.