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Tasmania
Australia's wild island state, a refuge of ancient forests and rare creatures
South of the Australian mainland, across one of the world's stormiest stretches of sea, lies an island of cool rainforests, jagged peaks and air famously among the cleanest on the planet. Tasmania is Australia's only island state, a wild, mountainous land far greener and wetter than the dry continent to the north. Nearly half of it is protected as national park and World Heritage wilderness, sheltering ancient trees, the snarling Tasmanian devil and some of the last truly untouched temperate forest on Earth.
The main island of Tasmania covers about 64,519 square kilometres, separated from the mainland by the rough waters of Bass Strait, around 240 kilometres wide. Carved by glaciers and rimmed by a dramatic, indented coastline, its rugged interior rises to its highest point at Mount Ossa, 1,617 metres in the central highlands. Lying in the path of the Roaring Forties, the westerly winds that circle the Southern Ocean unimpeded, the island catches abundant rain on its western flank, nourishing dense temperate rainforest, while the drier east holds farmland and the capital, Hobart. Cool, clear and remote, it feels a world apart from continental Australia.
Tasmania's Aboriginal people lived in isolation for some ten thousand years after rising seas cut the island off from the mainland, until British colonisation in the early nineteenth century brought catastrophe, including the establishment of brutal penal settlements such as Port Arthur. The island later became a battleground for the modern environmental movement, where campaigns to save its wild rivers and forests helped launch green politics worldwide. Today Tasmania trades on its pristine image, its wilderness, wildlife, cool-climate wines and clean produce drawing travellers to one of the most distinctive corners of the Southern Hemisphere.