7 June: Tasmania

On this date in 1825 Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) became a separate colony of Australia. Here are some facts about Tasmania.

1. Tasmania is an island (the 26th largest in the world) separated from mainland Australia by the Bass Strait. The state of Tasmania includes 334 other islands as well.
2. The first European known to have caught sight of it was Abel Janszoon Tasman, the Dutch explorer. He didn't land there, but he did give it a name - Anthoonij van Diemenslandt, after his sponsor, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. The British later shortened the name to Van Diemen’s Land, and later still, in 1856, changed the name to Tasmania.
3. The capital city is Hobart, named after Robert Hobart, the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies at the time of its settlement in 1804. It is known for having the second lowest rainfall of all the Australian state capitals. Other cities include Launceston, Devonport, Burnie, and Ulverstone.
4. Tasmania's tallest mountain is Mount Ossa at 1,617 metres (5,305 feet). The South Esk River is the longest river in Tasmania. Other rivers have the same names as rivers in the UK - The Derwent, the Tamar and the Mersey.
5. Tasmania's official flower is The Tasmanian Blue Gum, Eucalyptus glolulus Labill In favourable situations the Tasmanian Blue Gum can grow into a tree about 200 feet tall.
6. It doesn't have an official animal but it does have an unofficial animal symbol - the Tasmanian Devil, a creature only found wild in Tasmania, which is the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. According to myth, they are man eaters, but there is no proof of this. We do know they have the strongest bite of any living mammal based on its body mass. The most famous Tasmanian Devil is the Warner Brothers Tasmanian Devil cartoon character Taz, introduced in 1954, who had his own series - Taz-Mania.
7. Another animal which used to live in Tasmania is the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger because of the stripes on its back. It wasn't a tiger. It wasn't even a cat. It looked more like a dog - but it wasn't a dog either - it was a marsupial. It was hunted to extinction in 1936, but two of them appear on the coat of arms of Tasmania.
8. Famous people from Tasmania include Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Blackburn, the first woman from Australia to win a Nobel Prize, and Mary Donaldson, now the Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.
9. Tasmania's history has its dark side. The settlers tried to forcibly remove the aboriginal population to other islands. As well as a conflict between the settlers and indigenous people known as the Black War, the settlers brought diseases with them that killed all but 300 Aborigines. Modern historians say what the early settlers did amounted to genocide and ethnic cleansing. The last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine died in 1876. Her name was Truganini.
10. In the 19th century it was Britain’s prime penal colony. About 75,000 convicts were sent there; 40% of all the convicts sent to Australia. The last penal settlement in Tasmania closed in 1877.

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