Tasmanian History
Follow the Heritage Highway!!
The elegant buildings of Tasmania's colonial past line the streets and grace the countryside. They stand as a monument to the island's colonial settlers and to the transported felons of Van Diemen's Land.
Along the route of early settlement are more 19th century streetscapes than almost anywhere in Australia. Whole villages built of stone and avenues of English trees providing a close and lasting resemblance to the British Isles.
Those transportees who weren't incarcerated provided the main source of labour in the colony's golden age of building, from the homes of country gentry to offices and warehouses, cells and factories, clustered hamlets, churches and public houses, gaols and barracks, roads and bridges.
And Tasmania's heritage blends naturally with hospitality. Behind the hawthorn hedges of the north, along country gravel roads and in the heart of early Hobart you can walk and dine and live in history.
Or stir the souls of long-dead convicts at Tasmania's haunting penal settlements. Take a hurricane lamp and wander among the ruins on an evening tour at Port Arthur; camp in the former penitentiary at beautiful Maria Island or cruise the Gordon River to the crumbling ruins of Sarah Island, most hellish of them all.
Unlike the relics of Tasmania's colonial past, the heritage of the first Tasmanians is less defined. In the caves and rock carvings of the north-west and in Tasmania's wilderness areas the history of the first Tasmanians is still being uncovered. At Risdon Cove near Hobart, traces of Aboriginal inhabitants lie scattered among the artefacts of the first official European settlement of Van Diemen's Land.