Tasmania Holidays

Where is Tasmania?
Tasmania lies off the south-east corner of the Australian mainland, 150 miles across the Bass Strait. It’s actually an archipelago consisting of the large main island and around 334 others, most of them uninhabited. Only around 570,000 people call Australia’s smallest state home, giving it a population density in single figures. Around half of the inhabitants live in the two largest cities, Hobart and Launceston, whose airports have direct flights from Melbourne (1hr), Sydney (1hr 50) and Brisbane (2hrs 40): great for multi-centre experiences. The climate is temperate, rarely too cold or too hot, with four distinct seasons – sometimes, the locals joke, all in one day.

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Hobart
Roughly 40 per cent of Tasmanians live in and around Hobart, Australia’s second-oldest state capital, which lies at the mouth of the River Derwent in the island’s south-east. Wedged between a deep natural harbour and the soaring peak of Mount Wellington, it is a relaxed, cultured and welcoming city crammed with highly regarded restaurants and well-preserved historic architecture. The former docks area of Salamanca Place features sandstone Georgian warehouses that now house cafés, boutiques and galleries, and nearby Battery Point is a warren of lanes lined with picturesque old cottages. One of the newer attractions is the eye-catching Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), a short ferry ride from the town centre; older sights include the fascinating Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, founded in 1818.

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Launceston
Leafy Launceston in the north is Tasmania’s second city, with a rich history and appealing setting to rival that of Hobart. Located at the point where the North Esk and South Esk unite to form the Tamar River, it makes the most of its watery assets. Vintage-style boats take visitors upstream to the Cataract Gorge, where a cable car provides birds’-eye views of this unique natural formation. There are clifftop paths and boardwalks for breezy strolls and heritage buildings-turned-restaurants from whose terraces you can watch the yachting crowd at play. As for the past, it’s left its mark on the city centre, with street after street of impressive Georgian, Victorian and Art Deco architecture to admire; the Tamar Valley vineyards provide another reason to linger.

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Cradle Mountain
Landscapes don’t come any more jaw-droppingly beautiful than Cradle Mountain, part of the UNESCO-listed Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area that encompasses a fifth of Tasmania. In this breathtaking wilderness, a network of walking tracks of varying length and difficulty leads to everything from ancient mossy rainforests and alpine wildflower meadows to jagged peaks dusted in snow overlooking cool-blue glacial lakes. It’s a haven for all kinds of wildlife, from egg-laying mammals such as platypuses to carnivorous marsupials including quolls, wombats and the endemic Tasmanian devil. The plant life is no less extraordinary – there are 300-foot-high native conifers whose ancestry dates back to the times of Gondwanaland, the long-vanished supercontinent.

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Freycinet National Park
Home to one of the state’s most iconic views, Freycinet National Park encompasses an island-capped peninsula nudging into the Tasman Sea, along with a slender strip of the mainland. Its headline act is the spellbinding sand-edged curve of Wineglass Bay, bookended by well-worn granite mountains called the Hazards, but it’s far from the only lure. There are tucked-away coves accessible only by kayak, lookout points from which visitors might glimpse southern right whales or white-bellied sea eagles, and walking trails through rugged hills and flower-carpeted heathlands to deserted stretches of white sand. Wildlife fans should keep an eye out for creatures such as Bennetts wallabies, possums and echidnas, though some of the most intriguing inhabitants only come out at night.

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Wildlife
Once part of the mainland, Tasmania was cut off by post-Ice Age rising sea levels around 12,000 years ago – long enough to develop unique species of flora and fauna, including some of the oldest trees in the world and several endemic birds, tree frogs and the ‘mountain shrimp’. While the Tasmanian tiger, actually a dog-like marsupial, may have been extinct since the 1930s, the fierce little Tasmanian devil lives on despite the twin threats of cars and disease. The national parks and reserves that cover almost half of the state provide superb opportunities for spotting native wildlife, while boat trips offer the chance to catch sight of rare Australian fur seals, bottle-nosed dolphins and several kinds of whales.

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