The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted the west coast of the island in 1642. Landing a party on its east coast, he named it Van Diemen's Land in honour of the Governor of the Dutch East Indies. Early maps show it connected to the mainland, and several eighteenth-century French and British navigators, including William Bligh and James Cook, who claimed it for the British, did not prove otherwise. It was not until 1798 that Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the island, and his discovery of the Bass Strait reduced the journey to Sydney by a week. In 1803, after the French had been observed nosing around the island's southern waters, it was decided to establish a second colony in Australia. (The first had been established at Sydney Cove in 1788.) Lieutenant David Bowen was dispatched to Van Diemen's Land, settling with a group of convicts on the banks of the Derwent River at Risdon Cove. In the same year, Lieutenant-Colonel John Collins set out from England with another group to settle the Port Phillip district of what would become Victoria; after a few months they gave up and crossed the Bass Strait to join Bowen's group. Hobart Town was founded in 1804 and the first penal settlement opened at Macquarie Harbour in 1821, followed by Maria Island and Port Arthur; they were mainly for those who had committed further offences while still prisoners on the mainland. Van Diemen's Land, with its harsh conditions and repressive, violent regime, became part of British folklore as a place of terror, a prison-island hell. Collins was Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land until his death in 1810, but it is Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur (1824-36) who has the most prominent position in the island's history. His ideas were an influence on the prison settlement at Port Arthur and he was in charge at the time of the Black Line , the organized white militia used against the indigenous Aboriginal population.

 

Tasmania did not experience the postwar industrialization that transformed the mainland. A small, isolated and neglected state, it even missed out on postwar immigration and consequently remains predominantly Anglo-Saxon in character, with an insular, often conservative, population. Its natural resources include forests - covering forty percent of the island - and water, and the mountainous terrain and fast-flowing rivers meant that hydroelectricity schemes began early here, under the auspices of the huge Hydro Electricity Commission (HEC). The flooding of Lake Pedder in 1972 led to the formation of the Wilderness Society , a conservation organization whose successful Franklin Blockade in 1982 managed to save one of the last wild rivers. Controversy over these issues still divides the state into "Greens" and a pro-logging, pro-dam working class worried about their jobs. By voting for the Tasmanian Greens in 1989, enough ordinary Tasmanians showed that they didn't want Tasmania's natural assets destroyed, and the party held the balance of power in the state's parliament until 1992; in early 1996 the Greens again held the balance of power, with a Liberal state government. Before the 1998 state elections, the two major opposing parties, Labor and Liberal, conspired together to change the electoral structure, voting to reduce the number of members in the Lower House from 25 to 15, purposefully making it more difficult for the Greens to win seats. The Labour government was voted in, and the sole Green Member of Parliament in the Lower House has little chance of exercising any influence. The Tasmanian Green party is represented federally by one senator, the Tasmanian environmental activist Dr Bob Brown .

Recent campaigns have been aimed at stopping old-growth logging in particularly sensitive areas, and ending woodchipping (pulping trees for paper) for export to Japan; currently some ninety percent of the wood taken from Tasmania's forests ends up this way, with Tasmania the only state in Australia that woodchips rainforests . It's claimed that the state government is subsidizing the industry, selling woodchips off at a third of the going rate to keep Tasmanians employed. At the time of writing a new campaign had begun to stop a woodchip-fuelled power station being built just south of Hobart. Another high-profile issue is genetically engineered (GE) farming. After much campaigning, the Tasmanian Government has defied the rest of Australia and announced a one-year moratorium on GE crops . The majority of the Tasmanian people want this moratorium extended indefinitely and many would like to see Tasmania market itself as a clean, green, organic state.