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Tasmania
Tasmania, abbreviated as TAS, is an Australian island territory, nicknamed Tassie. It is situated 240 km to the south of the mainland of Australia, isolated by the Bass Strait. The state includes Tasmania's biggest island, the world's 26th-largest island, and the adjacent 334 islands. As of March 2020, the state has a population of around 539,000. Just more than forty per cent of the population resides in the Greater Hobart precinct, which forms the metropolitan area of the state capital and largest city, Hobart.
Tasmania's territory is 68,401 km2, of which 64,519 km2 is occupied by the main island. It is marketed as a natural state, and about 42 per cent of its land area which includes national parks and World Heritage Sites, is covered by Tasmanian protected areas. The foundation of the world's first environmental political party was Tasmania.
The island is thought to have been inhabited for 30,000 years prior to British settlement by indigenous peoples. As the sea rises to create the Bass Strait, Native Tasmanians are believed to have split from the mainland Aboriginal groups around 11,700 years ago. At the time of settlement, the Native population is believed to have been between 3,000 and 7,000 but was nearly wiped out within 30 years by a mixture of violent military warfare with colonists known as the Black War, intertribal conflict, and the introduction of infectious diseases to which they had little immunity by the late 1820s. The war, which peaked between 1825 and 1831, cost the lives of nearly 1,100 Aboriginals and settlers and contributed to more than three years of martial law.
In 1803, as a penal settlement of the British Empire, the island was permanently occupied by Europeans to avoid claims to the territory by the First French Empire after the Napoleonic Wars. The island was originally part of the New South Wales Colony, but in 1825, under the name Van Diemen's Land (named after Anthony van Diemen), it became an independent self-governing colony. Before travel ceased in 1853, nearly 75,000 convicts were taken to Van Diemen's Land. The new Tasmanian Constitution was passed in 1854, and the colony obtained permission to change its name to Tasmania the next year. Via the Federation of Australia process, it became a state in 1901.
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