Qualla: Van Diemen's Land

Van Diemen's Land: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Vaughan, CC0. The name itself became a curse. In 19th-century England, to be sent to Van Diemen's Land was to be sent to the edge of the known world, to chains and exile and a country with a reputation for swallowing men whole. This was the colonial name for the island we now call Tasmania, and for half a century it carried so much dread that when the colony finally won self-government, one of its first acts was to scrub the name away. But the horror England feared was only part of the story. The deeper tragedy belonged to the island's first people, whose world was undone in a single generation.

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Image: John Vaughan | CC0

Van Diemen's Land: A Dutchman's Name for Someone Else's Island

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Glover, Public domain. In 1642 the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman became the first known European to reach these shores, landing on the south-east coast and raising his flag. He named the island Anthoonij van Diemenslandt, after Anthony van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies who had sen...

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Image: John Glover | Public domain

Van Diemen's Land: The Island That Caught the Worst

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Van Diemen's Land became the hard heart of Australia's convict system. From the early 1800s until transportation here ended in 1853, roughly 73,000 convicts were shipped to the island, about 40 percent of all convicts ever sent to Australia. Most were not monsters. They were the ...

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Image: Public domain

Van Diemen's Land: Defiance and the Long Voyage of the Cyprus

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Herman Moll, Public domain. The convicts were not passive in their misery, and now and then they seized their own freedom in startling ways. On 14 August 1829 the brig Cyprus, carrying convicts and supplies, lay becalmed in Recherche Bay on its way to Macquarie Harbour. The prisoners allowed on deck overpow...

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Image: Herman Moll | Public domain

Van Diemen's Land: The Black War and a People Nearly Erased

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit YSSYguy at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The arrival of the British was a catastrophe for the Aboriginal Tasmanians, who had lived on the island for tens of thousands of years. When the colony was founded in 1803, they numbered somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 people. As settlers and their livestock spread across the h...

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Image: YSSYguy at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Van Diemen's Land: Burying a Name

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martybugs at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the 1850s the colony was desperate to escape its own reputation. Free settlers far outnumbered convicts, towns were growing, and the stain of the old name was bad for business and worse for pride. When responsible self-government arrived, the new parliament moved quickly, and ...

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Image: Martybugs at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0