Tasmania
state of Australia
Tasmania (/tæzˈmeɪniə/; palawa kani: Lutruwita) is an island state of Australia. It is located 240 kilometres (150 miles) to the south of the Australian mainland, and is separated from it by the Bass Strait. The state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, and the surrounding 1000 islands. It is Australia's smallest and least populous state, with 573,479 residents as of June 2023. The state capital and largest city is Hobart, with around 40% of the population living in the Greater Hobart area. Tasmania is the most decentralised state in Australia, with the lowest proportion of its residents living within its capital city.
Tasmania's main island was first inhabited by Aboriginal peoples, who today generally identify as Palawa or Pakana.
It is believed that Aboriginal Tasmanians became isolated from mainland Aboriginal groups around 11,700 years ago, when rising sea levels formed Bass Strait.
In 1803, Tasmania was permanently settled by Europeans as a penal settlement of the British Empire, partly to pre-empt French territorial claims during the Napoleonic Wars. At the time of British arrival, the Aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 3,000 and 7,000.
“Tasmania” enters the record as state of Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tasmania, state and Australia can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Tasmania” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tasmania, state and Australia provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q34366. VIAF identifies the subject as 123100758. The Library of Congress control number is n79115474. Authority coordinates are -42.000, 147.000. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1000, 2023 and 1803.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tasmania” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.