Hobart is one of Australia's most charming and surprising capitals: small, historic and, at the same time, home to one of the boldest museums in the world. On the banks of the wide River Derwent and beneath the bulk of kunanyi/Mount Wellington, the city has kept its Georgian sandstone centre, stone wharves and the relaxed feel of a port at the end of the world. It is the country's second-oldest capital, with a past of convicts, whalers and merchants that you can feel on every street in Battery Point and in the Salamanca warehouses.
But what put Hobart on the global travel map was MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), Australia's largest private museum, carved into the rock on the banks of the Derwent and filled with provocative, strange and brilliant art, created by the eccentric David Walsh. The 'MONA effect' transformed the city, and today Hobart combines that cultural cutting edge with an unmissable Saturday market, food built on some of the best cool-climate produce on the planet (oysters, salmon, cheese, whisky, cool-climate wines, cider) and wild nature just around the corner.
This guide explores Hobart with a practical, curious eye: how to visit MONA (and get there on its ferry), how to make the most of Salamanca Market, head up kunanyi for its dizzying views, wander historic Battery Point and the waterfront, visit Australia's oldest brewery and use the city as a base for trips to Port Arthur, Bruny Island and Tasmania's wilderness. It's a small city with big pleasures: art, history, good food and mountains, all on the banks of a spectacular river.
Hobart is the traditional Country of the muwinina people, one of the Aboriginal clans of Tasmania (palawa), who lived on this land for around 35,000 years and called it nipaluna. European colonisation came early and was traumatic: in 1803 a post was set up at Risdon Cove, and in 1804 Lieutenant Governor David Collins moved the settlement to Sullivans Cove, founding Hobart, Australia's second-oldest capital. The city grew as a penal colony and whaling port, while the so-called Black War and disease tragically decimated Tasmania's Aboriginal population. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Hobart went from quiet port to cultural capital, especially after the MONA museum opened in 2011. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The island south of the mainland, once Van Diemen's Land: home to one of the most feared penal colonies of the empire and the scene of the tragic Black War against the Palawa people. Today it is a haven of wild nature, with more than a third of its area protected as a World Heritage Site.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the English name 'Hobart' arrived, this saltwater land between the River Derwent and the mountain had another name and other owners. It was called, and is still called, nipaluna, in the revived language palawa kani, and it was Country of the muwinina people, one of the clans of the Aboriginal Tasmanians (palawa or pakana). Aboriginal occupation of Tasmania goes back a very long way: First Peoples are estimated to have lived on the island for around 35,000 years, since the time when Tasmania was joined to the mainland by a land bridge that the sea later covered, leaving them isolated for millennia.
That long isolation made Tasmanian Aboriginal culture one of the most distinctive in the world. The muwinina and the other clans lived by hunting, fishing and gathering, moving with the seasons across a territory that included the mountain we now call kunanyi/Mount Wellington, the banks of the Derwent and the coast. They had a deep spiritual relationship with land, water and fire, and a detailed knowledge of the landscape that allowed them to thrive in the cold climate of the far south.
Today the name nipaluna is used more and more, often alongside colonial Hobart, as a gesture of recognition towards the First Peoples. Institutions, universities and events open with an 'Acknowledgement of Country' that honours the muwinina as the traditional custodians of this land. Recognising that Hobart stands on nipaluna, muwinina land, is the essential starting point for understanding its history honestly, including the most painful part that colonisation would bring.
European colonisation of southern Tasmania came early, and its beginning was marked by violence. The first settlement was set up in 1803 as a military camp at Risdon Cove, on the eastern shore of the River Derwent. On 3 May 1804, that makeshift outpost was the scene of the so-called Risdon Cove Massacre: soldiers, settlers and convicts opened fire on a group of between 100 and 300 Aboriginal people who were hunting in the area, in one of the first episodes of bloodshed of the British occupation of the island.
That same year, 1804, Captain David Collins, the first lieutenant governor, decided Risdon Cove was not the best site and moved the settlement to the western shore, to a deep, sheltered harbour called Sullivans Cove: the site of today's Hobart city centre. Soldiers, settlers and convicts from the abandoned Port Phillip settlement (on the mainland) arrived with him. Collins named the new town 'Hobart Town' (or 'Hobarton') after Lord Hobart, then British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies.
Hobart was born, then, as a penal colony, and it is Australia's second-oldest capital after Sydney. For decades it was the destination of convicts transported from Britain, whose forced labour built many of the sandstone buildings we admire today in Salamanca, Battery Point and along the waterfront. At the same time, its exceptional harbour soon made it the main whaling port of the Southern Ocean, with an industry that, brutal as it was to the whales, drew ships, money and adventurers to the young settlement.
The colony's expansion brought with it one of the darkest chapters in Australian history: the so-called Black War, a violent conflict between British settlers and Aboriginal Tasmanians that raged from the mid-1820s until 1832. As settlers took over land for grazing and farming, Aboriginal people, stripped of their Country and their food sources, resisted. The war was fought largely as guerrilla warfare on both sides, with ambushes, reprisals and massacres. Around 200 settlers and between 600 and 900 Aboriginal people died, figures that, together with introduced diseases and dispossession, pushed the Aboriginal Tasmanian population to the brink of extinction.
In 1830 the colonial government even organised the 'Black Line', a human chain of settlers and soldiers that swept across the island trying to corner the remaining Aboriginal people. Shortly afterwards, the official George Augustus Robinson set out on expeditions to persuade the survivors to surrender, with the promise of protection, and ended up exiling them to Flinders Island, where many died. A central and tragic figure in this story was Truganini (c. 1812-1876), a woman of the Nuenonne people of Bruny Island who, as a teenager, saw almost all her people die or scatter, acted as Robinson's guide and, in time, was described (wrongly) as 'the last pure Aboriginal Tasmanian'.
It is essential to say this clearly: Aboriginal Tasmanians did NOT disappear. The idea that Truganini was 'the last' is a colonial myth. The palawa/pakana community survived, above all through the descendants of Aboriginal women and sealers on the Bass Strait islands, and today it is a living, active community that claims its rights, is reviving its language (palawa kani) and honours its ancestors. Remembering the Black War and Truganini is not about dwelling on tragedy, but about recognising a real history that visitors should know in order to understand Tasmania today.
Throughout the 19th century, Hobart Town established itself as the capital of the colony of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania's old colonial name; it was renamed Tasmania in 1856, partly to leave behind its grim reputation as a convict land). Convict transportation to the island continued until the 1850s, and its legacy was carved in stone: the Salamanca warehouses, the churches, the public buildings and the Georgian mansions that make Hobart one of Australia's cities with the finest colonial heritage were built largely with forced labour.
The economy revolved around the port: whaling and sealing, and exports of wool, timber, fruit (Tasmania earned the nickname 'Apple Isle' for its apples) and other goods. With the end of convict transportation and the decline of the whales, Hobart gradually became a quiet provincial capital, somewhat removed from the rush of the big mainland cities. For much of the 20th century it was seen, even within Australia, as a remote place, beautiful but sleepy, better known for its nature and heritage than for any sense of energy.
That calm had its charm: the waterfront with its fishing boats, the Salamanca market (which became an institution), Battery Point with its cottages, the protective shadow of kunanyi and the arrival, every year's end, of the epic Sydney to Hobart yacht race, whose boats tie up at Constitution Dock amid celebrations. But Hobart was missing something to put it back on the world map. That something would arrive, completely unexpectedly, in the 21st century.
The great transformation of contemporary Hobart has a date and an author: on 21 January 2011, MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) opened its doors. It is the largest privately funded museum in the Southern Hemisphere, created by David Walsh, a Tasmanian millionaire and professional gambler who made his fortune with betting systems. Walsh built it into the rock of the Berriedale peninsula, next to his Moorilla winery: an underground, labyrinthine museum to house his deliberately provocative collection of ancient, modern and contemporary art, which he himself described as a 'subversive adult Disneyland'.
The impact was so great that a phrase was coined for it: the 'MONA effect'. Almost overnight, quiet, remote Hobart became an international art destination, drawing travellers from all over the world who came specifically for the museum. MONA changed not only the city's tourism economy but also its self-esteem and its energy: it added festivals such as the dark, ritualistic Dark Mofo in the depths of winter (with its famous nude swim at sunrise on the solstice) and the summer Mona Foma, and it sparked a creative, food and bar scene in Hobart that it had never had before.
Today Hobart, with around 250,000 people in its metropolitan area (almost half of Tasmania's population), combines the best of its two souls: the historic one —Salamanca, Battery Point, the Cascade brewery of 1824, the colonial heritage— and the avant-garde one, embodied by MONA. Add to that a food culture built on some of the most sought-after cool-climate produce on the planet (oysters, salmon, whisky, cheeses, cool-climate wines, cider) and wild nature just around the corner. And, increasingly, an honest acknowledgement of its history: that of a city built by convicts on nipaluna, muwinina land, whose First Peoples, far from having disappeared, are still here, claiming their place.
