Although more than twice the size of Belgium, Tasmania has only about two hundred thousand people, compared with Belgium’s seven millions. Hobart, the capital and largest city on the island, has about fifty-two thousand. It lies on a fine harbour in a nest of hills on the banks of the Derwent. Back of the river rises a mountain, the rocks of which look like the pipes of an organ. The town is well laid out in checkerboard fashion; it runs up hill and down and here and there takes a jump out into the country.
I went from one end of the city to the other one day on a street car. The people of Hobart pride themselves on having the first electric railroad line in their latitude. The cars are not like any we have in the United States. They were made in England and look as though they had been pounded out by a crossroads blacksmith. They are enormous double-deckers, and their sides are plastered with advertisements. I rode on the roof right under a great steel bow, which, pressing against the overhead wire, takes the place of our trolley. I timed the trip and found we made speed only when going down hill. Most of the time our motion was a succession of spasmodic jerks, as though the electricity were afflicted with fits.
Near Hobart was Port Arthur, the chief penal colony of the old Van Diemen’s Land. Its site can be reached by a short sail down the Derwent River. Some of the convict buildings are still standing, and one can get a guide there who will describe the terrible punishments that drove many of the prisoners to suicide. They were flogged, tortured with dripping water, and loaded with heavy chains. They were kept in dark cells, were made to pull railway cars, and were subjected to all sorts of inhuman treatment. Many of the best families in Tasmania today are descendants of these convicts. Some of them will acknowledge their ancestry, but if one asks them the crime for which their forebears were transported each will invariably reply that it was for stealing a loaf of bread. It would have taken a good-sized bakehouse running steadily to supply the many loaves said to have been stolen by these early Tasmanians. Transportation of criminals ceased in 1853, and all the arrivals since then are people who have come of their own accord. To-day the number of crimes is no greater than in other parts of the Empire. Indeed, the Tasmania of to-day is rather pious than otherwise. The majority of the people are either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland, or Australia.
Unlike continental Australia, Tasmania has a moist climate. This has given the island dense forests of eucalyptus and other woods which furnish railroad ties and paving blocks to her sister states.
Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, lies on the south coast of the island between the great hills on both sides of the Derwent River. Its harbour is second only to that of Sydney.
Tasmania deserves its name of the “Apple Isle,” for it annually exports many shiploads of apples to the mainland and London. The orchardist often makes a profit of upwards of $200 an acre.
The Hobart museum is a Mecca to students of ethnology, for here is preserved the body of the last of the aborigines. When the island was a penal colony there were still a number of the original blacks, but they were so corrupted by escaped convicts that they became a menace to the whites. In 1830 a drive of three thousand Europeans was organized against them and all who survived were finally exiled to a dreary, windswept island in Bass Strait. Here their health suffered because they were forced to wear clothes, which they never took off, no matter how filthy they became. The poor creatures were also the easy prey of the sealers and escaped criminals that came now and then to their place of exile, and at the end of fifteen years only forty-four survived. A woman, Truganini, the last of the race, died at the age of seventy-three, in 1876. Her skeleton is in the museum and the scientists come here to study the skull. The native Tasmanians belonged to an even more backward race and stage of civilization than the aborigines of Australia.