Why Van Diemen's Land changed its name to Tasmania in 1856
By the 1850s the name Van Diemen's Land made English readers shudder. About 73,000 convicts had been shipped there, some 40% of all those sent to Australia, and penal stations like Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour had a fearsome reputation. So one of the island's first acts of self-rule was to rename itself.
The original name was a thank-you note. In 1642 the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, dispatched by his patron Anthony van Diemen, who ran the Dutch East Indies, became the first known European to set foot on the island. He landed at Blackman Bay, raised the Dutch flag at North Bay and honoured his patron, assuming he had reached part of the mainland. Nobody proved it was an island until Matthew Flinders and George Bass sailed around it in the sloop Norfolk in 1798–1799.
British and French visitors mapped it piece by piece. Tobias Furneaux drew the first British chart in 1773, James Cook stopped for water and wood in 1777, and French expeditions under d'Entrecasteaux and later Nicolas Baudin explored the south-east. Worried by that French interest, the governor of New South Wales sent Lieutenant John Bowen in August 1803 to set up an outpost on the Derwent River. For a while the island was split at the 42nd parallel into two counties, and it became a separate colony in 1825.
Until transportation ended in 1853 it was Australia's main penal colony. Most male convicts worked for free settlers or on public works gangs, with only hardened reoffenders sent to Port Arthur, while women went into households or one of five female factories. In 1829 convicts seized the supply brig Cyprus, sailed it to Canton and along the way made it the first Australian ship to visit a closed Japan. Freed prisoners often headed for Victoria, especially during the gold rush, and complaints about them reoffending there helped end transportation. The 1851 census counted 70,130 people, about three-quarters of them free.
Residents were called Vandemonians, a spelling whose devilish echo did the place no favours. The new name, adopted on 1 January 1856, honoured Tasman instead, and the last penal settlement, at Port Arthur, closed in 1877.
Source: Van Diemen's Land
