It’s hard to take a bad photo in Tassie. Everywhere you look, there is a cinematic masterpiece. Dark rivers reflecting rainforest, moss so green it’s almost fluorescent, waterfalls surrounded by centuries-old trees, wet roads glowing under neon signs, and whiskey tasting beside an open fire, deemed completely reasonable behaviour long before the sun has gone down behind the mountains.
I travelled as a guest of Tourism Tasmania, and this summer-loving water babe has fallen madly in love with a wild winter and the women of Tasmania. Let me say this early: many of the women shaping modern Tasmania were not necessarily born there; they are women who chose Tasmania, invested deeply in it, and are now helping to build its modern cultural identity. But more on the women shortly.
Tasmania’s off-season campaign works because it’s true. The island thrives in winter, its darker, sharper, hungrier, and somehow more alive. Restaurants are warm and buzzing, and locals lean hard into winter hospitality, wine bars glow, fire pits blaze, and long lunches stretch into late afternoons. Rain becomes part of the atmosphere rather than something that’s ruining your plans. Whilst Hobart is, in fact, the second driest city in Australia, on the wild west coast, the rain makes you feel alive.
There is an unmistakable connection between Tasmania and Antarctica that shapes the island’s identity. Hobart is one of the world’s official gateway cities to the Antarctic and has a solid track record of polar exploration, science and expeditions.
Fun fact and who knew? Or maybe its common knowledge and I never paid attention in school, Tasmania was once physically connected to Antarctica as part of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. Ok, so they broke up around 33 million years ago when the universe shifted and Tasmania left Antarctica to chase Australia across the ocean. Still, their love story endures. Parts of Tasmania’s rainforest ecosystems are considered Antarctic relict forests, with surviving remnants of landscapes that once stretched across both continents. Armed with this knowledge, the further south you travel in Tassie, the more the island begins to feel less like the bottom of Australia and more like the edge of Antarctica itself.
A Tasmanian road trip in winter is all-encompassing; over five days, we crossed dairy country, rainforest, mining towns, alpine wilderness, hydro regions, convict history, harbour cities, and ancient river systems, often all in one day. And here’s where I must pay a massive shout out to our driver, Junaidi. There is nothing this man doesn’t know about Tasmania, its history, culture and, importantly, every single place to eat and drink if you want home-grown Tassie produce. I’d give a kidney for his little black book.
Few places in Australia compress this much ecological and emotional contrast into relatively short distances. The route itself tells the story of Tasmania, beginning in Launceston’s famed food and wine culture, pushing north for a quick stop at Penguin, then south through the dramatic scars of Queenstown and the Macquarie Harbour wilderness, before dropping into the stillness of Lake St Clair and Pumphouse Point, then finishing in Hobart, where art, history, food and science all collide.
I reckon Tasmania has grown into itself. She feels culturally comfortable, confident, and uninterested in proving herself to anyone. The island is doubling down on exactly what it already is, and what it is, increasingly to me, is joyfully fascinating.
The trip kicked off in Launceston beside the Tamar River at Peppers Silo Hotel, a fabulous example of Tasmania’s obsession with adaptive reuse: silos become hotels, flour mills become restaurants, an asylum becomes a fine dining cooking school, and hydro infrastructure becomes luxury accommodation. Tasmania rarely bulldozes its history; with careful respect to its past, it repurposes it for the future.
Dinner at Stillwater set the tone. Housed inside a restored 1830s flour mill at the mouth of the Cataract Gorge, the restaurant has become one of the island’s dining institutions, birthed into existence by (co-founder) Kim Seagram, one of the women who fundamentally changed how Tasmania’s food and tourism culture is viewed nationally. Long before Tasmania became shorthand for premium produce and destination dining, Canadian Seagram understood the island had the raw ingredients to become something far more significant. She also serves as the chair of FermenTasmania, overseeing fermentHQ , which is basically a “proving ground” where startups, commercial producers, and researchers can test, scale, and commercialise fermented products. The food and service was exceptional, but more than that, it was deeply connected to place, and that confidence continued across the state.
The following morning, we boarded the West Coast Wilderness Railway and headed toward Queenstown through rainforest and mining country under low cloud and soft rain. Seriously, Tasmania should charge extra for tricky weather because it transforms the landscape into something quite spectacular.
There is a hardness to the West Coast that Tasmania doesn’t try to soften, and the railway itself tells much of that story. Vast rainforest, black rivers, sudden weather shifts and tiny towns pressed against enormous mountain systems. At Queenstown Station, the West Coast Wilderness Railway Museum sits at the heart of a story shaped by copper, engineering and isolation. The railway was originally built in the 1890s by the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company to move copper from Queenstown’s mines to the port at Strahan, across some of Tasmania’s toughest terrain.
Queenstown still carries the weight of that history. By the late 1800s, Mount Lyell had become one of Australia’s most important copper mining fields, driving industrial-scale mining, logging, smelting and environmental change across the region. In 1912, the North Mount Lyell mining disaster claimed the lives of 42 miners in an underground fire, and its tragedy that remains a dark chapter in Tasmania’s mining history.
The line also stops at Lynchford and Rinadeena, both proudly carrying their own stories of gold mining, labour and isolation. Yet beyond the hardship is the ingenuity of the railway, the endurance of its communities and the stunning beauty of a place that has never hidden its scars.
And the lunch on board was a cracker.
Curated by emerging young gun Lily Trethowan, the Tasmanian chef and Dark Mofo feature talent, our dining experience was designed with a menu that read like a who’s who of Tasmania’s producers, places, and personalities.
Tarkine oysters, freshly shucked with Tasmanian sparkling from Leven Valley Vineyard before boarding, gave way to a culinary journey featuring, among others, Ghost Rock wines, Freycinet Marine Farm scallops, Willie Smith’s cider, Federation Chocolate, Mama Pastry, La Cantara Cheese, Furneaux Distillery’s unpeated single malt, a whisky cream from Hellyers Road Distillery and, somewhere along the way, a cherry gin from the fabulously named Tasmaniac Distillers.
And who knew, Tasmania has become a serious cherry export powerhouse. In the 25/26 season, the state exported more than 2,740 tonnes of cherries and delivered a record export value for the industry – to the tune of $70 million for those of you asking. Make sure you shop for Tassie cherries this Christmas.
The meal was regional, confident and very proudly interconnected. Every course referenced another Tasmanian producer, maker and landscape.
Alice Laing of Tasman Sea Salt also jumped on board for a quick chat on all things salt, and she is very representative of modern Tasmania: thoughtful, environmentally driven, ambitious and deeply passionate about the place she chose to call home. Originally from Scotland, and later living in London, Alice couldn’t understand why Tasmanians were importing sea salt flakes from overseas when they lived beside some of the cleanest ocean water on earth. She moved with her partner, Chris, back to his homeland and built Tasman Sea Salt on the east coast, using solar power during the day and ocean thermal energy at night to evaporate seawater, producing salt that quite literally tastes of the Southern Ocean and the environment.
Tasmania’s agricultural story runs deep. Dairy country stretches endlessly across rolling green hills. Some of the world’s cleanest air moves across these regions. Honey producers near Cradle Mountain work within ecosystems almost impossibly rich in biodiversity. Tasmania produces around 60 per cent of Australia’s leatherwood honey, one of the few honeys in the world tied directly to ancient rainforest species.
This relationship between wilderness and food sits beneath almost every Tasmanian experience. You get the sense that Tasmania’s producers are less interested in scale and more interested in quality, provenance and specificity. As Alice puts it, “Tasmanian producers use our salt in their products as well now. People want things to be really, really uniquely Tasmanian.”
I lapped this up.
At Risby Cove in Strahan, overlooking Macquarie Harbour, owner Jacinta Young has taken a former industrial waterfront site and turned it into one of the West Coast’s most considered stays, without sanding back its past. Once home to the Risby Bros sawmill, (see what I did there) Jacinta has created a design-led boutique retreat where heritage, wilderness and Tasmanian creativity all live together.
Its twelve suites, The Mill, and Risby’s Restaurant draw on local art, timber, and produce, with private harbourfront dining and e-bike storytelling tours, kayaking, hot tubs and sauna sessions beneath the stars all on offer. What makes it work is that the design doesn’t feel imported or overdone.
The Gordon River cruise deepens this feeling further for me. There are few places in Australia where beauty and brutality sit so closely together. Ancient Huon pine forests, among the rarest and slowest-growing timbers in the world, exist beside stories of convict labour and brutal punishment. But even the word “wilderness” needs some care here. These landscapes may feel remote to visitors, but they’re not empty. They hold Aboriginal history, cultural knowledge and continuing connection, as well as the later stories of convicts, miners, piners and settlers. Sarah Island remains one of the harshest penal settlements established by the British Empire, yet today it sits surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty and is very much a must visit.
That tension followed me into Hobart and the Cascades Female Factory, easily one of the most emotionally affecting experiences of the trip and another must-do when visiting the city. Around 7,000 convict women and girls passed through the site between 1828 and 1856, and the stories are confronting: institutional control, punishment, forced migration, separation from children, hard labour and occasionally, against all odds survival.
The beautifully monikered Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls tour brought much of that history into sharp focus. These women may have been labelled “strumpets” by the systems that judged them, but after hearing stories of grit, defiance and sheer determination, I’d offer any one of them a place to call home. Frankly, in context, strumpet sounds less like an insult and more like a badge of honour.
What I loved most about the Female Factory is how carefully Tasmania is working to bring these women, whose stories were diminished or rewritten entirely, back into view. Two hundred years on, their lives are given weight and humanity. In The Strumpets tour, there’s just enough irreverence to remind you that these women weren’t passive victims; they were feisty, passionate women who resisted and endured.
At Mona’s newly opened Electra exhibition, I found myself standing for a longish time in front of an homage to Anselm Kiefer’s sculpture “Sappho”, which honours the ancient Greek poet whose largely lost work now stands as a powerful symbol of women’s creativity, intellect and cultural erasure across history. After the Female Factory, Sappho felt loaded with meaning: women’s voices partially preserved, women’s stories filtered through others and remembered only in fragments.
The whole trip felt connected with an unexpected thread. Tasmania seems unusually willing to sit with complexity: women’s stories, colonial violence, wilderness, food, science, art and the theatrics of winter. It also made the women shaping the island feel even more significant now, as they drive Tasmania’s modern cultural engine.
New Yorker-turned-Tassie woman Dr Margo Adler’s Beaker Street Festival blends science, culture and art in a way that reflects this energy. By all accounts Beaker Street Festival is smart science, slightly eccentric, loads of fun and distinctly Tasmanian. There is a real entrepreneurial spirit at play across the board here that feels very different to mainland start-up culture: less pitch deck power hustle and a more considered passion project, with weather and the environment central to the mix.
Arden Retreat near Richmond is another bloody marvellous example of this Tassie spirit. Their “It’s Bloody Cold Mary” bathhouse ritual became one of the standout experiences of the entire trip. The four-hour wood-fired sauna, cold plunge and outdoor hot tub ritual is designed to be relished in the freezing winter air, with clear skies and stars above, bush silence all around you, and a Bloody Mary in hand using Killara Tasmanian Vodka, distilled just down the road in Richmond, founded by another Tassie woman Kristy Booth – Lark.
The whole experience sounds mildly ludicrous when you write it, but in real life, it was bloody brilliant, wellness with a bit of fun which is exactly how it should be done.
The owners, Alice and Tristan Burns, are having a genuine crack at building something niche, experiential and oh so very Tasmanian. Arden is connected to its environment; the cold and the stillness are the point and if that’s not enough, Alice also happens to hold her own in academia, working within science and engineering, because why not? These Tassie women are building a thoroughly modern story.
Tasmania very much understands the value of atmosphere. You feel that at Pumphouse Point on Lake St Clair, where old hydro infrastructure has become one of the country’s most atmospherically divine wilderness stays, and where a fireside Stillwater whisky tasting feels entirely at home, evidently, I am quite the fan of a French Oak. You feel it at The Agrarian Kitchen in New Norfolk, where exceptional produce, sprawling gardens and the somewhat sad energy of the old Willow Court asylum precinct combine into something far more memorable than standard fine dining. Even a truffled toastie and s’mores over the firepit at The Kiosk came with a small dose of history and a big whack of sugar to boot.
Tasmania consistently pairs beauty with discomfort and somehow makes both more interesting as a result. And then there is Hobart after dark.
Winter suits the city, especially if you’re on a wild seafood cruise under black skies, sipping LARK whisky and eating abalone fresh from Tasmanian waters. Back on the waterfront, Aloft and its more relaxed contemporary, Maria, with her distinct Amalfi after-dark vibe, complete with an old-school DJ mixing vinyl, are both on Brooke Street Pier, and deliver exceptional Off-Season menus, with Tassie service second to none.
Tasmania’s greatest strength is that very little feels overproduced. By the end of the trip, what stayed with me most was not one specific experience, but the overwhelming sense that Tasmania has stopped trying to explain itself to outsiders. It feels completely comfortable being exactly what it is: dark, creative, complicated, wild, cold, beautiful, thoughtful, occasionally and fabulously offbeat, and in the off-season, well, that’s when Tasmanians really turn it on.