Tasmania

Tasmania is Australia's oldest child who moved out and never came back. When Bass Strait flooded 12,000 years ago, the land bridge to the mainland disappeared. The island evolved alone. When Europeans arrived, they called it Van Diemen's Land and made it a dumping ground for the empire's worst convicts—80,000 transported between 1803 and 1853, to a place already inhabited by Aboriginal people who'd lived there for 35,000 years. In 1856, the colony petitioned to erase the convict stain by changing its name to Tasmania. The stigma faded. The isolation didn't.

By 2025, Tasmania has 574,705 people—the smallest state population except the Northern Territory. The median age is 42, four years older than the national average of 38. Twenty-one percent of the population is over 65. Tasmania grows at 0.2% annually, the slowest rate in Australia. Young people leave for Melbourne and Sydney, chasing jobs that don't exist on an island of half a million. Net overseas migration now drives what little growth remains, but immigrants arrive older. The demographic profile is senescence written in census data: increasing median age, declining innovation, risk aversion, reliance on mature stable industries.

The island compensates through autotrophy. Tasmania generates 90% of its electricity from renewables—hydroelectric power stations in the Derwent Valley, wind farms along the coasts. It's one of the rare places that produces more clean energy than it consumes, exporting surplus to Victoria via Basslink, the undersea cable that pulses 500 megawatts beneath Bass Strait. Tourism employs 10.9% of the workforce (31,919 jobs), followed by education and aquaculture. The economy runs on what the island can produce locally or sell to visitors—wine, salmon, opium poppies for pharmaceuticals, Port Arthur's convict ruins, the wilderness that covers 40% of the state.

But Tasmania's icon is the Tasmanian devil, the marsupial carnivore found nowhere else. Since 1996, devil facial tumor disease has killed 80% of the wild population. The cancer is transmissible—devils bite each other during mating and feeding, spreading malignant cells. Isolation created an apex predator with no competitors. Isolation also meant no genetic diversity to resist novel disease. The mainland doesn't have devils. The island can't import resistance. Conservation efforts maintain captive populations, hoping the tumors evolve toward benignity or the devils evolve immunity. It's a race between extinction and adaptation on an isolated population with nowhere to run.

By 2026, Tasmania faces the same calculus: small isolated population, aging demographics, youth emigration draining the gene pool, energy self-sufficiency masking economic dependence on tourism and exports. The island is K-selected—mature, stable, slow-growing, investing in quality over quantity. The mainland is r-selected—fast iteration, high churn, constant reinvention. When you're separated by water and time, you either adapt to isolation or you wait for the bridge that will never be built. Bass Strait flooded 12,000 years ago. It's still rising.