There’s an otherworldly quality to Tasmania, with its gothic landscape of rain clouds and brooding mountains. This was a prison island whose name, Van Diemen’s Land, was so redolent with horror that when convict transport ended in 1852 it was immediately changed. Yet the island has another, friendlier side to it too, with distances comprehensible to a European traveller – it’s roughly the size of Ireland – and resonant echoes of England: cream teas, old-fashioned B&Bs and amiable, homespun people. In winter, when the grass is green, the gentle and cultivated midlands, with their rolling hills, dry stone walls and old stone villages, are reminiscent of England’s West Country. Town names, too, invariably invoke the British Isles – Perth, Swansea, Brighton and Somerset among them. It’s a “mainlander’s” joke that Tasmania is twenty years behind the rest of Australia, and it’s true that in some ways it is very old-fashioned, a trait that is by turn charming and frustrating. However, things are changing fast: with a new arts festival and a literary festival, the island is keen to promote itself as a cultural centre, and most towns now have internet access thanks to federal government funding.