Your journey begins here...
The Polar Pathways takes you from Sullivans Cove, through the streets of Hobart and as far south as Bruny Island. The Walking Tour is divided into three sections: Sullivans' Cove; Hobart CBD and; the Salamanca precinct - all a leisurely and enjoyable stroll. The Driving Tours take you north beyond Hobart City; up to Mt Wellington; south to Sandy Bay and Kingston and then further south to Bruny Island and to the village of Franklin on the Huon River. |
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| To begin your journey, simply click on the maps to the right or use the navigation buttons to the left. |
There is an ever-present sense of the Antarctic 
in Hobart and its surrounding countryside.
You need look no further than the dolerite columns of Mount Wellington’s Organ Pipes, powerful evidence of our common Gondwana past, or the docks of Sullivans Cove, from where so many Antarcticans set off in search of fame and fortune.
Polar Pathways will take you to these and many more places, following in the footsteps of the pioneers of Antarctic exploration.
Tasmania’s connection with Antarctica goes back a long way. Australia and Antarctica were once joined in the supercontinent of Gondwana. When the break-up happened, Tasmania was last to separate.
Likewise, we share a long human history that started with James Cook’s epic Antarctic voyage of the 1770s. Hobart was a centre for Antarctic sealing and whaling, just as it features in the voyages of Ross and Dumont D’Urville and the expeditions of Mawson, Amundsen and Borchgrevink.
And today, as Australia’s Antarctic headquarters and the location of a major Antarctic research centre, Hobart holds a pre-eminent place among Antarctica’s ‘gateway cities’.
Tasmania: staging post for the Antarctic
The 1773 visit by Captain Tobias Furneaux to a Bruny Island bay he named after his ship, Adventure, was the start of a historical link between Tasmania and Antarctica that endures to this day. Thirty years later, Europeans had begun to live in this remote Southern Ocean outpost. Some of them ventured to newly-discovered subantarctic islands in search of wealth from the sea, in the form of oil and pelts from seals. One of these was John Biscoe. The story of his circumnavigation of Antarctica in 1830-31 is a little-known treasure of Antarctic history, full of discovery, death and near-starvation. He wintered in Hobart on the way, and liked it so much that he later made it his home.
The Frenchman Dumont D’Urville and the Englishman James Clark Ross each made Hobart their base during their great voyages of discovery around 1840. Late in the century Norwegian-born, Australian-resident Carsten Borchgrevink began his ‘British Antarctic Expedition’ – first to winter on the Antarctic mainland – in Hobart. It was here that he ‘discovered’ Louis Charles Bernacchi, who would serve both Borchgrevink’s and Scott’s polar expeditions as a physicist.
We come to the ‘heroic age’ of Antarctic exploration: the age of Amundsen and Scott, Shackleton and the Australian, Mawson. In 1912 Amundsen came to Hobart to report to the world the dramatic news that he had reached the South Pole – a month ahead of Robert Scott.
And it was from Hobart that Douglas Mawson set off on the ‘Australasian Antarctic Expedition’, whose scientific and geographical discoveries are second to none among the ‘heroic’ expeditions. Mawson again departed from Hobart in 1930 for his final Antarctic voyage, in which he discovered the land in which Australia later established its first Antarctic station, to which it gave his name.
To begin your journey, simply click the walking, driving or explorer tabs on this page....
