Hobart

A sealed road runs to the top, twenty minutes up from the centre, and the summit is bare rock above the tree line with wind strong enough that you hold the car door. Columns of dolerite called the Organ Pipes line the eastern face.

Sandstone warehouses from the 1830s line the dock in one unbroken row, shops and bars inside them now. On Saturday stalls take over the road in front, selling wooden boards, honey and vegetables. Kelly's Steps behind climb into Battery Point.

A gallery cut into a riverbank hill, half an hour upstream from the dock by boat. The entrance is the top floor, so you descend as you look, and the windowless rooms take the hour away. One man built it privately on gambling money, and the choices show.

A prison built at the peninsula's tip for convicts who offended again. It carries a World Heritage listing. The Separate Prison used silence as punishment instead of the lash. Each man was hooded, so none knew another's face or voice.

The island is two pieces joined by a thin neck of sand. Wooden steps on the neck put both seas in view at once, and little penguins burrow in the dunes below. A vehicle ferry crosses and the last sailing is early, so check the return first.

A fifteen-minute walk from the car park brings Russell Falls, dropping in tiers. In the forest above grows the tallest of all flowering trees, high enough that your neck aches looking up. Climb higher in the same park and you reach snow country.

The houses where dock workers and sailors lived are still there on the hill. The lanes are only just wide enough for a car, and Arthur Circus is a ring of sixteen cottages around a green that is still shared.

Two blocks in from the docks, and nobody takes money. In one room Tasmanian Aboriginal history is set out in the words of Aboriginal people, and another holds the mounted skin and skeleton of the thylacine, the last of which died in 1936.

Convicts cut the sandstone for this bridge in 1825 and traffic still crosses it, and being the oldest stone bridge left in Australia it shows six arches whole in the water when seen from the bank below.

A squared basin at the heart of Hobart where boats come right in. Yachts that left Sydney on 26 December start arriving two or three days later, and people stand along the edge until the new year. Punts selling fish are moored on the rim.

From 1828 convict women were locked up and put to work here; in 2010 it became World Heritage as one of the Australian Convict Sites. The buildings are mostly gone, leaving only high stone walls. A short tour inside has an actor tell one woman's life.

A sanctuary at Brighton to the north that rescues injured animals, nurses them and lets them go again in the bush. Here you hear up close the shriek Tasmanian devils make tearing at food. Night tours find wombats and quolls moving in the dark.

A car-free island reached by ferry from Triabunna, an east-coast town; you walk or cycle. Wombats graze the lawns of the old convict settlement, paying people no attention. At low tide, the Painted Cliffs reveal rippled bands in the sandstone.

Free gardens laid out in 1818, the second oldest in Australia. Paths wind between old walled beds and a Japanese garden given by the sister city of Yaizu. The slope looks over the Derwent, a fine walk at sunset.

The road to Port Arthur crosses the narrow neck where the Tasman Peninsula begins. Shore rock split as if tiled, the Tessellated Pavement, and the wave-cut Tasman Arch lie minutes apart. Walk out onto the rock platform at low tide.