Tasmania Honey
Four thousand vehicles cross the Richmond Bridge each day. Convicts cut its sandstone in 1823, and it is the oldest bridge still in use in Australia. In Hobart, half an hour south, the Theatre Royal has staged shows since 1837, and the Cascade Brewery sold its first beer in 1832. At Oatlands, the Callington Mill lost its sails around 1900, burned out in 1913, spent decades as the town’s water reservoir, and grinds flour again.
Tasmania sits about 240 kilometres south of the Australian mainland. The strait between them flooded as the last ice age ended, roughly twelve thousand years ago, and the sea did not close over the Bassian Plain until around eight thousand years ago. Palawa oral traditions recorded in the early nineteenth century describe the flooding. The island is about the size of the Republic of Ireland. More than thirty thousand square kilometres of it, nearly half, is dolerite – the largest expanse of that rock on earth. It stands in columns at Cradle Mountain, at the Organ Pipes above Hobart, and along the sea cliffs of the Tasman Peninsula. The interior is steep and mostly dolerite, so settlement went to the coast and the midlands and stayed there. A quarter of the state is World Heritage.
A stand of Huon pine on Mount Read is a single clonal organism, dated by pollen record past ten and a half thousand years. In the Franklin valley, Kutikina Cave holds deposits about twenty thousand years old: people lived here through the coldest part of the last glacial period, further south than anyone else on earth at the time. Their descendants are the Palawa. The wukalina Walk on the northeast coast is Palawa-owned and Palawa-guided. Palawa kani, the reconstructed language, is taught to children from infancy, and its names are on road signs and park gates – kunanyi, takayna, larapuna, lutruwita.
The island runs about 300 kilometres north to south, and the loop is a week’s driving. Roads through the middle are single-lane. The ferry crosses overnight from Geelong, an hour southwest of Melbourne, and lands at Devonport on the north coast. Salamanca Market has run on the Hobart waterfront every Saturday since 1972. At Mole Creek, the Stephens family have extracted honey since 1920, now in their fourth generation.
Food
Tasmania was the Apple Isle for a century. On 1 January 1973 Britain joined the European Economic Community, the export market closed, and a government tree-pull scheme paid orchardists to bulldoze their trees – about 1.88 million of them between 1972 and 1975, with some 700 growers leaving the industry. Production halved in three years. What you eat here now grew out of what came after: the orchards that held on and turned to cider, a whisky industry built from nothing in the 1990s, oysters and scallops from cold water, and truffles from ground nobody had asked that of before.
An 1888 orchard that outlived the tree-pull, the state's only mussel farm, a distillery that needed the law changed, and Australia's first black truffle
Willie Smith's Apple Shed, Grove, Huon Valley -- Artisan Market Saturdays 10am to 2pm. The orchard was planted in 1888 and is still worked by the same family, now certified organic and Australia's first organic cidery. The Apple Museum on site tells the Apple Isle story, including the part where it ended. The Huon Valley is 40 minutes south of Hobart and the road continues to Hastings Caves and the Tahune forest.
Freycinet Marine Farm, Coles Bay -- kitchen 9am to 3pm. Oysters grown in Great Oyster Bay and eaten at a bench looking at the water, and the only mussel farm in the state. The scallop pie is Tasmania's vernacular dish and the farm serves one in winter. Farmed Atlantic salmon is on menus across the state, and where its pens should sit has been argued over here for years. Farm tours moved to a separate operator, Oyster Bay Tours, from around $170 a head, so they are booked away from the farm. Coles Bay is the gateway to Freycinet National Park and Wineglass Bay.
Lark Distillery, Pontville -- daily 10am to 4pm, tours at noon and 2pm, around $70. Distilling was banned in the colony in 1839. Federation restored the right in 1901 but set a minimum still size that put small-scale distilling out of reach, and it stayed out of reach until Bill and Lyn Lark had the rule changed and took the first licence in 1992. There are now more than seventy distilleries in Tasmania. Lark's stills sit on a nineteenth-century estate half an hour north of Hobart; Sullivans Cove at Cambridge, closer to the airport, was named the world's best single malt in 2014, the only Australian whisky to win that title. Tasmanian Whisky Week runs in early August.
The Truffle Farm, Deloraine -- hunts year-round, roughly $140 to $205. Tim Terry grew Australia's first black truffle here in 1999. The farm runs hunts with dogs through both seasons, black in winter and white in summer, which few places anywhere can offer. Deloraine sits between Launceston and Cradle Mountain, twenty minutes from Mole Creek.
Culture
The colonial record declared the Palawa extinct. They were not, and the evidence is not an argument but a set of operating businesses: the wukalina Walk is Palawa-owned and Palawa-guided, and palawa kani, the reconstructed language, is taught to children from infancy and now carries more than two hundred place names in a public app with audio. The rest of the cultural layer runs at a similar scale. A community boatyard in the Huon still builds in Huon pine and celery top. A play in Strahan has run almost nightly since 1994. And a private museum cut into the sandstone at Berriedale has become the reason a good many people come at all.
A four-day walk on returned country, a working boatyard, Australia's longest-running play, and a museum you arrive at by ferry
wukalina Walk -- four days and three nights, season September to April, from about $3,300. Palawa-owned, Palawa-operated and Palawa-guided, across wukalina and larapuna in the northeast. Guests sleep at krakani lumi, a standing camp built for it, and a night at the Eddystone Point lightkeeper's cottage. Elders travel with the group. The 2026-27 season is on sale and it books out; this is planned months ahead, not dropped into.
The Wooden Boat Centre, Franklin -- 10am to 3pm Monday to Friday and Sunday, closed Saturday. A community-owned working boatyard on the Huon River where traditional boats are still built by hand from Huon pine and celery-top pine, and where students come to learn it. You walk through a shed with work in progress, not a display. Franklin is 50 minutes south of Hobart, on the same road as the Apple Shed. The Australian Wooden Boat Festival, the largest gathering of wooden vessels in the southern hemisphere, runs in Hobart every second February -- next 5 to 8 February 2027, and free.
"The Ship That Never Was", Strahan -- daily at 5:30pm, September to May, around $30. Australia's longest-running play, staged continuously since January 1994 in a town of about 650 people. It tells the 1834 hijacking of the brig Frederick by convicts from Sarah Island, which is the penal station out in Macquarie Harbour that the Gordon River cruises pass. Two actors and a great deal of audience participation.
Mona, Berriedale -- Thursday to Monday 10am to 5pm, closed Tuesday and Wednesday, around $40. Reached best by the ferry from Brooke Street Pier, about half an hour up the Derwent. The galleries are underground, cut into the sandstone. Dark Mofo, its midwinter solstice festival, returns each June. Two cautions: Mona usually closes for a fortnight in August for maintenance, so check before booking that month, and Mona Foma, the summer festival, ended permanently in 2024 despite still appearing in older listings.
The open-air galleries -- Hobart's laneway walls, a whole town painted, and the free rooms behind Salamanca
Hobart's Urban Art Walls. Creative Hobart turns city walls into a canvas, concentrated in Bidencopes Lane off Liverpool Street, where local and visiting artists repaint the walls at regular paint jams -- the free, changing counterpart to the museums up the river. The Urban Art Walls program. (City of Hobart)
Sheffield, the Town of Murals. A dairy town below Mount Roland, on the road to Cradle Mountain, that painted its way out of a downturn from 1986 on: more than two hundred outdoor murals now, telling the district's history across shopfronts and side walls, with a self-guided map from the visitor centre. Each November nine artists paint new works over a week at Mural Fest, free to watch. The Sheffield murals and Mural Fest. (Sheffield Visitor Information Centre)
Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart. Behind the Saturday market, a warren of old sandstone warehouses holds working studios and free galleries -- the Long Gallery, Kelly's Garden, and a Lightbox lit around the clock -- open through the week when the stalls are gone. Salamanca Arts Centre. (Salamanca Arts Centre)
Natural History
On the Pieman River in the northwest, a short boardwalk at Corinna runs through cool-temperate rainforest to an old Huon pine leaning out over the tea-dark water – a living tree of a species that passes two thousand years. Most of what Tasmania protects is old like this: rainforest of Gondwanan lineage, eucalypts over ninety metres. The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area covers more than 1.58 million hectares, close to a quarter of the state, inscribed in 1982 on four natural criteria and three cultural ones – more than any other property on the list at the time – and more than 80 per cent of it is zoned wilderness. It is not protected from everything: the 2019 fires killed fifteen of the twenty-five largest trees then known in Tasmania.
A twenty-minute boardwalk among two-thousand-year-old trees, a car-free island where the devils are, Australia's highest sea cliffs, and the last breeding ground of a bird that got down to seventeen
Corinna and the Gordon River -- year-round. Huon pine is a podocarp rather than a true pine, and individual trees pass two thousand years. The Huon Pine Walk at Corinna is a twenty-minute boardwalk through living stands. From Strahan on the west coast, the Gordon River cruises run up into rainforest and land at a boardwalk there. The timber resists rot and carries its scent because of its methyl eugenol content, which is also why convicts were sent to cut it at Sarah Island.
Maria Island -- ferry from Triabunna, no cars on the island. One of the best places in Tasmania to see a devil -- from a disease-free population moved onto the island in 2012 -- along with wombats and Cape Barren geese, on an island you cross on foot or by bike. Be accurate about what you are seeing: the state environment department reports declines of up to 80 per cent where the facial tumour disease has been present for several years, and states there is no evidence yet of that decline stopping. A second, separately arisen tumour has also been identified. Water and electrical works are ongoing around the Darlington township.
The Tasman Peninsula -- Three Capes Track, four days, booked ahead. Parks Tasmania describes these as Australia's highest sea cliffs, and the columns you are standing on are the same dolerite as Cradle Mountain. Cape Pillar and Cape Hauy can also be walked as day trips from Fortescue Bay without the full track. Ninety minutes from Hobart, and the same road serves Port Arthur.
Melaleuca, Southwest National Park -- reached by light aircraft, or on foot at the end of the Port Davey and South Coast tracks. The only breeding site of the orange-bellied parrot, which bottomed out at as few as seventeen birds in the wild. Releases from a captive programme produced 105 nestlings in the 2025 season, the highest since monitoring began in 1994, and the population still depends entirely on those releases continuing. Tasmania's other critically endangered parrot, the swift parrot, is down to around 750 mature birds, and its breeding success tracks the blue gum and black gum nectar flow.
Built Heritage
At Brickendon, near Longford, the Archer family still farm the ground they were granted in 1824, among the granary, chapel and woolshed that assigned convicts built for them – the seventh generation on the same land. This is the unusual part of convict Tasmania: not that the buildings survived, but how many are still doing their jobs – bridges under traffic, a farm still farmed by the family it was granted to, a brewery still brewing. Over 75,000 convicts served time in Van Diemen’s Land between 1803 and 1853; the exact number cannot be established, and the largest database holds 76,820 entries, some of them men transported twice. Transportation ran here thirteen years longer than in New South Wales, and when the Australian Convict Sites were World Heritage-listed in 2010, five of the eleven were Tasmanian.
A farm worked by the same family for seven generations, a convict stonemason who carved his way to a pardon, the site that refuses re-enactment, and a copper town arguing about whether to let the hills go green
Brickendon and Woolmers, Longford -- combined ticket around $50, twenty minutes south of Launceston. Two adjoining estates that show the assignment system, under which convicts were handed to private masters rather than held in a station; between them they held the second-largest private convict workforce in the colonies. Brickendon is still farmed by the Archer family. A 2.8-kilometre Convict Farm Walk links the two properties.
Ross and Campbell Town -- free, open, no booking. The Ross Bridge was finished in 1836 and carries 186 carvings by Daniel Herbert, a convict stonemason who was granted a pardon for the work. The carvings appear in no construction record and were never officially approved. Ten minutes north at Campbell Town, the Red Bridge was built between 1836 and 1838 from around 1.25 million convict-made bricks and still carries the A1. The Ross Female Factory, the most archaeologically intact female-convict site in the country, is also free. Oatlands, half an hour south, holds Australia's largest collection of Georgian architecture.
Port Arthur -- daily 9am to 5pm, around $55 valid for two days, ninety minutes from Hobart. A secondary-punishment station from 1830 to 1877 that held around 12,500 convicts, with the Separate Prison built for silence and Point Puer, a boys' prison, across the water. The ticket includes an introductory tour and a harbour cruise; the Isle of the Dead is about $50 extra and ghost tours run after dark. The site also holds the memorial to the 1996 massacre, and it sets the terms: the Broad Arrow Cafe's shell was kept, the garden is screened by planting rather than signposted, costumed re-enactment is refused anywhere on site, and anyone coming solely to pay respects is admitted free. Few guides mention that last part.
Queenstown and the West Coast Wilderness Railway. Copper has been mined here since 1894, and smelter fumes stripped the hills bare enough that the bare hills became the reason people came. They are now slowly regrowing, and there has been genuine local argument about whether the regreening is a heritage loss. The Mount Lyell mine has been on care and maintenance since 2014; a decision on restarting was expected during 2026. The railway, built in 1896 to serve the mine, is Australia's only Abt rack-and-pinion line, climbing gradients of one in sixteen. Shorter journeys run from both ends -- the full Queenstown-to-Strahan through-run is not currently operating.
I want to dig deeper
Four things in Tasmania resist being fitted into a touring week. Each needs its own planning, and several have windows that close. One is a river reachable only by committing eight days or more to it. One is Australia’s best-known alpine walk, which sells out the morning bookings open. One is a country of dams, power stations and drowned valleys where Australia’s environmental movement started. The last is two islands out in Bass Strait, reached by air, one of them holding a site the Aboriginal community asks visitors to enter quietly.
Eight days on the river that stopped a dam, a six-day alpine crossing that sells out in a morning, a power-station road trip with a village on borrowed time, and the island where the first Aboriginal petition to a monarch was written
The Franklin River -- October to early February, and departures run on minimum numbers. The full run is about 110 kilometres, finishing at Sir John Falls on the Gordon, over eight to ten days, at roughly $4,000 to $4,800. Three operators run it: Water by Nature, Franklin River Rafting, and Tasmanian Expeditions, who pioneered the trip in 1978. Shorter options exist -- five days on the lower river, or six to seven on the upper and middle with an optional day walk up Frenchmans Cap, reached by four-wheel drive from Queenstown and a steep 350-metre climb. Water levels set the pace, and in low midsummer flow the longer trips are the better choice. This is the river the 1982-83 blockade was fought over: it began on 14 December 1982, the same day UNESCO listed the Tasmanian Wilderness, and ended with the High Court stopping the dam in 1983.
Cradle Mountain and the Overland Track -- booked season 1 October to 31 May, and it sells out the morning it opens. The track runs 65 kilometres from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair through the World Heritage Area, and Parks Tasmania says most walkers take six days, with optional side trips including Mount Ossa, the state's highest peak at 1,617 metres. During the booked season only 34 independent walkers may set out each day, walking north to south, and the pass runs about $272 to $312 a head depending on age and concession -- which covers park entry for the duration of the walk and the shuttle to the trailhead. Parks reviews the fee annually against CPI, so confirm the current rate when you book. Bookings open at 9am on the first Tuesday in July for the following summer, through a queue; the 2026-27 season opened on 7 July 2026. Huts cannot be reserved and are first-come, so a tent is required rather than optional, and there is no phone reception on the track. The ferry off the far end, from Narcissus across Lake St Clair, has to be booked before you set out rather than on arrival -- the alternative is another 17.5 kilometres along the shore, a further five or six hours. Between 1 June and 23 September the booking system gives way to free registration and either direction is allowed, but Parks is blunt that winter here suits only experienced alpine walkers. For a day rather than a week, the shuttle from the Cradle Mountain Visitor Centre reaches Dove Lake in about twenty minutes, and the six-kilometre circuit around the lake starts there. The shuttle is effectively compulsory: a boom gate closes Dove Lake Road to private vehicles through shuttle hours, there are nine parking spaces at the lake outside them, and campervans and caravans are barred from that road at any hour. Buy the Cradle Mountain day pass that includes the shuttle rather than a general parks pass, which covers neither Cradle Mountain entry nor the bus, and leaves you paying twice. Booking, fees and season dates. (Parks and Wildlife Service Tasmania)
Hydro country -- Waddamana is open year-round, Tarraleah has no closing date but will get one. Waddamana Power Station, commissioned in 1916 as Hydro Tasmania's first, is free and open daily 10am to 4pm from October to April, and Wednesday to Sunday from May to September. There is no catering, mobile coverage is patchy on the way in, and an hour is enough. It sits midway along the self-drive Highlands Power Trail, which runs Bothwell, Waddamana, Penstock Lagoon, Shannon, Miena Dam. Hydro has bought the village at Tarraleah and says it stays open to the public until the construction workforce needs the capacity -- no date has been given. Southwest at Strathgordon, the Gordon Dam wall is 140 metres and can be walked across; the commercial abseil there has not run since early 2020, whatever the listings still say. Lake Pedder was flooded in 1972, and the campaign to save it produced the United Tasmania Group, generally credited as the first political party in the world organised around environmental values -- narrowly ahead of New Zealand's Values Party, formed the same year.
Flinders and King Islands -- by air, and Wybalenna asks for restraint. At Wybalenna on Flinders Island, around 300 exiled Palawa were held between 1833 and 1847, and 107 lie in unmarked graves. Title was handed to the Aboriginal community on 18 April 1999 and the interpretation is Aboriginal-led -- a permanent installation in the chapel written by Nunami Sculthorpe-Green, in her words "our story, our way". It was also a place of agency: the 1846 petition sent from Wybalenna to Queen Victoria was the first from any Aboriginal people to a reigning monarch. The graves are unmarked and underfoot, so stay off the burial ground. King Island, at the other end of the strait, is dairy country -- the creamery was slated to close in 2024, was bought in 2025 and kept about sixty jobs, and the cheese store is open on site.
And one that asks for nothing but a booking and an afternoon.
The cave where an underground river runs under a ceiling of glow-worms
Marakoopa and King Solomons, Mole Creek -- tours daily except Christmas Day; book ahead. An hour west of Launceston, on the road to Cradle Mountain, two show caves sit in the Mole Creek karst. Marakoopa is the one to come for: its lower chamber holds an underground river and, in the dark beyond the lights, a ceiling of glow-worms -- the Underground Rivers and Glow Worms tour is the easy, all-ages walk to reach it, and the Great Cathedral tour climbs by stairway into a high vaulted chamber. King Solomons nearby is the drier cave, hung with flowstone. Entrance is by 45-minute guided tour only and sizes are capped, so book ahead; photography is not allowed in the glow-worm chamber. The caves are five minutes from the Stephens honey factory at Mole Creek and ten from Melita at Chudleigh. Tour times, prices and bookings. (Parks and Wildlife Service Tasmania)
The Honey of Tasmania
The tree that makes Tasmania’s honey grows nowhere else on earth. Leatherwood is a rainforest species of the wet west, where the Roaring Forties come off the Southern Ocean and drop their rain – the rainforest the drier east never grows – in the same forests as the Huon pine and inside much of the same World Heritage boundary, and it flowers for a few weeks in high summer. Beekeepers truck hives into that country and camp with them until the flow ends; more than seventy per cent of the state’s honey comes off public land. In 2020-21, leatherwood accounted for 76 per cent of everything Tasmania produced. When it fails, as it did in 2018-19, state output falls by about two-thirds – there is no pasture crop underneath it large enough to take the weight. The midlands do make clover honey and there is a small leptospermum industry, but the honey people come for is the one that depends on the forest staying where it is. The Tasmanian Beekeepers Association was formed in 1946 over leatherwood apiary sites, and has been arguing about access ever since. Nearly all of what it produces is sold within the state.
The Honey Road
One itinerary, running the same loop as the rest of the island. New-season leatherwood reaches shelves from late summer, after a flow that runs roughly December to April.
Hobart and the Huon -- year-round; markets Saturday and Sunday. Start in town, where the range is widest before you go looking for the source. Salamanca Market runs Saturdays 8:30am to 3pm and Heritage Honey holds site 283, with an observation hive on the stall and honeys from sites between Dover and Strahan. Farm Gate Market on Bathurst Street runs Sundays 8:30am to 1pm, producers only, where Grumpy Bee sells cold-extracted leatherwood from Huon and West Coast sites. Wellington Apiary has no shop of its own but is stocked at Hill Street Grocer, Salamanca Fresh and Wursthaus. Then take the Huon Highway south: the Apple Shed at Grove and the wooden boat sheds at Franklin are on the same road as The Honey Pot at Huonville, open 10am to 4pm, with its sister shop Bruny Island Honey at Great Bay open 9am to 4:30pm. Both are the Wright family's, working about a thousand hives with leatherwood sites in the southwest.
Perth and Launceston -- Monday to Friday, plus Saturday mornings. Coming north up the midlands you pass Oatlands, Ross and Campbell Town before reaching Perth, fifteen minutes south of Launceston, where The Tasmanian Honey Company has had a shop on Main Road since 1978. Open 9am to 4:30pm weekdays, and Saturdays 10am to 2pm through December to February. This is Julian Wolfhagen's company, the one that put leatherwood honey on the Slow Food Ark of Taste. The hives themselves are not visitable. In Launceston, Harvest Market on Cimitiere Street runs Saturdays 8:30am to 12:30pm, where Honey Tasmania and West-Bee both hold stalls -- note that Honey Tasmania's old Quadrant Mall and Exeter shops have both closed, whatever older directories say.
Mole Creek and Chudleigh -- weekdays for the factory, seven days for the farm. An hour west of Launceston, past the Deloraine truffle farm, R. Stephens have been extracting at 25 Pioneer Drive since 1920, now the fourth generation. The shop is on the factory floor and opens weekdays 9am to 4pm, closed public holidays. Their organic leatherwood goes out as Golden Nectar; the clover and blackberry blend is sold only inside Tasmania because supply rarely meets demand. Ten minutes away at Chudleigh, Melita Honey Farm is open seven days with a glass observation hive, honey ice cream made on site, and about fifty honeys -- though not all of them are Tasmanian, so read the labels. Both sit on the road toward Cradle Mountain, and Mole Creek's limestone caves are five minutes on.
Mawbanna and the Tarkine edge -- Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm. The last leg runs northwest along the coast through Devonport and Burnie to Stanley, then twenty minutes inland to Blue Hills Honey at 1858 Mawbanna Road. The Bakes family have worked leatherwood here since 1955, on the edge of the takayna forest the honey actually comes from -- this is as close to the source as a visitor gets. There is an interpretation centre, the Colony Cafe, and mead. Their leatherwood took a Monde Selection Grand Gold in 2016.
There is no guided trip into the leatherwood country itself. The sites are remote, the roads are working forestry and hydro roads, and the beekeepers are camped out there for the season. Blue Hills' interpretation centre and Melita's glass hive are as close to a honey tour as Tasmania offers.
Getting Here
Hobart and Launceston take the direct flights, and between them they cover most of the island – Hobart for the south, the Huon and the Tasman Peninsula; Launceston for the midlands, the north and the run west toward Cradle Mountain.
The Spirit of Tasmania sails overnight from Spirit of Tasmania Quay at 136 Corio Quay Road, North Geelong, about an hour southwest of Melbourne, and lands at East Devonport on the north coast. The crossing runs nine to eleven hours and normally departs at 6:45pm. Arriving with your own vehicle at Devonport puts you an hour from Launceston, an hour from Cradle Mountain, and within reach of the northwest honey country before you have unpacked.
Admission, tour and ferry prices given on this page are indicative only. Most are reviewed annually, several by CPI, and operators change them without notice – confirm the current rate when you book rather than budgeting from these figures.
A car is not optional. The island is roughly 300 kilometres north to south, the loop is about a week’s driving, and the roads through the middle and the west are single-lane, slow and worth the time. Public transport between towns is thin.
Tasmania runs biosecurity checks on arrival at both the ferry and the airports, and fresh fruit and vegetables have to be declared or surrendered. Relevant if you are travelling for honey: used beekeeping equipment is not permitted entry, and bees and apiary products are restricted under a general biosecurity direction issued in response to Varroa mite on the mainland. Buy your honey here and take it home rather than the other way round.
Seasonal Events Not to Miss
Australian Wooden Boat Festival – Hobart, 5 to 8 February 2027. Biennial, the largest gathering of wooden vessels in the southern hemisphere, and the state’s largest free event. Pairs with the working boatyard at Franklin. Dates and programme. (Australian Wooden Boat Festival, Hobart)
Ten Days on the Island – statewide, 12 to 21 March 2027. Biennial, and it deliberately programmes into small towns rather than concentrating in Hobart. Festival dates and touring information. (Ten Days on the Island)
Tasmanian Whisky Week – statewide, 1 to 9 August 2026, nine days for its tenth year, with the Whisky Showcase at Princes Wharf on 8 August. Also the month Mona closes for a fortnight. Programme and venues. (Tasmanian Whisky Week)
Cygnet Folk Festival – Cygnet, Huon Valley, 8 to 10 January 2027, with early-bird tickets from 1 August 2026. Line-up and tickets. (Cygnet Folk Festival)
Taste of Summer and the Sydney to Hobart finish – Hobart waterfront, around 27 December 2026 to 3 January 2027 at Princes Wharf (2026-27 dates to be confirmed). The race starts from Sydney on 26 December and the fleet arrives over the following days. Dates and site. (Taste of Summer, Hobart)
Dark Mofo – Hobart, midwinter. Mona’s solstice festival ran 11 to 22 June in 2026; dates for the next edition have not been published. Note that Mona Foma, the summer festival, ended permanently in 2024. (Dark Mofo, Hobart)
The Unconformity – Queenstown, biennial. Last staged in October 2025, so the next falls in 2027 by its own cadence, but the festival site does not yet carry dates. In the off year, Secret Station runs on the West Coast Wilderness Railway on Saturday 3 October. Festival site. (The Unconformity, Queenstown)
Where to Buy Honey
A family apiary on the edge of the takayna forest, with an interpretation centre and cafe. (Blue Hills Honey, 1858 Mawbanna Road, Mawbanna – Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm.) Leatherwood, manuka, prickly box, meadow, blackberry and pepperberry, with mead tastings.
Fourth-generation leatherwood specialists with a shop on the factory floor. (R. Stephens Apiarists, 25 Pioneer Drive, Mole Creek – weekdays 9am to 4pm, closed public holidays.) Certified-organic leatherwood as Golden Nectar, plus a clover and blackberry blend sold only within Tasmania.
The company that put leatherwood honey on the Slow Food Ark of Taste. (The Tasmanian Honey Company, 25A Main Road, Perth – weekdays 9am to 4:30pm, Saturdays 10am to 2pm December to February.) Leatherwood including bioactive grades, manuka, meadow, blue gum and Christmas bush.
A honey farm with a glass observation hive and ice cream made on site. (Melita Honey Farm, 39 Sorell Street, Chudleigh – open seven days.) Around fifty honeys, though not all are Tasmanian, so the labels are worth reading.
Two shops run by one family from about a thousand hives. (The Honey Pot, 2273 Huon Highway, Huonville – 10am to 4pm; and Bruny Island Honey, 2184 Bruny Island Main Road, Great Bay – 9am to 4:30pm.)
A Hobart producer working sites between Dover and Strahan, with an observation hive on the stall. (Heritage Honey, site 283, Salamanca Market – Saturdays 8:30am to 3pm.)
A producers-only Sunday market in central Hobart. (Farm Gate Market, Bathurst Street – Sundays 8:30am to 1pm.) Grumpy Bee sells cold-extracted leatherwood and MGO-graded manuka here.
Launceston’s Saturday producers’ market. (Harvest Market, 71 Cimitiere Street – Saturdays 8:30am to 12:30pm.) Honey Tasmania and West-Bee both hold stalls; Honey Tasmania’s former Quadrant Mall and Exeter shops are closed, despite older directory listings.
Raw, unheated, coarse-filtered honey sold through Hobart grocers rather than a shopfront. (Wellington Apiary, Hobart.) And French-style cold-extracted crystallised honey from the Channel district. (Miellerie, Woodbridge.) Neither has a shop; both are stocked at Hill Street Grocer, Salamanca Fresh, Wursthaus and Eumarrah.