The Bassian Plain: Ice Age Lands, Stories, and the Birth of Lutruwita/Tasmania
The Bassian Plain — now submerged beneath Bass Strait — was once a vast grassland and savannah linking mainland Australia to Tasmania during the last Ice Age. When sea levels fell more than 100 metres below today’s, the plain stretched from Victoria to northern Tasmania, dotted with rivers, wetlands, and open woodlands. It was home to people, animals, and cultures that left enduring marks in both the land and memory (Lambeck & Chappell 2001; Cosgrove 1999). Its eventual flooding, around 12,000 years ago, reshaped the southern continent and gave rise to lutruwita/Tasmania as we know it today.
Geology and the Ice Age Environment
During the Pleistocene Ice Age (ending ~11,700 years ago), vast ice sheets locked up water and lowered global sea levels (Lambeck et al. 2014). Australia’s southern shelf was exposed, creating the Bassian Land Bridge. Archaeological and geological reconstructions reveal a plain at least 50,000 km² in area, with rivers like the ancestral Tamar flowing northwards, feeding into great lakes and estuaries in the centre of the plain (Rosengren 2018).
The Bassian Plain would have been a mixture of grasslands, wetlands, and patches of dry forest, supporting large populations of grazing animals, including kangaroos, wallabies, and emus. Predators such as the thylacine and Tasmanian devils ranged across it (Prideaux et al. 2010).
When the Holocene warming began around 14,000 years ago, sea levels rose rapidly. By ~12,000 years ago, the land bridge was drowned, isolating Tasmania (Lambeck & Chappell 2001).
Indigenous Stories and the Memory of Flooded Lands
Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) oral traditions tell of a time when the sea rushed in and separated their island from the mainland. These stories are among the world’s oldest continuous cultural memories, potentially preserving recollections from over 12,000 years ago — a remarkable continuity of knowledge (Nunn & Reid 2016; Clark & Kostanski 2022).
In Victoria, Gunditjmara and other peoples of the south also hold stories of the shifting sea and sky. Scholars increasingly recognise these as historical accounts encoded in narrative, offering Indigenous perspectives on Ice Age climate change (Pascoe 2014; Gammage 2011).
The Southern Cross (Crux) plays a major role in Aboriginal sky lore across southern Australia (Hamacher 2012). Some Tasmanian Aboriginal stories connect the stars to seasonal movements, guiding people during the Ice Age when landscapes and coastlines were vastly different. The star group is seen variously as an eagle, a possum in a tree, or a spiritual marker of time and direction, binding earth and sky.
Animals of the Bassian Plain
The plain was a corridor for many iconic animals:
Thylacine and Tasmanian Devil: Widespread across the mainland before retreating to Tasmania (Johnson & Wroe 2003).
Emu and Kangaroos: Common grazers of the open grasslands.
Megafauna (earlier Pleistocene): Species like giant kangaroos (Procoptodon), diprotodons, and marsupial lions (Thylacoleo) roamed before disappearing around 46,000 years ago (Roberts et al. 2001).
Birdlife: Wetland species, pelicans, swans, and ducks thrived in the lakes and waterways.
These animals shaped both ecosystem dynamics and Aboriginal hunting practices, providing food, clothing, and cultural symbolism.
Naming Tasmania and the Bass Strait
The island now known as Tasmania was called lutruwita by its First Peoples, a name that continues in the revived language palawa kani (Ryan 2012). European names came later: Abel Tasman sailed by in 1642, naming it Van Diemen’s Land; the name Tasmania was officially adopted in 1856.
Bass Strait itself was named after George Bass, the English explorer who mapped the passage in 1798. But long before Europeans, Aboriginal stories marked these waters as powerful and dangerous, carrying memories of the once-dry Bassian Plain (Clark & Heydon 2002).
Indigenous Life on the Plain
Archaeological evidence suggests people lived on the Bassian Plain for tens of thousands of years (Cosgrove 1999; Lourandos 1997). Campsites, stone tools, and middens have been found on islands that were once part of the land bridge (such as King Island and Flinders Island). The plain would have supported large, mobile communities, who hunted marsupials, collected shellfish, and burned country to manage grasslands.
As the waters rose, people retreated to higher ground. Oral histories describe groups becoming stranded as the sea advanced, creating both separation and adaptation stories that remain embedded in cultural knowledge (Nunn & Reid 2016).
The Flooding and Transformation
By around 10,000 years ago, Bass Strait was fully formed. The once-rich Bassian Plain lay drowned, with only the Furneaux Islands and King Island as remnants above sea level.
The transformation created isolation:
The Palawa of lutruwita developed unique cultural traditions over millennia, separated from mainland groups (Ryan 2012).
Animal populations diverged: thylacines and devils survived in Tasmania, while dingoes never arrived (Johnson & Wroe 2003).
Stories of the Southern Sky
The Southern Cross, high in the Ice Age sky, was a guiding constellation for Aboriginal people across the south. In Tasmania, its rising and setting marked seasonal changes, while on the Bassian Plain it may have guided journeys across open landscapes and lakes (Hamacher & Norris 2011). Its enduring presence across cultures symbolises continuity, resilience, and navigation.
The Bassian Plain’s Legacy
Though drowned, the Bassian Plain remains visible in seabed mapping and in Aboriginal memory. Today, it represents:
A geological marker of Ice Age climate change.
A cultural landmark, preserved in stories that speak of seas rising and lands lost.
A biological bridge, explaining the distribution of species like the thylacine and Tasmanian devil.
In telling its story, we bring together geology, archaeology, Aboriginal knowledge, and astronomy — a reminder that landscapes change, but stories endure.
Conclusion
The Bassian Plain was once a thriving homeland, where people hunted, stars guided, and animals roamed. Its flooding was both an ecological and cultural turning point: it created lutruwita/Tasmania, reshaped Aboriginal lifeways, and forever changed Australia’s southern frontier.
For today’s readers, it is a story of resilience — of how the First Peoples of Australia held knowledge across 12,000 years, and of how land, sea, and sky remain deeply intertwined.
References
Clark, I. & Heydon, T. 2002, Dictionary of Aboriginal Placenames of Victoria, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Melbourne.
Clark, I. & Kostanski, L. 2022, Stories of the Sea: Remembering Ancient Coastlines and Drowned Landscapes, Aboriginal History Monographs, Canberra.
Cosgrove, R. 1999, ‘Forty-Two Degrees South: The Archaeology of Late Pleistocene Tasmania,’ Journal of World Prehistory, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 357–402.
Gammage, B. 2011, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Hamacher, D. 2012, ‘On Aboriginal Astronomy in Victoria,’ Journal of Astronomical History & Heritage, vol. 15, pp. 121–134.
Hamacher, D. & Norris, R. 2011, Bridging the Gap: Aboriginal Astronomy and Science, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.
Johnson, C. & Wroe, S. 2003, ‘Causes of extinction of vertebrates during the Holocene of mainland Australia: arrival of the dingo, or human impact?’ The Holocene, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 941–948.
Lambeck, K. & Chappell, J. 2001, ‘Sea Level Change Through the Last Glacial Cycle,’ Science, vol. 292, pp. 679–686.
Lambeck, K., Rouby, H., Purcell, A., Sun, Y. & Sambridge, M. 2014, ‘Sea level and global ice volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene,’ PNAS, vol. 111, no. 43, pp. 15296–15303.
Lourandos, H. 1997, Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Nunn, P. & Reid, N. 2016, ‘Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago,’ Australian Geographer, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 11–47.
Prideaux, G. et al. 2010, ‘Extinction implications of a chenopod browse diet for a giant Pleistocene kangaroo,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 277, no. 1680, pp. 2915–2922.
Roberts, R.G., Flannery, T.F., Ayliffe, L.K. et al. 2001, ‘New ages for the last Australian megafauna: continent-wide extinction about 46,000 years ago,’ Science, vol. 292, pp. 1888–1892.
Rosengren, N. 2018, Coastal Geology and Geomorphology of the Bass Strait Region, La Trobe University, Melbourne.
Ryan, L. 2012, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest.
Written, Researched and Directed by James Vegter 16/09/2025
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