The very name Tasmania, once known as Van Diemen’s Land, conjures up grim images of chain-ganged prisoners. The worst of the Australian convict settlements were there, and when I visited I feared being faced with terrible reminders of British brutality.

I need not have worried. The grim but fascinating past is now part of Tasmania’s “heritage”. One of the first things my husband, Kevin, and I did was to take a 40-minute boat trip to Maria Island, where convicts were first dumped in 1825. They had to make the bricks with which to build their blocks of cells, each narrower than a monk’s.

Today you can stay where they once slept, but in considerably greater comfort. The superior convict units, where they put the political prisoners, have been converted for holiday lets. Kangaroos frolic in the grass around the ruins of the penitentiary, and this beautiful little island is a car-free, shop-free nature reserve for walkers and campers. Nobody lives there, except for the rangers.

Maria Island offers the chance for solitude, and though the ironies of Tasmanian history gave us a lot to brood on, a holiday there is not a guilt trip. On the contrary, it’s like visiting the Garden of Eden.

What knocked me out, the moment we arrived on the flight from Melbourne, was the quality of the light, clearer and sharper than I have ever experienced.

The Tasmanian air is said to be the cleanest on the planet, thanks to the island’s southerly latitude and the purifying effect of the Roaring Forties, the prevailing westerly winds that arrive from the Southern Ocean.

Hobart is the biggest city, built around the wharf where the first settlers landed. It has only about 200,000 inhabitants. Tasmania, which is about the size of Ireland, is home to only half a million people — and on a Friday night most of them seemed to be milling around the bars and restaurants on Hobart’s quays.

I couldn’t get over the glossiness and perfection of the fruit and vegetables on sale in the Salamanca Market. I longed to buy basketfuls and start cooking. Instead I bought a smallish breadboard made of the dense, fragrant wood of the huon pine, one of the slowest-growing and longest-living trees on Earth.

I wish that I had bought one of the local handbags, made of skins so soft and fine that they would make Bill Amberg look twice.

I’ll get one next time — for there will be a next time. We might rent one of the pretty period houses in the steep little streets up on Battery Point. On this visit we stayed at the Henry Jones Art Hotel, converted from a former jam factory, and while we were there news came that the hotel had won a Condé Nast Traveller Award.

The quality of the food was another welcome surprise. I have never eaten so many oysters in my life. Tasmanian oysters are not huge, but they are so creamy and tasty that after the first few dozen I even dispensed with the statutory lemon juice.

We also drank extremely well and at Moorilla Estate, just north of Hobart, we had an instructive tasting session. Tasmania produces cool-climate wines — the temperature rarely falls below 5C (40F) in winter or rises above the mid-20sC in summer — so the pinot noir and riesling are especially good. Very little is exported (although the Wine Society stocks some) because the Tasmanians manage to drink most of it themselves.

The contrast between these sybaritic pleasures and the untamed nature of the island’s scenery is surreal. When Charles Darwin visited in 1836 he was amazed by what he saw, because the wildlife is extraordinary.

Tasmania has been cut off from mainland Australia, and everywhere else, for 10,000 years, and there are dozens of weird species that exist nowhere else. Most are marsupials. Some are the size of mice, but two, the Tasmanian devil and the striped thylacine known as the Tasmanian tiger, are scary, dog-sized carnivores.

The Tasmanian tiger is a cousin of the wolf, its wide and wicked jaws permanently agape and at the ready. There has been no confirmed sighting since the last one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.

In the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery I stood watching a two-minute loop on a screen, in grainy black and white, of a caged tiger, desperately clawing at the bars of its cage, turning away to pace and slump, and returning to attack the bars again. “Sad,” I said aloud, thinking I was alone. “Very sad,” a discreet male attendant behind me said. “I can’t even look at it.”

I had bought an Australian first novel, The Hunter, by Julia Leigh, a disturbing story of one man’s obsessive quest for the tiger. Some people think that the animal is still there, lurking in the impenetrable forest on the west of the island. I hope so.

There’s always a serpent in Eden. The tragedy is that on the east of the island the Tasmanian devils are suffering an epidemic of facial cancers, caught from each other through deep wounds inflicted by mutual biting during mating. Contagious cancers are rare, so the phenomenon is of great interest to researchers.

I saw pictures of diseased devils; the red tumours grow to the size of golf balls within a couple of weeks, and are always fatal. There is a campaign addressing this disaster. If nothing were done to isolate and preserve uninfected stock they would simply die out, as would some of the smaller marsupials, such as bettongs and bandicoots. European foxes have somehow slipped, or been slipped, on to the island.

They have no natural predators and will eradicate all the unique small creatures if they are not culled. It’s hard in the modern world for Tasmania to preserve its pristine isolation.

I saw from a safe distance a healthy family of Tasmanian devils at a large bushland animal refuge called Something Wild, an hour by car northwest of Hobart. Leanne Green, the owner, looks after injured and orphaned animals, and is breeding quolls (remember them for Scrabble?). I cuddled one of her koalas, which was not very responsive.

They are permanently stoned because of substances in eucalyptus leaves, their only source of food. I certainly wouldn’t want to cuddle a wombat, which is like a badger without the long striped nose. Its sharp little teeth snapped at Green’s trousers.

Kevin was keen to see a duck-billed platypus and we stood for ages by the river at Something Wild hoping to witness one come by, but with no luck. So we walked up the river to Russell Falls, through a forest of tall trees, and Kevin had to make do with the stuffed platypus in the museum back in Hobart.

Before leaving we stopped off at Barilla Bay shop and restaurant, only a few minutes from Hobart airport, for a last half-dozen of those glorious oysters. As we trudged to departures we were transfixed by a poster: “Enjoyed your stay? Then stay. www.migratetasmania.com.au.” If I were up for a new life, it would be a no-brainer.

Victoria Glendinning was in Australia to talk about her book Leonard Woolf: A Life (Pocket Books, £9.99)

Be a devil

Information For details on walks around Maria Island contact 00613 62342999 or see www.mariaisland walk.com.au .Something Wild animal refuge, 2082 Gordon River Road, National Park (001 362881013, www.somethingwild.com.au ). Preservation of the Tasmanian devil: www.tassiedevil.com.au. The Wilderness Society (www.wilderness.org.au ) campaigns to preserve the environment and wildlife of Australia.

Reading In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World by Nicholas Shakespeare (Vintage, £8.99);The Hunter by Julia Leigh (Faber and Faber, £6.99).

Need to know

Getting there Victoria Glendinning travelled with Turquoise Holidays (01494 678400, www.turquoiseholidays.co.uk). A seven-night self-drive holiday in Tasmania and three nights in Melbourne costs from £1,995pp. The cost includes flights from Heathrow to Melbourne and on to Hobart, car hire and ten nights’ accommodation, including two at the Henry Jones Art Hotel in Hobart. Further information www.discovertasmania.co.uk

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