Largest suburbs in Tasmania

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   Devonport, TAS

   Population 14,481 · Median income $1,093/wk · SEIFA 876

   Devonport stands at the mouth of the Mersey River on Tasmania's north-west coast, about 98 kilometres north of Launceston. For many visitors it is the gateway to the island: the Spirit of Tasmania ferries dock here after crossing Bass Strait, and the port handles a large share of the state's freight. The Mersey Bluff, with its 1889 lighthouse and headland reserve, guards the river mouth, while the fertile red-soil country inland grows vegetables such as potatoes, onions and peas. The modern city was formed in 1893 by joining the older settlements of Torquay and Formby. It lies on the traditional Country of Tasmanian Aboriginal (palawa / pakana) people, recorded in the palawa kani language as Limilinaturi.

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   Sandy Bay, TAS

   Population 12,315 · Median income $1,915/wk · SEIFA 1083

   Sandy Bay is an affluent waterfront suburb of Hobart, lying immediately south of the city centre along the River Derwent. It is home to the main campus of the University of Tasmania and to Wrest Point, the hotel and casino tower that opened in 1973 as Australia's first legal casino and remains a landmark on the city's skyline. A string of small beaches — among them Nutgrove and Long Beach — line its foreshore, and several of Hobart's well-known private schools are based in the suburb. Its leafy streets and harbour outlook have long made it one of the city's most sought-after addresses.

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   Kingston (Tas.), TAS

   Population 12,288 · Median income $1,517/wk · SEIFA 988

   Kingston is a fast-growing town just south of Hobart, Tasmania, about 12 kilometres from the city and the seat of the Kingborough Council. It serves as a southern gateway to the beaches and waterways of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, with the popular Kingston Beach on its doorstep. The area was first settled by Europeans in 1808, when Thomas Lucas and his family arrived after being evacuated from Norfolk Island, and the nearby Browns River recalls the botanist Robert Brown, who visited in 1804. Kingston's best-known institution is the national headquarters of the Australian Antarctic Division, which manages Australia's research stations and scientific program in the far south.

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   Glenorchy (Tas.), TAS

   Population 12,013 · Median income $1,143/wk · SEIFA 880

   Glenorchy is a suburb in the northern reaches of Hobart and the seat of the City of Glenorchy, set between the River Derwent and the slopes of Mount Wellington. Its name comes from Glen Orchy in Scotland, said to mean the 'glen of tumbling waters'. Settlement began early in the 1800s, and through the nineteenth century the district was orchard and farming country; it became a municipality in 1864 and a city a century later in 1964, filling out quickly after the Second World War as returning servicemen took up homes in the northern suburbs. Today Glenorchy is one of Tasmania's busiest shopping centres after central Hobart, taking in the Elwick Racecourse — home of the Hobart Cup — and the Hobart Showground, along with the riverside Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park.

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   Howrah, TAS

   Population 9,545 · Median income $1,690/wk · SEIFA 1021

   Howrah is a beachside suburb on Hobart's Eastern Shore, in the City of Clarence, lying east of Bellerive with views across the River Derwent to the city from Howrah Beach. Clarence Street runs through its centre, separating the hillside homes from the beachside flats. The suburb takes its name from Howrah House, a property established on the Clarence Plains in the 1830s by a retired Indian Army officer, who borrowed the name from Howrah, a place near Calcutta in India. Long a quiet rural district, it was formally gazetted as a locality in 1963 and has since grown into one of the Eastern Shore's larger residential suburbs, with Wentworth Park a hub for local sport and Shoreline Plaza its main shopping centre.

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   Claremont (Tas.), TAS

   Population 8,397 · Median income $1,241/wk · SEIFA 894

   Claremont is a riverside suburb on the northern edge of greater Hobart, set on a peninsula of the River Derwent mostly within the City of Glenorchy. It takes its name from Claremont House, built in the 1830s by settler Henry Bilton, who borrowed the name from one of the royal homes of England. Its defining chapter began in 1922, when Cadbury opened a chocolate factory here and laid out the Cadbury's Estate to house its workers — modelled on the company's Quaker 'garden village' at Bournville in Birmingham, with homes, shops, sporting grounds, a school and parkland dotted with purple benches. Eighteen of the estate's buildings are now heritage-listed, and the old railway that once served the suburb closed in 1974, its corridor now a cycle track along the Derwent.

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   Blackmans Bay, TAS

   Population 7,688 · Median income $1,806/wk · SEIFA 1041

   Blackmans Bay is a coastal suburb just south of Hobart, part of the Kingston–Blackmans Bay urban area that forms a satellite town of the Tasmanian capital within the Kingborough municipality. It takes its name from James Blackman, who occupied land here in the 1820s. The suburb curls around a popular sandy beach, at the northern end of which a sea-carved blowhole has eroded into a dramatic rock arch — by local account first noticed when James Baynton tracked his lost dog to its base. Southward, rocks lead out to Flowerpot Point, a favoured fishing spot, while the Suncoast Headlands track follows the clifftops and a steep path drops to fossil-studded Fossil Cove. Kingston Beach lies immediately to the north.

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   Riverside (Tas.), TAS

   Population 7,326 · Median income $1,519/wk · SEIFA 991

   Riverside is a residential suburb on the north-western edge of Launceston, Tasmania's second city, set across the river a few kilometres from the centre of town. It takes in the western bank where the South Esk River joins the broad Tamar, and the West Tamar Highway threads through it towards the small towns further down the estuary. Though a handful of older homes and the mid-nineteenth-century Cormiston House survive, most of Riverside grew up after it was gazetted as a locality in 1958, with shops and schools following through the 1960s. The western part of the suburb began as a hydro-electric workers' village built in the 1950s to house crews constructing the nearby Trevallyn Power Station. Riverside is now among the largest of Launceston's suburbs.

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   Newnham, TAS

   Population 7,073 · Median income $1,223/wk · SEIFA 873

   Newnham is a residential suburb on the northern side of Launceston, in northern Tasmania, about seven kilometres from the city centre on the eastern bank of the Tamar River. The East Tamar Highway runs through it, linking the city with the river towns downstream. The suburb is best known as a centre of learning: the University of Tasmania, the Australian Maritime College and a TasTAFE campus all share grounds here, drawing students from across the state and beyond. Newnham was gazetted as a locality in 1963, having come close to being named Mowbray Heights two years earlier. The waters of the Tamar form its south-western boundary, and the Mowbray Indoor Sport venue adds to the local recreation on offer.

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    New Town (Tas.), TAS

    Population 6,781 · Median income $1,596/wk · SEIFA 1019

    New Town is an inner suburb of Hobart, Tasmania, lying about 4 km north of the city centre on the western side of the Derwent estuary beneath kunanyi / Mount Wellington. It is one of the oldest settled parts of the city, with Europeans establishing farms here within about a week of the founding of Hobart at Sullivans Cove in 1804. The suburb retains a notable collection of colonial heritage, including St John's Anglican Church, designed by the colonial architect John Lee Archer and completed in 1835, and Pitt Farm, sometimes described as one of the oldest farmhouses in Australia. Today New Town is a leafy, established residential area, served by a local shopping centre at New Town Plaza.

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    Ulverstone, TAS

    Population 6,653 · Median income $1,012/wk · SEIFA 894

    Ulverstone is a coastal town on the north-west coast of Tasmania, set at the mouth of the River Leven about 21 kilometres west of Devonport and a short distance east of Penguin. It takes its name from Ulverston in England, which likewise stands at the estuary of a River Leven. European settlement began in 1848 when Andrew Risby and his family arrived from Gloucestershire to take up farmland; the name Ulverstone came into use in 1854 with the opening of a store, and the town was formally declared in 1861. Timber-getting, carried by rail to Burnie, and farming shaped its early growth. Landmarks include the Leven River bridge and a war-memorial clock tower, and the town has developed a waterfront precinct as a coastal destination.

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    Lindisfarne, TAS

    Population 6,639 · Median income $1,565/wk · SEIFA 1018

    Lindisfarne is a suburb on Hobart's Eastern Shore, about six kilometres from the city centre within the City of Clarence. It took its name from Lindisferne House, an 1820s property nearby, and for a time was called Beltana before being renamed in 1903 after Lindisfarne, the tidal island off the English coast, to avoid confusion with neighbouring Bellerive; the Beltana name still lingers locally. The suburb wraps around Lindisfarne Bay, a sheltered anchorage on the River Derwent that is home to long-established rowing, sailing and motor-yacht clubs. A waterside recreation park looks out across the Derwent towards kunanyi / Mount Wellington. Several churches and schools carry the names of saints linked to the English Lindisfarne, such as St Aidan's and St Cuthbert's.

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    West Hobart, TAS

    Population 6,525 · Median income $1,996/wk · SEIFA 1079

    West Hobart is an inner-city suburb set in the hills immediately west of central Hobart, its steep streets lined with Victorian and Federation houses prized for their views over the River Derwent. It began as a farming district of orchards, hops and dairies, worked in part by Chinese market gardeners, with a brickworks at the top of Arthur Street and coal mines below Summerhill Road; the slopes of Knocklofty Hill were quarried for sandstone and are now a bushland reserve looked after by the city council. The post office opened in 1892. Long regarded as a working-class quarter, West Hobart shifted character from the 1960s onwards and is today thought of as one of the city's more bohemian corners, home to artists and musicians in its gentrified old cottages.

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    Lenah Valley, TAS

    Population 6,522 · Median income $1,931/wk · SEIFA 1044

    Lenah Valley is a suburb of Hobart set in the foothills of Mount Wellington, west of the city centre between Mount Stuart, New Town and the City of Glenorchy. It was known in turn as Kangaroo Bottom, Kangaroo Valley and Sassafras Valley before being brought together as Lenah Valley in 1922; the name takes lenah, recorded as the Muwinina word for kangaroo. The eastern end was among the earliest parts settled, with the first land grants issued for farming in 1817, and the Newlands manor house of the late 1830s set a tone of orchards and quality homes for the surrounding district. In 1831 James Sherwin established one of Australia's earliest commercial potteries along Pottery Road. Lady Jane Franklin bought a tract of land here in 1839 to build a museum and botanical garden she called Ancanthe, from the Greek for 'blooming valley'; the sandstone museum, raised in the Greek revival style, opened in 1843, and the Art Society of Tasmania has worked from the Lady Franklin Gallery since 1949. The suburb's landmarks today include Calvary Hospital, the Pura Milk factory, John Turnbull Park and the bushland of Ancanthe Park around the gallery.

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    Wynyard, TAS

    Population 6,296 · Median income $1,042/wk · SEIFA 890

    Wynyard sits at the mouth of the Inglis River on Tasmania's north-west coast, about 17 kilometres west of Burnie and some 320 kilometres from Hobart. Its great landmark is Table Cape, a flat-topped volcanic plug that rises sharply from Bass Strait to around 170 metres, capped by a heritage-listed lighthouse and famous for the tulip fields that flower there each spring. Nearby Fossil Bluff yielded Wynyardia bassiana, one of Australia's oldest marsupial fossils, from rock about 25 million years old. The coast around Table Cape is Tommeginer country, and it is believed the clan built stone tidal fish traps at Freestone Cove. The town is thought to have been named after Major-General Edward Buckley Wynyard in the 1850s.

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    New Norfolk, TAS

    Population 6,037 · Median income $1,112/wk · SEIFA 848

    New Norfolk lies about 32 kilometres up the River Derwent from Hobart, the main town of the green, hop-growing Derwent Valley. First known as Elizabeth Town, it was renamed in 1825 in honour of the settlers brought here from Norfolk Island, who were resettled in the area after their own colony was abandoned. One of Tasmania's oldest towns, it keeps a rich stock of colonial heritage, from St Matthew's, the state's oldest Anglican church, to the timber oast houses that recall a long history of growing hops along the river flats. The rambling former Willow Court asylum, now given over to antiques and dining, and a working newsprint mill at nearby Boyer round out the town.

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    South Hobart, TAS

    Population 5,886 · Median income $1,787/wk · SEIFA 1063

    South Hobart is widely regarded as Hobart's first suburb, an inner enclave tucked between the city centre and the slopes of Mount Wellington. It was settled early by merchant and professional families wanting to escape the bustle of colonial Hobart Town. The suburb is home to the Cascade Brewery, Australia's oldest, and to the Cascades Female Factory, regarded as the nation's most significant historic site associated with convict women, sitting in the shadow of the mountain. High on the foothills, the famous Keen's Curry sign — white-painted stones first laid out in 1905 to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee — still looks down over the rooftops. Henry Hunter's All Saints' Anglican Church dates from 1858, platypus still frequent the Hobart Rivulet, and the acclaimed novelist Richard Flanagan has called the suburb home.

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    Moonah, TAS

    Population 5,884 · Median income $1,421/wk · SEIFA 944

    Moonah is a residential suburb of greater Hobart in the City of Glenorchy, lying about five kilometres north of the city centre and immediately north of New Town. It was gazetted as a locality in 1961, though the name had been in use since 1895; it is believed to come from an Aboriginal word for 'gum tree'. The area began as land granted to early settlers along the banks of the New Town Rivulet — which still forms much of its southern boundary — and in time those holdings grew into the neighbouring suburbs of New Town and Moonah. Its spine is Main Road, once a tram route and now a busy bus corridor, along which the Moonah shopping district gathers its shops, cafes and offices. The council's Moonah Arts Centre, opened in 2015, hosts exhibitions and classes.

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    Newstead (Tas.), TAS

    Population 5,617 · Median income $1,470/wk · SEIFA 997

    Newstead is an inner eastern suburb of Launceston, lying about three kilometres from the city centre within the City of Launceston in northern Tasmania. The North Esk River forms most of its eastern boundary, and the main A3 route — Elphin Road and Hoblers Bridge Road — runs through it. The suburb takes its name from 'Newstead House', built nearby in 1855 by the noted naturalist Ronald Campbell Gunn. For a time the area carried a different name: it was officially restyled 'Kawallah' in 1919, but local residents never took to it and kept calling the district Newstead, the name that eventually stuck. Newstead is home to several schools, among them Newstead College, and was formally gazetted as a locality in the 1960s.

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    Prospect Vale, TAS

    Population 5,433 · Median income $1,268/wk · SEIFA 948

    Prospect Vale is a residential locality on the south-western edge of Greater Launceston, about seven kilometres from the city and falling almost entirely within the Meander Valley municipality. Once part of neighbouring Prospect, it was gazetted as a separate locality in 1963, on land that European settlers had earlier used for cattle grazing and horse studs. The suburb has its own small shopping centre, the Prospect Vale Marketplace, anchored by a supermarket, along with a small industrial park and sporting grounds. It is home to two secondary schools — the public Prospect High School and the Catholic St Patrick's College, which moved to its present site in the late 1950s, onto the spot where the two-storey Rising Sun Hotel had earlier stood. The Bass Highway, part of National Route 1, runs through the locality, whose boundaries are mostly drawn along survey lines.

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    Latrobe, TAS

    Population 5,030 · Median income $1,173/wk · SEIFA 893

    Latrobe is a town in north-western Tasmania, on the Mersey River about eight kilometres south-east of Devonport along the Bass Highway. The district was first settled by B. B. Thomas in 1826, and in 1861 the growing settlement was named after Charles Joseph La Trobe, a colonial administrator. Latrobe today is known for the Australian Axeman's Hall of Fame, which celebrates the sport of competitive woodchopping, and for the Big Platypus that stands outside it as one of the country's big things. Each Australia Day the town hosts the Henley-on-Mersey carnival, a riverside gathering of woodchopping, ferret racing and other contests that has long drawn visitors from across the north-west coast.

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    Brighton (Tas.), TAS

    Population 4,983 · Median income $1,528/wk · SEIFA 912

    Brighton is a town about 27 kilometres north of Hobart, set on the Midland Highway between Pontville and Bridgewater in southern Tasmania. Before European settlement the area was the country of the Moomairremener, a band of the Oyster Bay tribe. Established as a garrison and coaching stop in the early nineteenth century, Brighton retains a historic army camp whose barracks date from the 1820s and which later provided temporary accommodation for Kosovar refugees. The town is today one of the faster-growing parts of greater Hobart and is home to a major thoroughbred horse-training centre. It serves as the administrative seat of the Brighton municipality.

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    Bellerive, TAS

    Population 4,945 · Median income $1,461/wk · SEIFA 1012

    Bellerive is a historic waterfront suburb in the City of Clarence, on the eastern shore of the River Derwent across the water from central Hobart, about 6km from the city. First settled in the 1820s, it was originally called Kangaroo Point for the kangaroos seen along the foreshore, before being renamed Bellerive - French for 'beautiful shore' - in the 1830s. Reminders of its colonial past survive in the 1885 Kangaroo Bluff Battery, a coastal fort now kept as a public reserve, and in heritage buildings such as the old police station, now an arts centre. Bellerive Oval, the waterfront ground beside the marina, has long hosted international cricket. Commuter ferries still link the suburb across the Derwent to Hobart, and it keeps a village-like character.

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    South Launceston, TAS

    Population 4,894 · Median income $1,374/wk · SEIFA 958

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    Trevallyn, TAS

    Population 4,826 · Median income $1,614/wk · SEIFA 1015

    Trevallyn is a residential suburb on the western edge of Launceston, set above the meeting of the South Esk and Tamar Rivers and split between the Launceston and West Tamar council areas. Gazetted as a locality in 1963, it takes its name from Trevallyn in Cornwall — in the Cornish tongue 'tre' means a town or settlement and the second part derives from a word for a mill. A curiosity of its past is that the local post office of the 1930s used the name spelled backwards, Nyllavert, which still lingers in some old lists of places. The suburb is best known as the gateway to the Cataract Gorge, the dramatic river gorge that is one of Launceston's great natural landmarks, and to the Trevallyn Dam and the bushland of the Trevallyn Nature Recreation Area, used for trail running, horse riding and mountain biking. The novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard spent part of her childhood here, and the Trevallyn Cricket Club has played at the Gorge Road oval since 1929.

Rankings are editorial, based on the public data shown on each suburb page. See our methodology.