Long before any sail appeared on the horizon, Aboriginal people of the Tyreddeme band of the Oyster Bay tribe crossed regularly to the island, and the evidence of their lives still lies thick around the bays on either side of the isthmus. The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sighted the island in 1642 and named it Maria, after the wife of his patron Anthony van Diemen, the man whose name the whole of Tasmania would carry for two centuries. In 1802 the French scientific expedition of Nicolas Baudin met the island's Aboriginal inhabitants; the expedition's zoologist, René Maugé, died here and was buried on the island's southern point. Two naming traditions, Aboriginal and European, still overlap on every modern map.

Maria Island served as a prison twice. The first convict settlement ran from 1825 to 1832, founded for men whose crimes were judged not bad enough for the dreaded Macquarie Harbour. The second, the probation station, ran from 1842 to 1850 and crowded some 600 male convicts into reused and ill-adapted buildings around Darlington. Among the prisoners of that second era was William Smith O'Brien, the Irish nationalist leader transported for the rebellion of 1848. Held at Darlington, he attempted to escape aboard an American whaler, failed, and was moved to Port Arthur. The oldest convict buildings still stand and still work: the Commissariat Store of 1825 is now the visitor centre, the penitentiary completed in 1828 now houses travellers instead of detaining them, and a convict-built dam still supplies Darlington's water nearly two centuries on.

In the 1880s a single restless imagination tried to remake the island entirely. The Italian entrepreneur Diego Bernacchi leased Maria Island, renamed Darlington San Diego, and set about producing wine and silk while filling a grand hotel with tourists who came to take the sea air. When that vision faltered, he returned in the 1920s with an even larger plan: a full cement works, fed by limestone from the island's Fossil Cliffs, served by a railway and a 200-foot concrete chimney, employing some 500 people. The town had clubs, dances, a school, and a chapel pressed into service as a cinema. Then the Great Depression and the island's stubborn geology undid it all, and by 1930 the works fell silent. After a final farming era, the Tasmanian Government bought out the families and proclaimed the national park in 1972.

The island's natural galleries rival its ruins. At the Painted Cliffs, low sandstone bluffs are stained in honeyed swirls of orange, cream, and rust where iron oxide has bled through the stone over ages, best seen at low tide when the patterns run right down to the waterline. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Fossil Cliffs are sheer faces of limestone crowded with the shells of creatures that lived in a Permian sea, a wall of deep time you can walk along. Above it all rises Mount Maria at 711 metres, a long day's climb rewarded with a view across the whole figure-eight island and back to mainland Tasmania across the Mercury Passage.

Maria Island has become a kind of ark. Wombats, some of them an unusual blonde colour, graze almost everywhere, alongside Cape Barren geese, kangaroos, and a wealth of birdlife that has earned the island international recognition for its endangered swift parrots and forty-spotted pardalotes. In 2012, conservationists released 15 Tasmanian devils here to build an insurance population safe from the facial tumour disease ravaging the mainland. The devils thrived, but at a cost no one fully foresaw. The island's little penguins, once around 3,000 breeding pairs, vanished entirely. It is a sobering reminder that even a rescue can reshape a place, and that an island sanctuary is a balance, not a guarantee. Today the devils are sometimes glimpsed by overnight visitors who stay in the old penitentiary, sharing a quiet island with the descendants of everything that came before.