Projected decreases and changes in the seasonal distribution of precipitation will have profound impacts on southeastern Australia. Recent decreases in precipitation over the region may be significant in the context of instrumental records, but the question of whether these decreases are within long-term natural variability remains. To help address this issue, we present December-January streamflow and dam inflow reconstructions for Tasmania in southeastern Australia based on locally available tree-ring chronologies. Our streamflow and dam inflow reconstructions span up to 800 years and indicate that 20th century summer conditions were well within the range of historical variability, and were in fact relatively wet. The period from ca. 1600 – 1750 CE was one of enhanced variability and a high proportion of low and high flow events occurred in the 17th century. There are significant relationships between the summer streamflow and inflow reconstructions and large-scale ocean-atmosphere processes such as ENSO and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). Critically, our reconstructions rely heavily on climate-sensitive non-traditional wood-properties chronologies produced using Silviscan©, a rapid-assessment high resolution technology developed by CSIRO. These chronologies are based on tracheid radial cell diameter, cell wall thickness, microfibril angle and wood density. The importance of these chronologies to dendrochronology in areas where it has been difficult to extract strong climatic signals from tree ring-widths cannot be understated. Our reconstructions will contribute to the PAGES 2k effort to better understand hydroclimatic variation over the past 2000 years. Finally, over the past decade, an active debate has emerged in the literature concerning climate reconstruction methodologies and the selection of climate proxies for a specific reconstruction. We therefore explore differences in our streamflow and inflow reconstructions that result from varying some model parameters that may also affect the selection of flow proxies.