Among the Australian capital cities Hobart ranks second in age to Sydney and second to none in the beauty of its late Georgian architecture. Few Australian cities have retained so much of the nineteenth century.
European settlement in Tasmania began in September 1803, when Lieutenant John Bowen took a party of convicts up the Derwent River to Risdon Cove on the eastern bank and established a settlement. He called it Hobart, after Lord Hobart, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Bowen was superseded in February 1804, by Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins, who had sailed for the Derwent after abandoning an attempt to establish a convict settlement at Port Phillip. Collins decided that Risdon Cove was an unsuitable place for a settlement and chose instead a site at Sullivan Cove, on the other side of the river. He called it Hobart Town.
The infant settlement took some time to become established and after seven years it was still only a jumble of miserable huts. When Governor Lachlan Macquarie arrived from Sydney in 1811 he 'observed with much regret' the wretched state of the township and directed that it be surveyed immediately. Mас-quarie issued a general order laying down a design that formed the basic plan of the city as it stands today.
When he revisited in 1821, Macquarie was well pleased with the town's progress and noted the 'Substantial Buildings... laid out in regular streets'.
Hobart's physical progress was not matched by an advance in the moral tone of the community. Lieutenant-Governor William Sorrell, who ruled between 1817 and 1824, found the convicts undisciplined and out of control. At night, the convict men, having no lodgings at all, would stalk the streets, committing acts of vandalism and violence. Many convict women joined the menfolk during their nocturnal marauding, while others preferred to prostitute themselves to military officers and government officials.
By 1827 Hobart's population was about 5000. Its thriving port was exporting wool, whale oil, sealskins and wattle extract. Deep-sea whaling encouraged ship-building and allied trades, and in the 1830s and 1840s Hobart was building more ships than all the other Australian ports combined.
It was during this period that the famous Battery Point-named after a battery of guns established to ward off a possible French attack-developed as the boisterous heart of the port. From a loose collection of farms in the late 1820s, Battery Point grew to become a busy seaport village by the early 1850s, inhabited by sailors, merchants, shipwrights and fishermen. It abounded with public houses such as the 'Whaler's Return' and the 'Shipwright's Arms'.
During the 1840s and 1850s the people of Hobart fought for the right to conduct their own affairs and there was strong support for the cessation of transportation. The free settlers saw the continued influx of convicts as a threat to the well-being of the town and formed defence associations to oppose it.
The end of the unpopular convict system finally came in 1853 with a decree from the British Government. Three years later Queen Victoria signed the document making Van Diemen's Land the first colony to receive self-government. On 1 January 1856, the colony's name was changed to Tasmania.
Hobart Town, as it was called until 1881, came of age in 1857 when it was incorporated as a city. But the town's progress had been marred by an event hundreds of kilometres away-the discovery of gold in Victoria. Freeman, bondsman and emancipist alike had swarmed to the goldfields, denuding Hobart of labour and turning it into a town of deserted houses.
The depression lasted a decade before Hobart once again boomed. Its most saleable commodity was the town itself. Hobart became 'the sanitorium of the south', a place where mainlanders could relax. And so it remains today. Hobart, least industrialised of the capitals, has been able to preserve more of its past than the others. The convict era remains only in mellow stone monuments.
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Text source: Readers Digest Book of Historic Australian Towns 1982
Photographs: Roderick Eime 2024
