Do Not Read This Title

In case you hadn't noticed, I am fascinated by towns that are no longer. Those places that were homes to hundreds of people who lived and worked, and sent their kids to school, and went to dances, and argued with their neighbours, and drank at the pub, and shopped in the streets, and were died and buried there. But are now home to maybe a handful of people, or just ruins, or wiped off the map completely. The rise and fall of mining booms obviously causes a lot, so there are many down the West Coast, possible more than living towns. Some, like Linda and Gormanston, are still on the map, but it's a bit harder to find Crotty, Pillinger (East or West) or Penghana. Of course there are others in different parts of the island, like the former port of Boobyalla (which is marked in my road atlas!), Cullenswood or Alveston, which I had never even heard of until recently, despite having through it many, many times.

Many years ago, when I was not much older than a teenager, I was looking through an art exhibition at the museum and in one cabinet was a miniature painting of Port Arthur, which is, of course, one of the dullest locations in the whole state, but this showed a street, with house-like buildings on either side. Street. Town. A real town, where people lived and worked, and... Ok it became quite a bit more interesting to me then. Although there probably wasn't much drinking at pubs going on, there not being one until after it closed down. But that's for another day. Maybe.

A different town today, and this one did have a hotel although I missed getting photos of what is left of it.

Definitely a town at this point, with places to live and work, and cleared land and gardens.

And if you follow the link, you'll know where it is :)

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User icon is Brisbane Hotel, which is there but not there. A ghost building.

Back in the early 19th century, speculators in the UK thought they could make money of all that unused land in the new colonies without actually having to travel out there, by establishing agricultural companies to grow fine wool that would be sold back home. One of these, the Australian Agricultural Company set themselves up in northern NSW. Another, the VDL Company, went to VDL. The colonial government wasn't too happy about this intrusion, so they found themselves shoved up into the far, distant corner of the island.



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Richmond is just north-east of Hobart, in the Coal River Valley. In the early day of British settlement, as settlers moved out looking for places to farm, this is where many of them went.


With the bridge over the Coal River, Richmond was on the road to both the east coast and the Tasman Peninsula & Port Arthur. These days the highway to both goes more to the south, bypassing Richmond. With its large collection of Georgian and sandstone buildings, Richmond is very much a tourist town now, lots of traffic, lots of people, lots of galleries and cafe, and things to look at. You could spend a day here, easily.

( It won't take that long to read about it though. )

(I'm trying out larger photo sizes. They're a bit big for my monitor but they might look better on newer ones.)



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I'm going to continue the mining theme with some more mining towns, this time down the West Coast. If you're not interested in mining towns, look away NOW.


Right. I've included some of these in my West Coast trip report back in 2005, but that was years ago and there are some additional photos. Unfortunately, we only made a quick visits to these towns so I only have a small number of photos of sometimes dubious quality.

The west coast is wild and remote, much more than you'd think from the map. It's all mountains and rain forest, winding roads and wild rivers, and some of the richest mineral deposits in the world.

I was going to do some background & start with Zeehan, but I have photos of Rosebery already uploaded and it is the first town of substance you come to from the north. So I'll start there, and add in background details as the come up.


Main street (Agnes St). The pub on the corner seems to have been done over.

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A side trip, to the hill behind the older part of town.

Through a gate



Penalty For Not Closing Gates ?10
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The best known, and probably most photographed, feature in Ross is the Bridge. As there are so many photos already on the web, you can look at them instead of me putting some up.

Ross sits beside the Midlands Hwy, not quite halfway between Launceston and Hobart, and just south of the Line. At the time of the second settlement in the north, the island was divided into two: Cornwall in the north, Buckingham in the south. Folk history puts the line along the 42nd latitude, and Ross is at 42°01' S. Nowadays, the (unofficial) dividing line between north & south is at Oatlands, the next town down the road.

With a settlement at each end of the island, there was soon travel between north and south. From Highway in Van Diemen's Land, by Hawley Stancombe, "Wentworth wrote in 1819 of the track between Hobart and Launceston worn by carts and stock regularly passing between the two towns, but winding about so much that it was probably a hundred and sixty miles long. [Today it's closer to 124 miles] Major Thomas Bell of the 48th Regiment was therefore commissioned in 1821 to construct portions of the road from the capital to Port Dalrymple."

1821 is the same year, according to Parks & Wildlife, that Ross was a declared a town, although there'd been a garrison there from a few years earlier.

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Gold was discovered at Brandy Creek in the 1870s, and it wasn't long before a substantial town, renamed to Beaconsfield, grew up. It was said to one of the biggest in the state at one stage. According to Town With a History, by Coultman Smith, in 1899, the population was "2,699, with 7 hotels, eight boarding houses, five bakers, four blacksmiths, two doctors, two watchmakers, a solicitor, a tailor, 15 general stores, six greengrocers, five drapers, a state school, and four private schools."

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Gravelly Beach, is another small riverside town.

These places have a lot of houses for the size of the town. They are close enough to Launceston that most people would go there for shopping and other services, or nearby Exeter for quick visits.

As you come into Gravelly Beach from the north, there's a long section along the river with newer houses, then the older ones and then this little shopping centre, if you can call it that.


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