The London Missionary Society (LMS), founded in 1795 to take the gospel to the Heathen[1], did not originally intend to evangelise Hobart. Nevertheless, Hobart became involved by circumstance: initially as a stopover for missionaries en-route to the islands, and later, from 1830, when a Congregational church – planted without an Read more
Sir John Eardley-Wilmot took office as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land on 21 August 1843.[1] He had been in the job a little over a week when, on the evening of Tuesday 29 August, the escaped convict Martin Cash shot dead a Hobart Town convict constable in the street outside Read more
Van Diemen’s Land had, in its first fifty years, three government chaplains: Robert Knopwood in Hobart (1803–1823), William Bedford (from 1823 into the 1850s), and John Youl in the north (from 1818). Collectively, they spanned almost the entire convict era and territory. None was simply a clergyman: all held substantial Read more
William Weston holds an odd distinction: the shortest-serving Premier in Tasmania’s history, in office for just 17 days in May 1857. Every list of Tasmanian premiers files him this way: a footnote number, filed alongside Champ’s 117 days and Gregson’s 58 as evidence that the colony’s first parliament couldn’t hold Read more
On Saturday 15 May 1824, a small notice appeared in the Hobart Town Gazette. Colonel William Sorell, who two days earlier had formally handed the government of Van Diemen’s Land to his successor, had ‘left Town, to reside for a short time in the Government House, at New Norfolk.’[1] Read more
Fifty-three people went to the gallows in Van Diemen’s Land in 1826 – the single deadliest year of George Arthur’s governorship, and by some margin. It’s tempting to read that number as the story of a colony finally getting its violent criminal element under control. The Supreme Court’s own record Read more
On 19 August 1830, after 108 days at sea, the convict transport David Lyon dropped anchor in the Derwent. She had left Sheerness in May with 200 male convicts aboard, drawn from the hulks Retribution and others moored at Chatham — men who had spent months, sometimes years, in Read more
George Arthur governed Van Diemen’s Land from 1824 to 1836 with a thoroughness that no previous colonial administrator had attempted. He built a system of surveillance and classification that tracked individual convicts through every stage of their sentence. He issued regulations covering almost every aspect of convict life. He Read more
In March 1825, the editor of the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser sat down to write about what he saw as one of the most pressing problems facing the infant colony. His concern was not the shortage of labour, the violence of the frontier, or the Read more
In 1803, the British established a settlement on the Derwent River as part of a wider imperial design: securing territory, countering French expansion, and deploying a convict workforce to lay the economic foundations of a new colony. Neither purpose left much room for the emergence of a prosperous middling class. Read more