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]
It reads as a footnote: an outgoing governor decamping to a country cottage while the colony adjusted to new management. In fact, it is the opening scene of one of the stranger episodes in early Tasmanian history: an attempt, pursued on and off for three years, to abolish Hobart as the capital of Van Diemen’s Land altogether.
The new Lieutenant-Governor was George Arthur, and according to Sorell, he arrived already convinced the colony was being run from the wrong place. Within months he was telling anyone who would listen that Hobart’s site was ‘exceedingly ill-judged… exposed to violent winds, extremely difficult of defense, and quite open to an attack by Sea,’ cut off from the settled interior by the Derwent. Worse still for a penal colony: holding convicts at seaports meant that escape by ship was always just half a chance away.[2]
By September 1824 the public knew Arthur wanted to shift the seat of government to a site called Brighton, a location Commissioner Bigge had flagged during his 1820 inspection of the colony. The idea smouldered for seven months before Arthur convened a meeting of the Gentlemen of the Colony on 19 May 1825 to make his case.[3]
He offered three arguments:
- agriculturists would benefit from having the seat of government inland
- it was absolutely necessary to remove the convict population away from Hobart
- the town’s population could be limited to allow the settlement to spread into the interior
A report commissioned from a Mr Kinghorne was produced, promising that Brighton could supply water for 20,000 people all year round, and possessed everything required for a ‘great and splendid town.’ The meeting did not go Arthur’s way. Chief Justice John Pedder, Attorney-General Joseph Tice Gellibrand, and the merchant Anthony Fenn Kemp led three hours of opposition. The Gazette‘s correspondent recorded Arthur bearing it all well, and calmly heard – and countered – every objection. Rather more telling was the report’s throwaway line that ‘Mr. Mulgrave’s location at Brighton has been already purchased by Government.’ – public money was moving on the scheme before anyone outside Arthur’s circle had been properly consulted, let alone before London had even been asked.[4]
Hobart’s merchants responded with a formal letter of protest. The government’s own newspaper kept the pot boiling through to the end of 1825, with editor James Ross declaring in November that ‘the situation of Hobart Town was decidedly bad and obstructive to the general interest of the Colony, no reasonable man still disputes’ – and floating not just Brighton but New Norfolk, and even Perth, as alternatives.[5]
Image: TAHO PWD266-1-1406
New Norfolk was not a name plucked out of nowhere. The town, known officially as Elizabeth Town from 1811 until locals reclaimed the older name in 1825, already had a government foothold. By 1815, Turiff Lodge, known locally as the Government Cottage, had been built specifically as a retreat for Van Diemen’s Land’s governors – two years before Sorell even took office, and long an established fixture of the role by the time he handed over to Arthur in 1824.[6]
Image: National Gallery of Victoria – public domain
A contemporary aquatint by the convict-artist-turned-publisher Joseph Lycett, titled ‘View of the Governor’s Retreat, New Norfolk, Van Diemen’s Land’ and dated around 1825, shows a substantial riverside estate in the town: house, granary, stables, walled garden, orchard, its own punt and ferry. It was advertised for sale while still ‘in the Occupation of His Majesty’s Government’ under a two-and-a-half-year lease.[7] Whether this was Turiff Lodge itself or a second government property in the same small town is not entirely clear, but either way, when Sorell rode out to the Government cottage at New Norfolk in May 1824, he was retiring to ground the colony’s rulers already knew well.
Officially, the decisive turn came in December 1825. Arthur put a formal proposal to his Executive Council, which resolved that a Land Commission survey then being organised, under the newly appointed Acting Surveyor-General Edward Dumaresq, assisted by Roderic O’Connor and Peter Murdoch, should be conducted specifically ‘with a view to the removal of the seat of Government to New Norfolk.’[8]
Arthur and his Council had committed the colony to the plan to move out of Hobart before a single report had come back. His formal notification to the Colonial Office followed on 22 April 1826, and it is a remarkable document: Giblin, writing in the 1930s, called its reasoning ‘paltry and unconvincing,’ so much so as to ‘throw doubt on their sincerity and genuineness.’ Arthur told Secretary of State Earl Bathurst that ‘every respectable Inhabitant’ he had met was as full of objections to Hobart as he was. He dismissed the protesting merchants with startling bluntness: their losses, he wrote, would be ‘only a just retribution’ for having ‘drained the Agricultural Interest to the last degree,’ and ‘there is nothing unreasonable in their being called upon to make some little restitution in this way.’ The change, he insisted, was needed for the prosperity of the Colony, the security of the prisoners, and so that convicts’ ‘dissolute habits and associations in Hobart Town should be effectually broken through.’ [9]
Behind the scenes, the scheme was already unravelling. A Hobart official named Humphrey had been privately urging Arthur’s predecessor Sorell, by then back in England, to support New Norfolk, without disclosing that his own property on the Styx River stood to benefit handsomely from the new road the plan required.[10] Sorell, unimpressed, wrote a long and cutting letter to Colonial Under-Secretary Robert Hay on 25 July 1826, tracing Arthur’s wandering choice of capital, first Launceston, then Brighton, now New Norfolk, and memorably comparing the whole business to ‘a person with a pack of cards putting up and pulling down houses for the amusement of children.’[11] No colony, he pointed out, had ever benefited from moving its capital away from its port, citing Canada, Nova Scotia, the West and East Indies, and New South Wales as evidence.[12]
The Land Commissioners then delivered the final blow. O’Connor and Murdoch condemned the scheme outright, arguing that a colony as young and as poor as Van Diemen’s Land had no business trying to force a second city into being. Only Dumaresq offered New Norfolk qualified support, and even he accompanied his report with a scheme for a bridge over the Derwent rather than a wholesale relocation of government.[13] Arthur, cornered, tried to argue in a second despatch that the move had always been intended as gradual rather than sudden, while announcing he would in fact build the colony’s badly needed gaol and barracks in Hobart because it was cheaper there: a retreat dressed up as patience.[14]
London’s verdict, when it came, was unambiguous. Bathurst’s reply of 3 November 1826 was, in Giblin’s assessment, ‘the severest censure the Lieutenant-Governor had received since his arrival in Van Diemen’s Land.’ Bathurst noted, pointedly, that he was inclined to favour Brighton over New Norfolk if any move were ever sanctioned (Bigge’s original recommendation, not Arthur’s) but made clear the whole idea was premature, expensive, and disruptive to property and settler expectations.[15]
Arthur’s second despatch drew a further, equally frosty reply, (Despatch No. 12, written from Downing Street on 12 February 1827), commending him only for eventually deferring to the local opinion he had ignored in the first place: You spoke before you had the facts, and should have stayed silent until you were sure the idea had merit. Three days after signing that despatch, Bathurst fired off an unrelated rebuke, ordering Arthur to sell off a Hobart courthouse he had purchased for £1,600 without authorisation: a second slap that Arthur, in a huff, tried to argue his way out of rather than accept.[16]
In the same letter, almost as an afterthought, Bathurst waved through a far more modest piece of infrastructure: a proposal from settlers in the interior to build, at their own expense, a toll bridge across the Derwent at New Norfolk. He saw no objection to it, provided the toll was time-limited and the government retained the right to take over its management once the debt was cleared. This was a small, self-funded, unglamorous scheme that sailed through without a trace of the suspicion Arthur’s grand design had provoked.
Image Alfred Abbott Album Image 128 – Crowther Library
With the scheme of moving the capital to New Norfolk now dead, the practical problem it had been meant to solve – a colony split by the Derwent, with no easy crossing between its northern and southern halves – found a far more modest answer. A proposal first floated in Andrew Bent’s newspaper for a bridge near what became Bridgewater grew, through the later 1820s, into the causeway built there by convict labour between 1830 and 1836. It was one of the largest and most expensive convict engineering projects undertaken in the colony.[17] That causeway is still standing today, heritage-listed. The bridge spanning the main channel beside it has had a rather less settled history: it has been rebuilt five times since the 1840s, most recently in 2025, when a new $786 million Bridgewater Bridge replaced the lift-span crossing that had carried traffic since 1942.[18] New Norfolk, meanwhile, settled into quieter roles: a stop on the road to Hobart, and eventually, as Giblin wryly noted writing in 1930, ‘a quiet, secluded spot for honeymooners’ and the site of Tasmania’s asylum for the insane.[19]
Image: Tourism Industry Council Tasmania
Giblin, closing his account, admitted that Arthur’s true motive for the whole affair was not clarified and could not be easily explained.[20] Was it genuine strategic and moral conviction? Or did it, as Sorell suspected, stem from Arthur’s determination to be innovative and to build himself a vanity project?[21] Nearly two centuries on, with Hobart still the capital and New Norfolk still a quiet town on the Derwent, it is hard not to side with Sorell.
[1] Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 21 May 1824
[2] George Arthur to Earl Bathurst, despatch of 22 April 1826, Historical Records of Australia [HRA], Series III, Vol. V, p. 179
[3] Giblin, Early History of Tasmania, Volume 2, p561
[4] Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 20 May 1825
[5] Hobart Town Gazette, 12 November 1825
[6] New Norfolk, TAS, Aussie Towns, https://www.aussietowns.com.au/town/new-norfolk-tas
[7] https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/100678/
[8] Giblin, p. 562 (Executive Council minute, December 1825).
[9] George Arthur to Earl Bathurst, despatch of 22 April 1826, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 181
[10] Giblin, p. 564
[11] William Sorell to Under-Secretary R.W. Hay, 25 July 1826, quoted in Giblin, pp. 564–566, citing Public Record Office, Colonial Office papers [P.R.O., C.O.], 280-5
[12] Sorell to Hay, 25 July 1826, P.R.O., C.O. 280-5
[13] Giblin, p. 567 (Land Commissioners’ reports by O’Connor, Murdoch, and Dumaresq)
[14] Arthur’s second despatch to Bathurst, 12 July 1826, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 304
[15] Bathurst to Arthur (Despatch No. 51) 3 Nov 1826, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 386
[16] Bathurst to Arthur, 12 February 1827, HRA Series III, Vol. V, p. 521
[17] Hobart Town Gazette, 7 October 1826
[18] https://www.bridgewaterbridge.tas.gov.au/history-and-heritage
[19] Giblin, p. 568
[20] Giblin, p. 571
[21] Sorell to Hay, 25 July 1826, P.R.O., C.O. 280-5
