Georgian Villages Again.

Well I am finally reaching the end of the saga of posting our Tassie trip. This is my penultimate post and features one of two villages we stopped off in on our last day in Tassie.

We started the morning in Hobart in the south of the state. Our flight was from Launceston in the evening. We followed the Tasman Highway north.

Oatlands is one of the villages the highway bypasses and we hadn’t intended stopping, but as we shot by something caught my eye and I just had to turn off. More of that in a moment.

Like much of Tassie walking the main street is a bit like stepping back into the 19th century. It is also like crossing half the world and dropping into an English village.

The village is largely built of local convict-cut sandstone. Most have corrugated iron roofs that replace the original shingles.

Almost every building was worth photographing so I’ve picked a few at random to share.

Little cottages like thisGrander residencesFormer shops now residencesShops that still fulfil their original function.The colours of this one caught my eye.I loved the faded sign on the side of this one.A sweet old barnThe ANZ bank with attached manager’s residence.These timber shops are more typical of those you would see in small Oz country towns.Now to the sight that brought me into town.

Callington Mill built in 1837.Alas, the sun was badly placed for getting good shots of the front of the sails
The mill has been lovingly restored and is fully functioning.

Standing along side are the miller’s cottage And the granary.Another out building

The roofs have been restored to the original hand-split timber shingles that would have once clad most of the town's buildings. Buildings like these in Melbourne would have been built with Welsh slate shingles. But Tasmania didn’t have the wealth of the Victorian goldfields to draw on, so they opted for a cheaper local option.

In Which Al Bangs on

I’m still on about our Tasmania trip.
We packed so much into day six that we took it easy on day seven of our trip.

For the whole day we hung around Tasmania’s capital Hobart. Deb and Lu went shopping, while I wandered the streets with my camera.

Hobart is a city of 212,000 and as such has nearly half the population of the entire state.

Founded in 1803 Hobart is one of the oldest Cities in Oz. Like many of our early settlements it began as a convict settlement.

Like almost everywhere in Tassie I loved this town. And like a lot of Tassie it still has a profusion of 19th century buildings.I wandered randomly and snapped away as the fancy took me.

Hadley’s Hotel if the sign is to believed was built the year before my current abode Melbourne was founded. Personally I don’t believe the sign. The fussy exterior screams Victorian period. Maybe the business was established in ’34 and they rebuilt later?

I’m not sure what this building is but the little plaque on the end says it was in 1823 the site of the first service conducted by a Presbyterian minister in Oz. Which kind of suggests the building is older hence the simple Georgian style.

I love architectural details like at the top of this doorway. This carving is in sandstone. The mason who carved this must have been amazingly talented.
This one is probably 1870s or so, looks like ‘Second Empire’ style to me.St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral.And the associated residence.The town Hall.I’ll finish with this fountain in Franklin Square.In the middle of which stands this statue of Sir John Franklin.He was Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tassie) from 1836 to 1843.
He was recalled to England after falling foul of the public service. His ‘crime’?
Trying to introduce humanitarian reforms to the way convicts were treated.

Perhaps because of this humanitarian streak he was fondly remembered by the citizens of Hobart and they erected this statue in memory of him after his ill fated journey to find the North West Passage.
He died lost in the Canadian Arctic in 1847.

Georgian Villages: Quaint Old English but in Oz?

A quick word about Nicole Ducleroir’s Bernard Pivot Blogfest. Quite simply what fun!
Thank you all who popped by for a look and stayed to comment or sign up as followers!

Now back in time to Tassie and back to another era in architecture.

On day five we left the north of Tassie and weaved south through the Central Highlands.

By Aussie standards Tasmania is tiny at 90,768 square kilometres (34,042 square miles). To put that in perspective it is almost exactly the same size as Maine in the US and about a sixth bigger than Scotland.

So from Launceston in the north to Hobart in the south is only about two hours drive along the main drag of the Tasman Highway. Even along the main highway there is little traffic because there are only about half a million people in the whole state.

We wanted to avoid the main road so our trip was about three hours driving time although we took most of the day to cover that with side trips and long pauses.

European settlement in Tassie began in the early 1800s and spread through the whole state quite quickly.

So most of the little villages scattered through the state are 1805 to 1830s in origin. And because very little development has occurred many original buildings are still standing.

Travelling through many Tassie villages you could convince yourself you were in the UK if you didn’t look too closely.

The main street of Longford for example. A row of classic Georgian era buildings. The only difference is these don’t have their original roofs. If their English born builders had put them up in the UK they would have Welsh Slate roofs. Here they used timber shingles that have been subsequently replaced by the incredibly practical Aussie tradition of corrugated iron.

At the highest point of the trip we paused near one of the highland lakes.

This is Arthur’s lake.I spotted these lovely Hyacinth Orchids growing there.This church is in Bothwell further south where we stopped for lunch.The main street of Bothwell is a funny mix of Georgian buildings and an Aussie Bush community.Our last stop before Hobart was Hampton. Every building in the main street of this village is 1830s to 1860s and most built from beautiful local sandstone quarried by convicts.

How hard life must have been for those poor souls torn away from their native Great Britain and sent half way around the world in stinking prison ships. Only to do hard labour once they got here.

The saving grace was that as a social experiment it ultimately worked for many of them once they were freed. And of course their children and grandchildren had opportunities that would have never been possible for slum dwellers in the UK.

I walked along Hampton’s main street clicking away to my heart’s content.
This gives an idea of just how rural this village is.
I liked this house. Replace the roof with slate and it would blend in to many English village streets.

This little place has been converted to a B&B. Johnson’s Emporium still bearing it’s builder’s name 170 years later.My favourite building in the village the original village school.This was the coach inn in the days when the Royal Mail travelled by stage coach from Hobart to Launceston.By UK standards Hampton is not old. But here in Oz as far as European settlement goes it is ancient.

The church in Hampton was completed in 1834.Which is the year before Melbourne was even founded.

As an aside, many Tasmanian churches are early enough to have burials in their churchyards. This is something that is essentially never seen in Mainland Oz. The practice was abandoned in favour of stand alone cemeteries and there are few churches (or churchyards for that matter) this old in most of the country.
The oldest standing church in Oz dates from 1809 and is just west of Sydney in NSW.