As a born and bred Tasmanian I’m ashamed to admit that I had never heard of remote Swan Island and its lighthouse. It is located five miles off the north-east coast of Tasmania. The tower was built in 1845 using convict labour, poor souls. An unusual feature
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Adelaide Ironside (1831-1867) was a Sydney girl, considered to be a child genius. She was taken under the wing of the Reverend John Dunmore Lang; clergyman, educator and politician. Adelaide Ironside became the first Australian born woman to study art abroad. In her case this was to
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On January 2 1941, Eric Ross Robinson was working alone on night-shift at Tasmania’s Moonah railway station. He had joined the railways in 1935, employed as relieving porter at various stations around the State. The 26 year old lived a quiet life with his parents and younger
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Agnes Grant Hay was the very wealthy widow of South Australian pastoralist, merchant and politician, Alexander Gosse Hay. She was an inveterate traveller…and an author; After spending many months in England and Scotland during 1908, Mrs Hay and her unmarried daughter Helen (Dolly) returned home on
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Grandma Shadbolt was born Jane Whitton. She was from Lichfield in Staffordshire. In 1848, when she was 19, she was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) for seven years. In a first offence she had stolen the sum of three pounds. Unfortunately we don’t have a photo
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Rivers Paterson (nee Staines) was born on the day her father Thomas drowned in the Bell River, between Molong and Wellington, in the central west of New South Wales. Thomas Staines was an ex-convict; a former blacksmith and farrier from Leicestershire. He was transported for life in
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Suzanne (originally Susannah) Evans was one of five children. She was born in 1893 in the gold mining town of Walhalla, Victoria to John and Alice Evans. Her mother died when she was only eight years old. In 1914 the Evans family moved to Melbourne and the
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Sao biscuits are almost as iconic as Anzacs, although they were far too delicate to send to our troops in the first and second world wars. However, in 1933 an anonymous poet did conjure a military connection dating back to a far earlier conflict. Apparently it was
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Picking blackberries and collecting field mushrooms…oh the simple pleasures of a 1950s Tasmanian childhood. There were a couple of uncultivated paddocks on our farm that produced basketfuls of mushrooms every autumn. We used to eat them fried on toast for breakfast. Plain old white bread in those
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NOTE – This is not intended a full history of the Hobart Regatta , merely some stories and facts that intrigued me. My interest in the subject was piqued when I was cleaning some of my partner Rob’s old sailing trophies. One was from the 1964 Hobart
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