Lewd women, grisly murders, sailors drinking themselves to death and typhoid. Sounds like your typical 19th century port.
Early Hobart’s Wapping district was known as a sewer-ridden slum, but was that really the case? Who else lived there and why did it disappear?
Former Hobartian Jane Orbell-Smith, who now lives in Brisbane, wanted to know more about the slum she’d heard about when growing up in the 1970s.
So she posed the question to the ABC’s Curious Hobart team: “What is the history of the Hobart area known as Wapping?”
“When I was growing up no-one lived there. It had a reputation of being a bad slum area with dreadful crime, poverty and disease,” she said.
Curious Hobart is a monthly ABC Hobart project which invites you to have a say in the stories we cover – such as the history of Hobart’s trams and whether there are secret tunnels under the city
