A walk in Old Launceston

Mike Tatlow

Tasmanians’ and our visitors’ considerable interest in the State’s heritage has been confirmed lately by Charles Wooley’s and Michael Tatlow’s latest book A Walk in Old Launceston joining their A Walk in Old Hobart as top sellers. We recommend A Walk in Old Launceston. It has several Snapshot sections, capturing moments in the life of the once-bawdy city. Here’s one of them:

The Flash Mob of wayward women, hard-core graduates of the convict women’s workhouse called the Female Factory, still sully the pubs and dark streets at night. General drunkenness in the streets, thievery, brawling, convicts escaping and bushranging are still a worry, but the affairs of this town have improved. Gone are the days of a decade or so ago, you believe, when that moralist Wesleyan, the Rev. William Horton, wrote to his Sydney elders pleading for missionary help. “The wickedness of the people of Launceston … exceeds all description,” he wrote. “I am sure if you could behold the state of the country and could witness the ignorance, blasphemy, drunkenness, adultery and vice of every description which abounds in it, you would use every effort to send them more missionaries.”
Tasmanians’ and our visitors’ considerable interest in the State’s heritage has been confirmed lately by Charles Wooley’s and Michael Tatlow’s latest book A Walk in Old Launceston joining their A Walk in Old Hobart as top sellers.
Charles and Michael have also been nominated for the 2008 Prime Minister’s Australian History Prize for the books.
And they had two more titles under way. A Tour of Old Tasmania, presenting motoring tours of a week, a few weeks and a month or so, with an emphasis in words and photos on the island’s heritage. This is due out in about August.
The pair’s successes have caught the eye of the right people in Sydney, too, who have identified a need for a similar publication there and provided sponsorship. The authors are spending time in Australia’s founding city working on A Walk in Old Sydney, planned for launching before Christmas.

We recommend A Walk in Old Launceston. It has several Snapshot sections, capturing moments in the life of the once-bawdy city. Here’s one of them:

SNAPSHOT 1835

YOUR horse is taking your open cart into the dusty track called Cameron Street from Tamar Street one balmy day in February 1835. You know this was the town’s first made street, formed to lug materials to build Government Cottage in 1806. The street is lined with huts of split timber and clay reinforced with wattle twigs. Roofs are of split shingle. The windmill up on Windmill Hill, nine years old now, is turning lazily.

A gang of 20 chained convicts carrying wicker baskets and shovels, heads bowed and silent, has just trudged by. Four red coats with muskets are in charge. They all contributed to the rather bad odour under the sun of horse, cattle, dog, pig and sheep droppings in the street.

You hope the energetic little Mr Fawkner, the hook-nosed keeper of the tavern up there on the left, might buy some of your load of potatoes or the “skun” sheep you killed only yesterday. Or his rival Mr John Batman might place a handsome order for supplies from your farm. Both men plan expeditions in a few weeks, you’ve heard, to claim land and form a settlement at Port Phillip, across Bass Strait. Batman believes a few trinkets presented to the wild natives can buy him thousands of acres for Port Phillip’s first farm.

But with what would they pay to buy your potatoes and sheep? The current madness of the colony’s money system has in circulation, in lieu of scarce English pounds, parcels of wheat, Spanish dollars from South America, American dollars, rupees from Bengal, pennies made of leather, Dutch guilders, a host of tokens issued by various traders and, of course, grog. You know the Chief Constable’s salary, for example, is seven gallons of spirits a quarter.

Launceston is recovering from the depression of a few years ago that spawned so many bankruptcies. There has been a trend towards prosperity since the town recovered governance from George Town 11 years ago.

A sure sign of growth is Mr Henry Reed’s amazing new house further down Cameron Street. Made of stone and brick, it is, and a whole four storeys high! Haystacks are still a fire hazard in the town. And the streets are in an awful state. Not one of them is paved in any way. Winter slush, even summer slush, makes them impassable by coach or cart. Even bullock teams founder. When this happens, fires are kindled around the poor beasts to make them stagger to their feet.

A man fell into a roadside ditch on the Sandhill recently and drowned. A man leaving for Hobart Town in his gig ran a wheel into a huge pot hole. He somersaulted out of the gig and broke a leg. Government barber Henry Roney lately fell into a street abyss-sized pothole and died in the Colonial Hospital. You are wary from your cart of marauding pigs and savage dogs in the streets. One huge beast lately attacked a horse, locked its teeth in the horse’s nose and pulled it to the muddy street, complete with the terrified lady rider.

The curfew of the repressive Police Act, in force for two years now, prohibits publicans from having constables or sailors on their premises after 9 p.m. without a permit. Anyone who bathes in the river in sight of a house, clothed or not, is now a law breaker. Pigsties within 30 feet [10 metres] of a street must be demolished. And one can now be put in the public stocks for casting dead animals into the river.

The Flash Mob of wayward women, hard-core graduates of the convict women’s workhouse called the Female Factory, still sully the pubs and dark streets at night. General drunkenness in the streets, thievery, brawling, convicts escaping and bushranging are still a worry, but the affairs of this town have improved. Gone are the days of a decade or so ago, you believe, when that moralist Wesleyan, the Rev. William Horton, wrote to his Sydney elders pleading for missionary help. “The wickedness of the people of Launceston … exceeds all description,” he wrote. “I am sure if you could behold the state of the country and could witness the ignorance, blasphemy, drunkenness, adultery and vice of every description which abounds in it, you would use every effort to send them more missionaries.”

The town now has two windmills, a cider maker and three busy breweries. A recent count proved the town has eight brick houses. There are 30 taverns, however. Nearly half of the 5,300 residents are convicts. Congregations are growing at the town’s sole church, more produce is being sent across the seas and there is that private residence four storeys high!

In seven months your town will premiere Evan Thomas’ Bandit of the Rhine, the first stage play published and performed in Australia.

***

Michael and Charles discovered a little-known official event that was supposed to end the State’s North v. South rivalry. Here is their Launceston book’s record of the event, which also carries a copy of The Examiner’s report then under the heading: COLD WAR ENDED AS L’TON GOES GAY.

Where are the golden hatchets?

After considerable sleuthing your authors can report that, probably lurking under a paving stone somewhere in front of the former Launceston Hotel, trodden over hundreds of times a day, are two icons of cardinal import to harmonious intercourse, diplomacy and development in this island State.

We refer to what your authors call The Golden Hatchets of Harmony; two little axes the bewigged and gowned Town Clerks of Hobart and Launceston (Messrs Reginald Cole and Henry Staubi) buried in a small hole in the footpath amid felicitous cheering during the Lions Club’s annual Fiesta on Friday the 13th of February 1959. The burying of the hatchets is an American Indian to signify an end to hostilities. The event was supposed to put an end to the vendetta between Tasmania’s North and South, referred to in a few places in this book. It had festered and erupted now and then since bureaucratic buffoons officially divided the island into two colonies, Buckinghamshire and Cornwall, in 1804.

So the event would never be forgotten, a metal plaque was placed over the hatchets’ grave. it read: Lions Fiesta Night, Friday, February 13th 1959. The North and South Hatchet was buried here by the Town Clerks of Hobart and Launceston.

The Examiner reported on it the next day on pages one and three: “Tasmania’s cold war between North and South is dead and buried …”. But where is the plaque today?

Charles Wooley remembers seeing it, covered in clear Perspex. Does the plaque’s removal indicate, perchance, an official view that the vendetta lives on? Has some dark and divisive parochialist had the hatchets removed, too?

Your authors, Tasmanians who have lived in Launceston and Hobart and other parts of this island, recommend to the City Council a radar or magnetic search, even an archeological dig if necessary, to find The Golden Hatchets of Harmony. Our civic fathers could then, with due reverence and felicity, reinstall a plaque. And then to Hobart, for a similar and overdue event.

The Launcston City Council has lately told Mike Tatlow it has embarked on a program to find the golden hatchets and mark their presence with a plaque. Next move, Hobart?