Hobart - Culture and History

Mark Twain, in his book Following the Equator (he was obviously seriously off-course when he visited Hobart), offered a eulogy to the city's charms:

'How beautiful is the whole region, for form, and grouping, and opulence, and freshness of foliage, and variety of colour, and grace and shapeliness of the hills, the capes, the promontories; and then, the splendour of the sunlight, the dim, rich distances, the charm of the water-glimpses! And it was in this paradise that the yellow-liveried convicts were landed, and the Corps-bandits quartered, and the wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black innocents consummated on that autumn day in May, in the brutish old time. It was all out of keeping with the place, a sort of bringing of heaven and hell together.'

Hobart's History
Hobart had the most inauspicious of beginnings. Its sole raison d'etre was to keep the French out of Australia. Fearful that the French might try to establish a colony on the island Governor Philip Gidley King sent Lieutenant John Bowen, with a party of 49 including 35 convicts, to establish a settlement on the Derwent River.

The town's economic raison d'etre was as a port. In its early days it must have been a wild and unruly place. One historian has written on the population of early Hobart:

'Such a hard and inhospitable place inevitably attracted a certain kind of person. By the 1820s the flotsam and jetsam of the world, men seeking refuge from the law or seeking isolation from other human beings, has been drawn to the shores of the island. Some of the men came as convicts and were emancipated; some came as convicts and fled into the bush; and some walked off boats and ships in Hobart Town or Launceston and became sealers, whalers, farm hands or drifters. They were rough frontiersmen. Not frontiersmen in the sense of opening up new land; frontiersmen in the sense that they despoiled and exploited everything and everyone they saw. It was against these men's natures to form a 'posse' to join forces with the military. They had laws of their won and those laws had nothing to do with the statutes and regulations which were being formulated in London.'

By 1827 Hobart was a thriving port with an estimated population of 5 000. It was the centre of trade not only for Tasmania but also for the sealers operating on the islands in Bass Strait and the whalers who were sailing the southern oceans. Its chief exports included sealskins and whale oil as well as hides, wool and an extract derived from wattle. Ships from Europe, China, Batavia, Singapore and the United States all used the port.

The problem of Hobart was that it was always at the mercy of trade. It has no enduring economic base and the hinterland it served was simply not large or diverse enough to sustain its existence.

By the 1830s the sealing trade had virtually disappeared. Whaling continued but the need to find an additional industry led to the establishment of considerable shipbuilding facilities. The quality of Tasmanian hardwoods, combined with the excellent port facilities, meant that by the 1850s Hobart was building more ships than all the other Australian ports combined. The inevitable march of technology saw ship design change to vessels driven by steam and manufactured out of steel. Hobart's timber-based shipbuilding industry was in decline by the end of the century.

Since World War I Hobart's economic livelihood, particularly in an industrial context, has been largely determined by the cheapness of its hydro electric power. This has given the city a small industrial base. However by the standards of the mainland cities Hobart is the least industrialised of all the state capitals.