Zeehan

Zeehan (including Trial Harbour and Granville Harbour)
Historic mining town in the wilds of Western Tasmania.
Located 293 km north west of Hobart, 38 km north of Queenstown and 155 km south of Burnie and 172 metres above sea level, Zeehan is a classic mining town. While the older sections of Zeehan are genuinely very interesting and give some indication of what the town must have been like when it had a population of 10 000. The new sections are really identikit mining town and is no different from any one of a thousand mining towns. Standard issue permulum houses abound. There is a modern library. A modern police station. Zeehan has spread down the main street with the old part of the town, which is worth exploring, being located at the far end of the town.

This contradiction has been well captured by the poet Graeme Hetherington who has written of the town:

Brand new and temporary
With one-night rooms, brick-veneer, fake stone
Bars, Dining Room, Reception, cars
The motel stood, spread here and there,
A boom town's bag of gold dust
Among the areas of swamp,
Heaps of mullock, caved-in shafts,
And sections of a fallen water race
Once raised up high
On thin and spreading stilts.

Still the town is worth visiting. The main street is a reminder of a bygone era and the local Museum is outstanding.

Zeehan was one of the first places in Tasmania ever seen by Europeans. As early as 1642 Abel Tasman sighted the mountain peak which was subsequently named Mount Zeehan after the brig in which he was sailing. It was Bass and Flinders, travelling around the Tasmanian coast in 1802, who named both Mount Zeehan and Mount Heemskirk after the two boats used by Tasman in his epic voyage.

The area, which was wild and rugged, remained unexplored until the discovery of tin at Mt Bischoff in 1871. In the years that followed prospectors rushed the area and a certain mining craziness set in. In 1879 tin was discovered at Mount Heemskirk north of the present site of Zeehan. It led to a boom which saw more than 50 companies staking claims over some 6400 hectares of what would prove to be hopeless and useless country. There were even leases sold on the beaches along the coast. By the 1880s there were only a dozen mines working in the Heemskirk area.

In late 1882 four miners moved further south and in December a man named Frank Long discovered silver-lead near the present day site of Zeehan. It led to the largest mining boom on Tasmania's west coast with Zeehan being dubbed the 'Silver City of the West' and, within a decade, Zeehan growing to become the third largest town in Tasmania. This is hardly surprising. Long's first samples had yielded 70 ounces of silver per ton.

By 1884 there was a paling hut, the Despatch Hut, at Zeehan and John Moyle, employed by the Despatch Syndicate, had become the first mine manager in the district.

Over the next decade Zeehan boomed. At its height in 1891 there were 159 companies with mining leases in the area. Trial Harbour was the port and there was a muddy and difficult road from the Trial Harbour Hotel to Zeehan.

By the 1890s the town had developed an air of sophistication. There was a Zeehan Stock Exchange which boasted 60 members. Each year, from 1890-1910, the mines earned an average of £200,000. The main street was full of elegant buildings including banks, theatres and hotels.