Nic's Blog
The Francises of Middlesex Plains 3: George Francis and the Middlesex hunters
When 52-year-old Maria Francis died of heart disease at Middlesex Station in 1883, Jack Francis lost not only his partner and mother to his child but his scribe.[1] For years his more literate half had been penning his letters. Delivering her corpse to Chudleigh for...
Jack Francis 2: Francis and the Philosopher, or how Mount Bischoff came to Middlesex Station
When it comes to mythology, James ‘Philosopher’ Smith (1827–97), discoverer of the phenomenal tin deposits of Mount Bischoff in north-western Tasmania, has copped the lot. He was a mad hatter who ripped off the real discoverer, didn’t know tin when he saw it, threw...
Wrestler wrangled Tasmanian tigers: the fact or fiction of George Randall
In 1945 one-time wrestler George Randall (1884–1963) recalled catching fifteen thylacines in the space of a month within 25 miles (40 km) of Burnie. He didn’t smother them in a bear hug. Randall reminisced that, upon finding tiger scats, he would lay a scent for half...
‘The Broken Hill of Tasmania’: the rise and fall of the Godkin Silver Mine, western Tasmania. Part 2: Collapse of the Godkin.
In 1891 the Godkin Silver Mining Company (GSM Co) spent about £7000 building a horse-drawn tramway to service its mine before the value of the property was even established. Its mine manager, Arthur Richard (AR) Browne, was more interested in installing machinery at...
‘The Broken Hill of Tasmania’: the rise and fall of the Godkin Silver Mine, western Tasmania. Part 1: Tramway to nowhere.
Tasmania has produced some disastrous mining ‘bubbles’. Stamper batteries and water wheels were rushed to the ‘Cornwall of the Antipodes’, the Mount Heemskirk tin field, in the early 1880s.[i] In the following decade the hydraulic gold craze crossed the Tasman Sea...
Jack the Shepherd or Barometer Boy: Middlesex Plains stockman Jack Francis
DYI dentistry would make for intriguing reality TV (Channel Seven’s new blockbuster The chair anyone?) but in the nineteenth-century Tasmanian backwoods it was an everyday reality. Many people were far removed from medical services, and if you owned forceps you were...
The twilight zone of Charlie Drury, Surrey Hills hunter
The palm of being Waratah’s first alcoholic probably belonged to its first resident doctor, John Waldo Pring, a Crimean War veteran who drank himself to death in the years 1876–79.[1] One of his lowest moments came in March 1876 when he escorted a disguised detective...
‘A terror incognito!’: hiking Tasmania’s Central Plateau in 1908
Hikers love drama. Launceston photographer Steve Spurling (Stephen Spurling III, 1876‒1962) manufactured some in 1908 when he set out on a hike with his mates Knyvet Roberts (1872‒1959) and John Burns (Jack) Scott (1873‒1915). Their journey to Lake St Clair was ‘a...
‘Five-fingered Tom’ and ‘Black Harry’: hunters of the Hampshire and Surrey Hills
They weren’t old lags, shifty safe-crackers or Hibernian highwaymen. They were Tasmanian highland snarers who flitted across the public record, leaving just their nicknames to tantalise the curious. ‘Five-fingered Tom’ was a little light fingered. ‘Black Harry’ was...