Citation
Macfie, Peter H., 2003, A Social History of Richmond, 1820 – 1855. https://petermacfiehistorian.net.au/publications/social-history
Abstract
The life and times of Richmond from 1820 to 1855 as recorded through the evidence presented at the Richmond court during those years.
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60 page document formatted to print on A4 paper.
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Contents
Excerpt
The village of Richmond was similar yet so very different to today’s tourist town. Horses were the main method of transport, pulling waggons, carts or more fashionable gigs. Poorer people walked everywhere or caught a coach to Hobart Town. There were eight inns for travellers. Until 1850, convict road gangs, some with men wearing leg irons, worked in the streets and on roads approaching the village. Flocks of sheep were driven through the village to the sale-yards. Assigned servants assembled on the Muster Ground, now the Municipal Park, to have their names checked, observed carefully by constables and the Police Magistrate, based in the Watch House. Here offending assigned servants, convicts under sentence and occasional free settler were charged before magistrates, and held in the holding cells.
At the Court House nearby, charges were heard by magistrates and ‘justice’ handed out, by today’s standards, harsh and without feeling.
From being a pioneering district, after 1850 the town gradually became a town left behind by the spread of settlement to the north and the new colonies of Victoria and New Zealand. First the Victorian gold rush attracted settlers away, then in 1874 the town was by-passed by the Mainline Railway to the north and the Sorell Causeway to the south. Richmond became a quaint village, preserved by default. From the start of the first Jury Act in 1855 to the introduction of Municipal Government in 1864, the Richmond district was under the jurisdiction of affluent locals, rather than government appointed magistrates. Sentences were just as harsh, although flogging became a thing of the past. Richmond became the centre of local government for the Coal River Valley, holding council and court hearings, for cases stretching from Dulcot through Richmond to Campania and Colebrook.
Meanwhile, a new generation of settlers had moved into the village – Jacobs, Kellys, Andersons, Nichols, Ross and other families who stayed. Immigrants, including some German families plus military pensioners used the former barracks for temporary accommodation.
While the streets were home during the 1870s to elderly emancipist – former convicts – who lived in cheap rent or in huts in the bush at hamlets like Dulcot, most families tried to over-look their own convict origins.
The Catholic -Protestant divide continued, with the Bridge Inn being the Catholic pub and the Lennox Arms/Commercial the Protestant/visitors hotel. A deferential relationships between farm-hands and farm owners continued; but behind closed doors, another world existed.
End of Excerpt
Index