EARLY DAYS OF HOBART TOWN.

Dunstan Times, Issue 576, 2 May 1873, Page 3

EARLY DAYS OF HOBART TOWN.

o The following extracts from the Hobart Town Mercury will interest many readers, as shewing tire great contrast betwixt life, past and present in the southern hemisphere : The second newspaper of which we have any account was started in May 1814, and was styled, *• The Van Dieman’-s Land Gazette and General Advertiser,” of which I think there is no perfect copy extant. But of its successor, the “ Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter,” commenced Ist of June, 181G, entire series have been luckily preserved, one of which I have now by me, from its earliest number to the one issued in the last week of 1826, in which the history of Tasmania is preserved for ten and a ' half j ears. The proprietor was always hard driven for matter to fill its limited space with, even about half of it was devoted to Government notices and trade advertisements. The police office, however, where a world of public business was done in those days, and bushrangings, weie the main pillars, of its strength, and the editor had often no other news bat these: bat then he was a clover fellow, and thought with Pope, that The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole, Can never be a mouse ofjany soul, so when the above subjects failed him, he had still his resources; and the last English newspapers received in the Colony, generally about threequarters of a year old, helped to fill up his blanks, %nd ho supplied his readers with plenty of notices of such events as the battle of Waterloo, fought about a twelvemonth before, of Napoleon’s life at St. Helena, the execution of Ney and Murat,' the Algenne expedition and a hundred other cognate subjects which half fill many a page of the first volumes of- this old chronicle, all of which, though a little stale at present, arc still pretty readable. How it would startle any of us now whose business or pleasure led him to tho Old Wharf, part of which overlays tho once wtll-wooded island on which Colonel Collins and the companions of his voyage first landed, called Hunter’s Island, to be met by such a ghastly spectacle as the dead bodies of a score or two of malefactors, hanging in gibbets where they had died, many of them several years before, and now doing good service in death—so it is then believed for the evil example of their lives. And yet this was the ever present exhibition to be found on the isle of Horrors until June of 181G; when it seems that public feeling—not too much cared for then—was still powerful enough to enforce their re moval to another point of the shore, a little more out of sight, where they were all of tliem set up again, doubtless under the mistaken idea of intimidating evil doers into the ways of righteousness. In confirmation ofthe aboveremarks, tho following paragraph is given : “ As the Bodies ofthe Felons that were Gibhetted on Hunter’s Island, is close to the place where tho Wharf is erected, and became objects of disgust, especially to the Female sox, they have been removed (by Command of His Honor the Lietenant Governor) to a point of Land near Queonborough, ■which in future will he the Place of Execution.” From the uncleared and wholly unformed state of the roads here, even between Hobart Town and Launceston, and from the perils caused by hordes of savages, large hands of bushrangers who infest Hie interior, and what was

nearly as bad as either, the military parties in pursuit, the really dangerous enterprise of crossing the island was then rarely attempted, except by those travelling on the public service, who could not help themselves; and the arrival of every traveller who had safely achieved the passage across is just as regularly chronicled in the old papers I am writing from, as the ship arrivals and departures are in the present days