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…the ladies complain that their husbands are in the habit of starting from their sleep, shouting, “Have you seen the Comet?” For five weeks, from 1st March 1843, the night sky of Tasmania was ablaze as the most spectacular comet seen since 1680 unexpectedly appeared. Initially mistaken as an aurora, the comet’s tail soon became …
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The stunning A.A. Rollings Collection of 2440 photographic glass plates could easily have been crushed fill under our feet if it wasn’t for the actions of Robert Tanner. Thankfully these images of South-east Tasmanian life in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries were saved. The story behind this donation is almost as wonderful as …
Tasmania’s remote and rugged Southwest is a place only a lucky few will ever visit. Robert Tanner is one of those who was fortunate enough to visit the wide sandy beach of Lake Pedder prior to flooding. He also traversed across the Southwest and many other wild parts of our island state during the 1950s …
It is almost 50 years to the day that Joyce Purtscher pressed record on her super 8 camera and captured a snapshot of daily life on the Derwent River following the Tasman Bridge disaster. The reel of film has been carefully stored since 1975 and now, thanks to the work of the Libraries Tasmania digitisation …
In 2011, the State Secretary of the Country Women’s Association first contacted the Tasmanian Archives to initiate a donation of their records. In 2023 the records came to us, and we commenced listing. This collection opens the opportunity for researchers to discover more about the Country Women’s Association’s impacts on the Tasmanian community. For those …
Read on to discover some of the newly digitised Tasmanian Archives and State Library of Tasmania Heritage collections from His Majesty’s Theatre Hobart, Beaconsfield Mines, land grant application registrations and more! To discover more material from our collections, search our catalogue and Tasmanian Names Index or visit us on Flickr, YouTube and Instagram.
In part one of this blog, we looked at the Cascades Female Factory admission register (Female House of Correction, Hobart – Register of Female Convicts admitted to the Factory, showing Number of Days Victualled, Tasmanian Archives: CON139/1/1), which records female convicts who passed through the ‘Female Factory’ from June 1833 to March 1834. This record …
The value of Tasmania’s convict records lies in the detailed information they provide on each person. But there are still gaps in our knowledge due to events not being recorded or records not being preserved in the Archives. Sometimes a single volume or scrap of paper shows us how much more we could have known …
This blog is one of a series that explores in greater depth some of the fascinating stories that we uncovered while researching Duck Trousers, Straw Bonnets, and Bluey: Stories of fabrics and clothing in Tasmania, an exhibition currently on display in the State Library of Tasmania and Tasmanian Archives Reading Room in Hobart. These blogs …
For the moving visual addition to the Duck Trousers, Straw Bonnets, and Bluey exhibition now showing in the State Library Reading Room, we were able to find a few gems from the late Tasmanian Film Corporation. The Tasmanian Film Corporation was the last incarnation of the Tasmanian Government film unit, which was established in 1946 …
The Conservation team was recently tasked with the treatment of a silver cup that belonged to a prominent Tasmanian, with links to a historic French fraternity. Read on to find out more about this unusual item and how it has been conserved.
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