In 1893 a strange man made a noteworthy proposal. Tasmanians are still thinking and arguing about it.

The man was William John Hackett, known colloquially as Professor Hackett. He was knowledgeable and provocative, a man of science and suspect activities. And undoubtedly eccentric.

For a few decades Professor Hackett strutted Hobart’s streets leaving a trail of stories. Quite a few involved the law, one way or another. He was charged with animal cruelty for riding a lame horse in 1895, for instance, where he profoundly misjudged his defence strategy. Bringing the horse to the court to show it was sound, the horse instead revealed a distinct limp when it was accelerated to a trot by the professor’s young assistant Freddy.

The professor’s obvious quirks, which allegedly included being party to crimes against property and person, also extended to the art of invention. In 1914 he was mentioned by one gossip column for being “the first person to experiment with wireless in Tasmania”. A much earlier report, in 1889, has him inventing “a machine for travelling on wires suspended similar to telegraph wires”.

Hackett also had a mind to civic improvement, although this served merely to highlight his oddness. For instance, in 1888 he “harangued” a crowd of about 700 in a field across the road from a hotel. Part of his proposal was to “do away with the mayor’s salary” and increase pay for city workers. He also “gave a detailed description of a flying machine he had invented, the patent of which he intended to dispose of to the [city] corporation”. 

Context suggests the professor might have visited the hotel before beginning this rambling public lecture.

Unsurprisingly, then, the professor’s scheme for “an aerial tramway … guaranteed to whisk you from the pinnacle of Mount Wellington to the Dunn-street Pier in thirty seconds” was not met with a great degree of seriousness. Apart from the fact that he proposed a frighteningly fast ride down the mountain – seemingly without detailing much of an ascending mechanism – the purpose of the meeting in Hobart’s Town Hall in mid-1893 was to discuss endemic unemployment.

The professor’s other contribution to that meeting was a scheme for pumping water out of the Derwent in order to flood the streets of Hobart clean. It too came to nothing.

But the notion of an “aerial tramway” endured, even if the scheme took time to develop more sensibly. In 1905, a proposal was put forward by “a syndicate” of businessmen interested in developing an “aerial tramway from the Springs to the top of Mount Wellington”. A two-car system was planned, “suspended the least possible distance from the ground”, slowly going up through and then above the tree-line at a stately 10 miles per hour.

Within a few months the plan had grown grander. There were hopes to extend the suburban tram lines further through South Hobart and run the aerial tramway from the Cascade Brewery, more effectively connecting the city and the summit. Soon there was a company and a prospectus and an expanding pool of provisional directors. A model was displayed to the public, and correspondents to newspapers began their inter-generational obsession with the subject.

Legislation enabling the project passed the Tasmanian Parliament in 1905 via an engineer’s report, a route survey, and a select committee, as well as the usual readings. Ultimately, a convoluted legislative history followed as The Mount Wellington Aerial Railway Act did various parliamentary twists and turns in the years and decades that followed.

In a hint of the many troubles to come, this act got a special mention in The Mountain Park Act of 1906 which created a mountainous public park vested in the City of Hobart. After providing for a variety of matters from the annual reporting of finances to fines for fire-lighting and illicit egg-gathering, The Mountain Park Act’s final clause quite specifically exempted its operation from anything that could “in any way affect or impede the exercise of the powers contained in The Mount Wellington Aerial Railway Act”. The legislative message was, of course, that private enterprise trumps public leisure. Certainly, it is an early pointer to perennial Tasmanian questions about balancing access and preservation, development and protection, novelty and tradition.

But the legislators wasted their provisional ink, for the aerial railway was not built. To be fair, the World War I intervened, but there were reports of flagging interest and little evidence of progress even before the Kaiser gave a good excuse for touristic inaction. In fact, while there were renewed attempts to kick-start aerial railway construction in 1928, then 1931, then 1937, and probably a few more times between them and many since, the Great Depression resulted in the execution of an alternative plan: the construction of a road. From that time onward, the cable car became the other idea, rather than the main idea.

Still, the professor’s scheme survived the advent of motor-car touring, even if it had become something of a running joke among locals. One company even played on the silliness of it all to great effect in 1939: “Ten years hence we may have an aerial railway to the pinnacle of Mt Wellington” one of its advertisements announced, “but you will still be riding with perfect security the same KING CYCLE.”

It was unlikely the same claim for security could be made for “a self-propelling bicycle”, which was another of Professor Hackett’s reported inventions. If his cable car velocity was any measure, then that particular bicycle may best have been avoided. Professor Hackett liked things to move quickly, even if the city of Hobart did not.

Nick Brodie describes himself as a professional history nerd. He has a doctorate in late medieval vagrancy law, is a leading expert on the history of poor boxes, and is the author of acclaimed popular histories Kin: A Real People's History of Our Nation and 1787: The Lost Chapters of Australia's Beginnings. His latest book is The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain's Tasmanian Invasion, which uses a wealth of new archival material to re-write Australia's most infamous colonial war.