Cut from corrugated walls, these crude windows remind me of gun slits. Made by slicing three lines and folding out a thin rectangle of metal, they face an almost forgotten Tasmanian frontier. On a sunny day, full of birdsong and lush spring greenery, they repose in fading incongruity.
These distinctive windows adorn a handful of corrugated sheds at the edge of a little town inland from Hobart named Hamilton. They house the apparatus of hydro-engineering, but thanks to their unique windows they resemble military pillboxes. By dint of their distinctive windows, they appear to guard the town from the floodplain and all that might lay beyond the distant hills.
I found these sheds along a genuinely pleasant waterside stroll which winds alongside the river at Hamilton’s edge. Below the war council chambers, beyond the social distancing sign guarding an empty picnic table, and past a fading welcome to walkers, the Clyde River Walk follows a path that is historic, industrial, and pastoral all at once.
I thoroughly enjoyed taking this track on one of those days when heavy clouds gently strobe the earth in shadow and sunshine. But while my eyes saw the archaeological interplay of history and heritage, my mind kept seeing pillboxes and gun-slit windows. Ironically, I kept thinking of the earlier, real frontier days of Hamilton, long before the advent and arrival of any of the metallic corrugations whose edges were now rusting gently in the warming present.
Situated as it is on one river not far from where it meets another, Hamilton occupies a classic frontier crossroad. Originally part crossing, part army base, and now mainly a local farming village and travellers’ stop, it seems to miss its rightful place in Tasmania’s epic story. The touring masses stop here, certainly, but they are generally headed elsewhere.
Several grand sandstone buildings speak of Hamilton’s civic beginnings and stylistic aspirations. Like many historic country towns, it feels pleasant to visit and is probably nice to inhabit. But, like that distinctive country town nicety, it does not offer much cause for the average traveller to linger beyond pleasant refreshments and a few touristic photographs. Only the determined slow travellers take the Clyde River Walk.
I too have regularly made the mistake of stopping only briefly while passing through. So, after many years of such error, I determined to make Hamilton my destination.
One day I got in the car and made for Hamilton, which is how I ended up walking past sheds and dreaming of battles.
Even as I drove towards Hamilton, I was thinking of the Vandemonian War. Having a few years ago written a history of Tasmania’s infamous and much misunderstood colonial war, it was unsurprising that my main points of historic reference for the town were sweeping campaigns and endemic conflict.
I had not intended to fixate on the war during my visit to Hamilton. I tried to focus on the coach-stop, farming, and civil engineering elements of the town’s history. But when I saw the gun-slit-like windows by the river, I started to mull more purposely about that conflict which I have come to know all too well.
Host to a police magistrate who was also a military officer, Hamilton was the administrative centre of one of those relatively under-documented fronts that blight Tasmania’s history. For roughly half a decade, Hamilton was part of the colony’s western front. Documentarily, it was suspiciously quiet.
As I examined the sheds that now mark this frontier, I thought how silly it is that so many people remember this war as one waged principally by settlers. While details of events are often sketchy, orders remain as clear as the ink they were written in. We know that British troops were ordered to clear Aboriginal people from the Hamilton district. In November 1829 Colonel George Arthur, who was both Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land and commander of His Majesty’s forces in the island colony, ordered a lieutenant and a detachment of about 100 soldiers “to Hamilton at the Lower Clyde, there to encamp, in order to check the atrocities and expel the Aborigines from that, and the surrounding Country”.
We might not have the day-by-day diarising of the Hamilton district campaigning like we do for some other Vandemonian times and places, but we have the fact that the use of force was state-sanctioned. Furthermore, it was deliberately brutal. When explaining his proposed methods to his British superiors, the Lieutenant Governor openly used the word “Terror”.
I recalled all this while imaginatively casting hydro-engineering sheds into military posts and thought how hard this story is to tell. No wonder it goes unremarked on the walk’s signage. Yet I also thought how Hamilton’s historical opacity can be a strength.
Other better-documented places often suffer from a species of Tasmanian history that says this man speared this dog here, this man killed this many people at this spot with this gun, and this historian wrote this book which gathered up all the truth with this many baskets of crumbs left over afterwards. But up by the waters of the Clyde I found it refreshing to be away from the sort of history which must be unwound before it can be retold. A line of military posts once divided Tasmania, a fact the landscape does not yet memorialise.
For now, at least, Hamilton’s corrugated sentinels at the edge of an ancient river will have to do.
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.
