Tasmania 40° South, Issue 53, June-2009
Westbury: English feel, Irish influence;
Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur envisaged that Westbury would become a large market town. He expected the village to thrive so he instructed his surveyors to map 126 miles [203 kilometres] of streets and roads. Although Westbury never quite reached the heights anticipated, it did indeed prosper. (Many of the early Tasmanian rural towns were surveyed and laid out with the expectation that they would become much bigger centres.)
The first European settlers referred to the whole of the northern part of the Midlands as Norfolk Plains — many of these early settlers had come from Norfolk Island. After the Van Diemen’s Land Company surveyors had blazed a track through the Meander Valley to company grants on the North-West Coast the value of these lands was realised and other settlers began to move in.
The name of the town itself comes from one of the five Westburys in England and its location as a (then) western outpost doubtless had something to do with it.
In 1832 a small military detachment cleared enough land where the village green is today to set up their quarters to bring law and order and protect the settlers arriving in ever-increasing numbers. As a garrison village Westbury began to grow rapidly during the 1830s, due largely to an influx of Irish ex-convicts, free settlers and retired British Army soldiers. By 1836 the district was home to 227 free men and women and 317 convicts. Almost the entire garrison was of Irish origin and most of them settled in the area on discharge or retirement. Military pensioners were each granted a five-acre [two-hectare] block, complete with a well and a pear tree. (It was presumed that a family would be able to support itself on one of these small holdings.) Many of Westbury’s streets recall this early heritage with names such as Five Acre Row and Pensioners Row. Thus the land around Westbury became the domain of small-holding, hard-working farmers who cleared their land and enclosed their fields with easily propagated English hawthorn creating the unmistakable, beautiful, English-style landscape we see today. (Sec Issue 49.)
It is often said that Westbury is the most English country town in Australia. If you find yourself on its village green among the established European trees surrounded by Georgian architecture you will feel you have travelled back in time to the early decades of the nineteenth century. Although English in style Westbury was profoundly influenced by its Irish citizens.
Exiled Irish political prisoner Richard Dry, pardoned in 1819, was Westbury’s largest landowner during these early years. At its peak his Quamby Estate totalled 30,000 acres [13,600 hectares]. (During the 1860s the Quamby homestead was known as Tasmania’s ‘Government House of the North’.) Dry helped many of his fellow Irishmen establish their own properties and his son (later Sir Richard Dry) became Tasmania’s first native-born premier and the first Tasmanian to be knighted.
Many more Irish, escaping the potato famine, settled in the district from 1847 to 1849. In 1848 seven Irish political activists were transported to Van Diemen’s Land as political exiles. Four of them escaped. The two most radical, Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel, were given refuge and aided in their escape by the people of Westbury. (For this deed Westbury has always held a special place in the hearts of the Irish.) Mitchel, when making his escape in 1853, spent a week or so in hiding and remarked in his journal: ‘One of the peculiarities of the Westbury district is that you find Irish families and whole Irish neighbourhoods associating together and seldom meetting foreigners — for even the assigned convict servants whom these people select are all Irish. Thus they preserve even in the second generation Irish ways and strong Irish accents.’ Gaelic was the local language in Westbury for many generations and a strong Irish brogue is reputed to have lasted throughout the nineteenth century. Westbury to this day retains some of its Irish connections. The annual Westbury St Patrick’s Day Festival is the state’s largest.
By the l850s Westbury had made spectacular progress and many of the finer buildings in the town were erected during this period. In 1850 Van Diemen’s Land was producing more wheat for the Australian colonies than New South Wales and Victoria combined. The town was the centre of a thriving agricultural district with wheat being the principal crop. Every town and centre in the Norfolk Plains area had its flourmill and many still survive. In 1851 there were 2,196 free people and 646 convicts.
In 1863 Westbury was important enough to become a rural municipality. When the other mainland colonies developed their wheat industry production turned to oats and livestock (primarily pigs). There were 49,000 acres [19,830 hectares] under cultivation in the Meander Valley by 1870. A downturn came in the late 1870s, however, and thousands abandoned the district — the effects of the depressed Tasmanian economy and the monopoly on land of the larger wealthier landholders being the principal reasons. Many Westbury men went to mining areas on the mainland and sent their earnings to their hard- pressed families. Others left the district with their families to go to the rapidly developing farming regions of the North-West and North-East Coasts.
By the end of the century the Westbury district had bounced back with a harvest of nearly 600,000 bushels [21,820 cubic metres] of grain and 10,000 tonnes of potatoes. In 1899 60,000 pigs were recorded as having been reared for market — a remarkable number.
The opening of the railway to Launceston in 1871 sealed Westbury’s fate: it remains a small town and this today is its charm. In its back streets there are some modern houses but in the older part of town near the village green time stands beautifully still. Here you can still sense the town’s long-gone heyday of the 1850s by strolling around its streets with the elegant public buildings, banks, churches and hotels.
Like a number of Tasmania’s historic centres Westbury is no longer on a main highway. For the sake of a five-minute detour, take the trouble to visit and enjoy this fascinating part of our heritage.