Mural, Kent & Kent Antiques (date & artist unknown at this point)

Welcome!

I am Silver & I live here in Hobart, Tasmania together with my partner David & our beloved Munchkin cat Cooper. We are Singaporeans but we moved to Hobart in 2004. I am a ghost tour guide for the Ghost Tours of Hobart & Battery Point.

I created this blog in order to share my on-going research of Hobart’s exciting history, as well as stories of the many colorful characters that make up its history.

I intend to focus only on the city of Hobart, along with its surrounds in the greater Hobart region, within the time period between 1803 to the early 1900s.

Why the interest & research in Hobart’s history?

I don’t really know why, to be honest. Perhaps its the image that I have in my mind of those first few British settlers, arriving here to such an alien land, so different from their original home. Seemingly familiar birds like sea gulls had totally different calls. Even the air smelt different, sweet with the scent of eucalyptus. Sounds so.. romantic but it must have been so unnerving for those first colonists.

An incredible juxtaposition of all sorts of different characters. Some of the stories are exciting, a lot of it sad, others even horrifying, just so colorful.

The same can be said of all lands & countries. Hobart isn’t even all that old, just over 200 years in age. But that’s not the point. I Just love it & am totally fascinated by it all.

How will this blog be structured?

Good question. I had almost killed the idea before I even got started because I started thinking too much. I didn’t know how long I was going to take to flesh out a complete picture of any one topic, location or person. It may take me weeks, even months. I started thinking that it wasn’t going to be possible to produce blog posts on a regular basis, at least not enough to make a blog worthwhile.

Then I figured, why wait to produce one massive ‘complete’ post? Define the word ‘complete’. It’s never complete. Why not just blog about new information as I go along? Blog about each new fact or story as I come across it. Keeps the blog lively & I can connect all the temporally scattered blog posts with a robust tagging system. Maybe somewhere down the line, I will do some compilation to create slightly more complete articles of various topics that have enough information already for that.

What kind of posts can I expect to find here?

Here’s the tentative plan, one that will definitely change with time & experience.

• There will be some posts that do a wider, more general scope discussion.
• Some posts will deal with the history of individual streets & their evolution over time.
• I will be covering buildings, sites, areas of important historical significance.
• I hope to do interviews at some point to collect oral history, stories, memories etc. from locals who have lived here their whole lives.
• Where possible, I will try to do photographic comparisons of the past & future at different time periods.
• I will also be covering other buildings that have historic value that are not as well known.

If you have any ideas or suggestions that you would like to contribute, drop me a line.