This view looks west across Richmond, Tasmania — Coal River country, one of Van Diemen’s Land’s early inland townships, not the Hawkesbury namesake outside Sydney. From the 1820s the crossing here pulled settlers, soldiers and convict work-gangs into a compact Georgian village that still reads as a film set when you stand on the rise.
The hero of most “looking west” postcards is Richmond Bridge: convict-quarried sandstone arches begun in 1823 and finished in 1825, still carrying traffic, and listed on the National Heritage List as Australia’s oldest surviving large stone arch bridge. The gaol nearby (from 1825) is among the country’s oldest surviving prison compounds. Together they explain why Richmond became a staging post between Hobart and the east-coast / Port Arthur roads.
Keep these six photographs. Caption by bridge, river flats and township roofscape if the frames support it; don’t drag NSW Richmond or Windsor into a Tasmanian paddock.
