Belmont Park - Richmond - NSW

Richmond Looking West – Tasmania

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.

This view looks west across Richmond, Tasmania, one of the island’s oldest settled townships. Founded in the 1820s on the Coal River, Richmond is known for its surviving Georgian buildings and historic bridge.

Richmond Church and Rectory

If you drive out to the Hawkesbury and come into Richmond along Windsor Street, St Peter’s sits on the rise above Pugh’s Lagoon as if Macquarie had planted it there — which, in a way, he did. This is one of his five Macquarie Towns. On the Hawkesbury tours of 1810–11 he chose an elevated bank for church, schoolhouse and burial ground; on 10 January 1811 the site was marked out with strong posts. An early schoolhouse-chapel served the town until a purpose-built church was needed.

The present Colonial Georgian church was designed by Francis Clarke and built by James Atkinson between the later 1830s and 1841. Bishop William Grant Broughton consecrated it on 15 July 1841. The picturesque rectory, also by Clarke, was completed in 1847. Edmund Blacket later altered the church — porch 1850, chancel mid-1850s — and remodelled the rectory in 1863. The group — church, rectory, school hall, cemetery and stables — sits in a park-like setting overlooking the lowlands and is listed on the NSW State Heritage Register.

Photographs here show the Richmond church and rectory group in the Hawkesbury landscape. This is St Peter’s, Richmond (Hawkesbury), NSW — not St Luke’s, Richmond, Tasmania.