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.

 

King Street, Sydney – Looking West

King Street cuts east–west through the CBD — Domain / Macquarie Street at one end, the land falling toward Darling Harbour / Cockle Bay at the other — named for Philip Gidley King, First Fleet officer and Governor of New South Wales (1800–1806). Nineteenth-century “looking west” views catch shopfronts, hotels and horse traffic on the descending ridge — the commercial grain between George, Pitt, Castlereagh and Elizabeth.

The street stayed a retail and theatre-adjacent corridor well into the twentieth century, rebuilt after fires and boom cycles. Images here belong to that looking-west documentary habit rather than to one surviving landmark façade. Caption by identifiable corners, signage or vehicles where you can read them — and don’t confuse this CBD King Street with Newtown’s King Street.

St Thomas’ Anglican Church, North Sydney (historic St Leonards)

The live title says “St Leonard’s Church, North Shore” — but the Anglican parish church of the old township of St Leonards (today’s North Sydney) is St Thomas’, on McLaren / Church Streets. Land was set aside as the north shore settled in the 1820s–40s. The first St Thomas church, generally attributed to Conrad Martens, was begun in the early 1840s, opened in 1846, and tied to Bishop Broughton’s early pastoral work on this side of the harbour. Martens’s carved font is still reported in use.

Population growth demanded a larger building. Edmund Blacket designed a new Gothic Revival church; the foundation stone for the nave and tower stage was laid in 1881, and the completed church was dedicated in 1884 (works continuing under Cyril Blacket after Edmund’s death in 1883). Built of locally quarried stone, St Thomas’ is among the longest Anglican parish churches in New South Wales. The proposed tower was never fully realised as originally intended.

Prefer the correct dedication St Thomas’ in titles and captions; “St Leonards” properly names the historic township/district.

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The Anglican parish church of the old township of St Leonards — today’s North Sydney — is St Thomas’ Church on McLaren / Church Streets, not a separate surviving building named “St Leonard’s Church.” Land was set aside as the north shore settled in the 1820s–40s. The first St Thomas’ church, generally attributed to Conrad Martens, was begun in the early 1840s, opened in 1846, and associated with Bishop Broughton’s early pastoral work on the north side of the harbour. Martens’s carved font is still reported in use.

Population growth required a larger building. Edmund Blacket designed a new Gothic Revival church; the foundation stone for the nave and tower stage was laid in 1881, and the completed church was dedicated in 1884 (works continuing under Cyril Blacket after Edmund’s death in 1883). Built of locally quarried stone, St Thomas’ is among the longest Anglican parish churches in New South Wales. The proposed tower was never fully realised as originally intended.

Photographs here appear to show that North Shore parish church and its nineteenth-century fabric. Prefer the correct dedication St Thomas’ in titles and captions; “St Leonards” properly names the historic township/district.

Courthouse and Scotch Church – Parramatta

The old prints call it “Courthouse and Scotch Church, Parramatta” as if they were a pair you could still walk between. You can’t — one is mostly gone, the other left town. Those colonial views show two neighbouring civic buildings near the corner of Church and George Streets: the second Parramatta Courthouse and the Scots’ (Presbyterian) Church, later known as St Andrew’s.

The courthouse was a Greek Revival sandstone building associated with Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis and builders James Houison and Nathaniel Payten, put up in the late 1830s (opened for use in the late 1830s–1840) and extended mid-century. It served until a later courthouse generation replaced it; only fragments (notably a sandstone wall and cell block behind the George Street frontage) survive from the Lewis complex. Some of the old courthouse columns were reused in the Boer War Memorial in Parramatta Park.

The Scotch Church — St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church — was a Victorian Gothic landmark on Church Street. Construction began about 1840 (architect James Hume, with local associations to James Houison) and the church was completed in the 1840s. When a larger St Andrew’s opened elsewhere in Parramatta in the 1920s, the old “Auld Kirk” was dismantled and re-erected at McKern Street, Wentworthville, where it was dedicated in 1928. These images therefore record a nineteenth-century streetscape pairing that no longer stands together in central Parramatta.

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The Parramatta Courthouse and Scotch Church were important civic and religious buildings in the colonial town. The Scotch Church served Parramatta’s Presbyterian community, while the courthouse supported the town’s growing judicial and administrative life. Together, they reflect Parramatta’s development as a major centre in nineteenth-century New South Wales.

Garden Island, Pinchgut, and Clarke's Island, Seen from Rose Bay

From Rose Bay the harbour still reads as a set of rocks in a drowned valley, even though one of them has been stapled to the mainland. Garden Island was the First Fleet’s kitchen garden for HMS Sirius in 1788, which is the whole of the English name. The navy never really left. By the 1850s it was a Royal Navy yard; the RAN took it in 1913; in the 1940s the Captain Cook Graving Dock filled the channel to Potts Point, and the island became a peninsula. What you photograph from Rose Bay is a working dockyard pretending to be a headland.

The little fortified stack closer in is Pinchgut, officially Fort Denison. Governor Phillip’s Rock Island became a convict isolation rock — the “pinchgut” ration story is folklore with a nautical rival, a pinch in the harbour. George Barney had the old pyramid cut down and raised a Martello tower, finished in 1857. John Dunmore Lang called the levelling vandalism against a work of God. He had a point; the silhouette is now all gun and garrison.

Clark Island — the extra e in Clarke’s is the usual slip — sits off Darling Point, named for Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, who ran a convict-tended vegetable garden there. It is a pocket of Sydney Harbour National Park: picnic tables, no ferry, bookings for weddings. Three different fates in one view — dockyard, fort, picnic — which is the harbour in miniature.

Entrance to Sydney Harbour – North Head

Stand on North Head on a clear day and you understand why every colonial chart and postcard obsesses over “the Heads.” This is the northern side of the seaward entrance to Port Jackson — Sydney Harbour — opposite South Head, near Manly. Contemporary park interpretation uses Aboriginal names such as Car-rang-gel (and related Gayemagal spellings); use published park or council forms carefully. From early colonial times the headland was a landmark for shipping and a vantage for signal and lookout posts — historic views “from the Flagstaff” look out across the Heads toward the ocean and the harbour mouth.

In 1832 the colonial government reserved much of North Head for quarantine. The North Head Quarantine Station operated from 1832 until 1984, receiving ships and passengers whose health threatened the colony and later the nation. It is among Australia’s most intact quarantine complexes and is listed on both the National Heritage List and the NSW State Heritage Register (as part of the wider North Head / Sydney Harbour National Park landscape). After closure the station passed to NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service; the leased tourism precinct is widely known as Q Station, still inside the national park and under heritage controls.

North Head also carries layers of Aboriginal Country, twentieth-century defence works, and remnant bushland of high conservation value. Treat this post as an entrance-to-the-harbour essay: keep the Flagstaff viewpoint if your images are historic prints, and let quarantine and national-park history give the place depth without inventing ship names or outbreak tallies.