Time to Roam Magazine Issue 12 - December/January 2015 | Page 24

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upfront feature

A scene from the arduous trip around
north west Tasmania. Today it could be
completed in a couple of hours.

Joshua Higgs and Frank Styant Brown

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Browne’s Homoeopathic Pharmacy, Brisbane St
Launceston. Browne’s son and grandson both
became chemists, with a family pharmacy trading
in Launceston right up until the early 1970s

it was no place for women or children. In most places the
roads were little more than bush tracks where they existed.
Meals mostly consisted of what they took with and
cooked over the campfire, and what they could acquire from
shops and pubs along the way. Their daily fare sounds
somewhat quaint today with meals of chops, mutton
and kippered herrings, washed down with billy tea.
Their first journey took them on a loop of north east
Tasmania heading south from Launceston on what today is
the Midland Highway reaching what today is the Esk Highway.
They then headed north east towards St Helens on the
coast, returning back to Launceston via Scottsdale. The 204
mile (328km) journey took 11 days to complete. Today a car
towing a caravan could complete the loop in a few hours.
As both men were well known they were recognised
in most places where they went. Styant Browne’s
recent x-ray breakthrough gave him celebrity status.
Nevertheless the pair didn’t get a warm welcome
everywhere. Even back then townspeople were a little
suspicious of tourists wanting a place to free camp
for the night. Entering the town of Avoca, the locals
were said to have “scattered with alarm” seeing what
they believed was a runaway railway carriage.
The trip has earned the pair a place in Australia’s history
thanks to the way it was recorded and preserved.
Stryant Browne was a founding member of the North
Tasmanian camera club and a proud exponent of this
new form of art. Meanwhile Higgs stopped at various
scenic points along the way and completed paintings.
Three years after the first journey the two headed off on
a similar trip, this time using their skills to capture a slice of
life of the people and places to the west of Launceston.
The photographs and logs are a remarkable
collection. They show fledgling settlements hewn from
the Tasmanian bush. The timber homes are in most
cases surrounded by massive trees, or towering ringbarked skeletons. Public buildings including churches
made of stone look shiny and new and almost as if
they’d been plucked out of the English countryside.
The travel diaries from both trips were transcribed
into logs in beautiful copperplate handwriting and were
re-published by the Launceston Library in 2002.
They provide an amazing insight into colonial lie in
remote Tasmania in the final years of the 1800s and the
colourful personalities of Australia’s caravan pioneers.

St Marks Church Deloraine, taken on the
1899 trip to north west Tasmania