This Weren’t No Walnut Grove!

January 26, 2025 – from Low Head to Beaconsfield

Our accomodation for the night was a charming hotel, with a room above a pub in the heart of Beaconsfield. The room itself held simply a bed and small table, our private bathroom was down the hallway, for which we had our own key to enter.  A kettle to make a brew was also down the hallway, in the other direction. These little quirks reminded us of a guest house we might have stayed in, in a place such as Cornwall. It was colonial and olde worlde but utterly pristine and when I went for a shower in our down-the-hall bathroom, the towels were white and fluffy and so thick, it was a good upper body workout just to lift them. We breakfasted with the fare provided and then Steve took himself off for a shower and bicep-workout towelling. When he returned I saw him start to check the pockets of his clothes and flip his towel back and forth.

“You didn’t?” I asked. “You didn’t lock the bathroom key in the bathroom did you?”

“I think I did. I’ve locked the key in.” Off Steve went to find Gavin, the proprietor, who was an utterly delightful, friendly and charming man. Laughter ensued, Gavin handed Steve a master key so he could retrieve our bathroom key and the problem was solved in a jiffy. 

On leaving we chatted some more to Gavin, who told us he had seen the hotel when visiting Beaconsfield in 2021 and saw that it was unoccupied since the previous owners had left after only seven months and the place had been left to dilapidate in the three years since. “It was in a terrible state,” he told us, “so I rang my sister and said ‘do you want to buy an old hotel in Beaconsfield?‘ She wanted to move to Tasmania anyway, so we took it on and have been renovating it ever since.” They’ve done a magnificent job, restoring it and removing the dark colours that had closed in the rooms and bringing it back to life. He showed us to the bar which looks like a old English lounge bar with Chesterfield lounges. “All the yobbos go to Beauty Point,” Gavin said, “and that’s not the crowd we want, so we’ve done it to be a place people can come for a drink and meet people and sit by the fire when it’s cold.” It was another little gem we discovered and another delightful person to meet, in a small patch of our small island. 

We began the morning by taking ourselves on a self-guided walking tour of some of the town’s history and we discovered some interesting stories along the way. So, come along for a stroll through some Beaconsfield of yesteryear…

Some drama, hoopla and all round criminal shenanigans befell the town in 1884 with none other than a brazen robbery at the Bank of Tasmania. The poor acting bank manager at the time, who was only 21 years old, was stopped on his travels along the road to Beauty Point, bound, blind folded and relieved of his bank keys. From there the outlaws took ￡2,600 in gold from the bank vault of the Bank of Tasmania (the equivalent of about $2,000,000 today). There followed 14 months of arrests, acquittals, counter suits and rearrests and finally convictions for the perpetrators. But…not all of the gold was recovered, sparking generations of gossip, rumour and innuendo as to its whereabouts.

Manion’s Jubilee Bakery was opened in 1887 by Dublin-born Paddy Manion. He named it in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coronation and, being of Irish Catholic stock, claimed to bake his bread with ‘holy water’ collected from the roof of the nearby Methodist Church. Paddy was also an early adopter of motoring fever and his son, Cyril, ran Manion’s Garage for over 20 years. 

The drama continued with the back story to The Exchange Hotel (which had been our overnight digs with the charming proprietor Gavin). In 1884, then owner Richard Collins and his son George, were accused of laundering notes from the 1884 bank robbery. The police lock-up was still under construction and so temporary cells were arranged at The Exchange, where Richard became a prisoner in his own hotel!

The Club Hotel was originally Beaconsfield’s second coffee palace. These establishments were a feature of the ‘temperance movement’ which encouraged abstinence from alcohol. Coffee palaces offered refreshments (of the sober variety) and accommodation. It seems this tea-total establishment didn’t last too long though, because it soon became the town’s fifth licensed hotel. Then, its claim to fame was a modern feature that was an innovation for an 1880’s mining town…it had a bathroom!

Just when you thought this small town couldn’t throw up any more drama and explosive events in its history, there was quite literally an explosion! During World War I when the issue of conscription was both political and divisive across the country, a pro-conscription rally was held in the Alicia Hall, where 700 people were in attendance. During the meeting, a bomb was thrown among the folk attending and two men were injured. But…the arguments on the conscription issue were so fierce and heated, that the participants were not to be deterred and the meeting continued despite the bomb! I tell you, this place sure weren’t the quaint Little House on the Prairie style Walnut Grove kinda town! It was all happening!

After a stroll through the town’s history, we took ourselves off to the Mine and Heritage Centre to learn some of the town’s more recent stories. This is where we could walk around the mine site where the gripping and tragic events of April, 2006 occurred. A rock fall trapped 17 miners underground and while fourteen of them were able to escape, one of them, Larry Knight, was killed and two others, Brant Webb and Todd Russell were trapped underground for two weeks. The rescue effort became national and international news, with the two men trapped in a small space under a pile of rocks. They were eventually rescued, emerging triumphant from the mine and symbolically pulling their tags from their hooks, signifying they were no longer underground, their shift was over and they were now above ground and safe. The Mine and Heritage Centre had a model of the space the men were trapped in and the pipeline that was created to communicate, feed and eventually free them. The space was too small for Steve to get into and it was a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit in times of adversity.

Upstairs were displays of colonial life and again, sadly, not a mention of First Nations history that pre-dated that era by many thousands of years. A common omission at many historic places and museums in Tassie. 

It had been an interesting little get away, seeing some places we rarely get to, seeing some scenery that reminds us of the top little place we have down here and some time to learn some new stories about its past. Once again, it’s also the people we get to meet along the way, such as Gavin and his commitment to restoring and maintaining a piece of the town’s heritage as he welcomes guests to The Exchange, that always gives any sort of travel that extra bit of gold dust. And, I guess, an old gold mining town was just the spot for us to find that bit of sparkle!