Two senior citizens have just spent two years and covered about 16,000km following the footsteps of one Tasmania’s pioneering photographers.
Their aim was to create a book in loving tribute to Herbert J King.
The result was ‘Tasmania Revisted’ by Jack Branagan and Mac Woodroffe, and it was released earlier this month by Regal Press.
Instead of going by horse and buggy or motorcycle and sidecar as did the intrepid Mr King and his wife Lucy back in the ’20s and ’30s, Jack and Mac travelled in a home-made campervan, accompanied by Mac’s faithful corgi, Beau,
Instead of lugging a cumbersome wooden framed box camera and glass plates, or heavy 16mm cine cameras and tripods (weighing around 27.5kg), they used a modern 35mm camera and rolls of black and white film.
Ten rolls of 36 exposures each were taken during the two years from January 1986, and these, plus a few rolls of colour film, amounted to nearly 400 shots.
From these, 150 were chosen that showed most clearly the changes in the Tasmanian landscape since Herbert King chronicled it more than 60 years ago.
The idea for the book came from Jack Branagan’s lifelong friendship with Mrs Lucy King, and with Herbert King himself, or HJ as he was known to many.
Jack first met HJ in 1925 at the Launceston Camera Club when he was a teenager.
Mrs King is custodian of many of HJ’s photograph albums and the watercolours he painted towards the end of his long life. (King died in 1973 aged 80.)
A look at the many landscape photos in the 12 albums inspired Mr Branagan to consider ways to have them published, and he hit on the idea of a book of comparisons – allowing HJ’s original photographs to be contrasted with modern shots of the same scenes.
Some of the comparisons are startling – Burnie’s Wilson St today bears little resemblance to the tall brick buildings with wooden verandahs and the horses and buggies pictured in 1914.
The changes to Burnie’s waterfront area since APPM came to the city in the early 1930s are also visible.
Comfortable brick and weatherboard homes have disappeared, replaced mostly factories and warehouses, the breakwater has been extended, and there is that tell-tale smudge of white smoke in the air.
Queenstown, too, has seen some changes in the 60 years, from a busy mining town with the bare mountain starkly white behind it, to a popular tourist destination capitalising on preserving the historic street frontages.
In other places, the changes are more subtle.
Launceston’s Brisbane and Charles Sts look almost unaltered from when the electric trams started running in 1911.
The trams are long since gone (a pity), and part of Brisbane St has become Tasmania’s first [pedestrian] shopping mall, but the elegant Victorian and Edwardian buildings still remain.
Sheffield, too, seems little different from the days of bullock carts and drays, but now the main street is sealed, with proper footpaths, traffic lanes and power lines.
Some of the places captured by Herbert King now no longer exist.
Linda, once a large West Coast mining town, now has little to show but the burnt-out shell of the Royal Hotel, a derelict wooden house that was once the post office, and the cemetery beside the Lyell Highway.
When HJ visited Linda in 1914, there were several shops, many homes and some substantial two-story buildings.
Daisy Dell, well-known to Gustav Weindorfer and others who explored Cradle Mountain in the early years, is now only a signpost beside the road.
In Weindorfer’s day, it was a cattle grazing property belonging to Bob Quaile, whose wagonette was the only way to cover the last 15 miles to Cradle Mountain, other than walking or horse riding.
Mac Woodroffe recalled how difficult it had been to find some of the exact spots where HJ had taken his photos.
“Even for Jack, who’s a very well-travelled man around Tasmania, and who knows the place like the back of his hand, it was often a case of ‘seek and ye shall find’,” he said.
“With many of these places we just had to go out in the bush and start looking for them, old tin mines and places like that.”
Although some of the character of the country towns seems to have vanished with modernisation, the essential character of the Tasmanian landscape still shines through.
For Mac, the walk into the spectacular Montezuma Falls on the rugged West Coast was the highlight of the two years of photographic journeys.
It flows beside the now abandoned North East Dundas narrow gauge railway, and HJ’s photograph from the 1920s depicts the engine and carriages passing the Falls, drenched with spray.
To get the modern shot, Jack and Mac had to walk for several hours from the end of the bitumen road between Rosebery and Williamsford, following the remains of the old railway track.
“I think that was one of the most satisfying walks that we did, because the Falls were in full spate. and I was able to photograph them from top to bottom,” Mac said.