Travel Australia

1836: The Port Arthur to Taranna Tramway

By most definitions, a Convict Tramway hauled by convicts from the Port Arthur convict settlement was the first passenger-carrying railway/tramway in Australia. An unconfirmed report says that the line, between Oakland (on the western shore of Port Arthur) and Taranna, continued to Eaglehawk Neck and, if this was so, the length of the tramway would have been more than doubled. The gauge is unknown. The tramway carried passengers and freight (with a capacity of one half-ton), and ran on wooden rails.



The penal colony of Port Arthur is located on the Tasman Peninsula, in Tasmania's far south east. Surrounded by supposed shark-infested waters, the convicts incarcerated there were completely isolated from the rest of the region. The only way out, was a heavily guarded strip of land called Eaglehawk Neck. Throughout the 19th century, convicts held here were subjected to a psychological punishment, which included social isolation and deprivation of basic needs. Most convicts either died or went insane (and conveniently, there was also an asylum within the premises). Port Arthur was also full of natural resources, like timber and coal. So, convicts were used as a manual labor manual labour.

There was no road from the main Van Diemen's Land settlement of Hobart to Port Arthur. Anything or anyone travelling between the two localities had to travel by sea, which involved sailing south down the Derwent River estuary, through D'Entrecasteaux channel and into the wild waters of the Soythern Ocean. After negotiating the tip of Cape Raoul, ships would head north towards Port Arthur. That was until the arrival of Charles O'Hara Booth (1800-1851) in 1833.

Born on 31 August 1800, at Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, the son of Richard Booth of Basing House, and his wife Mary Patricia, née Rézé, of Gibraltar. At 15 he was sent to the care of an uncle in India, where in August 1816 he was appointed an ensign in the 53rd Regiment serving at Madras. In April 1819 he returned to England, applied for a commission in the 21st Fusiliers and in January 1820 joined his corps in the Isle of Wight, before embarking for the West Indies. The corps returned to England in 1827. At Windsor he was promoted captain in September 1830, and two years later embarked for Van Diemen's Land in the Georgiana, arriving at Hobart Town in February 1833. In March 1833 he was put in the Commission of the Peace, and appointed commandant of the Port Arthur convict settlement, with jurisdiction over all stations on Tasman Peninsula.

Under his command the township of Port Arthur was laid out on an extensive scale, harbour construction carried out and reclamation undertaken, a government farm established at Safety Cove, a semaphore telegraph system was introduced which brought a high degree of efficiency for helping to arrest escapees, and a new method of travelling between hobart and Port Arthur devised. It involved sailing through the calm waters of Frederick Hendrick and Norfolk Bays as far as a convict depot at Taranna on Little Norfolk Bay, then travelling on to Port Arthur on land using a 5-mile long convict powered railway.


A section of the tramway next to Quarell's Mill on Norfolk Bay

In 1835, Book supervised the construction of the tramway consisting of roughly strewn pieces of timber, in order to form the tracks. Convicts manually pushed four-wheeled open carts, along tracks laid between Taranna and Oakland on Long Bay, Port Arthur. This tramway was often used by government officials, who came to visit. While it was completely human-powered, the convict tramway of Port Arthur may be considered Australia’s very first railway. Besides transporting passengers, the tramway was also used to transport goods and resources from Norfolk Bay, towards Port Arthur via the Eaglehawk Neck. A team of four convicts provided the manpower to push the 4-seater trams along the rails.

The Port Arthur prison facility closed down in 1877 along with the Norfolk Bay Convict Station. The red and white-roofed building, built by convicts in 1842 out of bricks brought to Taranna from Port Arthur, was originally the Commissariat Store and was specifically built to hold stores which were landed at the Taranna jetty and pushed along the railway to Long Bay. When Port Arthur closed, the store was converted into the Tasman Hotel and is still used as a guest house today.

Very little evidence of the tramway survives. The last remnants of the convict tramway can be viewed at the Federation Chocolate Factory in Taranna. Within the grounds of the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park are a number of mounds which were created as part of the tramway.


Taranna Commissariat Store