Callington Mill is a Lincolnshire tower mill built in 1837 in Oatlands, Tasmania by John Vincent. It has recently[ when? ] been restored so that it is now in full working order and is the only operating mill of its type in the Southern Hemisphere. It is the third oldest windmill in Australia. Traditional baker and blacksmith Alan Scott was a central figure at the mill. Today the mill is a major tourist attraction of Oatlands. Visitors are able to climb the internal stairs for a view across Oatlands and surrounds. The mill site comprises the windmill, a granary, stable, miller’s cottage and mill owner’s house.
John Vincent was born in 1779 in Cornwall, England. In 1803 he married in London Susannah Rivers who was the same age. Over the next twenty years the couple had seven children while they were living in England. In 1823 at the age of 44 they decided to move to Tasmania. They immigrated with their children on the ship Elizabeth which arrived in Hobart in 1823. After they came to Tasmania they had two more children. [1]
Over the next decade John became the proprietor of two licensed hotels, one in Bothwell called the Norwood Inn and one at Spring Hill called the London. His eldest son John Jubilee Vincent was also an innkeeper and ran the Lake Frederick Inn (later Lake Dulverton Inn) at Oatlands. [2] This hotel still stands today.
In about 1836 at the age of 57 John decided to build the flour windmill at Oatlands. He used the best technology available in this project. It seems that he was very proud of this investment and he announced its opening in the newspaper in 1837. [3] The advertisement is shown on the right. However his interest in the mill was short-lived and the following year he tried to rent it. He advertised it in the newspaper giving a good description of the mill and its surrounds. It said:
His attempt to let the mill appears to have been unsuccessful and two years later he sold it to his eldest son John Jubilee Vincent.
John Jubilee Vincent (John Vincent Junior) was born in England in 1809 and was fourteen when he came with his parents to Tasmania. During the early 1830s he was the pound keeper at Oatlands. [5] and then for several years was an innkeeper as mentioned above. In about 1840 he bought the mill from his father. An advertisement appeared in the Hobart Colonial Times announcing his new ownership. In 1846 he installed a steam engine in the mill and again he publicised this with an advertisement in the newspaper. It stated that the prices for milling would be:
He operated the mill for about ten years but in the early 1850 when the gold rush began in Victoria he left Tasmania and moved to the goldfields. He died at Mountain Creek, Moonambel near Bendigo in 1862. In 1853 shortly after leaving Tasmania, John Jubilee Vincent sold the mill to Thomas Jillett [7]
Thomas Jillett was born in 1817 in Hobart Tasmania. [8] He was the son of a convict named Robert Jillett and his wife Elizabeth Bradshaw, a free settler, who arrived in Sydney in 1799. In 1844 Thomas married Mary Ann Shone [9] who was also the child of a convict. The couple lived at York Plains near Oatlands after they married. He was a successful sheep farmer before he purchased Callington Mill. [10]
Thomas announced his new ownership of the mill in 1853 (see notice at left). He operated the mill for about ten years. At one time in the early 1860s he rented the mill to William Exton who left in 1862. [11]
In 1863 Thomas Jillett sold the mill to his nephew John Bradshaw and a few years later left Tasmania and bought a sheep property in the Wimmera in Victoria. http://www.jillettfamily.com
John Bradshaw was born in 1827 in Hobart. [12] His father was William Bradshaw who was the brother of Thomas Jillett. In 1859 he married Maria Bacon who was born in England and had arrived as a free settler with her parents Martha and Denis Bacon in 1833.
It seems that before buying the mill in 1863 from his uncle Thomas Jillett, John managed it for him as he advertised for a stoker for the mill in 1854. [13] After he bought the property he made some notable improvements. In 1870 he bought a silk dressing machine. [14] In 1873 he installed a Boddington mill stone and a very descriptive account of this was given in the newspaper.
In 1880 John Bradshaw advertised the sale of the mill [16] and shortly after it was bought by Percy Douglas MacLaren. [17]
Percy Douglas MacLaren was born in 1855. In 1877 he married Charlotte Shimmins in Oatlands. Percy bought Callington mill several years after their marriage and operated it until about 1892. While the couple lived in Oatlands Percy became bandmaster of the town band. [18] In the early 1890s Percy left Oatlands and moved to Ulverstone where he again became bandmaster. He later became bandmaster of the Latrobe Band and a photo of him in this role is shown on the right.
Percy and Charlotte had twelve children while they were in Tasmania. Their eldest son also named Percy joined the Tasmanian Bushman Contingent to fight in the Boer War. Unfortunately he was killed in South Africa in 1901. There is a marble monument to him at Oatlands Town Hall. [19] The Plaque reads.
After Percy and Charlotte left Oatlands in about 1892 it appears that the mill ceased operating and not long after the sails were removed for safety reasons. [20] A photo is shown on the left of the mill in about 1900 after the removal of the sails.
The Callington Mill, Mill Lane, Oatlands, Tasmania is now fully restored and operational, grinding locally sourced flour (see picture above) as it did over 120 years ago. It is the only working example of its type in the Southern Hemisphere.
Visitors are welcome to come and see the Mill and the Mill Precinct. 'Millers Way' guided tours of the Mill Precinct and Tower happen daily (10am-3pm, on every hour).
The mill is accompanied by the Oatlands Heritage Highway Visitor Centre. The mill featured on the Tasmanian ABC Television program Stateline on April 30, 2010.
Oatlands is an important historical village on the shores of Lake Dulverton in the centre of Tasmania, Australia. Oatlands is located 84 km north of Hobart and 115 km south of Launceston on the Midland Highway. At the 2021 census, Oatlands had a population of 728.
Frenchmans Cap is a mountain in the West Coast region of Tasmania, Australia. The mountain is situated in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park.
Thomas Bock was an English-Australian artist and an early adopter of photography in Australia. Born in England he was sentenced to transportation in 1823. After gaining his freedom he set himself up as one of Australia's first professional artists and became well known for his portraits of colonists. As early as 1843 he began taking daguerreotypes in Hobart and became one of the earliest commercial photographers in Australia.
Carrick is a small historic village 17 kilometres (11 mi) west of Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, on the banks of the Liffey River. The Meander Valley Highway passes through the town's centre; this road was formerly the main road from Launceston to Deloraine and Devonport. Carrick has a well-preserved 19th-century heritage; fifteen of its colonial buildings are listed on the Tasmanian Heritage Register including Carrick House (1840), St Andrew's Church (1848), the Old Watch house (1837), Monds Roller Mill (1846) and the Carrick Hotel (1833).
TheMercury is a daily newspaper, published in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, by Davies Brothers Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, itself a subsidiary of News Corp. The weekend issues of the paper are called Mercury on Saturday and Sunday Tasmanian. The current editor of TheMercury is Craig Herbert.
Australian rules football has been played in Tasmania since the late 1860s. It draws the largest audience for any football code in the state. A 2018 study of internet traffic showed that 79% of Tasmanians are interested in Australian rules football, the highest rate in the country.
The Tasmanian emu is an extinct subspecies of emu. It was found in Tasmania, where it had become isolated during the Late Pleistocene. As opposed to the other insular emu taxa, the King Island emu and the Kangaroo Island emu, the population on Tasmania was sizable, meaning that there were no marked effects of small population size as in the other two isolates.
The Stacks Bluff is a peak in northeast Tasmania, Australia. The mountain is situated on the Ben Lomond plateau.
The Courier is a newspaper founded in 1827 in Hobart, Tasmania, as The Hobart Town Courier. It changed its name to The Hobart Town Courier and Van Diemen's Land Advertiser in 1839, settling on The Courier in 1840.
George Quinlan Roberts was a Tasmanian-born rower who won events at Henley Royal Regatta in the 1880s. He later served as chief secretary of St Thomas' Hospital in London from 1903 to 1928.
Sir John George Davies, generally known as (Sir) George Davies, was a Tasmanian politician, newspaper proprietor and first-class cricketer.
The Oatlands railway line was a short branch of the Main Line from Launceston to Hobart in Tasmania, which was built to give rail access to the town of Oatlands. The railway opened on 13 May 1885 and it closed on 10 June 1949. The line branched off of the Main Line in Parattah outside the Tudor style Parattah Hotel and followed parallel to the Main Line for approximately 700 metres (2,300 ft) before branching off in a north west direction towards Lake Dulverton. From there, the railway followed the lake's shoreline before turning in on Wellington Street and ending where it intersects with High Street. The original station building is now used as a child care centre. Much of the former route is now used as a bike trail, a section of it is clearly visible as a terrace like formation at Mahers Point and part of an embankment and small bridge runs alongside the road to Parattah, where it crosses Parattah Creek. The locomotive "Big Ben" used to operate the line from 1948 until the line closed a year later in 1949.
The Roving Party is a 2011 novel written by Tasmanian author Rohan Wilson. Wilson's first book, it is published by Allen & Unwin. The Roving Party won the 2011 Vogel Award. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2011 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.
Henry Hunter (1832–1892) was a prominent architect and civil servant in Tasmania and Queensland, Australia. He is best known for his work on churches. During his life was also at various times a state magistrate of Tasmania, a member of the Tasmanian State Board of Education, the Hobart Board of Health, a Commissioner for the New Norfolk Insane Asylum and President of the Queensland Institute of Architects.
The Tasmanian Heritage Register is the statutory heritage register of the Australian state of Tasmania. It is defined as a list of areas currently identified as having historic cultural heritage importance to Tasmania as a whole. The Register is kept by the Tasmanian Heritage Council within the meaning of the Tasmanian Historic Cultural Heritage Act 1995. It encompasses in addition the Heritage Register of the Tasmanian branch of the National Trust of Australia, which was merged into the Tasmanian Heritage Register. The enforcement of the heritage's requirements is managed by Heritage Tasmania.
Ingle Hall is a landmark building in Hobart, Tasmania on the corner of Macquarie and Argyle Streets. It has served numerous purposes over its history and is vacant; it was most recently used as The Mercury print museum. It is unknown when the building was built as it predates any government record holding by the state of Tasmania, which began in 1822. It is named for John Ingle, one of the two possible first inhabitants of the building.
Isle of the Dead is an island, about 1 hectare in area, adjacent to Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia. It is historically significant since it retains an Aboriginal coastal shell midden, one of the first recorded sea-level benchmarks, and one of the few preserved Australian convict-period burial grounds. The Isle of the Dead occupies part of the Port Arthur Historic Site, is part of Australian Convict Sites and is listed as a World Heritage Property because it represents convictism in the era of British colonisation.
William Nevin Tatlow Hurst, ISO was a senior Tasmanian civil servant. In 1925 he succeeded the Tasmanian Surveyor-General, E A Counsel, as the head of the Tasmanian Department of Lands and Surveys, although with the title of Secretary for Lands.
Risdon Zinc Works is a major zinc refinery located in Lutana, a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. The smelter is one of the world's largest in terms of production volume, producing over 280,000 tonnes annually of high-grade zinc, primarily as die-cast alloys and continuous galvanising-grade alloys. These products are exported for global markets and utilised in a wide range of industries and products, from building and infrastructure to transportation, business equipment, communications, electronics, and consumer goods. The facility produces zinc using the Roast, Leach, Electrowinning (RLE) method, creating leach byproducts, including cadmium, gypsum, copper sulphate, lead sulphate, sulphuric acid, paragoethite and leach concentrate. The refinery has been owned and operated by the global multi-metals business Nyrstar since 2007. Nyrstar Hobart works closely with the Nyrstar Port Pirie multi-metals smelter in South Australia. The facility is Tasmania's largest exporter, contributing 25% of the state's overall export value in 2013.
Mary Elizabeth Livingston was a late-colonial Australian artist. She was best known as a botanical artist, specialising in Tasmanian native flora.