It is unique for this type of book in that it has gone to the sixth edition in 2000, and few company histories in Australia have achieved such continual publishing.
Blainey was fortunate in being able to speak to older people about the history of the West Coast, some who had known Queenstown in its earliest years.
The book gives an interesting overview from the materials and people Blainey was able to access in the early 1950s, and the omissions. Due to the nature of a company history, a number of items of Queenstown history did have alternative interpretations on events such as the 1912 North Mount Lyell Disaster, and there were residents of Queenstown living in the town as late as the 1970s who had stories that differed from the official company history.
Significant characters from the West Coast Tasmania history such as Robert Carl Sticht and James Crotty amongst a longer list probably still deserve further work on their significance in West Coast and Tasmanian history, but the book has had significant "presence" in being in print for so long.
Scholarship on some of the neglected aspects of West Coast and Queenstown history only emerged from the shadow of Blainey's work in the 2000s.[2][3][4] In 1993 for a mining conference in Tasmania,[5] a number of publications were produced regarding the same subject.[6][7]
In 1994, when the fifth edition of Peaks of Lyell was printed, the Mount Lyell company closed down, and most of the records held by the company were donated to the State Library of Tasmania.[8]
In 2000 the sixth edition of the book was published.
Publication history
Blainey, Geoffrey. The Peaks of Lyell, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1954, 310pp.
History of Mt. Lyell [manuscript] (M.A. Thesis), University of Melbourne, 1955, 328 leaves.
The first half of this history was presented as Geoffrey Blainey's Master of Arts thesis.
2nd ed., Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1959, 310pp.
3rd ed., Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic.; London, 1967, 341pp.
4th ed., Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1978, 341pp.
5th ed., St. David's Park Publishing, Hobart, Tas., 1993, 370pp.
Blainey, Geoffrey (2000). The Peaks of Lyell (6thed.). Hobart: St. David's Park Publishing. ISBN0-7246-2265-9.
Sound recording of the second edition of the book.[9]
↑ NLA notes include: – Manuscript reference no.: NLA MS 393. Typescript.Thesis (M.A.)--University of Melbourne, 1955. Blainey, Geoffrey (1954), History of Mt Lyell, retrieved 11 January 2014
↑ Fox, Charlie (September 2003), "Work and Welfare at Mt Lyell 1913–1923", Journal of Australasian Mining History, 1: 51–78, ISSN1448-4471
↑ Roberts, Glyn (2007), Metal mining in Tasmania, 1804 to 1914: how government helped shape the mining industry (1sted.), Bokprint Pty. Ltd. in conjunction with Fullers Bookshop, ISBN978-0-9585174-1-6
↑ Australian Institute of Mining & Metallurgy State Branches Conference (Nov. 1993) - Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy; Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (1933), Proceedings, The Institute, ISSN0004-8364
↑ Rae, Lou (1993), The Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Co. Ltd: a pictorial history 1893-1993, L. Rae, ISBN978-0-9592098-3-9
↑ The mining heritage of Mount Lyell: a brief glimpse /Australian Institute of Mining & Metallurgy State Branches Conference (Nov. 1993)Flitcroft, Murray - Compiled for AusIMM Conference 20-21 November, 1993, Mount Lyell Heritage Tour.
Mount Lyell is a mountain in the West Coast Range of Western Tasmania, Australia.
Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company was a Tasmanian mining company formed on 29 March 1893, most commonly referred to as Mount Lyell. Mount Lyell was the dominant copper mining company of the West Coast from 1893 to 1994, and was based in Queenstown, Tasmania.
Regatta Point is the location of a port and rail terminus on Macquarie Harbour.
The North Mount Lyell disaster refers to a fire that broke out on 12 October 1912 at the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company operations on the West Coast of Tasmania, killing 42 miners. The mine had been taken over from the North Mount Lyell Company in 1903.
Gormanston is a town in Tasmania on the slopes of Mount Owen, above the town of Queenstown in Tasmania's West Coast. In the 2016 census, Gormanston had a population of 17.
Crotty is the site of a former gazetted town in Western Tasmania, Australia. The town was on the southern bank of the King River, on the eastern lower slopes of Mount Jukes, below the West Coast Range. The locality was formerly named King River
The North Mount Lyell Railway was built to operate between the North Mount Lyell mine in West Coast Tasmania and Pillinger in the Kelly Basin of Macquarie Harbour.
Mount Owen is a mountain directly east of the town of Queenstown on the West Coast Range in Western Tasmania, Australia.
The Queen River, part of the King River catchment, is a minor perennial river located in the West Coast region of Tasmania, Australia. It is notable for its high level of pollution caused by mining runoff which has led the river to be uninhabitable to life.
North Mount Lyell was the name of a mine, mining company, locality and former railway north of Gormanston on the southern slopes of Mount Lyell in the West Coast Range on the West Coast of Tasmania, and on to the ridge between Mount Lyell and Mount Owen.
Pillinger is an abandoned port and townsite in Kelly Basin, on the south eastern side of Macquarie Harbour on the West Coast of Tasmania.
The history of the railways on the West Coast of Tasmania has fascinated enthusiasts from around the world, because of the combination of the harsh terrain in which the railways were created, and the unique nature of most of the lines.
Linda is the site of an old ghost town in the Linda Valley in the West Coast Range of Tasmania, Australia. It has also been known as Linda Valley.
Mount Murchison is a mountain on the West Coast Range, located in the West Coast region of Tasmania, Australia.
Robert Carl Sticht was an American metallurgist and copper mine manager, active in Colorado and Montana, U.S.A. and in Tasmania, Australia. Sticht was the developer of the first successful purely pyritic smelting in the world. He was also an important book and art collector, a large part of whose collections were acquired by the Public Library of Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria in the 1920s.
James Crotty was an Irish-born Australian mining prospector who formed a mining company, the North Mount Lyell mining company, in the western region of Tasmania, just before the turn of the twentieth century.
Iron Blow was the site of the earliest major mining venture at Mount Lyell on the west coast of Tasmania, Australia in 1883.
The West Coast Wilderness Railway is a reconstruction of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company Mount Lyell railway in Western Tasmania between Queenstown and Regatta Point, Strahan. The railway is significant because of its Abt rack system to conquer the mountainous terrain through rainforest, with original locomotives still operating on the railway today. Now operating as a tourist experience with a focus on sharing the history of Tasmania's West Coast, the original railway began operations in 1897 as the only link between Queenstown and the port of Strahan.
Lou Rae is a Tasmanian author and historian of the West Coast of Tasmania.
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