Scottish Networks and their Buildings in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania

Abstract

In the 1820s an increasing number of Scottish settlers arrived in the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania, Australia) to take up government land grants. At the time, they were the second largest ethnic group, after the English, and through their numbers, enterprise (typically pastoralism and trading), land ownership, and building helped shape the colonisation and Europeanisation of the island. This article outlines their influence in the built environment and proceeds to present portraits of three related Scottish-Vandemonian pastoral properties. Employing personal records and correspondence it focuses upon the motivations, ambitions, and agency of Scottish networks (familial, social and entrepreneurial) as reflected in the architecture and building of their mansions. Those networks were local, regional, and global, with active participants in Scotland, and were instrumental in the development of the mansions. The designs for these mansions (often unattributed), along with their construction, also played a role in the building of these networks. Employing the lens offered by the experience of Scottish settlers, the paper considers the interplay of empire, regions, settler networks, and buildings in Van Diemen’s Land in the first half of the nineteenth century.