Burnie

Like most of the north coast of Tasmania, the area surrounding Burnie was first explored by Europeans when George Bass and Matthew Flinders circumnavigated Van Diemen's Land in 1798. As they passed the current-day Burnie area, they named Round Hill Point and described a 'peak like a volcano'. Bass and Flinders did not land on the coast, and it was left to a party from the Van Diemen's Land Company to climb this peak on 14 February 1827, and name it, appropriately, St Valentine's Peak.

Later in 1827, a small settlement was established at the western end of Emu Bay, near the present city centre. The name 'Emu Bay' was chosen because the Tasmanian sub-species of emu – which was smaller than its mainland counterparts – roamed the district at the time of settlement. Sadly, this sub-species became extinct sometime in the 1850s.

The settlement of Emu Bay was initially used as the base for all the Van Diemen's Land Company operations in the district. For the first one hundred years of settlement, its progress was modest. The first permanent settlers of Emu Bay arrived from England in the vessel Caroline on February 2, 1828.

Emu Bay's initial lack of growth was due primarily to two crucial mistakes. The Van Diemen's Land Company settled the town to serve three of several land grants it took up on the North-West Coast. The grants in the current Burnie area were 50,000 acres at Emu Bay bounded by the Emu and Cam Rivers, and to the south, 10,000 acres at Hampshire and 150,000 acres at Surrey Hills.

The first mistake was that of the company's chief surveyor, Henry Hellyer. Hellyer's misjudgement was that the land selected would provide good natural grazing for fine-woolled sheep. The second mistake was that the company's chief agent, Edward Curr, accepted Hellyer's judgement without first inspecting it himself. Unlike the older sheep districts in eastern Tasmania, the land around St Valentines Peak was sub-alpine, featuring long, wet and bitterly cold winters. The native snow grass lacked nutrition and in the first few winters more than 5000 merino sheep and their progeny died of cold and malnutrition. The surviving animals were taken to the milder coastal climate of Circular Head and Woolnorth.

Those initial mistakes resulted in a disastrous beginning for the Van Diemen Land Company and condemned the isolated port settlement on the shores of Emu Bay to years of inertia while much younger centres to the west - namely Latrobe, Port Sorell, Formby, Torquay, Don and Forth - achieved steady growth.

During the lifetime of these first settlers Burnie was little more than a Van Diemen Land Company-owned town that existed because of, and mainly for, the company. Indeed, those first settlers, and others who were to follow in the next two decades, literally carved out a village from the rain forests and tea-tree swamps. The town was renamed Burnie - after Van Diemen Land Company director William Burnie – in the early 1840s. Villagers established their own tracks to and from the company store, and there existed no semblance of a street until the first town survey in 1843. Indeed, after the first fifty years of settlement, Burnie's population failed to exceed 200.

From the earliest days of the settlement, Burnie was a timber port. The timbers of the hinterland were felled and a sawmill was established near the port. Timber was exported across Bass Strait to Melbourne, to the new settlement at Adelaide and to Launceston along the coast. It was used for everything from roof shingles to road paving, from house building to ship building.