former town

Linda Valley & Royal Hotel

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This is Linda, population not very many.

The internets are being unhelpful at giving up useful information, and I obviously have boxes of books to unpack somewhere. So I’ll have to rely on what I know, which is, um, not much. Still former mining town, you can probably tell the story yourself 🙂

I did find some old postcards in the State Library’s collection, so you can see that early in the 20th century it was town of some substance, with multiple hotels (I think four at one point) and boarding houses, a hall and shops. It was, at one point, the main town for workers at the nearby North Mt Lyell mine, and the end point of the railway. A busy little place, with a population in the hundreds.

Then it faded over the years, and the buildings went away, until it is as you see it today.

It does, however, have a phone box!

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Darlington, part 3

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Grass

A non-building to start with. Part of the site of the Separate Apartments, built 1840s (dotted line).

The first block of 102 cells formed a rectangle nearly 85 m by 20.5 m. They were built to keep the worst behaved and suspected homosexual convicts completely separate. Improvements and additions were commenced until, at the very end of 1848, the complex consisted of 205 cells in two tiers. The 1846 cells were 3.05 m high, 2.44 m long and 1.22 m wide whereas the earlier cells were wider, longer but not as high. You can see where the two storey level is indicated by joists in the wall of the Bakehouse close to the oven’s chimney. The building was derelict and housed pigs in 1876. Within ten years, the bricks were used to pave roads or build Bernacchi’s cottages prior to the erection of the Coffee Palace where one complete cell exists beneath the floorboards.

View of inside, outside (long building at front) and plan and elevation.

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