Author(s): Michael Holmes

Tasmanian

Concealed by the passage of time, encroaching forest or the dust of public records are an amazing number of Tasmanian towns and settlements that no longer exist. Vanishing Towns, the first comprehensive book of such places, provides a fascinating insight into vanished communities, often located in remote areas, where life was harsh beyond our twenty-first century imagination. Many of these towns have vanished almost completely, others remain as little more than remnants and some only ever existed on paper. The idea for the book came to the author during a visit to one of Tasmania's iconic ghost towns - Adamsfield. In the 1920s hundreds of miners and their families, driven by desperate times, sought their fortunes prospecting for osmiridium which, at the time, was worth eight times as much as gold. Well documented are places such as Balfour in the far North-West, Gormanston on the West Coast, Lottah in the North-East and Ramsgate in the south. A town to be called Russia was even uncovered. While many of the sites are located in what were once remote areas, the good news for the historically curious is that most are now reasonably accessible.