Launceston is the third oldest city in Australia behind Sydney and Hobart, having started life as a military settlement with the arrival of the first Europeans in November 1805, the Tamar area until then having been home to the Palawa people.
The area was ideal for settlement, the Aborigines having lived off the land for some 35,000 years. Its natural source of fresh water and trees provided materials for building and Launceston started to prosper over the next 20 years or so.
Launceston became a municipality in October 1852 with Alderman William Stammers Button appointed as its first Mayor three months later, by which time the settlement had already made history as the first in all of Australia to form a Chamber of Commerce.
Six years later Launceston was incorporated as a town and it was around this time that work also began on the first underground sewerage system in Australia. In 1864 the Town Hall was built, albeit with only four of the nine Corinthian pillars it bears today.
Launceston, whose other claims to fame include being the first place where anaesthetic was used in the Southern hemisphere and the first to be lit by hydro-electricity, was granted city status in October 1888.
Either side of this elevation a number of Launceston’s landmarks were built – the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Waverly Woollen Mills and City Park among them – as the city enjoyed a boom period both in terms of growth and wealth.
Launceston is now the second largest city in Tasmania behind state capital Hobart, and is the main town in the north with its landmass having grown from its diminutive early status to some 1,600 square kilometres today.