Launceston

Launceston stands where the North Esk and South Esk rivers meet to form the Tamar, on the country of the Letteremairrener people of the North Midlands nation. William Paterson landed a party at the head of the estuary in 1806, after an earlier attempt further north was abandoned. The settlement was first called Patersonia and renamed Launceston after the town in Cornwall where the colony's governor, Philip Gidley King, was born.

Wool, wheat and shipping made it rich. The northern midlands became prime grazing country, worked in large part by convicts, and the port at the head of the estuary shipped the produce out; the Georgian and early Victorian warehouses, banks and terraces of the centre date from that boom. Mineral finds in the north-east, tin around Derby and Scottsdale and gold at Beaconsfield down the Tamar, brought more money late in the century, and the railway to Hobart opened in 1876.

In 1895 the city built a hydroelectric station at Duck Reach in the gorge, the first publicly owned hydroelectric power station in the southern hemisphere. In 1929 the rivers flooded and devastated the low suburb of Invermay; levees now defend it.

The twentieth century brought an aluminium smelter and deep-water port at Bell Bay down the estuary, then the slow loss of railway workshops and factories. The workshops at Inveresk have become a museum and a university campus, and in 2021 Launceston was named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

Part of Launceston's identity is built on not being Hobart. The north–south rivalry runs through politics, sport and arguments about money, and northern Tasmanians point to their older buildings, their vineyards and their own airport with some feeling.

The city is proud of its architecture, an unusually complete nineteenth-century centre of brick and stucco, with a nineteenth-century shop kept by the National Trust still trading in the centre and an exhibition hall of 1891 beside City Park. The park itself keeps a conservatory of seasonal flowers and a colony of Japanese macaques, held through the city's long relationship with Ikeda in Japan.

February is the month of festivals. Food, wine and music fill City Park, the Launceston Cup is run at Mowbray, and at Evandale, a Georgian village south of the city, riders race penny farthing bicycles through the streets at the village fair. Australian rules football is the winter religion, with mainland clubs playing home games at the city stadium since the early 2000s and Tasmania's own team due to enter the competition in 2028.

Food and drink have become the civic project. The vineyards of the estuary, the dairy and berry farms of the north and a run of restaurants around the Quadrant earned the gastronomy title, and the weekly producers' market is a fixture rather than a tourist event. Tasmanian Aboriginal names are in official use beside English ones, and palawa kani, the revived language of the palawa community, appears in signs and welcomes.

About 91,000 people live in the Launceston urban area, which makes it Tasmania's second city and the service centre for the whole north of the island. The centre is compact and low, with suburbs on the hills around it — East Launceston and Newstead to the east, Trevallyn above the gorge, Riverside and Legana down the west bank — and the flat, levee-protected ground of Invermay and Inveresk to the north.

The hospital, the schools and the university are the largest employers, alongside retail, tourism and hospitality, food processing and freight. Down the estuary the smelter and the port at Bell Bay anchor heavy industry, and the farmland around the city grows dairy, berries, cherries, potatoes, vegetable seed and poppies licensed for the pharmaceutical trade. The University of Tasmania has been moving its northern campus into the old railway workshops at Inveresk, which is bringing students into that side of the city.

The population is older than the Australian average, and housing costs and hospital waiting times are the standing local complaints. Winter brings frost, fog and still air that traps wood smoke in the valley, a problem the city worked hard to reduce from the 1990s onwards.

Life is quiet and local. Sport, the gorge, the river and weekend drives out to the coast, the valley or the mountains fill the calendar, and much of the city closes early in the evening.

Launceston was named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy in 2021 on the strength of what grows around it. The Tamar Valley, running north from the city to Bass Strait, is Tasmania's best-known wine district, with cellar doors on both banks making sparkling wine, pinot noir, chardonnay and riesling, and several of the island's gin and whisky distilleries stand in the same country.

The farms of the north supply dairy and cheese, berries, cherries, apples, walnuts, truffles, potatoes and vegetables, much of which reaches the weekly producers' market in the centre, where stalls are limited to growers and makers from the region. Seafood comes from the north and east coasts: oysters, rock lobster, abalone and farmed salmon. The scallop pie, curried scallops in shortcrust pastry, is a bakery standard here as across the island.

Beer is a local institution. James Boag's brewery has stood beside the North Esk since 1881, and the rivalry between Boag's in the north and Cascade in the south is a piece of Tasmanian folklore.

Eating out concentrates in the Georgian streets of the centre, around the Quadrant and George Street, and along Charles Street, where small restaurants, wine bars and cafés occupy nineteenth-century shopfronts and the range runs from Italian and Japanese to Indian and Nepalese. Bakeries open early for a city that starts its day early, and the kiosk in the gorge is the traditional place for tea and cake after a walk.