Lenah Valley, Tasmania, Australia

Kangaroo Bottom

Lenah Valley lies on the lower north-eastern slopes of kunanyi, about five kilometres north-west of the centre of Hobart, in the valley of a small creek that runs down from the mountain towards New Town and the Derwent. It is Muwinina country. The Muwinina people hunted the open grassy flats and the forest edge for thousands of years before the British arrived in 1804, and their word for the forester kangaroo that grazed there, lenah, eventually became the suburb's name. By the 1830s the Muwinina had been driven from the land around Hobart Town, and the valley's first colonial names recorded only the animals they had hunted.

Early settlers called it Kangaroo Bottom. The land was divided among a handful of large grants in the 1810s and 1820s, the biggest of them a sweep of more than two thousand acres running from New Town Bay up through the foothills and over the ridge towards Glenorchy. The grantees cleared the lower slopes for grazing and orchards and left the upper slopes to the bush. A rough track along the valley floor, known simply as the Back Road, linked the farms to New Town and the road to Hobart.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the valley had become Kangaroo Valley, and it held a scattering of small farms, cottages and orchards, a Wesleyan chapel and a schoolroom. Clay from the creek beds supplied small potteries that made bricks, pipes and domestic ware for the colony. The upper part of the valley, where sassafras grew thickly along the gullies, was known for a time as Sassafras Valley. It was a quiet, damp, unfashionable place, close enough to town for its produce to reach the markets and far enough away that few people from town ever went there.

Ancanthe

The valley's one claim to wider fame came from Jane Franklin, the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Sir John Franklin. Lady Franklin was dismayed by the colony's lack of cultural institutions, and in the late 1830s and early 1840s she bought land in Kangaroo Valley with the aim of founding a botanical garden and a museum of natural history. She named the estate Ancanthe, from the Greek for a blooming valley.

The museum was a small sandstone building in the form of a Greek temple, designed by the colonial architect James Blackburn and built at Lady Franklin's own expense. It opened in October 1843 as the first privately funded museum in Australia. Within weeks the Franklins had been recalled to England, and the project died with their departure. The collections were dispersed, the garden was never planted as she had planned, and the temple passed into other hands. For most of the next century it stood in an orchard and was used as an apple store.

The building survived largely because nobody needed the land it stood on. Hobart City Council acquired the site in the late 1930s and restored the temple, and from 1949 it was let to the Art Society of Tasmania, which used it as a gallery. The surrounding land became Ancanthe Park, a patch of bush and lawn at the top of Lenah Valley Road. Most residents of the suburb knew the building as the Lady Franklin Gallery, and many of them knew little else about it.

The Name

Kangaroo Valley grew slowly through the later nineteenth century. The orchards prospered, the potteries came and went, and a handful of larger houses appeared on the slopes, built by Hobart families who wanted views of the river and could afford a horse. The population was small enough that the valley had no clear boundary, and its various parts were known by different names. There were at least two other Kangaroo Valleys in Australia, and the confusion caused by the name was a recurring complaint in the Hobart newspapers.

In 1922 the scattered settlements of the valley were brought together under a single name. Local residents chose Lenah Valley, adopting the Muwinina word for the animal that the colonists had named the place after. The new name was promoted at the time as a gesture towards local history. It was adopted without any consultation with the Aboriginal people whose word it was, few of whom remained in southern Tasmania by then, and the irony was not widely discussed until much later.

The interwar years brought the suburb's first real growth. Building blocks were subdivided from the orchards along Augusta Road and Lenah Valley Road, and modest weatherboard and brick bungalows went up on the lower slopes. Buses replaced the horse traffic on the Back Road. By the end of the 1930s Lenah Valley had a primary school, a row of shops on Augusta Road, a Methodist church and an Anglican one, and a population of clerks, tradesmen, shopkeepers and public servants who worked in town and came home to the quiet.

Augusta Road

The most important event of those years for the suburb's later history was the arrival of the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary, who opened Calvary Hospital on Augusta Road in November 1938. The hospital sat on a sloping block that had been an orchard, with a view down the valley to the river. Its maternity ward opened in 1944, and for the next eighty years a large share of Hobart's middle-class children were born in Lenah Valley, whether or not their families ever lived there.

Among them was Richard Alan Rothschild, born at Calvary at 7:15 am on 24 June 1953, after his father had spent a freezing midwinter night in the fathers' room at the end of the maternity corridor. The hospital was then a modest brick building, and the slopes above it were still largely bush and old orchard. The convent, the surgical wing and the car parks that later spread across the site had not yet been built.

The post-war decades filled in the rest of the suburb. War service homes, housing commission blocks and private subdivisions climbed the slopes towards the bush line, and the orchards disappeared one by one. Cream-brick and weatherboard houses of the 1950s and 1960s, on quarter-acre blocks with vegetable gardens and fruit trees, became the suburb's characteristic form. The Augusta Road shops grew to include a butcher, a newsagent, a chemist and a branch of the bank, and John Turnbull Park was laid out on the flat land near the creek.

Black Tuesday

On 7 February 1967 the bushfires that came to be known as Black Tuesday swept across southern Tasmania in a single afternoon. A fire burning in the hills behind Glenorchy crossed the ridge and came down into the upper streets of Lenah Valley on a hot north-westerly wind, at the same time as other fronts were burning into South Hobart, Fern Tree and Sandy Bay. It was the closest the fires came to central Hobart.

The upper streets of the suburb, where the houses backed onto the bush, took the worst of it. Several houses were destroyed, and many more lost sheds, fences and gardens. Residents fought the fire with garden hoses, wet sacks and buckets until the water pressure failed, and volunteer firefighters came from across the city to help. Three men from Bellerive, on the far side of the river, died fighting the fire in Lenah Valley that afternoon. Calvary Hospital, which stood in the path of the smoke, took in casualties from the surrounding streets through the night.

The suburb rebuilt, but the fire left a permanent mark on how its residents thought about the mountain. Families in the upper streets kept their gutters clear and their hoses ready for the rest of their lives, and the question of how much bush to clear and how much to burn became a standing argument in local politics. Every hot north-westerly afterwards was watched more closely than it would have been before 1967.

Under the Mountain

Lenah Valley settled in the 1970s and 1980s into the shape it would keep. It was a family suburb of steady incomes and long tenures, close to the city but separated from it by the hills, with the mountain at its back and the bush at the end of its streets. The western-shore suburbs were spared the worst of the disruption when the Tasman Bridge collapsed in January 1975, but Calvary's maternity ward felt it. For nearly three years mothers from the eastern shore arrived at Augusta Road by ferry and taxi, or by the fifty-kilometre road around through Bridgewater.

Two of the hospital's most closely linked births came in that year. Sandra Elizabeth Harris was born there at 9:07 am on 22 March 1975, the daughter of a violinist and a painter from Sandy Bay. Alice Catherine Hughes was born on the same ward at 2:40 pm on 17 September, after her mother had been driven the long way round from Bellerive. Six years later, on the afternoon of 12 March 1981, Theodore James Rankin was born at Calvary during an autumn storm, with his father's marine radio on the windowsill of the labour ward.

The Patterson family were among the suburb's ordinary residents in those years. David Alan Patterson, a public servant in the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and his wife Margaret, a primary teacher in Moonah, lived in a cream-brick house on a quiet street that climbed towards the lower slopes of the mountain. Their daughter, Linda Marie Patterson, was born in 1990 and their son, Christopher, in 1993. The children grew up on Saturday walks to the Organ Pipes and summer evenings in a back garden that produced more zucchinis than the family could eat.

Weatherboard and Bush

The suburb changed slowly in the 1990s and 2000s as its first post-war generation aged and sold. Young families bought the old houses, renovated them or knocked them down, and the cream brick began to give way to timber decks and glass. Lenah Valley remained cheaper than Sandy Bay or West Hobart and better connected than the northern suburbs, and it attracted public servants, teachers, nurses and police who wanted a garden and a short drive to work.

In 2000 David Geoffrey Marston, a detective with Tasmania Police, and his wife Alice, a children's librarian, bought a weatherboard house in Lenah Valley with a long back garden that ran up towards the bush. Alice, who had been born at Calvary a few streets away, spent the next two years making it habitable. Their daughter, Grace Evelyn Marston, was born at Calvary on 14 March 2002, delivered by ventouse at 11:52 pm while her father was at a service station further down Augusta Road buying coffee. Their son, Samuel, followed in 2005. Both children went to Lenah Valley Primary School, Grace from 2007 and Samuel from 2011.

Gerald and Marie Ashby, a chef and his wife, ran a small catering business from their Lenah Valley home through the 1990s and early 2000s, cooking for weddings, wakes and office parties across the city from a converted double garage. In 2003 they moved the business into town and opened the Cornerstone Café in a laneway off Collins Street. Several of their old neighbours remained regular customers for years.

Ancanthe Park

The quiet of the suburb concealed a steady series of local disputes. Calvary's growth was the most persistent of them. As the hospital expanded through the 1990s and 2000s, its car parks, delivery trucks and staff traffic spread into the surrounding streets, and residents on Augusta Road complained for decades about cars parked across their driveways. The hospital built more car parks, and the complaints moved one street further away.

The fiercest argument was over Ancanthe Park. In 2014 a proposal to subdivide part of the land around the Lady Franklin Gallery for housing provoked the largest public campaign in the suburb's history. Historians, members of the Art Society and residents who had walked their dogs in the park for forty years joined forces to oppose it. The dispute went on for several years and left resentments on both sides that outlasted it.

The bush remained the other constant concern. Fuel-reduction burns on the lower slopes of the mountain divided the suburb between those who remembered 1967 and wanted the bush burned more often, and those who had moved there for the bush and wanted it left alone. The smoke from autumn burns drifted down the valley most years, and every summer the fire danger signs on the roads leading up towards the reserve were watched with an attention that newer residents sometimes found excessive.

The Valley in the 2020s

When the pandemic closed Hobart in March 2020, Lenah Valley was emptier and quieter than it had been in living memory. Alice Marston, by then Senior Children's Librarian at the Hobart City Library, read her story times online from her dining table, to children across the state she could not see. Calvary's surgical floors stood nearly empty for weeks, though its maternity ward stayed open throughout. The bush tracks at the top of the suburb were busier than they had ever been.

House prices across Hobart rose sharply in the late 2010s and through the pandemic, and Lenah Valley, long the affordable alternative to the inner suburbs, ceased to be affordable to many of the young families who had once moved there. Some of those who did buy had help. Linda Hodgman, née Patterson, and her husband, the historian Kevin Hodgman, bought a house in Lenah Valley in 2020 with assistance from his parents, a few streets from the house she had grown up in. Her father, Alan, retired in 2022 and devoted himself to the vegetable garden, which her mother continued to defend from his more ambitious plans.

In 2022 Grace Marston taught her brother to drive in the car park of the Augusta Road shops, after two sets of lessons with their father had ended in silence. Grace left for Melbourne in 2024. Samuel stayed in Hobart for university, and their parents stayed in the weatherboard house. In 2025 Calvary expanded its maternity service to deliver more than twice as many babies as before, and the parking along Augusta Road became worse than it had ever been.

By 2026 Lenah Valley had a population of around six thousand. The orchards were long gone, the potteries forgotten, and the Back Road had been Lenah Valley Road for a century. The Lady Franklin Gallery still stood in what was left of Ancanthe Park, holding exhibitions on weekends. The suburb remained, as it had been for most of its history, a place that most of Hobart passed through on the way to somewhere else, and where a large part of the city had been born.