Free Worker's Cottages

These four cottages were built in the 1840s, the brick and stonework laid by convict bricklayer Benjamin Seth, the joinery done by free carpenter George Gilham. The stone foundations are original. The bricks are handmade, produced on the estate itself. The stairs creak. That is the character of sleeping inside genuine heritage, not a reconstruction.

The people who moved into these cottages arrived because a system had ended. By 1840 the Assignment System that had supplied Woolmers with convict labour was being replaced by a probation scheme, and the supply of assigned workers dried up almost overnight. Thomas Archer turned to England. The immigration agent worked the counties recruiting skilled free workers, offering paid passage and three years of guaranteed employment. On March 31, 1842, the Arab anchored off Launceston with 205 immigrants aboard. Eighteen of them were heading for Woolmers: three farm labourers and their families, a blacksmith, nine children between them. A wheelwright arrived six weeks later on the Corsair. A carpenter had come separately from New South Wales.

Twenty-five people arrived in a short space of time. Most came from Somerset, the heartland of English cider country. They brought with them a knowledge of orchards, a taste for cider, and traditions that had run through their villages for generations. Perhaps they continued at Woolmers the centuries old practice of wassailing the apple orchards in winter, involving offerings of cider-soaked bread for good spirits and noise to ward off bad spirits to bring a good harvest. At least one family brought a fiddle. A cabin passenger’s diary noted the immigrants below decks on the Arab entertaining themselves on the voyage with “an old cracked fiddle” found on board. The grandchildren of some of those immigrant children would remember the same tunes being played by their grandfathers at Christmas decades later.

These kitchen tables saw children learning to read and write. The air outside carried the smell of apple cider and the sound of Somerset fiddle music. Children were born in these cottages. Not all the workers who filled these cottages had arrived free. Some had come to Woolmers years earlier as convicts, earned their freedom, and stayed on by choice. They worked beside the newly arrived migrants as neighbours. That is the story of this precinct. Each of the four cottages holds a different part of it.