The walls tell tales from the colonial past in Alan Townsend’s home in Tasmania’s Southern midlands.
Midnight in Tasmania has a way of sparking curiosity. For Alan Townsend, it led to an extraordinary discovery in his 1850s heritage home near Kempton. Driven by a restless curiosity, armed with scraper and ladder, he ventured into one of the front rooms expecting to uncover what he believed would be red flock wallpaper mentioned in historical records. Instead, beneath decades of paint and paper, he found something much more remarkable. Three layers of original wallpaper had been perfectly preserved. At the intersection of wall and ceiling, an exquisite French design emerged — delicate gold patterns on a blue background — printed on thick cotton rag paper. “It was just beautiful,” Alan recalls. “Straight away, I was struck by the idea of putting that paper back in the room.”
What began as a midnight revelation in 2004 transformed a novice renovator into one of Tasmania’s leading specialists in the study of historic wallpapers. And since then, serving as Heritage Projects Officer at Southern Midlands Council, Alan has been on a mission to preserve the material heritage of colonial Australia. Detective work at the house, called Lonsdale, began with a lucky and invaluable imperfection. The original wallpaper had been hung slightly unevenly and it took determination to meticulously trace remaining fragments around the room perimeter, inch by painstaking inch, until the complete pattern emerged. It took almost a year to solve that historical jigsaw puzzle.
At the same time, delving deeper into Lonsdale’s past, Alan discovered the back section of the house was built from more humble beginnings around 1823, but the grander front addition of 1855 was an indication of rising fortunes for long-ago owners who were “middling farmers”. They had acquired 5000 acres (2023 hectares), and even had their own coach, a symbol of significant wealth in colonial Tasmania. Surviving diaries and documents encouraged closer examination of social hierarchy during the 1880s and 1890s. Fascinating intimate details of daily life were gradually revealed for occupants like the formidable Scottish Presbyterian matriarch Jane Johnson, who banged her cane on the ceiling at 5am to rouse servants from their slumber in the rooms above. Lonsdale remained a family home for more than 150 years, until the 1990s. Then in 2002, Alan spotted a listing on the internet. The house was for sale and his excitement was visceral.
“I knew instantly that I had to have it,” he remembers. “The house reminded me of my grandmother’s home, and I’d always associated houses like this one with comfort, warmth and, of course, it was just beautiful in its own right.” His unique approach to renovation demonstrates a profound respect for history. Rather than pursuing restoration in the usual way, he embraces authentic imperfections, where heavily cracked ceilings tell their own stories. “I’m not here to prettify, so I generally don’t even fi x things because I like them as they are,” he says. The cobwebs and possums must go but the delicate balance between preservation and liveability will be maintained. “I love places that feel as if they’ve been here forever. And this one will probably last another 200 years.”
Faced with the daunting cost of commissioning reproduction wallpaper from UK specialists — a staggering £30,000-£40,000 (approximately AU$61,000-$82,000) — Alan took an enterprising approach. He started reading books from the library, sought out skilled technicians and with a $300 gift from his mother for supplies, he taught himself the art of silk screening. “I didn’t even know what silk screening was to start with, I just thought it was something you did with T-shirts,” he admits. Through trial and error, he mastered not just the patterns but the historical techniques themselves, working with hand-drawn sketches and thick cotton rag paper to recreate the subtle interplay of colours and textures that had been lost in time. Eventually, he succeeded, recreating wallpaper not seen for centuries. An equally significant breakthrough came in 2006, when he volunteered for the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service and met Brad Williams, manager of Heritage Projects for Southern Midlands Council. Brad offered Alan the chance to transcribe historic documents related to Oatlands Gaol, which eventually resulted in paid work and the opportunity to reproduce wallpaper for other heritage buildings (such as the gaol and courthouse).
Alan’s expertise has proven invaluable in Tasmania, home to 40 per cent of Australia’s heritage buildings, despite housing just five per cent of the population. He has produced wallpapers for the National Trust and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. His findings have continued to astonish. None more so than at Patterdale Farm, the home of colonial artist John Glover, near Evandale. “That was almost a religious experience,” he recalls with reverence. “In the parlour, we noticed one wall that was really damp. The built-in bookcase was long gone, but there were six layers of wallpaper still there. The bottom layer was simply magnificent — luminescent green with gold detailing.”
Tasmania’s heritage buildings have yielded so many unexpected treasures within the walls and floors: marriage certificates, newspaper advertisements, shop bills from the 1930s hidden between boards and layers of linoleum. In one property, dress materials from the 1860s through to the 1890s were used to plug gaps between wooden shingles. Most poignantly, children’s copybooks from a Catholic school were found with religious precepts such as “temptation is to be resisted” written in young, careful handwriting beneath printed lines.
Alan reflects on walls that can talk while standing in Lonsdale’s kitchen. Every surface — every door, wall, architrave and staircase — tells a story of skilled craftsmanship. The historic bread oven is a reminder of classic Australian settlement patterns: start modest with the hearth, then add grandeur as prosperity allows. Looking beyond the back door, to the rolling pastures and open grasslands that remain virtually unchanged since John Glover’s time, this is a nostalgic view of early colonial life. A peacock, called Percy, wanders free-range in a tangled garden under huge cedar trees. “We can’t talk to someone from this time,” he muses, boiling a jug for tea. “They’re all dead, but when you’re looking at something from their time, that’s as close as you’ll get to understanding what life was like back then.”
When Alan acquired Lonsdale for a mere $146,000, he became custodian of a remarkable piece of Tasmanian heritage. The six rooms in the front section alone showcase mid-19th-century construction techniques: beautiful pine architraves painted to simulate mahogany, mellow brick walls and the original shingles sitting dormant under the roof. The layout is a map of up-and coming colonial expectation: grand formal rooms in front, service areas behind, servants’ quarters above. These upper rooms have preserved their own riches in the layers of wallpaper that are likely to be the off -cut remnants of grander rooms below.
What makes Lonsdale truly exceptional is the complete collection of original wallpaper samples from every room in the 1855 section. “That means you’ve got the entire decorative scheme chosen by one person at one time,” Alan says. “They were all hung at the same time.” Its comprehensive snapshot of colonial interior decoration, he believes, is unmatched anywhere else in Australia. The nearby town of Oatlands, just 40 kilometres away, holds one of the largest collections of Georgian stone buildings in the Southern Hemisphere, and the town has become a hub for heritage crafts after the local council established a skills centre to preserve traditional building techniques.
Oatlands has evolved into a tourist destination, “a perfect blend of heritage architecture and modern amenities”, where ongoing restoration work continues to unveil layers of convict history. Just half an hour closer to Hobart, Lonsdale is a private museum, holding onto secrets of its own. “There’s still more to discover,” Alan winks. His scraper has a way to go — under windowsills, behind skirting boards, in the servants’ quarters. Surviving wallpaper fragments owe their existence to less than meticulous finishing in hidden areas, and subsequent renovators, too lazy to finish the job properly. Clear nights can bring bitter cold to Tasmania and, for Alan, the occasional desire for modern heating is offset by the deep satisfaction of living within a very particular experience of the past. As he puts it, these walls don’t just contain history, they are history layer by layer, just waiting to be discovered by those curious enough to look closer.
