Enterprise Risk and Ruin: The Stage-Coach and the Development of Van Diemen's Land and Tasmania

Enterprise Risk and Ruin: The Stage-Coach and the Development of Van Diemen's Land and Tasmania by Dr. Steven Walker

Dr. Steven Walker, who presented at the 2024 CAA International Carriage Symposium, has a background as an archaeologist and ancient historian, and restored a coaching inn at Oatlands, Tasmania.  This endeavor led him to document the history he discovered about early roads and transportation in Tasmania. 

"The development of the stage-coach industry in the colony of Van Diemen's Land, later Tasmania, was a vital cog in enabling communications, travel and the opening up of new frontiers.  Author Steven Walker has marshalled his analytical skills to delve deeply into a complex and competitive industry, plagued by punishing schedules, skilled labour shortages, bureaucratic fanangling, and above all by the need to feed and care for hundreds of hard-working horses stabled at ten-mile intervals along the length of each route.  The running of the stage-coaches themselves was just part of the industry; equally important were the staging inns that were required to feed and house travellers along the way.

These coaching enterprises with the best command of resources survived; many others took the road to ruin.  Steven Walker's rigorous analysis draws upon the historic record to show what worked, and what didn't.  

This book paints a broad picture of life in Van Diemen's Land and Tasmania from earliest European settlement right through to the 1920's.  It charts the changes in colonial society as former convicts moved into the mainstream, the roles played by women in what was traditionally a man's field, the threat of bushrangers, the beginnings of tourism, the opening of access to remote areas rich in mineral resources, and the tussle with the developing railway network - and eventually, motor vehicles."

**Limited Copies Available**

 388p.  Illustrated with numerous historic photos and source materials.