Qualla: Richmond Bridge

Richmond Bridge: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harryt51, CC BY-SA 4.0. One night in 1832, a man named George Grover went over the edge of this bridge and did not get up. Grover was a gaoler at the Richmond prison, and part of his job was to flog the convicts. He was good at it, and hated for it. The story handed down is that he had drunk himself to sleep on the parapet when someone pushed him into the dark water below. No one was ever convicted. The bridge that absorbed that small, ugly piece of justice is the oldest stone span bridge in Australia, and it still carries cars today, its sandstone arches barely changed since the men who quarried them were buried and forgotten.

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Image: Harryt51 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Richmond Bridge: Built by the Unfree

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harryt51, CC BY-SA 4.0. The foundation stone went down on 11 December 1823, and for roughly two years convict gangs hauled the bridge into existence by hand. The sandstone came from Butchers Hill, just upstream, and the men moved it the way men moved everything in a penal colony: on their own backs, in ...

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Image: Harryt51 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Richmond Bridge: The Man Who Drew It

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Barrylb, Public domain. The plaque on the bridge names William Hartley Wilson as Superintendent of Stonemasons, and for a long time that was the whole of his recorded glory. Then his descendants went digging. Records held in Sydney's Mitchell Library confirmed something the family had long suspected: Wi...

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Image: Barrylb | Public domain

Richmond Bridge: A Face That Changed

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dan Gordon, CC BY 2.0. The Richmond Bridge you see today is not quite the one Wilson finished. In its first decades it was a leaner, plainer thing. The bulky hexagonal cutwaters jutting from its middle piers were added in 1884 and 1885; before that, the central piers wore the same simple vertical cutwa...

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Image: Dan Gordon | CC BY 2.0

Richmond Bridge: Still Standing, Still Honoured

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harryt51, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most bridges of its age are relics, fenced off and admired from a distance. Richmond Bridge simply kept working. Cars roll across it daily on the road north from Hobart, an unbroken line of use running back to the reign of George IV. In 2005 it was added to the Australian Nationa...

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Image: Harryt51 | CC BY-SA 4.0