HOBART 1811 - 1813

…”When Governor Lachlan Macquarie toured the island in November 1811, some 600 people lived in Hobart and another 400 further up the Derwent at New Norfolk. Hobart still had the appearance of a temporary encampment. A few dozen huts, constructed of logs, turf, split palings and wickerwork covered with clay, ‘were indiscriminately scattered on both sides of a very fine stream of water’ which curved around to the south-west. Many were occupied by convicts. Others served as taverns, lodging houses and shops. On a low hill, a few hundred yards south of the stream, the marines’ tents stood in regular lines. a government store, built of brick for security, dominated the jetty at the mouth of the stream. The free settlers who had arrived seven years earlier had chosen land two mile further north at Newtown. Their ‘white cottages’ were surrounded by ‘tolerable good gardens’, but frequent cropping had already exhausted the soil. Hobart was little more than a village, but no ordinary village. Three-quarters of its inhabitants were not free, and the remainder consisted mainly of soldiers and civilian officials.”

  Rimmer, Gordon  ‘Hobart: A Moment of Glory’, in Pamela Statham (ed.) The Origins of Australia's Capital Cities, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 97.  [Note: the bold emphasis is mine. The Peters farm was located on the New Town Rivulet.]