Evandale lies in northern Tasmania, about eighteen kilometres south of Launceston. The place has a much longer Palawa history than the colonial township established there in the early nineteenth century. The later settlement became known for a notably intact streetscape of Georgian and early Victorian buildings. Seen only through sandstone, brick and orderly rooflines, it can look like a still picture of “old England”.
An unfinished work tells a more revealing story. In 1836, the colonial government proposed taking water from the South Esk River, driving a tunnel under the hill at Evandale and following the contours with channels so gravity could carry the supply to water-short Launceston. Convict labourers sank shafts and excavated part of the tunnel. Technical difficulty and cost defeated the scheme within a few years, and the promised supply never operated. The remains later entered Tasmania’s heritage system; recent local-government discussions still consider how development and interpretation should respond to the buried structure.
The failed watercourse pulls Evandale back from being merely a town of attractive preserved buildings. Houses are the visible successes. The tunnel records an unrealised public ambition, along with the question of who bore its labour and danger. Town history is not made only by what worked. Abandoned infrastructure can also show how a regional centre tried to enlist surrounding land, river water and coerced labour to solve an urban problem of its own.
https://www.utas.edu.au/tasmanian-companion/biogs/E000334b.htm
https://heritage.tas.gov.au/useful-resources/publications
https://northernmidlands.tas.gov.au/source-assets/files/2024-Council-Agenda-and-Minutes/2025-01-20-Open-Council-Minutes.pdf
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