The Warehouses of Salamanca Arts Centre
Askin Morrison was a merchant who arrived in Tasmania in 1829. In the early 1830s he imported a cargo of tea from China that reputedly made him a profit of 10,000 pounds. It is thought that he used this money in 1834 to purchase a parcel of land fronting New Wharf. Morrison immediately built a warehouse on the property (now 65 Salamanca Place), which became the base for his import and export business and where he stored whale oil and products.
By 1844 he had purchased an adjacent block from James Kelly and built a second warehouse (67 Salamanca Place). The building was built with a gantry at the first floor level that could lower barrels of whale oil straight out of the building onto a ship’s deck.
Adjacent to Morrison’s first warehouse, Richard Willis, a merchant arriving from London in 1834, built himself a warehouse for goods storage, with a covered archway leading to stables in a courtyard at the rear (65b Salamanca Place). Willis imported pianos, wines and silverware until his business collapsed in the 1840s depression. When he lost his building to a creditor, Morrison was quick to purchase it at a bargain price.
Captain William Young purchased the vacant block next door and built another warehouse in the same style as Morrison’s. Young was a whaler and timber merchant who also owned 600 acres of forested land on Bruny Island. In 1853 he sold his warehouse to Morrison.
The brothers, Hugh and John Addison originally built the two four-storey warehouses (77-79 Salamanca Place) in 1843 on land also purchased from Captain James Kelly. John Addison, an architect, designed the buildings to flank the pre-existing Kelly’s Lane. When the brothers died in 1847 and 1848, the warehouses were retained in their estate and leased out for the next 30 years.
The three-storey bluestone building at the back of the Salamanca Arts centre complex has a less clear history, although it is thought to have been built in the 1850s. It appears that Morrison used the building at times for additional storage and also as a residence (he died in this building in 1876).
Throughout the nineteenth century, the whalers had so dramatically diminished the whale populations in the waters surrounding Tasmania that some species were on the brink of extinction. By the late 1800s Hobart’s whaling days were over; and, like the warehouses in Hunter Street (where Old Wharf had been), the row of warehouses that lined New Wharf were given new life as fruit processing and jam producing factories.
Tasmania’s climate was well suited to growing stone fruits and the export market for jam and processed fruit expanded rapidly in the 1890s. During the next 50 years, the Salamanca Arts Centre buildings were expanded into each other to accommodate hundreds of workers producing millions of tonnes of jam and tinned fruit for export all over the world.
Many of the factory workers lived in the growing community directly behind Salamanca Place. Unlike the disease-ridden slums of Wapping on the other side of Sullivans Cove, Battery Point included the grander residences of merchants and factory owners alongside the humble cottages of labourers and tradesmen. Throughout the early twentieth century Battery Point was a rough working class suburb, filled with jam factory workers who were employed by IXL Jams in Hunter Street or WD Peacock & Sons in Salamanca Place. Many were women, who worked up to 50 or 60 hours a week during high season, running home to feed families at dinner time and then returning for an evening shift.
In 1910 IXL purchased the Salamanca Place jam factory from WD Peacock, but it continued to operate as before and was known simply as Peacock’s factory. After the onset of World War II the factory produced pure fruit juice and cordials as well as canned fruit and pulp for jam.
As sales slowed through the 1960s, many of the warehouses fell into a state of decline, with various buildings and floors rented out and others remaining unoccupied for years. The boom years that gave Tasmania its identity as “The Apple Isle” lasted until Britain finally entered the European Common Market in 1971 and Tasmania’s main fruit export market collapsed as a result.
Acknowledgment: Dr. David Young, ‘The Peacock Warehouses; a building-by-building history’, 2000.
Discover Us – Self Guided Tour
The seven sandstone warehouses that are home to the Salamanca Arts Centre have a rich and fascinating history. On Site Insight is a self-guided tour and pocket history of our buildings and their role in Hobart’s history. Download a copy here.
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