Land Musters, Stock Returns And Lists Van Diemen's Land 1803-1822
Australian History Local History Non-Fiction Colonial Studies Historical Reference Genealogy Reference Tasmaniana
Land Musters, Stock Returns and Lists – Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1822 is the essential hard-cover reference for anyone tracing Tasmanian ancestors, colonial livestock, or early land grants. Compiled by respected archivist Irene Schaffer, this 254-page illustrated volume transcribes and indexes the colony’s earliest nominal rolls, stock tallies and district lists, turning fragile nineteenth-century manuscripts into an easy-to-use alphabetical guide. Names, dates, acreages, animal counts and ship of arrival are all extracted verbatim, giving family historians, graziers and scholars a single authoritative source instead of scrolling through reels of brittle microfilm.
What makes the book so collectable is that every entry is linked to a primary record held in the Tasmanian Archives, allowing readers to leap from a name on the page to the original muster sheet with minimal effort. Researchers regularly report breaking “brick walls” by discovering a spouse, employer or land location listed here that never appears in later censuses. Historians value the statistical tables showing how sheep, cattle and land under cultivation expanded in the colony’s first two decades—figures unobtainable anywhere else in print.
Published in 1991 by St David’s Park in a quality hard-cover edition with dust-jacket, this copy is clean, tightly bound and from a smoke-free home, ensuring it will sit proudly on a reference shelf for years. Because the print run was small and most copies went to libraries, it rarely surfaces on the second-hand market in this condition. For collectors of Australiana, genealogists chasing a convict forebear, or local historians mapping early Tasmanian properties, this is one of the most practical and sought-after titles in the field.
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