Researching a House History: A Tasmanian Example

Queenborough House, 19 Queen St, Sandy Bay, Tasmanian Archives, NS1013/1/1988

Researching a House History: A Tasmanian Example

Imogen Wegman
28 January 2025

There is something very appealing about finding out the story of a house. Whether it’s the construction of the physical structure, the lives of those who have passed through its doors, or the land on which it is built, there can be a magnetic force drawing us into uncovering the narrative of the specific space. Houses carry an emotional heft that turn a simple place of shelter, as Darryl Kerrigan would say, from a house to a home.

As a landscape historian and family history lecturer, I am often asked for help with navigating land and house records by people who are researching the history of a property. There are a lot of different places to start looking for the history of a house, depending on what the goal of the research is. Do you want to:

• Uncover some stories about the people who have lived there over time?
• Find out about the construction history of the house?
• Know about the land it was built on?

Or is your goal to find out anything you can?

Start by gathering the information you already know and organising it into a timeline. Identify the names of people and places, and the gaps in the details. These will help determine your approach, especially as you try to decide where to begin.

As part of the Everyday Heritage project, Chief Investigator Kate Bagnall asked me to research the history of a house built in Hobart by Royden Ah Chung, the son of Chinese migrants, in the early twentieth century. She knew approximately when the house had been built and sold, but the family records weren’t clear on when alterations had been made or exactly why. The questions we were trying to answer related largely to the physical structure, rather than the people living in the house, so I knew my priority would take me to building and land records.

Often the physical location and address are good places to begin: looking up the address in some different records or using spatial records like aerial photographs and maps to see what might have changed over time.

We knew that the house was built on recreational land that had been subdivided in the early twentieth century. Libraries and archives sometimes hold the plans for such subdivisions, so I searched for the name of the main road running through the area in the Tasmanian Archives and found a partially dated subdivision plan (Image 1). It had enough detail to lead me to an advertisement in The Mercury for 6 February 1915, and I could see that this address was one of 268 plots for sale.

IMAGE 1: W.F. Darling, ‘Q/15: Golf Links auction sale tomorrow’, 6 February 1915, Tasmanian Archives, AF721/1/540

These records gave us a starting date to look for Royden Ah Chung’s purchase of the property. LandTasmania (the public-facing state government division overseeing natural resources and the environment) generously provides digitised copies of all their historic land titles records. The Ah Chung family were also known by ‘Chen’ and after some hunting through different indexes, I found the Certificate of Title (Image 2) which contained a great amount of information about the property’s history.

IMAGE 2: Certificate of Title, Cooperative Estates Limited to Royden Ah Chung, City of Hobart, Tasmania, 21 November 1922, 306/143, LandTasmania

The auction for the blocks of land must not have been a raging success – Royden bought his block in 1922 from the company responsible for the subdivision, and presented evidence he had acquired a mortgage of £850. A building plan, discussed in a moment, labelled blocks on either side of his as still vacant in 1925.

The certificate also tells us that the land went to Royden’s wife and two children on his death in 1949, and they sold it in 1953. It was then sold several times in quick succession – in 1964, 1966, and 1968 – before this record ends. This rapid set of sales raises questions about the use or condition of the building: why was a house in a popular Hobart suburb sold three times in a decade?

The physical appearance of the house shows that there have been some alterations over the years and the family’s photo album confirms this –  a changing structure stands in the background of captured memories. Old windows have been bricked up and there are sections of brick where the colours don’t quite match, suggesting additions have been made over the years. Aerial photography shows that the house has a peculiar footprint, as though wings have been added on to a central block.

Now that we had a more complete timeline describing the purchasing history of the property, Kate and I went to the Tasmanian Archives to look for building files to better understand the renovations. Applications to construct or make alterations are filed with local councils then preserved. In Tasmania, many historic applications are found in the state archives, but there are some access and copying restrictions so we won’t share any images of them here. The earliest application shows that Royden wanted to build a shed in 1925, by which time his house was already constructed. In 1945, the family made extensive alterations, including the expansion of the lounge with a curved outer wall, and the construction of a second floor with more bedrooms to accommodate a family that had grown in size and wealth.

There is one more alteration proposal on file, this one dating after the Ah Chung family had sold the house, and it goes a long way to explaining why the house was sold so many times in the 1960s. In 1958, Mr G.R. Cumming filed plans to convert the house into flats, adding in a new external staircase and adapting some of the windows to better suit the purpose. After maintaining this investment property for several years, Cumming sold it in 1964. My suspicion is that it was never as profitable as its investors hoped, so no one held onto it for long in the 1960s.

The written record runs out after this as privacy laws restrict what information is available about property owners from the mid-century onwards, so we can only speculate what happened later in the century. An aerial photograph archive shows that the external staircase was present in the late 1980s (Image 3) but removed by 1994 (Image 4). Perhaps this indicates that the property was transformed back into a single dwelling. Or maybe an internal stair was built to provide access between the two flats instead.

IMAGE 3 and 4: The house at the centre of these aerial photographs of Sandy Bay, showing the external stairs on 11 March 1984 (0995_051, black and white), but they’ve been removed by 12 February 1994 (1218_205, colour). Aerial Photo Viewer, LandTasmania

There isn’t a single way to approach researching the history of a house. While working through these files, I also searched for the address in Trove newspapers and got a glimpse into the lives of the Ah Chung family. In 1924 and 1925 someone at the property was selling off first a horse and cart, then a motorcycle and sidecar. A few years after both children were born, the family needed to advertise for general help. The same search revealed that there were several streets with the same name in Tasmania, so I needed to be careful as I perused the records. House numbers have often changed over time, as streets were formalised, subdivided, extended, or otherwise altered. When we research older houses, it’s important to account for such changes.

The 1925 application to build a shed noted that the blocks of land on either side of this were still vacant. To find out who first occupied these and when, I could have systematically searched through the Assessment or Valuation Rolls of the 1920s. These recorded details about owners and occupiers, and the development of the property. Post Office Directories are also useful for this, although they often only identify the occupier without noting whether they own or rent the property.

While talking to the family, Kate learned about life for the Ah Chungs living in this house, but they didn’t have a good record of the dramatic changes that had been made to the physical house. It started as an elegant but simple single storey family home, then expanded vertically with the construction of another floor to accommodate a growing family’s needs. It lived a second life as separated flats, with the stories of different people soaking into each floor. Now that we have built out this timeline, we have more research tangents to follow, to see what new narratives can be uncovered about this house.

Bio

Imogen Wegman is a historian at the University of Tasmania who researches the relationships between colonisers and the physical environments of colonisation. She has spent years working in a variety of public history settings and is known for getting too enthusiastic about historic maps.