NATIONAL TREASURES
If the clutter at home is getting on top of you, spare a thought for Woolmers Estate, near Longford in north-eastern Tasmania. For six generations, the owners of this World Heritage-listed estate, the Archer family, never threw anything out. From baby clothes and buttons to magazines, match boxes and even a snake-bite kit, the possessions accrued by the family from 1817 to 1994 were preserved in the homestead creating a remarkable pastiche of Australian colonial life.
In 1813, Thomas Archer I became the first of his family to settle in Van Diemans Land, as the colony was then known. He’d set off for Sydney from England in 1811 and in 1813 was appointed to the role of deputy commissariat of the stores at Port Dalrymple, now George Town,
