The Adamsfield mining rush
Nicknamed “ossie”, osmiridium is a naturally occurring alloy found in a few scattered locations across the globe. In the 19th and 20th centuries, one of its main uses was to tip the nibs of fountain pens.
Tasmanian government geologist William Harper Twelvetrees first discovered osmiridium’s host rock in Adamsfield in 1908 while scouting for potential mineral deposits along the proposed Great Western Railway line. Initially, there was little interest in the discovery.
Osmiridium had been known to Tasmanian miners since the gold rush. An entry by Chris Tassell in The Companion to Tasmanian History notes that the alloy was “an undesirable impurity associated with alluvial gold…[and] discarded by the miners”.
Russia had long enjoyed a monopoly over the world’s osmiridium supply, which was mined in the Ural Mountains. But soon after Twelvetrees’s discovery, civil war and political upheaval in Russia created a vacuum in the international osmiridium market.
In October 1919, market prices soared to £42 per ounce, sparking an osmiridium mining rush across Tasmania, and the state soon became the world’s largest producer of the material. Prospectors discovered more osmiridium deposits at Adamsfield in November 1924 and miners flocked to the area, with more than 1000 mining permits issued between July and September 1925.
These early diggers slept in tents and makeshift camps, but many laid down roots and stayed for years. Although never formally gazetted as a town, the Adamsfield settlement eventually developed into a handful of shops with a school, community hall, post office, bakery, butcher, police quarters and field hospital.
In its early days, Adamsfield was only accessible by foot, with the nearest railway station about 48km away at Fitzgerald. By October 1925, the Tasmanian government had paid £3000 to repair and extend the existing Great Western Railway Track, which had been cleared and abandoned a few decades earlier. Bridges were built to span the Florentine and Little Florentine rivers, and myrtle beech trees were felled to create a boardwalk over the track’s muddy and uneven sections, allowing packhorses to safely reach the settlement.
Weatherboard workers’ huts – remnants from the abandoned railway survey – became staging posts for passing travellers, selling mining tools, clothing, food and sly grog. Many of these have been lost to time or destroyed by bushfires, including Churchills Hut, where the last-known thylacine was snared and held captive before being delivered to Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1933. The hut was owned by Elias Churchill, a jack-of-all-trades who dabbled in fur trapping, sly-grogging, osmiridium digging and more.
In 1925 Adamsfield yielded 2872 ounces of osmiridium, followed by 3042 ounces in 1926, its best year. The Rev. C.W. Wilson visited Adamsfield in February 1926 and estimated its population to be 750 men and 15 women.
“There appears to be at least two years’ work in sight for about 400 of them,” he wrote in his report to the Bishop. “Deep boring should bring further discoveries, and prospecting may disclose additional supplies of osmiridium, but it is no place for a man without capital to carry him on for a while.”
While there, Wilson noted a shared sense of unease within the community; oversupply had dropped osmiridium’s market price from £32 per ounce in September 1925 to £20 in February 1926. By 1931, the mining rush was losing steam and Adamsfield’s population had shrunk to about 250.
“At present miners are not finding much metal, and, as the price is [a] low £13 10s. per ounce on the field, many are making only a bare living,” reported the Rev. J. Crookson, who visited Adamsfield on behalf of the Tasmanian Council of Churches with the idea of establishing a church at the settlement.
“All the buildings are very primitive, and conditions are rough,” he wrote, “but we have reason to believe that for a mining town so isolated and remote, the life and morals of the people are above the average usually found in such places.”
Osmiridium mining dwindled in the 1930s and was effectively abandoned during World War II. After the war, the fountain pen industry declined as ballpoint pens entered the market. Adamsfield’s last permanent resident left in 1960. With a permit, you can visit the Adamsfield Conservation Area and surviving worker’s huts on the Adamsfield Track bushwalk.
