Corporate Body

Hydro Electric Department (1914 - 1930)

State of Tasmania

From: 1 January 1914
Tasmania, Australia
To: 31 December 1930
Tasmania, Australia
Reference No: TA1103

Summary

Hydro-electric power provided by public enterprise came to Tasmania as early as 1895. The present state-wide system however usually counts its history from a franchise to generate electricity issued to "Complex Ores Ltd" in 1909. The company later assigned its concession to the "Hydro-electric Power and Metallurgical Company Ltd". This company ran into financial difficulties and the state acquired the undertaking under the authority of the Hydro-Electric Purchase Act 1914 and vested it in the newly created Hydro-Electric Department.

Timeline

c. 1910 - c. 1914 Hydro-electric Power and Metallurgical Company Ltd
1914 - 1930 Hydro Electric Department
1930 - 1996 Hydro-Electric Commission of Tasmania

Related Corporate Bodies

Amalgamated Zinc (de Bavay's) Ltd (1909 - ?)
In 1916, the Department contracted Amalgamated Zinc to produce zinc at Risdon.

Related People

Butters, John Henry (1885 - 1969)
Chief engineer and general manager 1914 - 1925.
Gillies, James Hynds (1861 - 1942)
In 1935 Gillies was granted an annual pension of £350 for services rendered to the State, primarily related to the Waddamana power scheme and the electrolytic zinc works.
Nimmo, William Hogarth Robertson (1885 - 1970)
Principal assistant, hydraulic design 1921 - 1923; Resident engineer 1919 - 1921; Assistant engineer 1918-1919.

Published resources

Books

Read, Peter Charles, The organisation of electricity supply in Tasmania (Sandy Bay [Hobart]: University of Tasmania, 1986). Details

Journal Articles

Butters, John Henry, 'Notes on the development of the power resources of Tasmania', Transactions of the Institution of Engineers Australia, 7 (1926), 3-36, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.865068251562676. Details

Ken McInnes

Created: 5 July 2023

EOAS ID: biogs/P007245b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2025 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - late summer - season of eels)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P007245b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260