By Ulverstone History Museum
The official founding of the town of Penguin was in 1875. Henry Hellyer surveyed the North West Coast almost 50 years earlier, naming the creek of this area ‘Sulphur Creek’ due to the sulphurous rocks at the creek mouth. These were later discovered to be washed out of silver deposits farther upstream. Farther west, there was a little penguin (Eudyptula minor) rookery. The Tasmanian survey department accidentally flipped the name on early maps and botanist Ronald Gunn formally called the town Penguin.
For thousands of generations, Aboriginal people have been living and thriving on the coastal fringe and inland amongst the many resources of this Country that has been their home. It is recorded that colonial Europeans first established their presence on these Aboriginal lands in the early- to mid- nineteenth century. Later, Thomas Sullock joined the emerging Penguin community in 1874. Born around 1829 in England, he journeyed to the goldfields in Victoria in 1852, finding varying success there before travelling to Penguin. He promoted mining to increase the town’s prospects as well as the construction of the port for local trade. Thomas, along with many of the other early settlers of the region, formed the Watcombe Mining Company, named after his house. He purchased Watcombe House in 1878, creating a successful tourism enterprise which included a tennis court and croquet lawn. Throughout the 1880s, Thomas and his wife, Mary Ann, advertised Watcombe House and Watcombe Beach as a spa resort particularly suited to sea bathing. Visitors could arrive via the steamship Cambria from Launceston.
‘The fruit, flowers, and forest trees were the only calendars’ in the early days of Penguin. There were few mail routes, and newspapers rarely made it to the town as there were only tracks, not roads. Westbury and then Torquay (East Devonport) had the first post offices in the area. The sea and small tracks overland were the only connections until the Leven Road District Trust was formed in 1868, covering from the Leven to the Blythe rivers. The Trust met in the region’s hotels, acting as a local government, and providing roads and other services. Section 6 of the Tasmanian Police Act 1865 allowed for the formal gazettal of towns. This was proclaimed by Governor Frederick Aloysius Weld on Monday 25 October 1875 for the township of Penguin.
On the centenary of the founding of the town, a giant penguin sculpture was placed on the foreshore. The iconic Penguin bins were placed along the main road in the 1990s and were updated in 2024. It will be 150 years since the formal gazettal of the town of Penguin in 2025 and everyone is invited to celebrate with a year-long calendar of events.