OK so using Melbourne newspapers from the 70s I managed to get a bit of a better understanding of the Penny Royal. I am embarrassed that I thought it was 'real'. It was a project of entrepreneur Roger Smith's. He was a British migrant who was involved in a lot of tourism (and hotel) businesses in Tasmania until he went bankrupt in, I think, 2004 (he died only a few years ago). Penny Royal was his favourite baby I think, though, and while it is a completely manufactured site (in an old quarry, well-positioned just outside Cataract Gorge and walking distance from central Launceston) he went a long way to making many of the features 'authentic'. Some or all of it was built with bricks from what seems to have been a demolished 19th century building (information is scant). He was adding all kinds of things to it through the 70s and 80s with ambition to build a tramline into the Gorge itself (somehow). None of that happened; there are a few tram tracks at the entrance to PR.
I'm going to try and make a Wikipedia page about PR soon. The above is just from memory.
As a child, naturally enough, I watched a lot of television and it being the early 1970s when I was a child, I watched a lot of what is no...
2 comments:
A local variant of Clough Williiams-Elliss's Portmeirion in Wales (used as location for "The Prisoner" TV show)...?
PS Thanks for the new Flook - that business about the different artwork is definitely a mystery.
The Portmeirion comparison resonates. Though this is more in the mode of the early 70s fashion for folk museums eg Sovereign Hill.
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