Oakleigh Park

Oakleigh Park, alongside Burnie's business centre, is regarded as the birthplace of Burnie and cradle of the north west coast because the Van Diemen's Land Company's chief surveyor, Henry Hellyer camped there in 1827 and seected it as the site for the company's port.

Oakleigh Park, close to Burnie's business centre is regarded as the birthplace of Burnie and cradle of the north west coast because the Van Diemen's Land Company's chief surveyor, Henry Hellyer camped there in 1827. With the company chief agent, Edward Curr's later agreement, Hellyer decided that Burnie's Emu Bay, which Oakleigh Park overlooks, should be the port servicing the company's tracts of land at Hampshire and Surrey Hills fifty kilometres inland around St Valentine's Peak. Hence, part of Oakleigh Park's cultural significance is historical.



This event is symbolised by a slender column of pink granite, and a plaque unveiled in the sesquicentenary year 1977. The park is a 0.5km walk from the City centre and features picnic seating and tables, playground equipment, a fountain and sundial. The park was named after a house known as 'Oakleigh' built for the Van Diemen's Land Company's Emu Bay overseer. It stood near the area from the early 1840s until it was demolished in 1962.

Emu Bay

Oakleigh Park was originally on the shores of Emu Bay, but reclamation on its western shore for the construction of Burnie's port facilities and road access into the city via Bass Highway has resulted in it being landlocked. The bay was named by Henry Hellyer, presumably because of the many Tasmanian Emus that were common in the area in Burnie's early days.

Like the Tasmanian Tiger, there are no emus in Tasmania any more as it is now extinct. The Tasmania Emu, after which the river and the bay on which Burnie stands were named, is believed to have been a smaller sub-species of the mainland emu. The external characters used to distinguish it were its whitish instead of a black foreneck and throat and an unfeathered neck.

The Tasmanian Indigenous people’s sustainable relationship with the emu also suggests emu population numbers were significant. The Tasmanian emu was regularly symbolised in Indigenous art, in their ceremonies it was common practice for Tasmanian Aborigines to dance and characterise emus by stretching out one arm to emulate the long neck of the bird. Feathers were used to decorate inside Aboriginal huts, and served as insulation and floor coverings. The indigenous people used a substance called ‘patener’, made from a ground metal mixed with emu fat/oil, to mark their heads and bodies. Emus featured in stories and songs, and there were many different names for them, including gonanner, ponanner and tooteyer. There are many references to the emu in early colonial records too, with many place names recalling it, eg. Emu Hill, Emu Heights, Emu Point.



A watercolour by William Porden Kay depicts emus at Stanley during the 1840s. (Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania)

Like the Tasmanian Aborigines with whom it had co-existed for thousands of years, the Tasmanian emu suffered a calamiltous fate with the arrival of white man. By the time of Henry Hellyer's encounter with emus at Emu Bay in 1827 when he named the bay after them because of their significant numbers, southern Tasmania's emu population was already in decline and within 40 years the species would be extinct. Though Emu Bay was once a stronghold for these flightless birds, their populations also diminished quickly after white settlers moved in. When the Burnie settlement was surveyed in 1846, the Tasmanian Emu was almost gone. The species survived in the wild until 1865, and the last captive bird died in 1873.

During those years, land was being cleared at an astronomical rate. The emu's habitat was quickly destroyed to make way for grazing land for sheep. By 1840, there were 280,000 sheep in Tasmania.

The introduction of dogs is also considered a major contributing factor to the fast extinction of the Tasmanian emu. Though it was a really important food source for the Aboriginal people who hunted emus, it was in relatively low numbers. Emus were pretty hard to catch, they were fast runners and could defend themselves. That all changed with the introduction of the domestic dog. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Van Diemen’s Land did not have a domestic dog, nor was the dingo present. But the Europeans had dogs and guns and that combination proved deadly for the emu and hastened its extinction.


Emu Bay