The Past

The Past

The mechanics’ institute movement was initiated by Lord Birkbeck in the 1820s in Britain to promote the diffusion of knowledge and moral enlightenment to working men.   The concept spread rapidly throughout the Empire as a localised means of providing community-based education and cultural activities. The first in the Australasian colonies was the Hobart Town Mechanics’ Institute in 1827, and Launceston established its own fifteen years later. 

The Launceston Mechanics’ Institute was formed by a group of citizens, including Police Magistrate W H Breton, newspaper editor and Congregational minister John West, newspaper proprietor James Aikenhead, and other influential figures such as Rev. Charles Price, William Henty and Thomas Button. It offered programmes of lectures and entertainments, and operated a library for the use of members. It grew largely through increasing membership and an expanding program of cultural events, while its resources accumulated through donations of books, periodicals and objects of scientific and technical interest by members, eventually augmented by modest government funding. The members, with general support from the community and a government grant, constructed a fine building in the centre of the prospering town, the Launceston Mechanics’ Institute, in 1860.

   

The institution, with changes of name and function, existed through to 1945; its building was demolished in 1971, with the remaining resources being transferred to the custody of the State Library of Tasmania. During this period of well over a century, the Mechanics’ Institute gave rise to a number of Launceston’s most significant cultural institutions, including the Launceston Library, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and shorter-lived book discussion groups, choral and orchestral societies, drama groups and a Parliamentary Debating Society. 

Histories of the Institute’s seminal role in Launceston life were written by Ernest Whitfeld in 1906 based on notes by Henry Button celebrating its first 50 years, and by Stefan Petrow in 1998 after its sesquicentenary.