How the Murals Began

A public meeting was held in Sheffield in 1985 to formulate strategies to arrest the state of steady economic decline which Kentish, Sheffield in particular, was experiencing at that time. This led to the formation of the Kentish Association for Tourism Inc. (K.A.T. Inc.) who then changed the name to Sheffield Murals and Rural Tourism Association (SMARTA Inc.) and currently Sheffield incorporating Murals, Tourism, Commerce (Sheffield Inc).

Soon after its inauguration, the K.A.T. Inc. committee began pursuing a suggestion to investigate an idea which had been successful for a town in Canada facing similar economic downturn in traditional industries. That town, Chemainus, on Vancouver Island's east shore, had begun painting murals on its town walls and had achieved much public recognition for its work. The murals were credited with rescuing the town.

K.A.T. Inc analysed the factors for success, then committed to achieving a similar result. This website is the record to date of the Sheffield Murals Project.

It was intended "that Sheffield and other areas in Kentish would have an outdoor art gallery of heroic proportions, depicting the pioneering history of the district and its people", to quote from the minutes of an early K.A.T. meeting. So! John Lendis was commissioned to paint the first mural which was completed in December, 1986. Since then the town has grown in directions we never dreamed could be possible.

Sheffield now hosts a week long event known as 'International Mural Fest', where nine artists paint their interpretation of the same theme on boards in a specially designed mural park. This means nine new murals are painted each year. With professional judging and by public voting, winning murals are selected and all the finalists' murals remain displayed in Mural Park for twelve months. This ensures, for people re-visiting Tasmania's Outdoor Art Gallery a renewal of interest in the Mural Project.

Sheffield can boast of approximately 2000 square metres of its history, events, heroes and heartbreaks painted on the walls of this quaint little town.

The Municipality of Kentish

The municipality of Kentish (or Kentishbury as it was once known) covers an area of some 1170 square kilometres extending from South Spreyton to the tip of Cradle Mountain and it embraces the four main regions of Railton, Sheffield, Wilmot and Cradle Valley.

Sheffield is nestled in under Mount Roland, just 30K from Devonport in north-western Tasmania. A beautiful undulating landscape produces lambs, pigs, timber, potatoes and a number of vegetable crops.

Nathaniel Lipscombe Kentish was appointed government surveyor in Van Diemen's Land in 1841. In 1842 he, with a gang of approximately 20 Probationers (parole men), was instructed to survey a road from Deloraine westward to the North West Coast through lands used by the Van Diemen's Land Company.

This area was opened up to settlement in 1859. By 1862 thirty lots of land had been surveyed and sold and the township of Sheffield had been named.

Surveyor Kentish first named the area, August Plains, to commemorate the date they were discovered. The name was later changed to the Kentish Plains after the surveyor himself. Then later again to Kentishbury, and still later it was shortened to Kentish. So dense was the bush in the area, Barrington had been settled for nine years before continued tree felling, revealed Mt. Roland - previously unknown to the pioneers.

From the 1880s onwards, mining was undertaken in the district and was particularly successful in the Moina area where gold and silver-lead were discovered. The early prospectors, using trails already long established by aboriginal tribes, helped open up the hinterland not only of Kentish, but the entire north west of Tasmania.