The Peaks of Lyell is a book by Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...

, originally published in 1954. It contains the history of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company

Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company

Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company was a Tasmanian mining company formed on the 29 March 1893, most commonly referred to as Mount Lyell. Mount Lyell was the dominant copper mining company of the West Coast from 1893 to 1994, and was based in Queenstown, Tasmania.Following consolidation of...

, and through association, Queenstown

Queenstown, Tasmania

Queenstown is a town in the West Coast region of the island of Tasmania. It is located in a valley on western slopes of Mount Owen on the West Coast Range.It had a population of 5,119 people . At the 2006 census, Queenstown had a population of 2,117....

 and further the West Coast Tasmania

West Coast, Tasmania

The West Coast of Tasmania is the part of the state that is strongly associated with wilderness, mining and tourism, rough country and isolation...

. It is unique for this type of book in that it has gone to the sixth edition in 2000, and few company histories in Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 have achieved such continual publishing.

Blainey was fortunate in being able to speak to older people about the history of the west coast, some who had known Queenstown in its earliest years.

The book gives an interesting overview from the materials and people Blainey was able to access in the early 1950s, and the omissions. Due to the nature of a company history, a number of items of Queenstown history did have alternative interpretations on events such as the 1912 North Mount Lyell Disaster

1912 North Mount Lyell Disaster

The 1912 North Mount Lyell Disaster refers to a fire that broke out on 12 October 1912 at the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company operations on the West Coast of Tasmania...

, and there were residents of Queenstown living in the town as late as the 1970s who had stories that differed from the official company history.

Significant characters from the West Coast Tasmania history such as Robert Carl Sticht

Robert Carl Sticht

Robert Carl Sticht was an American metallurgist and copper mine manager, active in Colorado and Montana, U.S.A. and in Tasmania, Australia...

 and James Crotty

James Crotty (Prospector)

James Crotty was an Irish born mining prospector who formed a mining company - the North Mount Lyell mining company in the western region of Tasmania, just before the turn of the twentieth century....

 amongst a longer list probably still deserve further work on their significance in west coast and tasmanian history, but the book has had significant 'presence' in being in print for so long, new scholarship on some of the neglected topics of west coast history only emerged in the late 1990s.

In 1994, when the fifth edition was printed, the Mount Lyell company closed down, and most of the records held by the company were donated to the State Library of Tasmania

State Library of Tasmania

The State Library of Tasmania is the organisation which runs the library system in the state of Tasmania, Australia. The State Library operates as part of the Tasmanian Department of Education, and maintains close ties with Tasmanian schools and senior secondary colleges.The headquarters of the...

. By the 2000s a sixth edition was published.

Publication history

• Blainey, Geoffrey. The Peaks of Lyell, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1954, 310pp.
• History of Mt. Lyell [manuscript] (M.A. Thesis), University of Melbourne, 1955, 328 leaves.
• The first half of this history was presented as Geoffrey Blainey
  Geoffrey Blainey
  Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...
  
  's Master of Arts thesis.
  • 2nd ed., Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1959, 310pp.
  • 3rd ed., Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic.; London, 1967, 341pp.
  • 4th ed., Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1978, 341pp.
  • 5th ed., St. David's Park Publishing, Hobart, Tas., 1993, 370pp.