Their History and Design

Piner’s Punts were used as part of Tasmania’s commercial timber industry in its rivers and tributaries since the 1850s. Little known outside of the Huon and West Coast Rivers systems until the late twentieth century, they have since entered folklore as a type of boat unique to Tasmania.

Tasmanian Piners’ Punts is the culmination of more than twenty years of research by members of the Wooden Boat Guilt of Tasmania, Inc., assisted by a Maritime Museums of Australia Project Support Scheme (MMAPSS) grant from the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Building on the world of earlier researchers, Tasmanian Piners’ Punts sets out the current thinking on the origins, design and use of the piners’ punt since its probable inception on the Huon River in the 1840s and introduction to the West Coast Rivers in the later decades on the nineteenth century. It shows that the design most likely evolved from the Scandinavian pram dinghy, modified for local conditions. All known surviving original and replica punts and listed with their known history and photographs, and plans generated from surveys of a representative sample of punts are here published for the first time.