A Tram Challenge! 

John purchased and commenced renovation of the Soundy Building North Hobart in 2000 and purchased the State Cinema two years later. His business went from a single-screen, 35mm cinema and 15,000 admissions a year, to a nine screen complex, an extensive bookshop, 120 seat café bar and over 220,000 admissions a year. John sold the State Cinema in late 2019 and purchased the heritage New Cresent Hotel at the corner of Burnett and Murray St in North Hobart.

For the past seven years, John has been intimately involved with the Hobart Tram Restoration and Museum Society. The last intact original Hobart tram journeyed from its home of the last 54 years in Huonville to the city, where it is hoped it may be used again.

The group hope to establish a tram museum at the Macquarie Point site on the waterfront and run trams to the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens and beyond.

The society will temporarily store the tram until funds can be raised for its restoration.

Hobart’s tramway system closed in September 1960 and most of the trams were stripped for parts and sold off. Many were situated on rural properties and destroyed in the 1967 bushfires.

The Hobart tram network, which commenced in1893, was the first such network to be established in the southern hemisphere. Trams used to run to Sandy Bay, South Hobart and West Hobart.  A line ran through North Hobart to Moonah with a branch line going along Augusta Rd.

John was inducted onto the St Virgil’s College Heritage Roll in 2014