High Lean Country: Land, people and memory in New England

High Lean Country Land, People and Memory in New England

Edited by Alan Atkinson, J.S. Ryan, Iain Davidson and Andrew Piper

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First published in 2006 Copyright © Heritage Futures Research Centre 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: High lean country: land, people and memory in New England. Includes index. ISBN 9781741750867. ISBN 1 74175 086 5. 1. New England (N.S.W.) - History. I. Atkinson, Alan. 994.444 Designed by Tabitha King Set in 10.5/12 pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed in Australia by Ligare Book Printer, Sydney 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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C O N T E NTS List of Maps and Diagrams List of Contributors Acknowledgements ‘South of My Days’

iv v xi Judith Wright

Note on Aboriginal Language Names Prelude: Uplands Always Attract 1. What is New England?

xv J.S. Ryan Alan Atkinson

PA RT 1: P H Y S I C A L E N V I RO N M E N T

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The Rocks Beneath Sunshine, Snow, Wind and Rain Wildlife The Vegetated Landscape Land and Livelihood

Robert Haworth Jack Hobbs and Alan Atkinson Peter Jarman and Karl Vernes Peter Clarke Nick Reid and Lewis Kahn

PA RT 2: F I R S T P E O P L E S

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Seeing Red: Musings on Rock Art Aboriginal Archaeology The Frontier Aboriginal People and Pastoralism Aborigines and Citizens

14. Homesteads 15. Schools 16. Religious Life 17. Twentieth-century Immigrants 18. Travelling and Communicating 19. Enterprise and Ingenuity 20. Politics

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1 10 21

23 35 44 57 69 79

June Ross Wendy Beck David Andrew Roberts Rodney Harrison Matthew Jordan

PA RT 3: N E WC O M E R S

12. Passing Through 13. Colonial Settlement

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81 88 98 111 122 135

Martin Auster Alan Atkinson and John Atchison Jillian Oppenheimer Bruce Mitchell and Jean Newall Jennifer Clark Janis Wilton Alan Atkinson and John Atchison G.R. Henning Frank Bongiorno

137 148 160 171 184 196 209 221 233

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21. War and Its Memories 22. The Archaeology of the New Peoples 23. Collecting and Presenting the Past

Ian M. Johnstone 245 Pamela Watson 253 Nicole McLennan, Bill Oates, 263 Andrew Piper and Alan Atkinson 277

PART 4: REPRESENTATIONS 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Imagining New England A University Becoming Stories and Prose Music Theatre

29. Film 30. Visual Arts Epilogue: ‘a high lean country/ full of old stories’

Julian Croft Don Aitkin J.S. Ryan Richard Peter Maddox Judith Lamb and Christopher Ross-Smith Neil Rattigan Meg Vivers Iain Davidson

279 291 296 308 319 333 344 355

Endnotes Index

363 409

Maps and Diagrams New England’s location Aboriginal language groups of New England Mean altitudes of the major levels of the New England Tablelands (1911) Cross-sections of continental passive margin structures The climate and weather of Australia (1913) Bora grounds and ceremonial stone arrangements Sites of frontier violence in the 1830s and 40s Plan of Kunderang homestead Nineteenth-century mining settlements Some New England homesteads New England locations referred to in The Shiralee Journeys and stops by Conrad Martens and Tom Roberts

xiv xiv 31 33 39 89 99 120 151 161 302 346

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L I ST O F C O N TRIBUTORS Don Aitkin, AO, has been Professor of Politics at Macquarie University and of Political Science at the Australian National University (ANU), chair of the Australian Research Council and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra. He is author of The Colonel: A Political Biography of Sir Michael Bruxner, The Country Party in New South Wales, The Second Chair, Stability and Change in Australian Politics, and joint author of Australian Political Institutions. John Atchison has taught Australian history at the Armidale College of Advanced Education and at the University of New England (UNE). He has chaired the Committee for Geographical Names in Australia (Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping) and was an elected member of the Board of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences. Alan Atkinson has a research fellowship in history at UNE. His books include Camden: Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales, The Common Task: A History of PLC Armidale (with Catherine Pound) and The Europeans in Australia, volumes one and two. His writing has won several national awards. He is currently a member of the Australian Research Council. Martin Auster teaches cyberspatial geography, architectural history, and urban planning law and administration, among other things, at UNE. He has an interest in cultural landscapes and is the author of A Poem on the Drummond Memorial Column in Drummond Park, Armidale: Being an Allegorical History of the University of New England, from Its Beginnings to its Present Time of Difficulty. Wendy Beck teaches archaeology at UNE. She has edited Plants in Australian Archaeology (with Anne Clarke and Lesley Head) and Gendered Archaeology: The Second Australian Women in Archaeology Conference (with Jane Balme) and was one of the authors of Yarrawarra Places Making Stories. In 1989 and 1990 she was President of the Australian Archaeological Association. Frank Bongiorno teaches history, including Australian local history, at UNE. He is author of The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914 and has contributed chapters on New England’s political history to several publications connected with the Sesquicentenary of Responsible Government in New South Wales (2006). During 2003–05 he was chair of the Literature and History Committee, NSW Ministry for the Arts.

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Jennifer Clark teaches Australian and American history at UNE. She is a former Harkness Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published in the areas of war and society, nationalism, Anglo-American literature, church history and memorial culture. Peter Clarke teaches plant ecology at UNE. He has been a plant collector at the University of Sydney, a vegetation mapper at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney and a soil conservationist studying coastal vegetation. He began his post-graduate studies in mangroves whilst working for CSIRO and his most recent research has focused on fire ecology. Julian Croft is Emeritus Professor of English at UNE. He has published one novel, four volumes of poetry (including Breakfasts in Shanghai, 1985, awarded the British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Asia Pacific region), a study of the Australian novelist Joseph Furphy (The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins, awarded the McCrae Russell Prize), and numerous academic articles in the fields of Australian, Anglo-Welsh, and African literatures. Iain Davidson teaches archaeology at UNE, focusing on empirical and theoretical issues, particularly in the symbolic construction of landscape and in the history of communications and transport. He has been president of the Australian Archaeological Association (1991–92) and in 2003 he was a Fellow at the Collegium Budapest, Hungary. Rodney Harrison is a research fellow in archaeology at the University of Western Australia, and an adjunct fellow in the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the ANU. With Christine Williamson, he edited After Captain Cook, a series of essays on the historical archaeology of Aboriginal Australia, and in 2004 published Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. Robert Haworth is a geomorphologist and environmental historian at UNE, with a special interest in the effects of land use changes in Australia on settlement patterns, the landscape and society, including the folkways and folklore of Australia. He has published widely in academic journals, most recently on issues of sea-level change and erosion. G.R. Henning is a widely published economic historian and a member of the School of Economics at UNE. He has long been an active member of the Armidale and District Historical Society, and is working on an account of the New England industries, to appear as a School of Economics working paper. During 2005–10 he is president of International Commission for Maritime History (part of the Comité International des Sciences Historiques, or CISH).

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List of Contributors Jack Hobbs has been a geographer at UNE for 33 years, with a particular interest in climatology and natural hazards. He was editor, with J.A. Lindesay and H.A. Bridgman, of Climates of the Southern Continents: Present, Past, and Future. He is currently Assistant Master of Earle Page College at UNE.

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Peter Jarman is Emeritus Professor of Ecosystem Management at UNE. His major interest has been the behavioural ecology of large mammalian herbivores—antelopes in Africa and kangaroos in Australia—and interactions between wildlife and humans, especially through land-use practices. His books include Kangaroos: Two Centuries of Ecosystem Management and Land Use in a Changing Climate (edited with Kath Johnson). Ian M. Johnstone, born in Armidale, practised as a solicitor in that city for 40 years. He has published over 60 papers and letters on legal topics including environmental law, primary production, conveyancing and no-fault compensation. He has researched the lives of those from Armidale, and from The Armidale School, who fell in both World Wars, and was President of Armidale and District Historical Society during 1999–2004. Matthew Jordan has published on the history of the White Australia policy and he is also the author of A Spirit of True Learning: The Jubilee History of the University of New England, which was written to mark the 50th anniversary of UNE, in 2004. He now works in the Office of National Assessments, in Canberra. Lewis Kahn is a senior research scientist at UNE, specialising in agricultural ecosystems and with a focus on nutrition, health and production of grazing livestock and pasture ecology. He also works with the consultancy Agricultural Information and Monitoring Services (AIMS) on the better management of grazing lands and livestock in northern New South Wales and South Australia. Judith Lamb, OAM, has been associated with Armidale theatre for over 40 years, as an actor and director, and has also been a local journalist and bookshop proprietor. With support from UNE, she has recently written Never Whistle in the Dressing Room, a history of Armidale’s long love affair with the theatre. Nicole McLennan has been a lecturer at the Australian Catholic University and a research editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and she was a curator at the National Museum of Australia, in Canberra. She is currently University Curator at UNE’s Heritage Centre, and co-ordinator for the New England and North West Chapter of Museums Australia. Richard Peter Maddox has degrees in music from the universities of London, Sydney and California, and he has taught at UNE. He now concentrates on composing, conducting and accompanying, working with many local musicians

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in the Armidale area. His compositions are published by Warner-Chappell (Los Angeles) and The Keys Press (Perth). Bruce Mitchell taught in the History Department at UNE for 24 years, specialising in Australian history. He has been active in local history societies and the National Trust and has written numerous books and articles about the history of education and of families and houses in New England. Jean Newall is the archivist for St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, as well as the New England Girl’s School, whose archive centre is named in her honour. A former teacher and librarian, she has co-authored two books on the history of the New England Girl’s School and contributed articles to many journals. Bill Oates is the university archivist at UNE. He has worked at all levels of government record keeping for Commonwealth, State and Local Government organisations. He is in the vanguard of record keepers seeking to preserve valuable records for future generations as well as deliver our documented heritage to this generation via the internet. Jillian Oppenheimer, OAM, was a grazier for over 30 years. She has also been a member of the Council and Board of the National Trust of Australia (NSW), and for eleven years its vice-president. She was a Councillor of UNE, 2002–06. She has published numerous articles and books about people and places in New England as well as organising local history workshops and related activities. Andrew Piper has worked in the cultural heritage industry since 1981 as an archaeologist, curator and site manager in Africa, Australia, Micronesia and New Zealand. For five years he was the senior heritage professional at the Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania. He has since been co-ordinator of the Heritage Futures Research Centre and now teaches history at UNE. Neil Rattigan teaches film studies at UNE. His publications include Images of Australia: 100 Films of the New Australian Cinema, This is England: British Film and the People’s War, 1939–1945, and a study of the 1991 Australian film Strictly Ballroom. His continuing research interests are Australian cinema, post-war British cinema, the films of Woody Allen, and film and fairy/folk tales. Nick Reid teaches at UNE, specialising in sustainable agriculture and catchment management, agroforestry, protected area management and ecology. He is particularly interested in the integration of resources at local and regional levels and in biodiversity in production landscapes. His current research includes collaborative projects with the cotton and wool industries and the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service.

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List of Contributors David Andrew Roberts teaches Australian history at UNE. He wrote his PhD thesis on the colonial frontier at Wellington Valley and has since written on numerous topics including convict history, race relations, Aboriginal religious change and Aboriginal rock paintings. He is co-author of Ancient Ochre: The Aboriginal Rock Paintings of Mount Borradaile (2003).

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June Ross trained as a designer in Sydney before going on to teach art at primary and secondary school level and then at the New England Regional Art Museum, where she developed the education and public programs. Having completed a PhD on the archaeological analysis of rock art in the central Australian Desert, she now teaches in archaeology at UNE. Christopher Ross-Smith has worked as an actor, director and lecturer in the UK, the USA and Africa. He was deputy director of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, before establishing the Drama Department at UNE, where he was primarily responsible for its initial direction as well as developing the external major in Theatre Studies. As a member of the New South Wales Drama Syllabus Committee he helped to implement the first two-unit drama syllabus offered at HSC level. J.S. Ryan of UNE has long written and edited northern cultural materials and novelists and poets with strong New England and North Coast connections. He has published linguistic, biographical and other material with the Armidale and District Historical Society and in folklore journals worldwide. He is editor of Australian Folklore: A Yearly Journal of Folklore Studies and editorial board member of Greenwood’s Encyclopedia of World Folklore. Karl Vernes lectures in wildlife ecology, conservation and management at UNE. His research interests include mammal ecology and conservation, ecological relationships between mammals and fungi, and management of native and introduced wildlife. He has postgraduate degrees from James Cook University and held the McCain Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Biology Department at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick. Meg Vivers is a long-time resident of New England and is enrolled in a PhD at UNE, with a thesis on women’s writing in colonial Australia. She is author of Mick and the Manager, a book about her father and an Aboriginal stockman who worked with him. She writes poetry and is a successful artist, many of her paintings reflecting her love of the New England landscape. Pamela Watson is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at UNE and directs historical archaeology projects in the region. Her background is partly in the archaeology of Late Antiquity the Middle East, and she has spent many years in Jordan, where she was co-director of the Pella Project (amongst others)

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and assistant director of the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History. Janis Wilton, OAM, teaches Australian History at UNE, specialising in oral and immigration history. She is coordinator of the state-funded Golden Threads Project on the Chinese in regional New South Wales, which has resulted in a website and a travelling exhibition. She has been President of the International Oral History Association and is a Trustee of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales.

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AC K N OW L E DG EMENTS This book is born of the collaborative expertise of members of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England. In a similar spirit, many others have helped in the work in one way or another, and we are very grateful for their contributions. Robin Riley and John Farrell supplied useful historical information, and Robin went to considerable trouble unearthing photographs from early Tenterfield. Michael Sharkey similarly located photographs for Chapter 24. Ann-Katrin Eckermann, Diane Roberts, Vera Lovelock and Elva Taylor laid the foundation for Chapter 11. The staff of the Dixson Library at UNE have, as usual, been unremittingly helpful throughout the project. The University Archivist, Bill Oates, Philip Ward and other members of staff at UNE’s Heritage Centre have also taken very considerable trouble, especially with the supply of pictures. David Elkins, UNE’s photographer, and Michael Watson very kindly took and copied photographs for us. We are grateful also to Michael Roach and Cate MacGregor for drawing the maps, Cate the first two and Michael the remainder. We owe a great deal, as usual, to Trish Wright-Langsford and Gina Butler in the School of Classics, History and Religion. Gina has been endlessly patient in dealing with the illustrations. For permission to reproduce lines of verse, we are grateful to Jack Bedson and to Carmen Blomfield (both in Chapter 12; Bedson for his own verse and Mrs Blomfield for that of her late husband, Geoff Blomfield), and to Geoff Page (for his own verse, in Chapter 21). The lines from Judith Wright—‘South of My Days’ (opening the book), ‘Bora Ring’ (in Chapter 8), ‘Wildflower Plain’ (in Chapter 12), and ‘Bullocky’ (in Chapter 18), all from A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (ETT Imprint, Sydney, 1996)—are reproduced with the permission of ETT Imprint, and with thanks also to Meredith McKinney. Most of the illustrations have been supplied either by the authors themselves or from the Heritage Centre. Four pictures, in Chapters 1 (John Wetherspoon), 6 (farm at Moree), 16 (Rev. A. Cameron) and 19 (butter factory), are taken from The Land of ‘The Beardies’, published by the Glen Innes Municipal Council in 1922. One, in the Prelude (Judith Wright, in about 1950), is from The Concise Encyclopædia of Modern World Literature (ed. G. Grigson, 1963); and one in Chapter 3 (Wallamumbi Falls) is from The Picturesque Atlas of Australia (ed. A. Garran, 1888). For the remaining pictures, we acknowledge the following: among the colour plates, the Nymboida River sketch comes with permission to publish from the State Records of New South Wales; ‘Bailed Up’, by Tom Roberts, with permission to publish from the Art Gallery of New South Wales; ‘Time and Two Waterfalls’ by Stuart Boggs, from the artist, with permission to publish;

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Anna Henderson’s pots, from Anna and David Henderson, with permission to publish; Jenny Evelyn’s digital art, from the artist, with permission to publish; and Anne Andrews’ two photographs from herself, with permission to publish. In Chapter 3, the image of snow in Armidale is from a picture held by Bruce Cady, and we thank him for permission to use it. In Chapter 10, the picture of branding at Kunderang is taken from the Fitzgerald-McDonell family albums held by the New South Wales Department of Environment and Conservation, in Armidale (thanks to Chris Lehmann for enquiries with regard to permission). In Chapters 27 and 28, the two images of performances in Tenterfield come, with permission, from originals held by the Tenterfield and District Historical Society. In Chapter 29, the image from The Picture Show Man is used with the permission of Limelight Productions and that from The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (supplied by the National Film and Sound Archive) with the permission of Fred Schepisi. In Chapter 30, the image of Conrad Martens’ drawing of Salisbury Court was supplied, with permission to publish, by the State Library of New South Wales, and with the agreement of Sir Owen and Lady Croft, of Salisbury Court. The image of Gerhard Koertner’s drawing was supplied by the artist and reproduced with his permission. We are also grateful to Lauren Finger and others at Allen & Unwin for their efficiency. John Ryan compiled the index.

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South of My Days Judith Wright (1940) South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country, rises that tableland, high delicate outline of bony slopes wincing under the winter, low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite— clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced, willow-choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen; and the old cottage lurches in for shelter. O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler roses, thrust its hot face in here to tell another yarn— a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter. Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones, Seventy years are hived in him like old honey. Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter, nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning; sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on, stopped at Sandy Camp and waited in the evening. It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees. Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand— cruel to keep them alive—and the river was dust. Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn when the blizzards came early. Brought them down; we brought them down, what aren’t there yet. Or driving for Cobb’s on the run up from Tamworth—Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill, and I give him a wink. I wouldn’t wait long, Fred, not if I was you; the troopers are just behind, coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny, him on his big black horse. Oh, they slide and they vanish as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards. True or not, it’s all the same; and the frost on the roof cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash. Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over. No-one is listening. South of my days’ circle I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

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❈ New England, showing its position within New South Wales and Australia.

❈ The Aboriginal language groups of New England.

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Note on Aboriginal Language Names We have used the versions of language names prepared by the University of New England’s Discipline of Linguistics with local Aboriginal groups, working through the Oorala Centre, UNE; the Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place (which holds the 2002 copyright of the supporting map); Armidale Dumaresq Council; and the GamilaraayYuwaalaraay Languages Network. There are other conventional versions, ‘Kamilaroi’ being an especially common alternative to ‘Gamilaraay’.

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P R E LU D E ❈

Up l a n d s A l w ay s Attract J. S . Ry a n

There is a part of England, an inland northern region set high above sea level, namely West Yorkshire, in which landscape still famously overshadows humanity, and where there remains a direct reliance on the land for food and employment and an awareness in its inhabitants of its isolation, outstanding scenery, diverse wildlife and cherished culture. In Australia, New England is a similarly elevated place, renowned for its brilliantly clear light—something noted by many regional writers (see Chapter 26 of this book)—and for its numerous sharp contrasts with the sun-drenched, holiday-focused beaches and densely populated cities of the coast. To New England, as to West Yorkshire, many visitors now come for solace, to enjoy a wide variety of leisure pursuits in the invigorating atmosphere, and to savour the distinctive and haunting settings of the innumerable stories—‘great flapping ribbons of shaped spacetime’— that enfold our identity.1 In Australia, as in the United States and the United Kingdom, the shocking upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century created among ordinary people the need to bond more deeply with the past in their places of residence. Both within universities and throughout western society for the last 60 years or so there has been an almost irresistible urge, both for those still living near their birthplaces and for newcomers, to engage with the local experience by grounding themselves more personally in their own landscape and its cultural heritage. Without a narrated past in and for our own place, we cannot face the dubious present or overwhelming future. Similarly, from such a vantage point the spaces of the world beyond can be explored with much more confidence.

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In New England, resident and visitor alike have been bemused by a potent sense of the past, a concern for the use and abuse of the earth’s resources, and a cultural ambience—an insistent pattern—categorised by a love of history and hierarchy, of order and beauty, and implying obedience, it almost seems, to some divine law. For there is here a certain orderly impress on the chaos of Australia’s history, a sense of sacredness and permanence, of community cohesiveness and of collective and inherited identity. To walk into a coaching inn built in 1856, surviving from pioneering days and still offering hospitality in the northern village of Deepwater, is to catch some of this feeling. What is now the New England Highway once had need of many such livery stables. To visit the western town of Inverell is to be reminded that the Celtic tongue was familiar on the lips of those who invented the name of that place—existing as it does nowhere else on any map in the world. In short, ‘Inverell’ was forged by those on the spot to mean ‘the confluence of waters where swans are to be found’. We believe in our landscape and have not forgotten its symbols. We are concerned to preserve the significant and the beautiful, and to affirm the relationship between cultural and economic regeneration.

❈ Judith Wright (1915–2000), one of Australia’s finest poets, was born and grew up at Wallamumbi, on the western edge of the escarpment, and although she spent most of her life elsewhere in Australia, much of her writing is about New England. Her sense of place and of people-in-place has helped to inspire this book. (photo: Moss Studio)

E M E RG I N G D I F F E R E N C E

Early in the settlement years, New England was the name of a sprawling northern pastoral district, and is now usually regarded as an extensive but undefined area in the north of New South Wales. From the beginning it seemed to many that the region deserved its own government. The Reverend Dr John Dunmore Lang (1799–1878) was one of those who argued for the creation of a number of small provinces in north-eastern Australia, each free of centralised bureaucracy and committed to a type of local free enterprise consistent with the social wellbeing of each provincial community. In the last third of the nineteenth century

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Prelude such arguments caused the drafters of the Federal Constitution to insert provisions for additional states and for their admission to the Commonwealth-to-be. And indeed, partly because of New England’s strongly articulated perception of its ‘difference’ and destiny, Armidale was—if briefly and with numerous other candidates—a proposed ‘Capital Site’ for the whole nation after Federation.2 However, the possibility of a separate New England remained a relatively quiescent issue until 1915 when Dr Earle Page, of Grafton—whose family had been admirers of J.D. Lang for three generations—boldly launched the New State Movement, an early campaign for separation from the rest of New South Wales. Page later became Member for Cowper in the Australian Parliament, and his increasing authority helped to push the movement forward. In 1934, a royal commission headed by H.S. Nicholas distinguished one obviously ‘cohesive NSW area’ in the districts between (and including) Newcastle and the Hunter valley and the Queensland border, an area already described as ‘the (proposed state of ) New England’.3 This recommendation helped to crystallise popular perception, and to draw out certain of New England’s more distinctive characteristics. Several of these attitudes are discussed in various parts of this book. They include a deep-seated distrust of an all-devouring Sydney. This last notion has overlapped with a persisting faith in development through decentralisation and through truly responsible local government, together with new ports on the North Coast, and so on. Note too, a long-running tendency in this region to nourish extreme right-wing groups, such as the New Guard and the League of Rights. New England has long demonstrated a Scottish desire for the generous provision of education for all, especially higher education. On the social and personal front, there was long the tendency to award quasi-aristocratic status to various early squatting families—among them the Ogilvies, the Whites, the Dangars, the Crofts, the Munros, the destiny-conscious Wyndhams and their minor branch, the Wrights, and so on. Among regional writers, there has persisted a somewhat blinkered obsession with the lives of these pioneering pastoralists. But New England’s sense of hierarchy and place also involved a commitment to the quality of the environment manifest in the drive for the New England National Park and for the University of New England’s School of Natural Resources, both orchestrated by leading graziers. Since the 1970s there have been similar campaigns for the creation of walking trails across unspoiled areas and giving onto magnificent mountain vistas. In July 1921, Earle Page described the core concerns of the separation movement in the first issue of the monthly New State Magazine. They were: the ‘developmental needs of the great wide spaces’ of Australia; ‘the decay of the countryside’; the conquest of drought; adequate public transport; the cultural development of new centres, to give ‘fresh stimulation to education and the cultivation of the arts and sciences’; and a conviction that ‘the country will find again its own power of expression and renew the old attraction it exerted before modern inventions irresistibly drew all into the city’.4 By this time the movement had 177 ‘leagues’ throughout the north of New South Wales, and

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❈ The New State Movement was always seen as a part of nation-building. Here, Earle Page stands in silhouette— strangely pointing backwards—on the cover of a booklet (published 1947) by Ulrich Ellis, the movement’s leading writer.

twelve larger ‘district councils’ busily organising in the same area. Subsequent issues of the Magazine (it did not survive beyond the year) elaborated on the need to revise the Australian Constitution; to follow at the local level the already planned devolution of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations—a community of equals—so to reinforce local government; and to keep the faith with the many thousands of men otherwise pointlessly lost in World War One, by the local provision of education for all. On this last theme a prominent ex-serviceman, Victor Bacon, of Coffs Harbour, remarked in the Magazine that the area of the proposed new state had only three post-primary schools, whereas New Zealand, which was of comparable size, had 119 high schools and four university colleges. Bacon wanted a technical school for every town with a population of 3000 or 4000 people, ‘scores’ of agricultural colleges, and some ‘four or five University Colleges affiliated with each other, and linked by an interlocked railway system, one radiating from a centrally situated capital city’.5 Such visions were to long imbue many local campaigners, and they seemed almost to be realised in the longdelayed and frustrating ‘hung’ Referendum of 1967 (see Chapter 21). Thus

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Prelude from 1921, if not earlier, we can also date a powerful ‘New England’ passion for the generous provision of education to all, and a significant willingness from secular and church leaders of various denominations to support all local tertiary education, meaningful decentralisation and a vigorous country life and enriched lifestyle for all—notably by keeping families together and employed—and, as an ultimate goal, life-long cultural fulfilment here in New England. Between the wars—and again from 1946 to 1970—there were many conferences and conventions throughout the region pressing for separation. A milestone gathering in Armidale in 1948 confirmed the boundaries laid down by the Nicholas Royal Commission, and also supported a plan for an autonomous university. The two leaders of the New England University College (NEUC) Council—and soon (1954) of the autonomous university—were the national leader of the Country Party, Earle Page himself, and the chairman of the New State Movement, P.A. Wright, a prominent grazier from east of Armidale. Some saw the separation movement as the hobby of eccentric jingoists, but at its core were many dedicated local regionalists who were also shaping the University College, notably the Scottish-descended David Drummond (a founder of both the Teachers’ College and NEUC, and at this point a federal MP), Dr James Belshaw (Deputy Warden of NEUC), the Kempsey-born geologist Dr Alan Voisey and the dynamic and compassionate Warden of NEUC, Dr (afterwards Sir) Robert Madgwick. Madgwick had been a brilliantly successful director of the wartime Army Education Service. He never formally entered politics, but remained totally committed to these visionary decentralising plans for education, while pioneering massive outreach schemes for adult education.6 In short, regional feeling gained a sharper edge from the ideals of enlightenment. Important as well was Christian compassion, galvanised by the difficulties of the 1930s depression.

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OUR NEW ENGLAND REGION AND ITS COMMUNITY

Discrete regions have always moulded the Australian settler, migrant and refugee experience and, whether we are drawn to them or flee from them, the places we live in and visit etch themselves on European-Australian memory—as they have long done for the Indigenous peoples. We still use perceptions of ‘region’ today to provide definition to our lives, despite a certain reluctance to study such zones in a focused and thoughtful way. Yet, as individuals growing older, we, like the nation, are more concerned to understand the environment, history and enforcing culture of our more immediate lives—in short, to savour a sense of place, of the patterning of lives as lived here, of time working to mould our particular physical circumstances, well aware that it is this small-scale process that makes up our Australian character. In this book the contributors aim to explore, record and interpret our regional heritage and shared identity, thereby reducing persistent misunderstandings about this somewhat aloof, even elusive, zone. Thus these essays offer a series of perceptions, a synthesis of experience and character, which should

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serve to mediate reflectively between the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities as they apply to New England. High Lean Country constitutes the first coming together in print of members of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England. This research group, an inter-School and, to some extent, inter-Faculty colloquium of the interested, is committed to exploring in lively fashion the geomorphology, landscape, inherited natural environment, native and later peoples, history, economy, cultural endeavours and experiences, and the more representative and artistic interpretations, both written and pictorial, of the region. Some of us have earlier worked with various organisations in Tenterfield, in the north of New England, to assist that community in scrutinising both its historical and contemporary landscapes in order to produce a reflective self-study as to its identity. The resulting report presented Tenterfield and its district as they might be seen today by residents, and as they might appear to visitors and tourists or, for that matter, to students at whatever level.7 At the time, it was hoped that that pilot project from our communityfocused university would lead to larger ones aimed at investigating, recording and publishing research materials about the region as a whole, thereby enlarging and clarifying its sense of its several inheritances, its identity and its culture.8 The present volume is the result—similar to the Tenterfield survey, but probing more deeply into the various regional and discipline-based perceptions that New England can embrace.

❈ This book is another step forward in the detailed observation of New England. Here, John Fauna Campbell, resident surveyor at Walcha and a skilled botanist (right), is seen in 1897 with two experts from Sydney, J.H. Maiden, the government botanist, and William Forsyth, overseer of Centennial Park. (photo: unknown)

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Prelude This book, then, is a team product of the Heritage Futures Research Centre, one concerned to inform the reader about the manifold heritage aspects of our region, its people and its traditions. In their totality, these lively contributions endorse two central and general notions. The first is that heritage is best understood when disciplines and their manifestations and data are collected, then sorted and focused in an appropriate and categorised fashion. The second is concerned with understanding the purpose of any heritage—once we have conceptualised or created it—with its better explication, sharing and presentation and, over time, its configuration and reconfiguration (see, for example, Chapters 2 and 23). We are all historical subjects, moving through time and space, and we should have the opportunity to understand the rooms and passages through which we travel. While Australian federal law may determine the fate of larger heritage items, and State law the treatment of significant structures, much more wideranging types of the region’s heritage have been identified throughout the various chapters of this book, particularly the stories and personal histories of its people. The larger themes woven through our tapestry include many once integral to the New State Movement. Implicit in our writing is a sense of the common need for personal space, clean air and green and uplifting vistas—an urge to ‘decentralise’. The reformist ideas of the New England tradition are far too often misunderstood or ignored by the centre, including as they do a deep-seated distrust of today’s ‘maximisation’ and its creeping authoritarian mentality, a conviction of the need to de-standardise Australian lifestyles and, at the same time, a readiness for high technology in agriculture, marketing and the ingenious delivery of education and ideas—all of which depend on an innovative spirit within (see, for example, Chapter 19). This Prelude is concerned to establish in readers a sense of the unexpected contrasts in New England experience, and of its nuanced differences from the larger national experience, even as our book also promulgates many distinctive perspectives as to the region’s history, dilemmas and development, its art and lifestyle. New England retains from its spacious past a lively emphasis on anecdote, story and biography—be it presented in settler history, regional radio, public lectures, migrant tales, or by performance poets—and likewise a strong musical tradition, manifest not only among the Koori people, but from Tamworth, with its country music, to Armidale, with its Bach festivals, and beyond. New England politics, too, have long been distinctive—typically provocative and disconcertingly personal. The English scholar William Hoskins once wrote that ‘the English landscape itself, to those who know how to read it aright, is the richest historical record we possess’.9 We cannot make a similar sweeping claim for the way we have interpreted our physical and cultural landscapes, but we hope that the accumulation of scholarly perspectives will give the reader many powerful ways of understanding both the various enduring and changing faces of New England and the nuances of thought and action lying behind the past and present patterns of our regional experience.

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New England’s character has never been isolationist. Rather it is outreaching, heterogeneous, open to possibility and sensitive to local idiosyncrasies. It involves a belief in flexible governance and an ability to adjust to new challenges, both by entering into voluntary agreements and by creating intellectual and cooperative links between localities and institutions. The core policies of the New State Movement soon found an echo in the world-pioneering outreach of the University of New England’s departments of Adult Education (founded 1948) and (from 1954) of External Studies. Regionalism in New England, as it exists today, has grown by profiting from the challenges offered by a scattered population, a freedom from the scars and legacies of heavy industry, and an articulate and even passionate opposition to the apparently inevitable impact of suburban segregation on the natural environment and the best aspects of humanity. From very different perspectives, Judith Wright and Anglican Bishop of Armidale between 1929 and 1964, John Stoward Moyes (see Chapter 1), powerfully expressed this point of view. Through its focal point—its university—and because of its general cast of mind, New England has sought with success to minimise social disparities and also to broaden community involvement in economic growth. Quite apart from education in a formal sense, its political, religious and artistic leaders have been evangelists of political equality, civic tolerance and cultural enrichment and expression. DEFIANCE?

It is worth the long drive up the New England highway, just to have such a feast of talk and society. Les Murray, ‘North of My Days’ 10 Our book reports on the scholarship of our physical and cultural environments, on many historical matters and social-educational concepts, and on extensive data from current and developing research work in many fields. Perhaps, too, it may be seen as a powerful record of our various deepening insights into the meaning of the region from particular disciplinary points of view. Few of the writers of this book were born here, and several come from other countries, yet all have been enthused by their local experiences, by practising their disciplines here, and re-invigorating their scholarly and personal philosophies in this setting. High Lean Country is no mere compilation of data. Its merit—or at least its greater purpose—lies in a fresh identification of patterns, changes and interrelations, thereby presenting many useful epistemological and cultural concepts. Many will already be familiar to some readers, while others may well seem provocative, or debatable. We believe them all to be fascinating. In November 1990, at the National Conference of the Australian Folklore Association, at a seminar on identity held in the shadow of Mt Duval, near Armidale, the speakers concluded that the single quality of difference that best

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Prelude marked the mental climate of New England was ‘defiance’, and in particular defiance of media-formed and simplistic and centralising (Australian) conformities.11 Indeed, there are parallels between New England and certain provinces in medieval Europe—only slowly settled and often culturally distinct—and, more recently, parallels between New England and the provinces of New Zealand, similarly settled by Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century and similarly defiant of pressures from the centre. In New England, homesteads, schools, cathedrals and university have all proved potent phenomena for enriching the realms of values, activities, roles and beliefs, both socially and symbolically, and for the promulgation of a moral authority the more successfully empowering for its being quietly exercised. Our tradition of cultural provision, persisting now for a century and more, is alive and defiantly shaping social actions and human relationships, ‘its overall meaning greater than the sum of its possible expressions’, as one of our most penetrating cultural historians has so proudly told the world.12 Finally, by their concentration on the quality of the private sphere rather than the public, the citizens of New England have had as their concern personal morality rather than centralist policy. So they have created a space where the individual may indeed dissent, survive and, in the words of Armidale Dumaresq Council’s challenging slogan, ‘thrive’. Pride and defiance, smallness of scale and the acknowledgement of individuality, social compassion and the wondrous clarity of atmosphere and thought—these, surely, abide as New England’s fascination, and as an inheritance that, like Chaucer’s modest scholar, it would gladly share.

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CHAPTER 1 ❈

W h a t is Ne w En g lan d? Al an At ki n s o n

O’er all the wide Australian land I’ve wandered far and near, Through dusky scrubs and dreary plains The haunts of pallid fear; O’er valleys green and mountains high Where wild marsupials roam— Yet thou are dearer far to me My own New England home. So wrote John Wetherspoon, of Glencoe, near Glen Innes, in 1871, summing up in stumbling rhyme a real love of country. What was it he liked so much about New England? Most of his poem was a list of less interesting spots, from ancient Greece (over-rated, by comparison) to ‘the red Barcoo’ and the deserts of the Darling. But he did mention some local pleasures—or, as he called them, ‘scenes which please my beating heart’. They included the mountains, ‘[m]ajestic in their height’, the shaded valleys and New England’s still famous waterfalls.1 Wetherspoon was not a brilliant poet. All the same, he was one of the first in this part of Australia to try to capture its landscape in verse. There were three places in the world he felt passionate about. One was Scotland, his native country, though he had left it as a child and he could barely remember it. The second was Australia, not yet federated. The third was New England. Only in the case of New England did he wrestle at length with his feelings and ideas, trying to put down on paper what it was like to live in a place so new and

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What is New England? challenging. Some of his other poems give rousing accounts of the Scottish past and the Australian future, but his most interesting efforts were about the things he could see, touch and hear in his own region. He too seems to have asked himself, ‘What is New England?’—or, at least, ‘What does New England mean to me?’. He wrote of the balancing rock at Stonehenge, a great boulder of granite with a smoothly rounded top and a pointed base, that ‘it seems to rest on nothing but the circumambient air’. In a poem called ‘Night Musings’, he described a cold, wet night spent on horseback, holding cattle at Byron Plains. First he mentioned his impatience with the restless livestock (‘shivering hand upon the rein’), passing then to a few lines about his old cabbage-tree hat (‘patter, patter, one, two, three, / The rain falls on my cabbage tree’). Finally his mind drifted to his absent ‘angel’, ‘my darling Kate’, and thoughts of her seem to have kept his mind busy most of the night. At length it was morning.2 The feelings in this poem seem very personal and very local. Wetherspoon was a Tableland patriot. For him, New England was a palpable piece of Australia just as Scotland was a palpable piece of the British Isles. Whether we are good poets or bad, could we now write about New England as Wetherspoon did? Are we its citizens as he was?

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❈ John Wetherspoon of Glencoe, Glen Innes (1843–1928), farmer, politician, poet. (photo: unknown)

SELLING POINT OR SOULFOOD?

Today, what does ‘New England’ mean? The 2005 telephone directory lists nearly a hundred enterprises using the name, from ‘New England Embroidery’ to ‘New England Tractors’. Half of them are in or around Armidale, but others are scattered through Uralla, Glen Innes, Tenterfield, Inverell and Moree, and as far south as Tamworth, Quirindi and Gunnedah. Obviously, the name has a living significance. It offers a sense of place reaching beyond any one town or district, which to the enterprising mind also means reaching an extended

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market. On the other hand, it has geographical limits. In the north, there is the Queensland border. On the western slopes the pleasant reaches of the Gwydir River throw up some feeble terminological competition. So we find ‘Gwydir Glass’, ‘Gwydir Olives’ and ‘Gwydir Air’. There is no ‘New England’ beyond Moree. To the east, across the escarpment, the name is no use at all. There, the coastal rivers, the beaches and the ocean provide a sense of place for which the name is totally irrelevant. But within certain boundaries, ‘New England’ reigns supreme. It has a real existence in local imagination. What kind of existence, though? Is it more than a useful brand-name? In his day, Wetherspoon certainly thought it was. Ten years after Wetherspoon wrote the lines I quote at the beginning of this chapter, a Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Charles Lyne, visited this part of the colony and he had no doubts either. Lyne came in wintertime, and perhaps the crispness of the air gave a sharp edge to his feeling that, in venturing up the Moonbis, he was entering on something different. The weather had been gloomy enough on the plains. ‘Further on,’ he said, ‘in the New England country, there are times when the wind whistles loudly around the corners of the houses, and rumbles about the chimneys, when the snow, falling first like feathers borne upon the breeze, descends thickly and fast.’3 For John Wetherspoon, the Tableland was a place of stillness and affection. For him, it was home. For Charles Lyne it was a country to be explored. Lyne wanted to understand New England by hearing stories about it, as he moved about. The coach he travelled in was overcrowded but cold all the same, and it got colder as they neared Armidale and other passengers alighted—‘until one’s rug becomes very much like a sheet of cold iron, and one’s toes seem to have slipped away altogether’. But a stimulated mind made up for a freezing body, and Lyne discovered ‘several places of considerable interest’ along the way. New England already had a history. Lyne remarked on the Moonbi Range and on Bendemeer, on the site of ‘the late Constable Bowen’s exploits’ (undetailed), and on Uralla and the Rocky River goldfields. Each place, he said, ‘has attached to it either a history or some attractive incidents which the coachman can tell with great effect in lessening the discomforts of the journey’.4 However, Lyne was being paid by the Herald to hear stories of a different kind. He was travelling around all the settled parts of New South Wales to gather information about local industries, with the intention of making a report to the paper. If we read his final account carefully, we can see how men and women of his generation thought about the towns and regions ruled from Sydney. Their perspective was different from ours. In particular, it was formed, a good deal more than ours can be, by problems of distance and terrain. It was easy in those days to notice, and hard to forget, how long it took to travel any distance from Sydney, and obstacles in the way of getting to the Tableland were painfully obvious. Your toes froze, for instance, in a horse-drawn coach, while in hard and gasping stages you doubled your height above sea-level. In his account of the colony, Lyne mentions several discrete regions—almost provinces—isolated by such rigours, or by mere distance, but, in his eyes at least,

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What is New England? this part of New South Wales had a variety and a picturesqueness not to be found elsewhere. He was interested in it just as he was interested in the far west, the vast plains around Cobar, Wilcannia and Bourke. Both seemed to be set apart from New South Wales proper. The Hunter valley, though less remote, was another such province, and Lyne reported on its well-established farms, vineyards and tobacco plantations, its horse-breeding and coal-mining. Maitland, he said, ‘ranks perhaps next to Sydney in size, in population, in the amount of business done by its inhabitants, and in commercial soundness’.5 (In fact, Newcastle’s population had already overtaken that of Maitland.) In Lyne’s day, indeed, the Hunter valley had an economic importance within the colony that is now easy to forget. The rough country between Sydney and the Hunter, including Broken Bay, meant that there was no good road. A railway was not built until 1889, and the two places were linked mainly be sea. For the traveller from Sydney, New England was another stage beyond the Hunter, one reached only after a steam-ship journey, plus a relatively easy drive or ride up one or other of the coastal valleys, and then a harder climb across the mountains. In terms of wealth, New England was nothing to write home about. The 1881 census, parts of which Lyne added at the back of his book, proved the greater prosperity of the south, where the main towns (Forbes, Hay, Deniliquin, Wagga Wagga and Albury) were hurrying ahead at a surprising pace. Lyne admitted that New England had yet to be ‘very populous and very flourishing’. As for Armidale, he said, it showed ‘very little outside bustle’. For Lyne, however, this only proved the solid foundations of the local economy. ‘[I]n a quiet, earnest, effective way the people . . . push along, some of them making plenty of money, all or most of them getting a comfortable livelihood, and the city and district, as far as can be seen, gradually going ahead.’ He had a soft spot for Glen Innes—for the sound of ice cracking on its winter mornings, as horses and vehicles passed through puddles—mingled, as he said, with the songs of magpies looking for their breakfast. Such morning noises were ‘altogether new to a stranger in the district, and very interesting’.6 They might well have been ‘altogether new’ to him. London-born, Charles Lyne, like John Wetherspoon, had come to Australia as a child, and he probably had no clear recollection of frost-bound fields in the mother country.7 There were, of course, several other parts of New South Wales where the winters might be just as cold. But perhaps there was nowhere else that seemed so clearly to constitute a world of its own, a land to be reached (at least from Sydney) through such difficult passes. It was this sense of a dominion resting, like the balancing rock at Stonehenge, on ‘circumambient air’—of a detached high country held up and over-shadowed by mountains—that, at least in the colonial period, defined New England. In later days another Tableland poet, Judith Wright, wrote in similar terms. ‘I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country / Full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.’8 Of course, the stories heard by Lyne en route to Armidale were even older by the time Judith Wright was familiar with them.

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But by then, too, the image of New England as a region was less concrete and obvious. Only someone who thought hard about the land, as Judith Wright did, might have taken the trouble to pin-point the characteristics of its terrain. She was, of course, drawing on other, more prosaic ways of thinking about landscape, on the vivid skills of men and women on the land, who learn to read the bush in all its tiny details—the variations of soil and pasture, the patterns of native vegetation—because their livelihood depends on it. Nevertheless, the question ‘What is New England?’ has to be answered, first of all, by saying that the name probably had more powerful meanings in the past than it has today. GIVING THE NAME LIFE

In May 1836, the Sydney Herald (later the Sydney Morning Herald ) reported that ‘Rumours have reached Sydney, of a party of armed bushrangers having visited a place called New England’. This is the name’s earliest recorded usage. In fact, this bushranging adventure took place at Henry Dumaresq’s newly established station of Saumarez, only a few miles from where, in the early winter of 1839, a police headquarters was to be established and named Armidale.9 And, as David Roberts says (see Chapter 9), the bushrangers in this case had their headquarters not far away at Gostwyck. It may well be that it was this fragment of landscape, no more than 50 or 100 kilometres across—roughly between today’s Armidale and Walcha—to which the name ‘New England’ was first attached. It soon became an official title. The birth of Armidale in 1839 coincided with the government’s creation of a much larger New England. The colonial frontier was now divided into so-called ‘pastoral districts’, each managed by a Commissioner of Crown Lands with his own body of police. The district of New England measured about 200 kilometres from east to west, from the edge of the escarpment to an imaginary line where the Tableland met the plains (including what is now Inverell and Bundarra). In the south it reached to the headwaters of the Hastings River. In the north, as the notice in the Government Gazette remarked, ‘the boundary is indefinite’, but in practical terms only for a very short time did it ever extend beyond what was later the Queensland border.10 In colonial Australia the names of most large areas were chosen either by governors or government surveyors. ‘New England’ seems to have begun as the choice of squatters, but these were well-connected squatters, which may explain why it was readily taken up by government. It was to be the name’s destiny, for ever after, to hover between local fancy and the priorities of officialdom, without being strongly embedded in either. Apart from its landscape and climate, have New England’s inhabitants ever really believed in it as a place with some kind of single life and purpose? The generation of John Wetherspoon and Charles Lyne thought in terms of a distinctive climate and landscape. This is all very well, but it may be harder to give this geographical space a political dimension. When Robin Walker, of the History Department at the University of New England, wrote his history of the region during the colonial period, Old New England (1966), he was struck with the way its towns had jostled and

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What is New England? sniped at each other. He could find no sense of common purpose—no belief that New Englanders should stick together. ‘In view of this intense parochialism,’ he said, ‘it may be asked whether New England was [at that time] more than a geographical expression.’11 Walker did notice, all the same, the strong separatist feeling that characterised the Tableland during the 1840s and 50s. But, as with the original name, this seems to have emanated mainly from the squatters. Those gentlemen certainly thought they were a special type within the colony at large. As one of them put it, with a little exaggeration, New England was ‘by far the most Aristocratic Part of New South Wales, almost all the young settlers are either Oxford or Cambridge’.12 They typically ran sheep—cattle were more common to the west—and their flocks were large. And, of course, the management of sheep was a more civilised business than the management of cattle, where profit depended not on docile shepherds but on the wild skill of men on horseback. New England squatters called themselves a ‘second race’. Not only was their air cleaner, but the social atmosphere of the Tableland was also more elevated than that of the city, a place still pungent with convict and ex-convict life. This region, so some asserted,

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has been mainly discovered and settled by the enterprise and capital of those who, with very few exceptions, are not connected by the possession of land or otherwise with New South Wales . . . and have only landed at Sydney from necessity. They therefore asked, for the first time but not for the last, for a government of their own, for separation from ‘the old penal colony of New South Wales’.13 The same sense of superiority had been behind the foundation in 1836 of South Australia, a colony proudly convict-free, and it survived there for generations. The same argument worked for the Port Phillip district of New South Wales, which (for that and other more substantial reasons) became the separate colony of Victoria in 1851. But New Englanders had no such luck. Their logic was laughed at in Sydney. There was too much to drink in the bush, said one city paper, and it was hard to take seriously the talk of ‘gentlemen squatters [who were] “happy and glorious” every day of the week’.14 But the ideal lived on, oblivious to mockery, far beyond convict days. The selfcongratulatory sense of Tableland virtue took a long time to die. Today, it has its best tangible memorial in the glorious window of coloured glass, five metres high, that lights the stairwell at the sometime homestead of Booloominbah, near Armidale (now part of the University of New England). The window’s nine panels, pale brown patched over with burning scarlet, soft green and deep blue, commemorate the life of the steadfast ‘Christian soldier’, Charles Gordon, and his death at the hands of the less enlightened at Khartoum in 1885. It was installed by Booloominbah’s owner, F.R. White, in about 1901, in the final adornment of his new house. It is typical of New England that such a brilliant work should be set up as a moral beacon in such a far-away, rustic setting.

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These were days when a good deal of lyrical feeling was invested in the Australian bush. In stark contrast to F.R. White at Booloominbah, at Newstead, near Inverell, the Andersons had a small, unpretentious homestead, and yet the master, Duncan Anderson, was a wealthy man, a classical scholar and a skilled musician. He was also a close friend of the celebrated painter, Tom Roberts, and thirteen of Roberts’ pictures, including ‘The Golden Fleece’, ‘Bailed Up’ and ‘In a Corner on the Macintyre’, date from visits to Newstead during the 1890s (see Chapter 29). The paintings, with their dry, bright tones, commemorate down-to-earth rural life and labour. They also remind us of the friendship of two highly cultivated men, both of whom believed that the bush landscape was the best place in which to find humanity’s fundamental virtues.15

❈ Armidale, a place of dreaming spires and keen aspirations, with the Catholic Cathedral of St Mary and St Joseph on the right and the Anglican St Peter’s on the left. (photo: D. Elkins)

The same exclusive idealism—but exclusive to the Tableland rather than to the bush in general—explains why, from the 1870s, the name ‘New England’ was used by local private boarding schools, places designed to turn out ladies and gentlemen. Armidale had its New England Grammar School, and there was another with the same title later on at Glen Innes. Also at Armidale we find a New England Ladies College, a New England Proprietary School for boys and a New England Girls School—together with a widespread belief that the Tableland was unrivalled in the way it educated children (see Chapter 18). Of course, in each case, as with ‘New England Embroidery’ and ‘New England Tractors’, the name was also designed to capture a scattered clientele. Boarding schools needed to appeal beyond their town limits. They had to draw children from afar. But then, as I recall, in the classrooms and dormitories of my own school in Armidale where a boy came from was part of who he was. These schools thus helped to strengthen the possibility of a real and tangible New England, among a chosen few. They focused the collective sense of a regional elite. School speech days, when parents gathered from all quarters, were a celebration of the Tableland as a place of special promise. The name ‘New England’, then, spelt moral ambition. The same appears again in the New England New State Movement, from its birth in about 1920

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What is New England? to its dwindling away in the 1960s (see Chapter 20). Again, ‘New England’ embodied a sense of difference—especially difference from Sydney. The city was no longer a place of convicts. But since the 1890s there had grown up throughout rural Australia yet another form of moral pride, to which recent historians have given the name ‘countrymindedness’. Tom Roberts was among its precursors. In several places, this feeling was nourished by the hierarchy of the Anglican Church—here the diocese of Armidale included the Tableland and the southern and western plains. Countrymindedness, like Anglicanism of a certain type, included a faith in well-settled communities, with their roots deep in the local soil and shaped by their own old hierarchies, producing the basic foodstuffs of the people.16 All the better if such communities seemed to form, as in New England, a world apart. For instance, John Stoward Moyes, Bishop of Armidale from 1929 to 1964, was a prominent social critic, even in national terms, during the post-war period. An admirer of the nineteenth-century Christian Socialist F.D. Maurice, Moyes thought that ‘city life is an artificial life’. In his opinion, there was more room for kindness in the bush, and for a proper valuation of labour and property. He watched with interest socialist and communist governments overseas, as they moved (or seemed to him to move) away from the state ownership of land towards ‘ownership by the people, with peasant proprietorship and co-operative organisation’. Moyes wanted capitalist nations to embrace the same compromise. ‘The country has never had fair play,’ he said, ‘—it has merely been the lemon to be squeezed to provide the city’s food and drink.’17 Australia needed decentralisation. Only when a true value was placed on community life (and Australia’s only real communities were in the bush) would Australians create among themselves genuine humanity and common justice. The New State Movement failed. In the official Referendum of April 1967, two-thirds of voters on the Tableland supported separation, but at that time the area proposed included the north coast, Newcastle and the Hunter valley, and opposition in those places was enough to defeat the idea over-all. Even on the Tableland, support soon wavered. In the general election for the state parliament immediately afterwards, New State candidates took less than a fifth of the vote.18 No doubt the lack of sustained enthusiasm was due, partly, to the kind of small-town parochialism noticed by Robin Walker. But perhaps it was also due to limited sympathy with the ethical ideals and the economic ambitions of the large graziers who, with a number of professional men, were behind the movement. Generation by generation, this class had struggled to make New England a single, self-governing, self-conscious place, but with uneven success. All the same, it has to be said that there exists today an independent ‘Kingdom of New England’. It boasts a large and complicated website, a sovereign head of state (King James), and a colourful history, including a six-year war of independence from the Australian government, the climax of which was the Battle of Walcha—fought in gorge country. Six Black Hawk helicopters went down. This New England is one of the ‘Webring of Imaginary Countries’ that can be discovered by enterprising voyagers on the internet. They include the

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❈ Poster for the New State Movement, with its defiant, even aggressive lion rampant, devised, apparently, by Ulrich Ellis, and still associated with New England. Badges could be bought with the lion in gold.

Empire of Gruver, in North America, the Kingdom of Kaupelan, to Australia’s north, and many more. The Kingdom of New England is an imagined state, a utopia built on the realities and values of the present. Its people are virtuous in twenty-first-century ways. They believe, so we are told, ‘in a sense of community that should encompass all those around us’. They are also scrupulous environmentalists—‘one of the “greenest” nations on earth’.19 Here is New England idealism wonderfully up-dated. For many years the New State idea seemed almost to rank with the glassy idealism of General Gordon and with the green perfections of this cyberspace kingdom. Every age has its own moral attitudes, and looking backwards we can easily mix up foolishness, vanity and genuine high principle. It is interesting too, to trace connections between countrymindedness at the regional level and the national level, particularly since for many years the federal leadership of the Country/National Party drew largely on New England (see Chapter 20). As

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What is New England? John Ryan says in the ‘Prelude’ to this book, Armidale (or nearby Gostwyck, to be precise) was once briefly thought of as the national capital. What a neat interweaving of attitudes and aspirations that would have been! Some of the energy behind New England separatism survives today in the University of New England, founded by a few leading New Staters (and Bishop Moyes) as a moral and intellectual engineroom for their yet-to-be-realised ideal. The university began life in 1938 as a college of the University of Sydney and became an autonomous university in 1954 (see Chapter 24). As Matthew Jordan says in his history of UNE, for many years its teaching staff laboured to make education a means of social justice. In some ways, they still do. (General Gordon thought along similar lines, spending part of his life teaching boys from poor families living along the River Thames.) Organised Christianity also had a powerful impact during the early years of what was called ‘the holiest campus’ in Australia. Most significant, however, was the fact that, as with the boarding schools, students were gathered largely from the Tableland and nearby places. UNE seems to have been especially attractive to country girls, who probably thought—or whose parents thought—that its residential colleges were free of the moral danger that accompanied student life in Sydney.20 In some countries, universities have inspired regional and national awareness. Future leaders living and working together as young men and women have manufactured a collective identity for themselves and their country. In the nineteenth century England’s governing class was shaped at Oxford and Cambridge, and after World War Two many political careers in new nationstates had similar beginnings, in Delhi, Jakarta and so on. In Canberra, the Australian National University was intended to be a breeding ground for federal administrators.21 New England New Staters probably hoped for the same kind of thing on a smaller scale in Armidale—the creation of a well-informed provincial leadership. In fact, UNE’s early undergraduates usually set their sights on wider horizons. Drawn mainly from the region, perhaps they were more like the Welsh students who for centuries followed each other to Jesus College, Oxford, but who found there a much larger intellectual landscape than Wales could offer.22 Academic staff at UNE focused some of their research efforts on the region round about and, as this book shows, they still do. But if the university was designed to perpetuate the patriotic spirit of John Wetherspoon, it failed. For most of those first students, it was a stepping-stone away from their own parochial origins towards the civilisation of the Western world. Despite the desire of these young inhabitants to spread their wings, it is easy to love particular corners of New England—the Tableland and its escarpment, slopes and plains—and to feel that the landscape and sky have a character all their own. The appeal of the ‘high lean country’, the ‘majestic mountains’ and the extraordinary waterfalls and gorges has inspired some of the chapters of this book. It is easy too to represent the history of New England as something like a single story. In short, the name does mean something. But as many of these chapters also show, it is hard to settle on just what that meaning is. Our various authors work within whatever geographical boundaries

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seem logical for their subject. In other ways too, the meaning of ‘New England’ is suspended today between the concrete and the abstract. It is solid enough to be useful for administrative purposes (as with ‘New England Institute of TAFE’ and ‘Hunter New England Area Health’) and for advertising. The name is now stamped on bales of wool sent to market from the Tableland, and it is available for car numberplates.23 But at the same time, in day-to-day talk, in the opening years of the twenty-first century, it is too indefinite, at one and the same time too expansive and too slight to mean anything solid. New England is an idea, slippery, evanescent and rich. As these chapters will show, it is only by connecting the past to the present—through a careful sense of heritage—that that idea gives itself continuing power.

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Part 1: Physical Environment

❈

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CHAPTER 2 ❈

T h e Ro c ks Ben eath Rob e r t Ha w o r t h

The winter of the year 1818 in what is now northern New South Wales was extremely cold, frosty and wet.1 That winter a party of explorers led by John Oxley struggled with their horses and dogs through bogs and across flooded rivers to be the first official expedition from the Sydney-based colony to reach the New England Tableland.2 They had entered what seemed to be a strange, almost inverted landscape. That the lowlands adjacent to the Liverpool Plains were boggy after heavy rain Oxley could understand, but he was puzzled that even as he left the plains and entered the highlands all the way up he encountered numerous ‘wet hollows’. As he approached the Great Escarpment from the west the only indication of high altitude was the hard August frost. Also, instead of displaying the serrations of a mountain range, as experience had led them to expect, the land remained one of gentle rolling relief. Oxley and his party came from west to east, up the gentle gradient of the inland slopes, rather than tackling the highlands from their steep coastal margin. As a result, the transect cut by their path inadvertently revealed the structure of the south-eastern highlands of Australia. They found no ‘Great Dividing Range’, as had been imagined by those who viewed the highlands from the coast or from ships at sea and who saw there a landform apparently similar to the ‘tented’ range of high, Alpine-style peaks to be found in Europe and North America. Instead, they discovered an ‘upside-down land’ of plateaux cut by deep gorges, ‘natural phenomena’ as Oxley remarked, ‘which, from their defiance of all rule, perplex us . . . greatly’.3

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So powerful was the cultural expectation that Australia should have a defining range on the lines of the Rocky Mountains that for 150 years maps and atlases have perpetuated the cartographic myth of a ‘Great Dividing Range’. In fact, the continental drainage divide is usually so flat that it accommodates lakes, lagoons, and even airstrips and race-courses. The watershed is marked along most of its course by the modern New England Highway, built by engineers who presumably sought the easiest gradient, hardly an indication of a near-impassable barrier of peaks that the term ‘Dividing Range’ implies. From the beginning, British settlers had been bemused by the contradictory style of nature in the Antipodes, and Oxley and his men were about to make a discovery that would show that Australian landscapes could be as perverse as any black swan or hopping marsupial. Reaching the edge of the Tableland, a greatly surprised Oxley recorded: fine open forest land ended abruptly on . . . precipices . . . and deep and apparently impassable glens . . . the country eastward of these glens appeared very lofty, and much broken . . . the country between us and the coast was of an equal elevation and appeared broken and divided by ravines and steep precipices.4 Oxley’s ordeal began when he left the Tableland and struggled through a maze of gorges. As he neared the coast, he realised that the many high ‘peaks’ were remnants of a once continuous plateau, now dissected by the gorges. Some, such as the Carrai Tableland, are flat; further erosion reduces them to rugged ridges.5 After a final effort, Oxley exclaimed, ‘Bilboa’s ecstasy at the first sight of the South Sea could not have been greater than ours, when on gaining the summit of a mountain, we beheld Old Ocean at our feet’.6 There is a hint of the ‘wild surmise’ of John Keats (see his poem, ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ ) in the descriptions in Oxley’s journal, as he looked back from the coast and realised that the apparent mountain range was not what it had seemed. But it took another 150 years of surmising before the problem of its peculiar formation could be resolved. S K E TC H O F N E W E N G L A N D

Modern geomorphic descriptions of the landscape confronting Oxley, like his original description, stress the contrast between the bland relief of the plateau and the abruptness of its edge. Modern accounts also set it in the time scale needed to account for its formation. The New England Tableland consists of ancient rocks planed down to a low-relief surface and then uplifted in association with the opening of the Tasman Sea from about 80 million years ago. Granitic intrusions were eventually stripped of their cover to form stark outcrops such as the Moonbi Range in the south, Mount Duval near Armidale and Bald Rock near Tenterfield. After uplift between 50 and 30 million years ago, the

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The Rocks Beneath ancient surface was blanketed with outpourings of flood lava from multiple local vents. Between twenty and fourteen million years ago, parts were also covered with lava from some of the great shield volcanoes surrounding New England, particularly from the Ebor/Dorrigo volcano in the east. This preserved part of the ancient surface (including gold-bearing fossil river beds) has been systematically exhumed over the last twenty million years by the erosion of the basalt cover. This down-cutting erosion has also formed the present east-flowing river system, which rolls sluggishly over the Tableland until it meets the gorges cutting back from the escarpment. The New England Tableland is the second highest surface in Australia (after the Southern Alps). Because of its height it has been subjected to recurring extremes of cold as well as drought over the last two million years. Until 15 000 years ago, the higher parts of the Tableland formed a largely treeless, cold and windy steppe, with an estimated 40 snow days a year.7 Large sand dunes built up in areas such as the Llangothlin Lakes near Guyra. Evidence obtained from lake sediments indicates that the climate began to improve 13 000 years ago, with permanent water in the many ponds and lagoons that dotted the uplands before European settlement.8 The mid-nineteenth century onwards has seen significant landscape changes, caused by stock trampling and consequent erosion. Many local streams have been transformed from stable ‘chain of ponds’ systems to more deeply incised channels with sharply variable flow patterns.9 The dominant relief feature in the region is the abrupt eastern edge of the old, flat, eroded Tableland surface. This local escarpment (roughly equivalent to the so-called ‘falls’ country) is part of the continent-long Great Escarpment, the dominant relief feature of Australia that extends from North Queensland to Gippsland in Victoria as a chain of tablelands and plateaux, their eastern edges sharply truncated by an advancing erosion front. The confounding feature of the New England escarpment is the extremely deep, entrenched gorge system that cuts cross-wise through the Tableland to the eastern sea. This pattern is repeated along the entire hinterland of the east coast of Australia, but nowhere are the gorges so pronounced as in New England.

25

TA B L E L A N D S , C O N T I N E N TA L M A RG I N S , A N D G R E AT ESCARPMENTS

The mapping of the New England Tableland in the years following Oxley’s expedition allowed the first recognition of landforms and landscapes that were seen later to be the pattern for the full length of the eastern highlands. The west–east route taken by Oxley across the southern edge of the Tableland revealed not a range of mountain peaks (as one would expect in a ‘Great Dividing Range’), but a high, smooth land surface that terminated in a line of steep and rugged cliffs up to almost 1600 metres in altitude above the Pacific Ocean. This line of cliffs is part of the 3000 kilometre-long north–south bulwark of the Great Escarpment.10

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❈ Darkies’ Point, from Point Lookout, on New England’s eastern escarpment, said to be the site of a massacre of Aborigines. These heights reach almost 1600 metres, making the eastern side of the upwarped Tableland over 600 metres higher than the area around Armidale in the west (see diagrams later on). (photo: I. Davidson)

The gorges and cliffs that blocked Oxley’s way were analogous to the steep canyon sequence of the Blue Mountains that held back inland expansion of the Sydney settlement for almost 30 years. But the same landscape pattern of deep ‘glens’ and terminal escarpments in New England was reproduced from rocks completely different from the near-horizontal sandstones of the Sydney Basin. The ‘inverted relief ’ of plateau and ravine was imposed on the very different rocks of the New England Fold Belt. What could produce similar landscapes with dissimilar geology? It was, obviously, something on a continental rather than a local scale. By way of answer, the first hint of global tectonics was presented to the discerning mind. The ‘deep and impassable glens’, while driving the explorers at times to despair, do not seem to have quenched either their romantic sensibility or their scientific inquisitiveness. Oxley remarked on the ‘grand natural spectacle’ of the gorges blocking his progress, and he wondered ‘how dreadful must the convulsion have been that formed these glens’.11 He somehow managed to record the major physical features of what later Earth scientists would call a ‘passive continental margin’ produced by the break-up of Gondwana (the landmass comprising South America, Africa, India and Australia) 80 million years earlier. The subdued relief of the top of the New England Tableland, as traversed by Oxley, was the Australian equivalent of the South African Highveld.

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The Rocks Beneath Oxley was entering New England at the very moment when worldwide European exploration had concluded its first great task of mapping the world’s coastlines and the extent of the World Ocean.12 New England exploration represented one of the first forays involving an understanding of continental interiors. Oxley’s expedition followed on the Lewis and Clark penetration and survey of inland North America, and was nearly contemporary with the first quests for the source of the Nile, where African explorers encountered features of highveld and rift valley structure of a tectonic mould similar to the formation of eastern Australia. Trained in the methods of the scientific enlightenment, officers of the British Empire such as Oxley were in fact engaged in mapping the major surviving fragments of Gondwana. These explorers and surveyors were beginning the process that would lead to the great advance in Earth science represented by plate tectonic theory. The puzzle of the New England landscape was to play a key role in deciphering such mysteries as drifting continents and globally disjunct flora and fauna distributions. It thus led to one of the greatest intellectual advances in the understanding of Earth dynamics. The process of interpreting inland landscapes such as New England went handin-hand with improved and accessible mapping. The false geomorphic aim of some Australian explorers, the location of an inland sea, compelled them to think in continental terms when interpreting the landscape. If the rivers they discovered ended up in many cases running nowhere, it nevertheless brought to early attention the strangeness of the drainage systems originating in the Tableland.

27

G E O L O G Y A N D A RT I N T E R P R E T T H E TA B L E L A N D

In 1852, the colony’s leading geologist, the Church of England clergyman William Branwhite Clarke, began his official survey of the headwaters of rivers rising in the ‘Great Divide’ north of the Hunter River, that is, in our region of New England. The first feature that impressed him was the non-existence of a ‘dividing range’ and the flatness of the country that separated the inland from the coastal rivers. He also noted the extensive alluvial gold-bearing deposits, often containing the bones of extinct megafauna. But these remnants of ancient rivers were located in the most unlikely places—in many cases on the tops of present-day hills beneath ancient lava flows. As he looked at these ‘deep leads’ on his tour of the New England diggings, Clarke reasoned: No one can believe that our present conditions of climate consort with such deposits as those which fill up receptacles 100 feet deep with detritus of shales, sandstones, quartz rock, bones of extinct animals, trappean alluvium and . . . gold.13 He leapt to a startling conclusion. What were now hilltops must once have been valleys, and if these valleys contained great quantities of rounded cobbles they must have been worn down by great and rapid streams that could only have come from a higher and wetter land to the east. But there was now a

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mighty absence of land to the east—first the gap of the gorges and the Great Escarpment, and beyond that only the Pacific Ocean running to South America. A thought came to Clarke that was to revolutionise Earth science in the next century—could the continents themselves move, not only vertically by uplift, but laterally, across the earth’s surface? If not, where were the lost lands to the east? How did the New England landscape fit, if at all, into the picture of the new science of geology as it was being developed in old England? This new science was the work of men who had never set eyes on either Australia or any of the other remnants of Gondwana, and Clarke lost no time declaring an independent view: Geologists at home [England] have in the past considered that we can, in Australia, know nothing aright but what we glean from them. But . . . to those who are interested in the advancement of Australia . . . Australia itself is likely to throw considerable light on questions . . . imperfectly understood at home.14 Clarke was following in the mental footsteps of Darwin who, less than two decades before, had deduced from his Southern Hemisphere voyage that the island and coral reef environments of the Pacific were the result of great earth movements of subsidence and uplift. But even Darwin’s mind had stopped short of imagining the long ages needed for persistent water erosion to wear down the results of continental uplift.15 The idea that the world’s landscapes could be carved by the humble agency of running water had only just been introduced to the scientific community.16 Clarke, looking at the New England lakes and lagoons nestling where no lakes should be, on the crest of the ‘Great Divide’, and noticing the void to the east, foreshadowed the next 150 years of thinking in Earth science: The conviction in my mind is . . . that the continent, then occupying a nobler portion of the Pacific, has oscillated vertically and therefore, has been shattered and broken up; that we now inhabit but a portion, and that a ridge only of the ancient Australia; that vast areas to the eastward have sunk, of which we have traces in our present sea border . . . and that there was once . . . a breadth of surface . . . to allow the formation of reservoirs or, when higher, melting snows. As Ollier and Pain would put it 150 years later, ‘the (passive) continental margin is basically a former land surface—the palaeoplain—which has been warped, producing the basal unconformity offshore where it is down-warped, and the marginal swell where it is upwarped’, a consequence of the earth mechanics of break-up of the former Gondwana supercontinent.17 Clarke, following in Oxley’s tracks, but with a more extensive geological knowledge and an imagination stimulated by several more critical decades of nineteenth-century science and art, could make the intellectual leap that allowed for a fluid and mobile

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The Rocks Beneath earth. The ‘rock of ages’, such an important metaphor for stability in Clarke’s Church of England, was beginning to look anything but solid. Clarke was one of the last in the tradition of the great eighteenth-century scientist-clergymen, and indeed was only one degree of separation from Darwin’s own circle. Clarke’s best friend in his parish of North Sydney was the sometime landscape painter of Darwin’s Beagle expedition, Conrad Martens. During their long bush walks the two discussed and developed the method of looking beneath the superficial landscape to understand structure and dynamics, such as had long been done in life drawing of the human figure.18 Martens, even more than the Tasmanian-based John Glover, was the greatest early exponent of the English landscape-painting school in Australia. His painting, ‘Belltrees’, now held in the New England Regional Art Museum, depicts the view north from the Hunter valley to the southern margin of New England, with the dominating image of the Great Escarpment looming out of the distance. Like Clarke, Martens had also apparently managed to grasp the essential physiographic reality—even today not understood by most Australians—that the Great Escarpment was a more significant barrier and boundary than any ‘Great Dividing Range’. When Clarke brought this approach to interpreting the puzzling anomalies of New England’s plateaux and gorges, he was bound to see far more and far further, with all the interpretive visionary power that the marriage of Enlightenment science and the Romantic imagination could offer. Following on Clarke’s investigation of the New England Tableland, in 1882 Thomas Edgeworth David, the founder of the Department of Geology and Physical Geography at Sydney University, visited the Uralla goldfields to work on the puzzle of deep leads in relation to local gold deposits and granite outcrops.19 The alluvial gold did not seem to come from quartz reefs, as was usual, or if it did it was from some faraway source that no longer seemed to exist. Edgeworth David was able to use information gleaned from prospecting the Tableland for over 30 years, representing the collective knowledge of many thousands of diggers. This allowed him to make a very detailed reconstruction of previous geological eras, and particularly past drainage systems, thus providing the key to the record of uplift and downwarp. During the nineteenth century, and increasingly in the twentieth century, the years of work of explorers and surveyors had allowed for the production and sale of easily accessible topographic maps.20 Once again, New England was at the forefront: following on the region-wide mapping by the early explorers of the Tableland—John Oxley, Allan Cunningham and Henry Dangar—government surveyors such as J.J. Galloway began the process of detailed local mapping.21 It has been said of Galloway’s extraordinary surveying and mapping work in the New England region that ‘almost single-handed [he] reduced a great cartographic blank to an ordered and planned region in as few as six years [1848–54]’.22 Access to cheap, easy-to-understand maps gave ordinary people a better knowledge of the land and more control of their environment. Maps became an important adjunct to political and social democracy.23 By the 1970s large-scale topographic maps were available for most of Australia, creating an

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educated audience ready for the radical shift in Earth science ideas of the second half of the century. C A RTO G R A P H Y F O R A C O N T I N E N T

To ordinary literacy and numeracy could be added a third skill necessary to conceive of the world as a product of global process, ‘topographic comprehension’, or cartographic literacy. Once people were used to taking the bird’s eye view provided by a topographic map, a view for which several centuries of landscape perspective painting had prepared them, it was possible for them to follow elaborate arguments about the origin and development of the Earth’s surface, and to accept that a world of such complicated physiography could have only evolved over exceptionally long ages. The topographic map, indeed, represents the ultimate ‘marriage’ of science and art, and is very often a thing of great beauty as well as a mundane land management tool. The increasing cartographic awareness of the early nineteenth century was primed for the popularising work of the Commonwealth Meteorologist, geographer and sometime Antarctic explorer, Thomas Griffith Taylor. In 1911 Griffith Taylor brought out a work that was both popular and scientific and that demonstrated enormous insight on matters of geology and landscape. Entitled ‘Physiography of Eastern Australia’, it was essentially a plea for systematic topographic mapping of the entire country. Relying on the contemporary rise in popularity of outdoor sports such as bushwalking and recreational fishing, Taylor was able to appeal to a large audience with what became best-selling books on geomorphology.24 There was one driving mystery for Griffith Taylor—what had fractured the landscape of eastern Australia, turning the land upside down and reversing the coastal rivers? Gentle rolling plains were at the top of the range and tortuous gorges below, while coastal rivers displayed bizarre courses, often beginning near the present coast and flowing inland until suddenly switching back again to find the sea. The most contorted of coastal rivers was the Clarence, with many of its major tributaries appearing to be oriented to reach the inland Condamine River and the Murray-Darling system, only to switch back in a series of ‘boathook bends’ against the trend of headwater flow to return to the eastern sea. Taylor, like Clarke, was convinced that this river system had risen to the east of the present coastline, in land no longer there, a lost continent he dubbed ‘Pacifica’. He concluded that river-flow had been disrupted in all the coastal streams by a reversal of drainage as water-flow from the Tableland sought a new base level on a new eastern coastline. As geophysical detail accumulated, there were various attempts at a great synthesis. The New England Tableland figured in the writings of most researchers as a key by which they might interpret the whole eastern highlands of Australia. From 1903, E.C. Andrews published a series of papers and geological reports emphasising the unity of the highlands, arguing that the similar physiography throughout suggested the action of continent-wide, possibly

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The Rocks Beneath 31 Tenterfield

C la c re n

Location

eR

1200m

.

M a c inty r e

R. Glen Innes

960m

Boy

dR

.

Inverell

Ben Lomond Llangothlin Ls.

Guyra

B o orol ong C k Ebor

Gw

1300m

yd

Armidale

ir

R

.

960m M

ac

le

ay

R.

1300m

Kilometres 0

100

❈ Mean altitudes of the major levels of the New England Tablelands—from a map by Griffith Taylor in a Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology Bulletin, 1911.

global, forces.25 Frank Craft, a student of Griffith Taylor, demonstrated the part played by differential erosion in the development of landforms, using as examples the New England gorges.26 After the formation of the Geology and Physical Geography departments at the future University of New England, researchers such as Alan Voisey and Robin Warner built on this body of work by mapping large-scale denudation zones, or ‘erosion surfaces’.27 The unique outreach of the university’s external studies system also brought knowledge of Earth science to a wider audience than ever before. These later New England researchers concentrated on the detailed pursuit of elusive ‘erosion surfaces’ that they thought might be a key to the past, but the amount of detail often obscured the central puzzle. For the first and earliest contemplators of the region, such as Oxley, Clarke or Griffith Taylor, a flash of inspiration working on basic geological knowledge was enough. The clear outline of their topographic vision was unclouded by as yet undiscovered detail.

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Only in the last decades of the twentieth century was such clarity again within reach—now because a good global template was finally available. C O N T I N E N TA L R I F T I N G , R I V E R R E V E R S A L A N D T H E O P E N I N G O F T H E TA S M A N S E A

Earth scientists with extensive experience of the Southern Hemisphere were among the most adamant supporters of what for long were regarded as heretical theories of continental drift. Not until it was recast as plate tectonics in the early 1960s were the mainstream scientists of the Northern Hemisphere prepared to accept this vast paradigm change in understanding the Earth. The New Zealand-born and South African-based geologist Lester King synthesised the immense amount of geological detail gathered by earlier workers to make an unanswerable case in support of drifting continents,28 and an outspoken Tasmanian geologist, Warren Carey, spread the news in a series of barnstorming lectures to British and American universities throughout the 1950s and 60s. King particularly emphasised the similarity between the escarpments of southeast South Africa and Australia, and the parallel development of highvelds and high tablelands. The geological record from New England encapsulated the whole history of Southern Hemisphere earth movement and drift. Arriving at the University of New England in the early 1980s, Cliff Ollier was able to look at the landscape of the whole of the eastern highlands in light of the new theory. Ollier was the first to identify and map the Great Escarpment for its full length, but particularly where it is at its most spectacular, on the eastern edge of the New England Tableland. He placed it in the time frame of the fracturing of Gondwana. Eighty million years ago, one fracture of this megacontinent had opened the Tasman Sea, separating Australia from New Zealand. There had been a great landmass east of the Australian mainland, most of which had sunk beneath the ocean to form the Lord Howe Rise as well as parts of New Zealand. The inland plain had been uplifted to become the Tableland. We now know that major rivers between the divide and the coast were reversed by the uplift, setting in action an erosion front marked by the escarpment, which slowly moved to the west. The Great Escarpment is present only on the eastern side of the Tableland, so the escarpment’s development must be related to events that occurred on the eastern side, not the western. The emergence of the new continental margin, combined with uplift, produced short, steep rivers flowing to the new coastline and forming deep, amphitheatre-shaped valleys, or gorges. It then coalesced to form the inlandadvancing escarpment. However, the bizarre pattern of the coastal streams suggests something more gradual than a simple single event.29 Much of the early flow direction of the eastern rivers is still preserved. That is, they flow inland from the coast until they suddenly turn on their tracks and run in the opposite direction, to the Pacific Ocean. This reversal of flow, particularly evident in the drainage pattern of the coastal streams that flow off the Tableland, strongly suggests not only continuous erosion but continuous,

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The Rocks Beneath 33

Great Escarpment Sedimentary wedge

mountain

coast

belt

palae oplain

sea Breakup unconformity

Zone of Zone of normal drainage reversed drainage

sea

deposition

pala

eoplain

maximum uplift hinge zone Breakup unconformity

Great Divide outlying plateau mountain belt

Great Escarpment palaeoplain

coastal plain

maximum uplift coastal facet Breakup unconformity deposition

Gondawana 2500m

lan ds u

rface Coast Cretaceous and younger sediments

2000m

❈ Diagrammatic cross-sections and plan drawings of continental passive margin structures, using New England as a template—from a work by Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain (see note 5). The key to the top cross-section is the ‘mountains’ (in fact, isolated fragments of the former Tableland) carved out by the advance of the Great Escarpment erosion front, and the transfer of the sediment from erosion to the continental shelf. The second figure from the top shows the effects in diagrammatic plan, with warping to partially offset the sediment movement. Third from the top is a representational plan. The ability to understand these maps and diagrams is derived from a particular way of looking developed by western representational art. All these types of figures can now, of course, be presented electronically, with endless permutations. The bottom cross-section shows an idealised, uneroded Gondwanic fragment, immediately after break-up and rifting.

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or at least continuously intermittent, uplift of the Tableland. Ollier developed a model of differential uplift and subsidence that best fitted the apparent surface phenomena. This postulated the existence of a hinge of landform flexion along a former Great Divide with downwarp to the coast.30 The most dynamic marker of landform change is the carving out of the great gorges31(Oxley’s ‘impassible glens’), but this is only the most obvious of a set of processes whose ultimate trigger has to do with the fluid motion of the Earth’s lithosphere under pressure from orbital motion and spin. To comprehend such a vast and dizzying evolution of Earth and sky was the work of centuries, one only set in motion by the first explorers from Europe, who tried to understand where they were in relation to terrestrial and celestial markers. Some of the first penetrations of the interiors of the colonial world were the ventures onto the New England Tableland, and the explorers immediately saw that the unknown landforms needed to be fitted into a bigger picture. They and their followers developed new forms of mapping and positioning and, ultimately, a cartographic way of thinking that allowed new, comprehensive and secular ways of looking at the Earth. This understanding could only come from men of the Enlightenment, those able not only to train their minds in scientific precision but also to expand their imagination under the influence of the art forms of the Romantic movement. Seeing new continental landscapes through the lens of this ‘Higher Intuition’, the very first explorers and surveyors could sense that what they could not explain or understand might nonetheless be the key to a more universal explanation of the mysteries of the Earth. For a while the wealth of new detail obscured the grander vision, but by the latter parts of the twentieth century enough data had been amassed to fit it to one of the great intellectual advances, global plate tectonic theory. The New England Tableland’s perverse landscape pattern and the various attempts, spanning two centuries, to explain it played a significant part in formulating this theory. N E W E N G L A N D A N D A C O N T I N E N TA L T E M P L AT E

The discovery and description of New England’s physical features by a series of explorers, followed by surveyors, geologists and geographers, as well as diarists, poets and landscape artists, represented the first attempt to depict and understand relatively the inland structure of any continent. Australia was a useful template, being small, isolated and structurally simple. Between Oxley in the 1810s and Ollier in the 1980s, the puzzle of a fractured ‘upside-down’ landscape was solved. Meanwhile, the particular case of the New England Tableland found a worldwide application to similar landscapes on the trailing edges of their continents.32 The Tableland provided a template against which theories of Earth development were tested over a century and a half of speculation— speculation all the clearer because it was perceived through the casement that science and perspective art had opened onto the lost worlds of Australia’s continental past.33

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CHAPTER 3 ❈

Su n s h in e , Sn ow, Win d an d Rain Jack Hob b s and Al a n At k i n s o n

It was customary once to think that New England’s weather was like the weather ‘at Home’, that is, in England, Scotland and Ireland. This idea might have been comforting for settlers, but it did not encourage the interest of weather specialists during the colonial period, especially since the meteorological novelties of other parts of Australia were more obvious and intriguing. Also, the Government Meteorologist in Sydney during the late nineteenth century was mainly concerned with Australia as a whole, and New England was not a criticial piece in his jigsaw. This officer, Henry Chamberlain Russell, set up weather stations or in other words observation points from which he heard about local conditions by daily telegraph throughout the colony, but he was slow to extend his net to New England. In 1877, when he began to publish weather maps in the Sydney Morning Herald—the first such publications anywhere in the world—the only weather stations on the Tableland were at Tenterfield and Armidale. There were others nearby, however, at Grafton, Inverell, Narrabri and Tamworth.1 Local settlers were more observant. For instance, Albert Norton, who lived near Walcha in the 1850s, remarked on the possible effect of climate on Tableland forests. ‘The district of New England,’ he said, ‘is subject to sudden and severe changes of temperature.’ Also, he went on, although the region had copious rain, ‘it is also subject of long periods of comparatively dry weather’. Norton thought that trees on the Tableland must feel the impact of such dramatic shifts in the weather. For instance, ‘if they have been first weakened by want of rain, then further tried by too great a quantity, [and] their protecting foliage thinned

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by the trials to which they have been exposed’ then, he said, the impact of a hard winter might surely be enough to kill them.2 More recently, long years of experience have suggested that widely ranging, unpredictable temperatures may be even more damaging to vegetation than heavy snow is in Europe. Animals, including livestock, are affected in their turn, especially where trees have been cleared for grazing or crops. It is said that God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, but without tree cover the high country winds can be cruel.3 When H.C. Russell finally turned his attention to the New England region, it was because he too had noticed such destructive power. In 1891 he reported to the Royal Society of New South Wales on a tornado that had lately made its way southward across the western slopes, past Yetman and Bingara. According to Russell’s Bingara informant, ‘as far as one could see, there was nothing left but bare tree stumps and fallen trees’. The forward movement of the storm was about 50 miles an hour, and Russell estimated that the ‘gyratory motion’ must have been more than 120 miles an hour. Next year he reported on a hail storm around Narrabri, with stones measuring at least six inches around: trees two feet in diameter were torn up by the roots, limbs twelve inches through were snapped off short, a brick factory completely ruined, roofs, sign-boards, and everything that the wind could move went flying.4 And yet, the current reputation of the Tableland proper was just the opposite. It was supposed to be like a resort, ‘high on the sanitary scale’, and

❈ Snow in Central Park, Armidale, in 1917, with St Paul’s Presbyterian church in the background. (photo: unknown)

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Sunshine, Snow, Wind and Rain bracing and healthy, especially for growing children.5 This partly explains the number of boarding schools established in Armidale from this period (see Chapter 17). The smallest, lowest and flattest of the continents, Australia is a land of extremes. It is the driest continent apart from Antarctica. Droughts, floods, heatwaves, storms and bushfires are part of the way of life for many of its inhabitants. The climate and weather of New England reflect these characteristics. Also, there are marked climatic variations across the region, from the Tableland and eastern ranges to the slopes and plains in the west.

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PA S T C L I M AT E S 6

Climate is ever-changing on all timescales, from geological epochs to decades. Assessment of past change is hampered by lack of evidence and problems of interpretation but, as with all other parts of Australia, the climate of New England has clearly changed over long periods of time. The last two million years have been punctuated by glacial periods and characterised by extreme climatic instability. Generally, temperatures have been colder than today. The Tableland climate during the last glacial maximum, about 18 000 years ago, may have been as much as 8°C colder, with rainfall about half of the present average. Thereafter, 10 000–15 000 years ago, the melting of continental ice and the retreat of glaciers created wetter and warmer climates. In New England, there are some indications of an abrupt change to wetter conditions at around the 10 000-year mark, especially in the east. The period since that time has been dominated by the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO), a phenomenon that apparently occurred a little late in New England, around four or five thousand years ago, with rainfall possibly 50 per cent more than at present. There is currently considerable interest in the HCO as the most suitable recent epoch to indicate the possible nature of future warmer earth conditions. From that point to the time of European settlement, weather conditions seem to have been much more stable than in earlier epochs, becoming cooler and drier, especially within the last 2000 years. Reliable and continuous rainfall records in Australia date only from about the 1880s (the H.C. Russell period), but there is evidence of wetter conditions over eastern Australia from the 1850s to the early twentieth century, with drier conditions dominant until the late 1940s. This pattern was certainly evident in New England, although once again there have been significant variations within each period. The 1888 drought, for instance, was extremely severe and, coupled with a bitterly cold winter, caused high sheep losses, complicating what were already angry negotiations between squatters and shearers. The very driest years on the Tableland seem to have been 1861 and 1874, when the gauge at the Armidale Post Office collected an annual rainfall of 436 and 420 millimetres respectively. In 1902, a disastrous year for the continent as a whole with the worst drought on record at that time, the Armidale measure went no lower than 468. The wettest year, on the other hand, was apparently 1863, with a

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measurement of 1507 millimetres, twice what we now know to be the average and more than three times the minimum (420 millimetres in 1874).7 Good temperature data are even more limited. Eastern Australia seems to have warmed slightly after about 1940, with an increase in mean temperatures of up to 0.17°C per decade. Maximum temperatures have risen less than minima. But these trends are very small. They are not yet reflected, for instance, in fewer frosts. New England has recently experienced some of the most severe frosts on record, a thick white shell on the landscape, and at all times of the year there have been some unusually low day-time temperatures. The severity of frosts has not been helped, once again, by broadscale clearing of the landscape—and a hard spring frost can be fatal to lambs and hoggets.8 On the other hand, very high temperatures may also be a little more common and during the last few years there has been some hint of a return to drier conditions, with a possible shift towards more winter-type rainfall, even in summer. P R E S E N T C L I M AT E S : C AU S E S A N D PAT T E R N S 9

Because of the combined size and shape of the Australian continent there is considerable modification of air moving inland. The long coastline and few mountain barriers mean that large areas of the continent are subject to oceanic influence, but this is much reduced in the western parts of New England, thanks to distance and the barrier of the eastern escarpment. Oceans to the south of the continent lie in the way of unmodified polar air from Antarctica, and plenty of moisture is picked up in transit. Australia as a whole experiences high variability from year to year, and various factors combine to produce only moderate variations from one season to another. Because of their altitude, the higher parts of New England experience greater seasonal differentiation than much of the rest of Australia. It was H.C. Russell who discovered the importance of high-pressure systems, or anticyclones, for Australian weather. Moving east across the continent, these systems are the main controls on seasonal patterns of atmospheric circulation and rainfall. They cross the east coast at an average latitude of about 38°S in late summer and at about 28°S in late winter. Places north of the highs receive mainly easterly or south-easterly winds, and south winds come predominantly from the west. This means that in winter New England receives mainly cool to cold westerly or south-westerly winds. In summer it is usually under the influence of an easterly to south-easterly airflow, with cold fronts passing well to the south—on average, about 40 anticyclones cross New England every year. They are most frequent in winter, and they often bring frosts. High-pressure ridges are common along the New South Wales coast, especially during summer. Combined with a trough of low pressure, they can lead to heavy precipitation, strong winds and sudden changes in wind direction and temperature. For New England, this can mean the crackling light and vast noise of dramatic thunderstorms. Wind patterns shift all the time. The complicating effect of the meeting of land and sea breezes from the coast sometimes reaches the eastern parts of the

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Sunshine, Snow, Wind and Rain Tableland. Also, topography can shape airflow, especially over the Tableland, with cold air drainage from higher to lower ground being especially obvious in particular spots. In summer, air from the sea is cooler than the land over which it passes, and heating by the land surface can cause high instability and violent storms. Conversely, in winter easterly airflows tend to be warmer than the land surface. Stabilised by chilling from below, they lessen the chance of rain. It was obvious to the first colonial meteorologists that New England lay on the border between two great climatic regions, north and south. The north is monsoonal. From the south, frontal systems come from as far away as the Southern Ocean, and sudden cooling by more than 10°C is not unusual. Again, the interaction of such systems with the higher parts of the Tableland and with warm and humid air from the sea can mean severe thunderstorms along the ranges. If very cold but moist air follows, it can bring on snow. A strong, lengthy southerly flow, carrying air from near-ice-bound latitudes, can mean especially heavy snow falls in the higher parts. For early settlers, snow was a considerable nuisance. Albert Norton spoke of a particularly heavy and damaging fall near Walcha in early September 1857. Even a fortnight later, he said, ‘it was difficult

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❈ A map from a school textbook, The Climate and Weather of Australia, issued by the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology in 1913, and showing Port Macquarie and the Tableland on the border between ‘Summer Monsoon’ and ‘Uniform Rains’. This text was presumably used in New England’s first high schools (see Chapter 15).

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in places to get through the heaps of branches that lay thick upon the roads, and . . . large patches of snow were still lying in the shady places’.10 In summer, on the other hand, tropical cyclones can move southward along the Queensland coast, bringing with them prolonged heavy rain, locally called ‘monsoonal rains’. However, this now seems to be less common than it was even twenty to 25 years ago, when it happened at least once every summer. In late winter and early spring, east coast lows, in various forms, can be a cause of major flooding for eastern New South Wales, including New England. These multiple interactions have complex results. Day-to-day weather is rarely uniform, with striking contrasts between the higher parts of the Tableland and the slopes and plains to the south and west. The longer-term patterns of climate are just as variable—the region is neither uniformly cold nor hot, wet nor dry, when compared with other parts of the continent. Hence the common remark, now used as a draw-card for tourists, that Armidale is the city of four seasons, all of them coming sometimes in a single day. T E M P E R AT U R E

In New England, July is the coldest month, when much of the Tableland can be among the coldest parts of the continent. On the nightly television weather charts, the Tableland’s higher parts regularly show the lowest temperatures in New South Wales, with the precise location varying from time to time. Forty years ago Walcha was consistently reporting the lowest, then Armidale, then Tenterfield and, most recently, Glen Innes. With no other explanation available, it is tempting to suggest that towns have been vying for the publicity that goes with being at the bottom of the temperature league table. Walcha, on the other hand, took the opposite approach, asking to be removed from official registration. In all seasons, solar radiation, and therefore temperature, tends to be progressively higher across New England from south-east to north-west. But the main reason for the differences between the Tableland and its southern and western margins is altitude (usually pushing the mercury down by at least 5°C per 1000 metres). Distance from the ocean tends to increase the heat in summer and the cold in winter. Similarly, night-time cloud helps the temperature stay up and day-time cloud can bring it down. Strong winds generally produce a cooling effect, but they also reduce the chance of frost. Air from the south tends to be cold, while that from the north is warmer. Cold air drainage into valleys takes with it more and heavier frosts. High landforms can create shade, producing narrowly localised patterns of strong winds and calms, all of which can influence temperature. In all seasons there is a broad increase in temperatures as we move from Walcha, through Armidale and Guyra to Glen Innes, Inverell and Tenterfield. The warmest areas are well to the west, beyond Moree, and to the south around Tamworth and on the Liverpool Plains. Throughout the whole area of the Tableland and its slopes and plains, the frequency of frosts varies considerably,

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Sunshine, Snow, Wind and Rain 41

❈ The effect of good rain on the Wallamumbi Falls—a drawing first published in 1886. Note the small human figures in the middle foreground. (artist: unknown)

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the heaviest and most frequent being in the higher parts, where they can occur in any month of the year. Overnight temperatures of –10°C have been recorded regularly over most of the Tableland, while temperatures over 35°C are very rare, as are heatwaves. On the other hand, all the country to the west has at some time experienced temperatures over 45°C, and heatwaves of twenty days or more. P R E C I P I TAT I O N

In terms of rainfall, once again New England lies between the summer maximum areas of northern Australia and the winter maximum areas familiar in the south. Rain can come at any time of the year. In summer, most rain in the east is due to moist easterly winds, the influence of which lessens rapidly inland. Thunderstorms are common in summer, and can bring copious rain. Between May and September (especially in May and June), good rain can be the result of major north-west cloud bands or other cloud masses from the tropics meeting cold fronts from the south-west. But such good rainfall seems to have been increasingly rare in recent years. We still have the cloud bands and the frontal systems, but not at the same time, which means fewer precipitating interactions. Annual rainfall decreases rapidly inland. Mean figures range from nearly 900 millimetres on the higher parts of the Tableland to about 500 in the far north-west. Much of Australia suffers from extreme variability of rainfall, but most of this region has relatively low variability from year to year. Variability usually increases from east to west. On the other hand, as Albert Norton noticed in the 1850s, any particular area might suffer devastating floods in one year or season, and severe drought straight afterwards—or the other way around. Norton’s experience was around Walcha, but in fact such juxtapositions of flood and drought are more common to the west. Thunderstorms sometimes bring flash-flooding, and occasionally, as H.C. Russell remarked, giant hail—in modern measurements, up to 100 millimetres in diameter. The great hailstorm of September 1996 did $10 million of damage in and around Armidale.11 Small hail (less than ten millimetres in diameter) is more common in late winter and spring, while large or giant hail is more likely in late spring and summer, especially over the Tableland. Thunderstorm climatology shows a clear peak of storms in December, but widespread hail tends to peak a month earlier. Most parts of the Tableland experience one to three days per year with hail, the highest frequencies appearing to be between Copeton Dam and Inverell, and around Armidale and Uralla. Tornadoes are also a feature of New England, though a rare one. H.C. Russell thought that as settlement pushed into the remoter parts of the country tornadoes might be found to be as devastating as the American variety. In fact, they have rarely caused much damage, except to trees, sheds and small buildings. With a denser population there might be more risk to life and limb.

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Sunshine, Snow, Wind and Rain T H E F U T U R E 12

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We cannot know how future climate will be affected by such factors as increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and changes in the working of the atmosphere. There are no scenarios specific to New England, but predictions for Australia as a whole suggest what might happen in our region. Water vapour and as many as 40 trace gases may contribute to enhanced global warming, the most significant being carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, CFC-11 and CFC-12. Some models predict temperature increases of anything up to 5°C by the middle of this century. There is still no certainty as to the exact causes of this warming and as to how large any increases might be, but there will certainly be regional differences. In New England warming could be up to 2°C. Likely differences from place to place are hard to specify in the models, but it is most likely that the greatest rises will be further inland. There may be more summer rainfall, perhaps by as much as 20 per cent by 2030, with decreases in winter by as much as 10 per cent. At the same time rainfall intensity is predicted to increase, although the number of rain days may fall, with longer and more frequent dry spells. In the longer term, atmospheric circulation zones may shift south, and severe weather may be both worse and more common. Global warming could lead to changes in rainfall, run-off, cloudiness, frost and thunderstorm frequency, increased erosion and drought, changes in soil moisture and salinity, shifts in bioclimatic zones and species extinction. It might also result in the introduction of new species, reduced yields for some crops because of fewer frosts and the increased incidence of some diseases, human and animal. The picture is complicated by recent research, which suggests that increasing concentrations of solid pollutants in the atmosphere may create a dimming effect by reducing incoming solar radiation. That would help to mask any local impact of global warming. There are still many gaps in our knowledge as to how the global climate system works, and how processes on a global scale affect the regional and local level. But whatever the precise truth about the greenhouse effect, it is not too early to be preparing for its dangerous possibilities, and to be addressing related questions about energy consumption, population growth and material circumstances, many of them crucial to the way we live on the Tableland.

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CHAPTER 4 ❈

Wil d l i fe Pet e r Jar man and K a r l Ve r n e s

When New England was first settled by the Whites, they found the standing nets of the Blacks in many parts of the bush for the purpose of entrapping the wild animals—The tribes of Blacks met by appointment at these places at certain times driving from different directions their game before them, and this from a circle of many miles into these nets . . . Since the Whites have occupied the Pundarra & Byron plains Countries, the wild animals of every description have left the plains & frequented places occupied by civilized man, and have betaken to the mountains & unfrequented parts.1 The schoolmaster and chronicler William Gardner thus described the impact of the first twenty years of pastoralism. The Aborigines’ hunting infrastructure was destroyed, and the wildlife on which they depended drastically reduced in the developed areas, remaining abundant only in ‘the mountains and unfrequented parts’. This chapter takes up the theme of the diversity, distribution and human attitudes to New England’s vertebrate fauna—its native and introduced mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs and fishes—with a particular focus on mammals. To begin with, vertebrate species occurred on the Tableland in numbers above the average for Australian bioregions. From the mid-nineteenth century pastoral and agricultural settlement had an accidental but dramatic impact on species numbers and variety, mainly through habitat alteration, suppression of native predators and introduction of exotic predators and competitors. The

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Wildlife period around World War One was especially important. The eastern forest and gorge country then offered sanctuary to several species that could no longer survive on the Tableland proper. On the other hand, we can also date serious efforts to understand and preserve native wildlife, as typical of the region and Australia, from this time. Armidale, for instance, was one of the very first rural towns to see the formation of a branch of the New South Wales Naturalists’ Club (by 1906).2 Geographical patterns of wildlife distribution are among the many, often inconsistent factors that fix the heartland and boundaries of the Tableland. There are also historical patterns, in which we see temporary increases of populations and of species within a larger, long-term pattern of decline.

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MAMMALS

Monotrem e s, t h e e gg-la yi n g m a mmal s In 1818 the explorer John Oxley wrote of seeing in the Peel River ‘numbers of the ornithorrynchus [sic] or water mole’. Europeans considered the Platypus a remarkable oddity of nature, and this is its first reported sighting in or near New England. Later in the colonial period, many platypuses were to be trapped or shot for their fine skins. In 1978 residents of the Manilla district, just west of the Tableland, showed John Wheeler, of the University of New England, four rugs, each probably 50 years old and containing at least 25 skins.3 Indeed, in the 1910s and 20s the Platypus was hunted to such an extent that its very survival seemed threatened. As a result, zoos and museums, both in Australia and the United States, tried urgently to secure Platypus specimens. There were also private conservation initiatives, as a result of a widespread and growing interest in Australian wildlife. The Wildlife Preservation Society was founded in Sydney in 1909 and its early members included P.A. Wright of Wallamumbi and his teenage daughter Judith, the later poet. It was about this time that Wright also began his campaign for a New England National Park on the eastern escarpment, which came to fruition in the 1930s.4 Touring parts of the Tableland in 1919–21, Charles Hoy, of the National Museum in Washington, visited the wealthy grazier Charles Baldwin at Durham Court, near Manilla, and found that he had ‘taken to breeding up native mammals which are approaching extinction’. Baldwin’s private zoo seems to have included platypuses— the Taronga Zoological Park Trust, in Sydney, had asked him for live specimens in 1916.5 Visiting the headwaters of the Namoi and Manilla rivers, Hoy reported that the ‘Platypus although scarce is not by any means nearing extinction’.6 Today, although still widespread, platypuses are absent from some headwaters and small creeks on the Tableland, especially above waterfalls.7 They cannot survive in intermittent streams. The Short-beaked Echidna is also common throughout New England, although its numbers have similarly diminished where agriculture is intense.

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In the cold Tableland winters Echidnas get under cover and go into torpor, awaking to brief activity every few weeks.8 Mars u pia ls, t h e po uc h e d m a m m a l s The Platypus might have seemed to settlers the most remarkable of Australian vertebrates, but the marsupials have always been the most familiar. Of the small, insectivorous marsupial species, only the Yellow-footed Antechinus (found in drier woodland and forest) and the Common Dunnart (found in open grassy woodland) still live across the whole Tableland, although both are scarce. Others occupy the edges. The Dusky and the Brown Antechinus occupy wetter forests and heathlands in the east, and there may be Common Planigale in the far north-east. The plains-dwelling Stripe-faced and Fat-tailed Dunnarts may reach the Tableland’s western edge. Brush-tailed Phascogales are tree-dwellers, raiding birds’ and bees’ nests for eggs, chicks, honey and grubs, and hunting in trees for large insects and small vertebrates. In the colonial period, they raided settlers’ bee-hives and killed poultry by biting their heads and, or so the settlers believed, drinking their blood. They are vulnerable to forest clearing and fragmentation, and today probably survive only along the escarpment.9 Settlers called quolls ‘native cats’. The Spotted-tailed Quoll (the ‘tiger cat’) was persecuted for raiding poultry, but it can still be found in the region. The smaller Eastern Quoll, now extinct throughout New South Wales, may never have occurred on the Tableland, although it was supposedly seen west of Glen Innes in the 1860s–80s.10 Quolls were once common enough for riders with dogs to put up two or three a day, but during the first years of the twentieth century they succumbed to foxes and competition from rabbits. Charles Hoy noted in 1921 that Aboriginal people spoke of quolls, together with bandicoots, Rufous Rat-kangaroos and Brush-tailed Phascogales, as ‘plentiful up to a few years ago’. In the 1920s they were further reduced by rabbit poison.11 They also now survive most abundantly around the eastern gorges and forested country, and they still raid chook pens. Bandicoots hide in a nest in the daytime, but settlers were quick to notice the conical pits dug during their foraging at night. The Long-nosed Bandicoot was once found throughout the Tableland, and the Northern Brown Bandicoot in the north. Both ranged east to the coast, but they quickly disappeared after the introduction of foxes.12 Both species have now gone from most of the pastoral country but, like so many others under threat, they have found a refuge on the Tableland’s eastern fringe. Settlers found the Koala everywhere in New England, but numbers have been greatly reduced by land clearing and epidemic disease. In 1887–89 and 1900–03, throughout the whole of New South Wales, outbreaks were reported of ‘ophthalmia and periostitis of the skull’, which match symptoms of the chlamydial infections that still afflict Tableland Koalas and cause female sterility.13 Now that trees are more widely scattered, Koalas are sometimes forced to cross

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Wildlife open ground, which exposes them to dogs and cars. They survive across the Tableland, but are no longer ubiquitous. None have been seen near Glen Innes since 1920, but they still appear occasionally in or near other towns, including Armidale and Walcha.14 The Common Wombat is often seen between the Liverpool Ranges and the Nundle–Nowendoc area (including Riamukka State Forest), just beyond the Tableland’s southern edge. But it is inexplicably scarce on the Tableland itself.15 There have been occasional sightings in the south and a few small and dwindling populations exist north-east of Glen Innes, around Butterleaf State Forest, and in the north around Bald Rock National Park. In some places, farmers have destroyed wombats to protect fences and pasture, and to prevent stock and vehicles from falling into their burrows. Possums are much more numerous. All species have been affected by forest fragmentation and clearing, but none is extinct. Collecting possums and gliders for the British Natural History Museum in the 1920s, the polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins said of the Ebor district: ‘Trappers have exterminated most, if not all, of the valuable fur-bearing animals, such as the grey and black opossum, the wallaby, and the kangaroo’.16 Hoy found much the same, perhaps because New England maintained open seasons to allow trapping of possums and gliders for several years after the species were protected in the rest of the state.17 And yet, the Common Brushtail Possum (pictured on page 350) and the Sugar Glider are now widespread once more, and the Common Ringtail Possum is well distributed in the east. It may be that the Greater Glider was always restricted to tall eucalypt forests in the east, and the Yellow-bellied Glider and the Mountain Brushtail Possum to the high-rainfall northern and eastern edges of the Tableland. The Squirrel Glider and Feathertail Glider are both found only sparsely, again mainly in the east. Large numbers of macropods have been killed by both Aborigines and Europeans, for various reasons. They have always been valued for their flesh and skins, and kangaroos and wallabies, in particular, have been hunted for sport. Between the first pastoral settlement and the 1870s, despite initial reports of their displacement by stock, large kangaroos multiplied quickly, probably because of improved pasture and reduced hunting by Aborigines and dingoes.18 In 1878 over 400 residents of New England petitioned the Legislative Assembly for ‘special legislation’ to suppress the ‘alarming increase and ravages of the marsupials’ (meaning kangaroos).19 Soon afterwards, Pastures Protection Boards began to offer bounties on pests affecting the pastoral industry. Eastern Grey Kangaroos and Common Wallaroos were among the first species bountied in New England, as they were considered to be direct competitors with sheep. The impact on kangaroo populations was immediate. In the Tamworth district, 260 780 kangaroo scalps were paid for in 1884, but only 12 337 in 1892. On the Tableland the bountying of large kangaroos had largely ceased by the late 1890s. It had done its job, but also hunting for skins now paid as much as scalp bounties. On the other hand, from the mid-1890s the Tamworth Board sometimes paid bounties on more than 100 000 wallaby scalps a year.

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❈ The release of endangered Rufous Bettongs, by Peter Jarman and Lorraine Smith, into a predator-proof enclosure at Yarandoo, near New England National Park, in January 2003—a turning point for this species, once ubiquitous on the Tableland. (photo: D. Elkins)

Not surprisingly, in 1921 Hoy remarked that the Eastern Grey Kangaroo was ‘getting rather scarce’ in the Ebor District. The Swamp Wallaby and Red-necked Wallaby, he said, were both ‘very scarce’.20 Meanwhile tens of thousands of rat-kangaroo scalps were submitted every year until about 1910, when rabbit poison and foxes became even more lethal. Around Manilla in 1908, rat-kangaroos were still so abundant that netting was used to keep them from crops, but only five years later they were scarce.21 Bountied rat-kangaroos included the Brush-tailed, Tasmanian and Rufous Bettongs. Only the last survives in New England, and only in the north and east where foxes are few. In the Tamworth district the ‘pademelon’, or Bridled Nailtail Wallaby (also called ‘Flash Jack’), was bountied between 1897 and 1913, and it too largely disappeared during the last three years.22 In 1924, Baldwin’s collection at Durham Court apparently contained the last specimens in New South Wales. Brush-tailed Rock-wallabies were hunted for their pelts and were also bountied in some districts. Once widespread across the Tableland, wherever boulder piles or caves gave them refuge, today the cliffs and gorges on the eastern rim are their last stronghold in New South Wales.23

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Wildlife Native rode n t s a n d b a t s

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Few species of native rodents or bats ever had their range centred on New England. The Water Rat is the only native rodent still widespread, and its numbers may well have declined over the last 50 years, especially in the headwaters of the Namoi, Manilla and Apsley rivers, and more widely in degraded and now intermittent streams. Dependent on permanent water, it leaves distinctive middens of mussel shells on rocks or logs in the water or on the bank.24 Until the 1960s it was trapped for its dense and lustrous fur. The Bush Rat survives in some forest remnants, and the Fawn-footed Melomys and the Swamp Rat venture onto the eastern, forested edges. Other species of rat are now extinct, either on the Tableland or altogether. The Pale Field-rat, and possibly the Darling Downs Hopping-mouse, once inhabited the north. The Plains Rat was found on the western slopes, but no longer occurs closer than South Australia. Gould’s Mouse, also extinct, once ran on the Liverpool Plains. The White-footed Tree-rat, which lived throughout the Tableland in the nineteenth century, is also now wholly extinct. Remains of the Eastern Chestnut Mouse and New Holland Mouse, together with those of the White-footed Tree-rat, have been identified in superficial but pre-European cave deposits at Dripping Rock, on the western edge.25 As for bats, small numbers of Grey-headed and Little Red Flying-foxes occasionally venture onto the Tableland from the north-east coast and hinterland in search of blossoming trees, usually eucalypts, but they almost never breed here. In some years Little Red Flying-foxes even reach the western plains. These are fruit bat or ‘megabat’ (megachiropteran) species. At least 24 insecteating or ‘microbat’ (microchiropteran) species have also been recorded on the Tableland, mostly in forest country in the east and north-east.26 The Greater Broad-nosed Bat, Eastern Freetail Bat and Eastern False Pipistrelle all shelter in the daytime in tree hollows, while the Lesser Long-eared and Gould’s Longeared Bats hide under loose bark. The Eastern Horseshoe, Common Bentwing and Little Cave Bats roost in abandoned mine shafts and in houses. When Copeton Dam was created in the 1970s a colony of Large-eared Pied Bats was flooded out of Copeton Mine.27 Some bats gather in towns, colonising the colonisers. The Lesser Long-eared Bat, for instance, forages for insects around houses and roosts in roofs, and is one bat species that may have benefited from European settlement. Introdu c e d m a m m a ls The Dingo, introduced to Australia from south-east Asia 3500 years ago, was once ubiquitous on the Tableland. Pastoralists trapped, poisoned and shot dingoes until they were largely eradicated by the 1860s or 70s. There have been occasional sightings in cleared parts into the twentieth century and some live still along the forested eastern edge, at times attacking stock. An old system of dog-fences runs along much of the rim of the eastern escarpment, mostly in disrepair but maintained or restored in places. Fencing to exclude dogs was

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❈ Dingo and wild dog carcases displayed on a ‘dog tree’ near Oxley Wild Rivers National Park. Game-keepers like to show that they are playing their part in controlling ‘pests’. (photo: P. Jarman)

largely abandoned in the 1960s as Wild Dog Destruction Boards promoted widespread poisoning with 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate). Poison baits are still spread each year in forests and parks to ‘control’ wild dogs, many of which are no longer pure-blood dingoes.28 Rabbits, hares and foxes were all brought originally from England to Tasmania and/or Victoria, for traditional coursing and hunting. The European Rabbit was established on the mainland in 1859 and it reached New England in the 1890s. Tamworth Pastures Protection Board had already offered a bounty on rabbits, hoping to stop the species’ advance, but the Armidale board saw no need for organised effort until 1909, and by then rabbits were out of control. Fencing, poisoning, trapping and, more recently, introduced diseases (myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease), together with the poison 1080, have been part of the New England battle against rabbits for the past century. Rabbits are the major food source for foxes, Wedge-tail and Little Eagles, and Whistling Kites. The Brown Hare reached Armidale, Tamworth and Glen Innes by 1892 or 1893, and Tenterfield by 1900. Scalp returns show that hare numbers erupted and then declined quite rapidly, usually as rabbit numbers built up. Hares were hunted for sport, landholders boasting of the numbers (often hundreds) shot on their property in a day. They are now ubiquitous in pastoral areas, but much more rare in remnant native vegetation.

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Wildlife The Red Fox, imported in the 1860s and 70s, reached southern New England in about 1900 and within a few years its numbers had risen exponentially.29 Recognised as lamb-killers, foxes had bounties on them before they arrived. They are still a major threat to many native species, but they avoid areas where there are dingoes. In the 1970s and 80s foxes on the Tableland were hunted (both casually and professionally) for their excellent winter pelts, but that trade collapsed when rabies in Europe made fox fur unpopular. Use of 1080 to control foxes on sheep-breeding properties then dramatically increased.30 Some introduced animals were not originally meant to run completely wild. Feral cats became widespread soon after settlement and now occur throughout the Tableland. They too may be responsible for the eradication of some native species. In the early years of settlement, before cheap and effective fencing was available, sheep, cattle and horses were only lightly controlled by shepherds and stockmen. As a result, these animals also escaped and formed feral populations. Horses often ran free, being mustered only when needed. Graziers would capture them and break them either for stock work or for sale as re-mounts for the British, Indian and Australian armies. Feral populations remain on leasehold and Crown land in the east of the region. Herds at Guy Fawkes ‘represent a mixture of different breeds, with a continual introduction of outside blood’.31 Fallow Deer have run wild since the late nineteenth century, mainly between Glen Innes and the Queensland border, but since the 1960s they have spread

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❈ Wild horses in Guy Fawkes River National Park in 2005, being censused by helicopter. (photo: K. Vernes)

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further south. Feral goats are common in the eastern gorges, and scattered feral pigs have multiplied in forests and around wetlands and watercourses. By the late nineteenth century, the introduced House Mouse was a problem on the Tableland and it is now the region’s most widespread rodent species. After drought-breaking rains it can erupt in huge numbers, especially in cropping districts, and has done so in northern New South Wales (including western New England) half a dozen times since 1903. The Black Rat was first noticed in the Manilla district as late as 1920–21. After ‘two good wheat years’, numbers were so high that rats were eating rats.32 There have been no more plagues on this scale, but Black Rats are now common in Tableland towns. They can also survive without human resources, and they may even perform some of the ecological functions of native Bush and Swamp Rats, such as dispersing spores of below-ground fungi. BIRDS

Between 1978 and 1982 a total of 296 bird species were recorded in New England for the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union Atlas.33 Two-fifths either occurred throughout the Tableland or showed no geographic pattern. The remainder were mostly characteristic of the western slopes and plains, or the wet forests along the eastern edge. Despite being on a high plateau, the Tableland’s lagoons are visited, at least occasionally, by most of Australia’s waterbirds, including such rarities (for New South Wales) as the Freckled Duck, Magpie Goose and Brolga. Many visiting birds are on their way between inland wetlands and the coast, but the lagoons no longer provide good breeding habitat for most species—apart from the Black Swan, Eurasian Coot, Purple Swamphen and Dusky Moorhen. Several wetlands are conserved, Llangothlin Lagoon as a game reserve for breeding and shooting ducks, and nearby Little Llangothlin, Billy Bung and Mother-ofDucks as nature reserves. Dangar’s Lagoon, near Uralla, although a Travelling Stock Reserve, is also managed for the preservation of waterbirds. However, the draining of the Tableland’s once-extensive temporary wetlands, both intentional and accidental and, as William Gardner shows, well under way in the 1850s,34 has left limited habitat for Latham’s Snipe, which each summer migrates to Australia from Japan. Woodland birds have declined in numbers since European settlement.35 Emus have largely disappeared from the Tableland. The Bush Thick-knee (the ‘curlew’ of the settlers) was once widespread and common but, as one observer near Walcha said in 1922, ‘since the coming of the fox they have become very rare’.36 Their haunting call was last reported at Inverell in 1958.37 The Squatter Pigeon once ranged further south than at present—to Inverell, Ashford and Bingara, for instance.38 The Paradise Parrot occurred in the north but may now be extinct throughout its range. The Whistling Kite was common near Walcha in 1919–20 and in Glen Innes in the 1920s, but it disappeared in the 1960s.39 There is no single cause for these declines. Ground-nesting birds, such as the Bush

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Wildlife Thick-knee and the Squatter Pigeon, are very vulnerable to foxes. The Paradise Parrot was probably affected by changed fire regimes, which reduced its food supply (grass seeds), and by intense hunting for the trade in aviary birds. On the other hand, a few native birds of more open, grassy habitat have increased in numbers since settlement. The Crested Pigeon is now common, and the Galah was absent at first settlement and not recorded at Glen Innes until after 1945.40 The once-migratory Pied Currawong now lives here year-round, and breeds in areas where exotic berry-bearing shrubs (such as hawthorn) provide a continuous food source. It also takes the eggs and nestlings of smaller birds, adding to a general decline among songbirds. The Little Eagle was recorded as new to Bundarra in 1920, and even in 1922 it had not reached Walcha.41 Its increase may be linked to its modern diet of rabbits.42 Introduced bird species are few. However, House Sparrows, Common Starlings and feral Pigeons occupy every town and some farms, the Common Mynah and the Spotted Turtledove have spread from the south-east as far as Tamworth, and a few Blackbirds live in Armidale and Uralla. Goldfinches are patchy on the croplands and pastures. The small populations of parrots and cockatoos from outside the region that are established in some towns—for instance, Little Corellas in Armidale—are probably descended from escaped cage-birds.

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REPTILES

New England is home to between 22 and 30 species of snake, and between 62 and 76 species of lizard.43 No exotic reptiles are established on the Tableland. The cold climate favours skinks and venomous (elapid) snakes, several of which bear live young rather than laying eggs. The spine of the Tableland appears to divide the snake and lizard fauna into eastern and western elements. No species particularly characterise the central Tableland.44 Turtle species are few. The Eastern Snake-necked Turtle occurs across the Tableland in all kinds of waterbodies, including farm dams, and the Murray River Turtle probably lives on the western edge.45 Bell’s Turtle is restricted to headwaters of the Namoi and Gwydir rivers. Its isolated populations may well turn out to be several distinct species or sub-species. Foxes dig up and eat the eggs of all turtle species, and both foxes and cats prey on lizards and snakes. Such predation may threaten the survival of some reptile species. F RO G S

Frog species in New England, all of them indigenous, apparently total 48.46 A dozen are confined to the high-rainfall eastern edge of the region (and usually down onto the coastal plain), and another set extends up the western slopes onto the west of the Tableland.47 Three sphagnum frog species (genus Philoria) have ranges along the eastern rim, each being found in high-altitude rainforest with persistently wet sphagnum or ferns.48 In the headwaters of rivers above

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the escarpment these frogs show interesting patterns of distribution, with each species inhabiting a distinct range. The Yellow-spotted Tree frog and the Peppered Frog, both once unique to the region, have become very rare or even extinct within the past 30 years. The numbers of some other species, including the Green and Golden Bell Frog and the Booroolong Frog, have declined and several with restricted distribution and specialised habitat requirements are listed as threatened in the region. These include the sphagnum frogs,49 the Pouched Frog that inhabits Antarctic Beech forest and the barred frogs (genus Mixophyes) found in rainforest streams. Perhaps the greatest global threat to amphibians in recent times is the pathogenic chytrid fungus that affects frog populations. In some cases it has caused extinction. In Australia, frogs that have suffered the greatest declines have typically been stream-dwelling species in upland areas where conditions seem to encourage fungal infection and transmission. Most New England species are relatively safe, because they live in non-stream habitats such as dams, ponds and lakes (tree frogs, genus Litoria); soaks and marshes (sphagnum frogs and brood frogs, genus Pseudophryne); or else in places intermittently free of standing or flowing water (the Burrowing Frog, Spade-foot Toad and toadlets of the genus Uperoleia). Some, for example the marsh frogs of the genus Limnodynastes and froglets of the genus Crinia, manage in a variety of habitats. Overall then, much of the Tableland has a secure and diverse frog fauna. The eastern rim is another matter. There, where some species are already threatened and where the greatest diversity occurs, the danger of chytridiomycosis is likely to be high.50 In addition, this is where cool-adapted, high-altitude frogs will be confronted by the reality of global warming. FISHES

All native fishes in New England have (or had) their major distributions in rivers either flowing inland into the Murray-Darling system or flowing coastwards in the Richmond, Clarence and Macleay.51 Most reach only the edge of the Tableland. No native fish species is unique to New England, although a few are now better represented here than in their former downstream ranges.52 Such species include the River Blackfish, which has suffered from degradation and siltation of its habitat, and the Climbing Galaxias and the Mountain Galaxias, both of which are sensitive to introduced trout and are now mainly confined to trout-free headwater streams. The Eastern Cod declined from the 1920s as a result of intensive agriculture and commercial exploitation. It now breeds in only a few sites in the Guy Fawkes, Nymboida, Boyd and Mann rivers.53 The Southern Purple-spotted Gudgeon, once widespread in the whole MurrayDarling system, now occurs only in a few sites near Inverell and Tenterfield, and in the Gwydir at Bingara. Its massive range reduction correlates, in space and time, with the invasion of the Mosquito Fish.54 The Tableland has had few commercially important native fishes, although the Eastern Cod was once heavily exploited and the Long-finned Eel is still

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Wildlife harvested in the Guyra-Ebor area. Large numbers of exotic cool-water fishes have been bred and released here for sport-fishing, most notably the Brown and Rainbow Trouts. There are many self-sustaining wild populations of both species, and one of Brook Char.55 The Redfin Perch, also introduced for sport, is similarly widespread. Trout, Mosquito Fish (which were introduced in a vain attempt to control mosquito larvae) and Goldfish (released from aquaria) are blamed for the reduction of several native fish species. However, trout fishing is a major sport in New England and commercially important. The trout hatchery near Ebor (begun in 1925 near Guyra, by Les Dutton, and moved to its present site in 1949) is the last example in New South Wales of government-sanctioned breeding, and of the release of non-native vertebrates to the wild. It is therefore the last gasp of the nineteenth-century acclimatisation movement which also brought to Australia foxes, rabbits and hares.

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C O N C LU S I O N

New England’s native vertebrate wildlife, while rich in species, now includes none confined to this region alone. The two distinctive species of frog are apparently gone, and the National Parks and Wildlife Service lists as threatened with extinction in the region 23 mammal, 24 bird, one reptile and seven frog species.

❈ The Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby, once common from Toowoomba to the Grampians, is now an endangered species, but persists in healthy numbers in the gorges and eastern escarpment of the New England bioregion. (photo: K. Vernes)

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The threat to mammal species—accounting for one fifth of the total (including 38 per cent of bat species)—is especially serious. On the other hand, populations of ground-dwelling mammals such as rock-wallabies, bettongs, potoroos and bandicoots survive wherever foxes are scarce. Exotic birds are not numerous and generally avoid native vegetation, leaving it to indigenous species. Also, the Tableland is free of the Cane Toad and exotic reptiles. Some native fishes have suffered from competition with trout, Mosquito Fish and Goldfish, but we have no other seriously detrimental exotic fishes, such as the European Carp. Change to New England’s vertebrate fauna following European settlement has come in phases. The first phase (1830–80) involved the establishment of sheep and cattle, the eradication of native predators such as the Dingo and an increase in the number of kangaroos and wallabies. The second phase (1880– 1920) saw the arrival of hares, rabbits and foxes, and with it the swift extirpation of ‘critical-weight-range’ native mammals and ground-nesting birds.56 In the third phase (1920–60), exotic mammals, birds and fishes established themselves in settled patterns, agriculture intensified, remaining tree and understorey cover was fragmented and removed on pastoral land, and many mammals and some birds disappeared from affected areas. The final phase (since 1960) has seen better control of rabbits, the systematic culling of kangaroos and the establishment of many conservation reserves around the edges of the Tableland. But native mammals, birds and reptiles continue to disappear from isolated remnants of native vegetation, and frog species likewise dwindle. The contrast between the impoverished wildlife community on the Tableland proper and the rich diversity still to be found within the forests on the eastern escarpment should remind us of the wildlife heritage we have almost lost. Some species will remain in the rural environment, and even in suburbs, for generations yet. Unhappily, however, the reserves that are meant to represent the ecosystems of the Tableland proper (rather than the eastern escarpment) are too few, too small and too disconnected to ensure that full communities of wildlife will live on into the distant future.

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CHAPTER 5 ❈

T h e Ve g e t a t e d L an ds cap e Pet e r C la rk e

Plants, both natural and agricultural, are fundamental to all New England life. Directly or indirectly, native animals depend on them for food and habitat. Agriculture itself benefits directly from native vegetation because it provides renewable herbage for sheep and cattle production, and indirectly because it ensures healthy soils and water, and limits insect pests. This chapter summarises what we know about the striking diversity of native vegetation to be found on the New England Tableland. More than this, it seeks to show that the vegetation is dynamic. While the people of New England depend on its plant life, the future of the plant life depends on the people. The Tableland is more or less a single bioregion, as defined by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service. As such it extends a little to the north of the Queensland border and to the south of Walcha, eastward to the escarpment, and with Inverell just beyond its limits to the west. Very roughly, a bioregion is an ecosystem in itself, having distinctive natural features and environmental processes, and contributing to the geophysical pattern of Australia as a whole. Native vegetation is ever-present in the rural landscape of the Tableland bioregion, from roadsides to paddocks and from stock reserves to national parks. Even within towns and villages, native vegetation is common in cemeteries and parks. While much of the bioregion has highly modified vegetation, resulting from more than 150 years of agriculture, there are remnants and reserves that still reflect the pre-European nature of its plant life. This can be gleaned from the accounts of John Oxley, who described the vegetation around Walcha in 1818, and of Allan Cunningham, who made

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the first known collections of New England plants, at Bald Rock Creek, in 1826–27. About 220 500 hectares (7.7 per cent) of the bioregion is managed as conservation reserves, mostly national parks and nature reserves. These areas tend to have nutrient-deficient soil (which is why they were not taken up for settlement) and vegetation types to match. However, rather than distinguishing sharply between ‘natural’ and ‘agricultural’ or ‘cleared’ areas, this chapter describes a continuum, ranging from conservation reserves to the more highly modified native pastures. F LO R A N OVA A N G L I C A

About 2000 native plant species are to be found on the Tableland. This flora began to be systematically described by the distinguished Government Botanist in Melbourne, Ferdinand von Mueller, who received specimens in the 1860s from Charles Stuart, a gardener at Clifton station, near Tenterfield, and from Alexander Crawford, of Moona Plains, near Walcha. Stuart’s work was recognised in the names, Pultanaea stuartiana, a rare pea, and Brachyscome stuartii, the more common Rock Daisy. Mueller also employed Herman Beckler as a collector, receiving from him many rainforest species from the head of the Bellinger and Macleay rivers. Some specimens were later sent to George Bentham at Kew Gardens, London, and Bentham published the first list of Australian flora in 1866. When the New South Wales Herbarium was established, collections from the region were contributed by Ernst Betche, James Boorman and Joseph Maiden and, in the 1920s, by the Presbyterian minister at Guyra, E. Norman McKie. More recently, the late John Williams made extensive collections of the flora, and both he and McKie had eucalypt species named after them (Eucalyptus mckieana, Eucalyptus williamsiana). The work of describing species continues today at the New England (Beadle) Herbarium at UNE, where the evolution and biogeography of the flora is being unravelled. By far the most numerous species are those that make up the ground cover— grasses and forbs (broad-leaved herbs), many of them widespread but several highly localised and/or rare. One of the most obvious in summer is the annual Paper Daisy (Xerochrysum bracteatum). Some widespread ground species emerge after disturbance and even then may be hard to notice. The yellow-flowered Fire Spurge (Monotaxis macrophylla), for instance, springs up in the months following bushfires. The New England Gentian (Gentiana wissmannii), on the other hand, with its long, bell-like flowers, green outside and sky-blue within, has been seen only a handful of times and always on wet ground near Cathedral Rocks, on the eastern escarpment. Approximately 250 native and 100 exotic forbs have been recorded in the bioregion, mostly in grassy or wetland vegetation, plus some 150 species of orchids and 100 species of sedges and rushes. More dominant in the landscape are the ubiquitous native grasses used for grazing. Some 250 grasses have been recorded, about 150 natives and 100 exotics. A dozen or so of the native grasses form the bulk of herbage used in animal production.

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The Vegetated Landscape The less palatable woody plants form the shrub and tree layers of the forests and woodlands. Eucalypts dominate these formations with some 50 species being recorded, several of them unique to the region—for example, the New England Peppermint (Eucalyptus nova-anglica), with its narrow, grey-green leaves and oval buds. Several species have been identified only recently, including the Bolivia Stringybark (Eucalyptus boliviana), which is restricted to the Bolivia Range between Glen Innes and Tenterfield, and the Gorge Red Gum (Eucalyptus sp. nov.). A sometimes prominent feature of New England eucalypts are the twenty or so species of mistletoes which parasitise trees and shrubs. Acacia trees and shrubs are another species-rich component of the flora, with about 70 varieties recorded in habitats ranging from rainforest (Blackwood, or Acacia melanoxylon) to dry rocky outcrops (Beadle’s Wattle, or Acacia beadleana). Beadle’s Wattle, its yellow blossom scattered along hairy stems, commemorates Noel Beadle (1914–98), foundation Professor of Botany at the University of New England, whose work greatly advanced our knowledge of New England vegetation. The six volumes of Beadle’s book, Students’ Flora of North Eastern New South Wales, with pictures by Lois Beadle, were published between 1971 and 1987. The lack of shrubs along many roadsides and nearby paddocks belies the richness of the shrub flora found in the more remote and rugged parts of the region. Some 350 species in 40 families have been recorded and of these 40 are listed as endangered.1 Remarkably, many species have only recently been

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❈ Acacia beadleana, a rare wattle restricted to rocky granite habitats at Gibraltar Range. (photo: J.J. Bruhl)

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described, such as the Torrington Boronia (Boronia inflexa ssp. torringtonensis), and a handful or more are currently being described by botanists at UNE. The richest spots for shrubs are the spectacular granite landscapes of Cathedral Rock National Park, Gibraltar Range National Park and Torrington State Conservation Area. Species restricted to one region are called ‘endemics’, or ‘narrow endemics’ if there are few or single localities. The Tableland contains an unusual number of endemic species, some in isolated habitats and others that have survived through glacial periods because of regional topography. They include the spectacular Silver Sword Lily (Neoastelia spectabilis) identified by John Williams in the 1970s. This rare lily-like plant, with its long green and silver leaves and white flowers, grows on rocky slopes near waterfalls and seepage lines in the Antarctic Beech forests of New England National Park. Its nearest relatives are the bog lilies of the Australian Alps, Tasmania, New Zealand and South America, their common forebear being one of the ancient species of Gondwana (for which, see Chapter 2). Rocky outcrops of the bioregion provide another setting for the evolution of species, where ancestral populations have become isolated and have diverged into highly localised types. The Heath Myrtle (Homoranthus spp.) includes a number of species restricted to areas of less than a few square kilometres each, such as the Bolivia Hill species (Homoranthus croftianaus) and the Torrington species (Homoranthus binghiensis). These are narrow endemics, each with less than a few thousand individual plants limited to a few square kilometres. Their survival depends on protection from feral goats and not too frequent fire. Introduced plants are prominent among the modern vegetation of the bioregion. Many are harmless, some are important for pasture production, but a few are invasive weeds detrimental to the economy and environment. No precise estimates are available on species numbers, but surveys of the grassy communities have recorded more than 150 introduced species.2 The most common are those typically found in any garden lawn or paddock, such as Cats Ear (Hypochaeris radicata), Dock (Rumex crispus) and Thistle (Cirsium vulgare), all of which thrive on regular disturbance and fertiliser, but otherwise dwindle. Of more concern are longer-lived invasive perennial grasses and shrubs that restrict pasture production and biodiversity. The most obvious have spread in the past decade along roadsides and stock reserves. These include African Lovegrass (Eragrostis curvula), Chilean Needlegrass (Nassella neesiana) and Coolati Grass (Hyparrhenia hirta), all of which displace native plants and pasture. Serrated Tussock (Nassella trichotoma) has also been reported recently on the Tableland. It is a ‘Weed of National Significance’ that is on the march throughout Australia and is a potent threat to grassland biodiversity. Woody introduced plants have been slower to invade bushland and roadside reserves but their prevalence has increased markedly in the last decade. Most of these woody weeds originate from gardens and hedgerow shrubs. They include Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), Plum (Prunus), Privet (Ligustrum vulgare)

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The Vegetated Landscape and Blackberry (Rubus ulmifolius), and are spread by birds such as the Pied Currawong, which thrive in the more open rural landscapes.

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PLANT SOCIETIES

Groups of plants that coexist in similar environments form characteristic types of vegetation. Far from having uniform vegetation, the bioregion has distinctive and diverse types, the major ones being rainforest, sclerophyll forest (swamp, wet and dry), grassy woodland, heathland, grassland and wetland. In the 1870s, William Christie distinguished shrub-dominated heaths, woodlands and forests, which grow on infertile siliceous soils, from the grasslands, grassy woodlands and wet sclerophyll forests that need the better soils derived from metasediments and basalts. Christie was struck with the way water collected in the granite country around his home. The broken-down rock, he said, retains a very large amount of moisture: so that if the wheels of a vehicle break through the outer crust, the argillaceous matter [sediment] from below spurts up and is soon worked into a bog, out of which it is almost impossible to be extracted. Such areas, where drainage is poor, feature wet heaths, sedgelands and wetlands, while rocky outcrops support species-rich scrub and dry heath.3 Rai nforest Closed canopied rainforests, listed as World Heritage, occur on high rainfall sheltered sites free from fire along the eastern edge of the Tableland. They are interspersed with the more open-canopied sclerophyll forests dominated by eucalypts. The boundary between these two types is thought to be shaped by fire, which at rare intervals opens the way for eucalypts to invade the rainforest and, conversely, by its long absence allows rainforest species to return, driving the eucalypts out. The coldest high altitude forests (cool temperate rainforest) are dominated by the ancient Antarctic Beech (Nothofagus moorei), a genus found as Tertiary fossils in Antarctica and still common in various parts of the Southern Hemisphere. These forests mainly consist of small-leaved trees and are structurally much simpler than other rainforests.4 At lower altitudes the rainforest becomes gradually warmer and Coachwood (Ceratopetalum apetalum) becomes more common, while even further down, beyond the bounds of the bioregion, more complex coastal subtropical rainforest takes over. Curiously, so-called ‘dry rainforest’ also exists in a patchwork along the dry, rocky slopes of the Macleay River gorges, next to the more fireprone gorge woodlands. These viney thickets are found in sites that have annual rainfall below that normally associated with rainforest (less than 900 millimetres each year). They survive apparently because of isolation from fire and an ability to reach down into deep water tables.

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❈ Cool temperate rainforest in the New England National Park, with the trunk of an Antarctic Beach (a remnant of Gondwana plant life) in the foreground. (photo: P. J. Clarke)

We t s c l e ro p h y l l f o re s t ‘Sclerophyll’ means hard-leaved. Wet sclerophyll forests are tall, with an understorey of tall shrubs, ferns and grasses. Variety depends on past management. Few stands of ‘old growth’ wet sclerophyll forest remain along the edge of the Tableland, but at Washpool National Park and in New England National Park, New England Blackbutt (Eucalyptus campanulata), Tallowood (Eucalyptus microcorys), Brush Box (Lophostemon confertus) and Blue Gum (Eucalyptus saligna) remain, standing more than 60 metres high in isolated valleys. The soil is shallow mudstone, common to the eastern edge of the Tableland. Even taller trees were once found on the deeper soils derived from basalt caps and softer shales. Here, the understorey species are often soft-leaved. On the wettest southfacing slopes they include Tree Ferns (Cyathea australis) and understorey shrubs associated with rainforests. On the more exposed northerly slopes these mesic (moisture-loving) species give way to a grassy understorey including grass trees and hard-leaved shrubs.5 Frequent fires and grazing have reduced the mesic shrub cover, and in fact many forests on the escarpment now have only a grassy understorey with a few scattered shrubs.6 Dr y s c l e ro p h y l l f o re s t The dry sclerophyll eucalypt forests are the most widespread forests on the Tableland. More than twenty communities have been described across the region.7 Sclerophyll forests standing on the most nutrient-deficient soils

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❈ Dry sclerophyll forest in Gibraltar Range National Park, between Grafton and Glen Innes, after burning. (photo: P.J. Clarke)

have a diverse and heathy understorey, varying from east to west because of differences in rainfall. The heathy forests to the east, where there is more rain, feature Peppermint Eucalypts (Eucalyptus radiata, Eucalyptus olida) while the western fall features Stringybark (Eucalyptus williamsiana, Eucalyptus subtilior). And again, along the Tableland’s western edge we find Black Cypress Pine (Callitris endlicheri), with its wide-spreading branches and light green foliage, and Tumbledown Red Gum (Eucalyptus dealbata), with its grey-green leaves and bark streaked in white, grey and coppery-orange. Legumes, Heath and Banksia families dominate the shrub layer, their short, narrow or needlelike leaves reducing water loss and conserving nutrients in these relatively harsh environments. Gr a s s y f o re s t s , w o o d l a n d s a n d g r a s s l a n d s Wet sclerophyll forests, typical of fertile soils, gradually change into more open, park-like, grassy woodlands in the colder and drier parts of the Tableland. These forests and woodlands have suffered greatly from dieback, which seems to have a long history on the Tableland (see Chapter 6). Albert Norton, who lived near Walcha in the 1860s, set down his observations from that time on what he called ‘the natural decay of indigenous forests’.8 In valleys and basalt plains the forests and woodlands give way to natural grasslands, wherever cold air drainage and cracking soils make life hard for trees. Soil, altitude and rainfall all seem to matter here. The basalt parts of the central

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❈ Grassy woodlands close to the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, with dry rainforest on the right. The grassland on the upper right is typical of the Tableland at the top of the gorges. (photo: P.J. Clarke)

Tableland support woodlands of Mountain Gum (Eucalyptus dalrympleana ssp. hepantha) on upper slopes, and of Snow Gum (Eucalyptus pauciflora) further down, with Black Sallee (Eucalyptus stellulata) on the valley bottoms. On less fertile sedimentary (trap-rock) country Silvertop Stringybark (Eucalyptus laevopinea) covers the ridges, while New England Stringybark (Eucalyptus caliginosa) forms grassy forests on the hillsides. On the lower slopes we find woodlands of Yellow Box (Eucalyptus melliodora) and Red Gum (Eucalyptus blakelyi), with narrow belts of River Oak (Casuarina cunninghamii) dangling long branches and grey-green leaves along the creeks and rivers. The deep alluvial soils in the Tableland’s broad valleys once supported natural grasslands, but only vestiges remain. The ‘montane’ or high-country grasslands featured tussocks of Snow Grass (Poa) and Kangaroo Grass (Themeda), with a rich diversity of other herbaceous species in between.9 He a t h s — Ro c k y o u t c ro p s Where granite rocks stand out in large masses, as at the monolithic Bald Rock, east of Tenterfield, shrubs and mallee eucalypts form archipelagoes in a sea of forest. The species living here are only occasionally found in the surrounding dry sclerophyll woodland and some are narrowly endemic. Remarkably, each cluster of outcrops, from Tamworth in the south to Stanthorpe in the north, has a distinct species composition, 25 types in all, ranging from mallee heaths to hummock grasslands of Spinifex.10 A unique feature of these outcrops is the miniature plant life nestled in the rocky depressions. Each microcosm can contain

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The Vegetated Landscape native bulbs, such as Wurmbea, for drought avoidance, together with tiny succulents, such as Crassula, for drought tolerance, and carnivorous sundews, such as Drosera, whose insect diet makes up for the paucity of nutrients.

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We t l a n d s — Sw a m p h e a t h s a n d l a g o o n we t l a n d s Two distinctive wetland vegetation types occur on the Tableland. On the eastern granite country there are swamp heaths where organic matter, or peat, has accumulated in poorly drained, infertile spots. The peat contains pollen records of vegetation change that extend back thousands of years and which have yet to be fully explored. These are ‘acid’ swamps and often have a drainage line where Sphagnum moss has gathered as a result of constant seepage, with sedgeland ‘fens’ further out and heaths on the drier margins.11 Sphagnum peatlands are confined to a handful of localities along the escarpment. Many are severely degraded because of cattle grazing and in most cases the Sphagnum moss has now vanished.12 They are now listed as endangered communities. The fertile basaltic soils of the central Tableland include a scatter of lagoon wetlands, with floating and emergent water plants (hydrophytes) wherever the water is still. In summer these wetlands are a haven for water birds, including migratory waders (see Chapter 4), but severe winters freeze the surface and the rushes die back during drought. Remarkably, however, they regenerate rapidly in the aftermath of droughts, thanks to a seed bank that germinates when moisture and temperature are right.13 Distinctive zonal patterns emerge

❈ Little Llangothlin Lagoon, north of Guyra. Montane wetlands, locally known as lagoons, often fluctuate from moist pasture to lake-like conditions with abundant plant and bird life. (photo: C. Cooper)

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as these lagoons wet up, the deepest parts having floating-leaved species and submerged water plants, while the edges sometimes form wet lawns of grasses, forbs and sedges. D Y N A M I C S O F V E G E TAT I O N

Fire is an integral part of the ecology of New England. Whether lit by lightning or by hand, most of our vegetation burns when ignited. In the spring and summer of 2002 over 130 000 hectares of heath, dry sclerophyll forest and wet sclerophyll forest burned, but new life emerged from the ashes as seedlings and old plants re-established. Single fires are part of a long-term fire regime that shapes the pattern and process of vegetation types. The effect varies. Wet sclerophyll forests and grassy woodlands are dominated by species that resprout after burning, whereas the rocky outcrops and dry sclerophyll include many species that are killed by fire.14 Fire intensity and season can both be important. Moderately intense fires in spring are more effective than lighter ones in autumn.15 Fire frequency is perhaps even more significant. Fires that are too frequent reduce species richness in all vegetation types, but on the other hand many years without fire can lead to the senescence and dwindling of some species. Preliminary fire-regime ‘thresholds’ are being established for the major vegetation types on the Tableland and we now know that in most communities biodiversity depends on burning at intervals of five years or more. The mosaic of vegetation across New England has been termed a ‘variegated landscape’.16 This pattern is caused, not only by complex environments (geology, soils, topography and climate), but also by the imprint of agriculture and dieback. Eucalypt woodlands and forests have been removed or thinned to promote palatable native grasses and improved pasture (see Chapter 6). The resulting man-made grasslands and woodlands form a continuum of vegetation ranging from introduced pastures through to grassy woodlands that are predominantly native. Cultivation and the addition of fertilisers have caused major shifts in the composition and diversity of native vegetation. Long-term grazing of native pastures leads to reduced diversity because of the selective removal of ferns, forbs, shrubs and climbers.17 Kangaroo Grass (Themeda australis), Native Sorghum (Sorghum leiocladum) and Snow Grass (Poa sieberiana) initially gave way to Wallaby Grass (Austrodanthonia spp.) and Spear Grass (Austrostipa spp.). More recently, graziers have been concerned to find that, because of overgrazing or frequent burning, these are being replaced in turn by the less palatable Wiregrass (Aristida ramosa) and Redgrass (Bothriochloa macra).18 However, much herbaceous understorey can still be found in lightly grazed and unfertilised places, such as roadside verges, backblocks and stockroutes.19 The herbaceous layer is moderately resilient to some forms of grazing, but shrubs and trees eaten by stock cannot always replace themselves, even when the animals are moved away. The natural opportunities for tree and shrub recruitment are rare. It needs warm summer temperatures, above average

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The Vegetated Landscape rainfall, soil disturbance and sometimes fire.20 Seed, whether from canopies or from the soil, also needs the right conditions. The availability of naturally occurring seed is one of the major drivers of woody plant recruitment for the Tableland. Unfortunately, there are very low levels of such seed. Even under optimal conditions, regeneration of trees and shrubs is now very rare on New England’s grassy woodlands.21

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C O N S E RVAT I O N

Much research remains to be done on the current state of vegetation on the Tableland. Of the major vegetation types defined at a statewide level we know that fifteen are found here, and the pre-European extent of these has been modelled to measure loss and conservation protection.22 Within these fifteen main types, many (perhaps more than 70) plant communities have been described, including the 25 granite outcrop communities mentioned above.23 We have a comprehensive survey and map of the Guyra 1:100 000 Map Sheet, and smaller scale maps, mostly 1: 25 000, have been produced for conservation reserves.24 But vegetation on other public and on private lands remains largely unmapped and no overall synthesis has been attempted. So it is difficult to assess conservation status at the plant community level. More broadly, however, the statistics are stark, with approximately 60 per cent of the landscape being cleared of woody vegetation. There are now no large (more than 1000 hectares) areas of grassy woodland left in the bioregion.25 There are no natural grassland reserves and only a few of the montane lakes are managed for biodiversity conservation. Most at risk perhaps are the Sphagnum peatlands, with only a handful of sites remaining intact and mostly unprotected from grazing, clearing and drainage. Whether trees, shrubs and the herbaceous layer can survive and replace themselves in the variegated New England landscape is now a critical question. Some forests, woodlands, heaths and wetlands remain close to their native state and can look after themselves, as long as they remain safe from frequent fires, grazing by feral animals and invasive plant species. But some remnants are small and isolated, with loss of connectivity preventing species from migrating from one to the other. Climate change may also threaten migration pathways. Vegetation which has been altered to make way for agriculture offers a more complicated challenge. But there is growing awareness of the importance of native vegetation and of the need to manage some of it for sustainable production, as well as for conservation. Conservation management will eventually go beyond the immediate issues of saving representative samples of vegetation types. The urge to clear is already abating and attention is being focused upon re-vegetation and management of remnants on farms, especially after the shock of dieback (see Chapter 6). A perennial concern is how best to manage remnants, especially as boundaries with intensive agriculture are often diffuse. There is no easy remedy, but fencing and the removal of feral animals, control of weeds and management of stock are starting points.

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Pasture management has long focused on maintaining and improving feed suitable for livestock. Some of this focus must now be shifted to the retention of all native plants on the Tableland, not just the ones palatable to stock. What we manage today is the result of a long evolutionary history. It is up to us to ensure that the vegetation of the New England Tableland also has a future.

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CHAPTER 6 ❈

L a n d a n d L i velih o o d Ni ck Re i d and Le w i s K a h n

The biophysical environment of any region dictates the use of resources, but resource use in turn affects the biophysical environment. In this chapter we explore that process for New England. In broad terms, this is an account of pastoralism. Temperate pastures for livestock grazing, high rainfall and mild temperatures first attracted Europeans to New England in the 1830s and 40s, and pastoral land use dominates the region today. There have been significant changes all the same. By the late nineteenth century, increased population and changes in the tenure and administration of land meant that parts of the region had been more closely settled by smallholders, depending on crops. And again, the advent of aerial fertilisation and reliable machinery for sowing pasture in the mid-twentieth century meant that livestock production reached a much more intensified level than hitherto. Soils and topography combine to form a mosaic of primary production zones across the New England landscape. Other things being equal, upper slopes have shallower soils and a dry micro-climate because of exposure and the continual downhill movement of water and other matter. Lower slopes and valley floors receive more water, soil and nutrients, creating deeper, more fertile and more finely textured soils, which hold water better and are altogether more productive. Also, floodplains benefit from periodic accessions of silt, clay and organic matter, and sometimes have underlying aquifers within reach of tree roots. Poorer country, including most of the coarse granite and acid volcanic landscapes, are suitable for the growth of fine wool (from wethers) and timber. In basalt landscapes and valley floors, meat production (beef and fat lambs), forage

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❈ Drenching sheep at Spring Hill, near Bingara, in about 1900. (photo: A. McLennan)

crops, hay and vegetables do well. These examples of land uses are typical of central New England. Varying temperature and rainfall mean that productive potential declines to the west and increases to the east. Grazing happens across all soil types but, apart from small areas of fodder, profitable crops (potatoes, for instance) depend on basalt-derived soils and alluvial soils in valley floors. G R A Z I N G A N D FA R M I N G

Today, the perennial grass base of New England pastures distinguishes the region from other parts of southern temperate Australia, where native perennial grasses have largely been replaced by introduced annual grasses. The native perennial grasses cope well with droughts, erosion, weeds and acid soils, but the varieties have changed under the impact of grazing. Tussock grasses such as Kangaroo Grass (Themeda australis), Barbed-wire Grass (Cymbopogon refractus) and Wild Sorghum (Sorghum leiocladum) have given way to more grazingtolerant species, such as Paddock Lovegrass (Eragrostis leptostachya), Parramatta Grass (Sporobolus creber), Wallaby Grass (Austrodanthonia spp.) and Redgrass (Bothriochloa macra). The usefulness of perennial grasses depends on management. The layout and size of paddocks, artificial fertilising and grazing patterns all make a considerable difference. But the use of superphosphate fertiliser, containing phosphorus, sulphur and calcium, has caused the most dramatic changes in New England. The sowing of exotic legumes and grasses in conjunction with superphosphate began in the 1930s, and aerial spreading was widespread by the 1960s.1 The benefits of rotating livestock from paddock to paddock according to plans that

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Land and Livelihood take account of the needs of both animals and plants have been proven only recently, with stocking rate increasing by 22 per cent, annual pasture production by 40 per cent and water-use efficiency by 45 per cent. Worm infections in Merino lambs at weaning are even more dramatically decreased.2 Improved pasture productivity and nutritional quality in turn allow for the more reliable breeding of both sheep and cattle. Various forms of agriculture, including pastoralism, now account for 69 per cent of the region. The great majority of enterprises are sheep and cattle, with beef cattle properties outnumbering sheep, except around Guyra and Uralla. In 2001, the region supported about 685 000 cattle and calves and 3 815 000 sheep and lambs, and produced 13 924 tonnes of wool, or 2 per cent of the national output. A recent survey of 356 woolgrowers in southern New England showed that half are essentially ‘range managers’ with larger properties (1380 hectares, on average), a high dependence on wool income (shearing an average of 4355 sheep each year) and a good deal of native pasture and bushland. A quarter are ‘meat producers’, depending on income from lamb and beef, with large (64 per cent of the farm) areas of sown pasture. A minority (9 per cent) are ‘high input wool producers’, managing mostly sown pastures (averaging 83 per cent of their land) and shearing large flocks (on average, 7300 head). The rest are the ‘lifestylers’ (17 per cent), who depend on off-farm income and whose properties (522 hectares on average) are largely native pasture and bush.3

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❈ Deeargee woolshed, near Uralla, one of the largest sheds in Australia. Built by A.A. Dangar in about 1869, its unusual design, with glass ventilators set high in the roof, is proof of the kind of ingenuity often applied to life on the land. (photo: I. Davidson)

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Pasture production in New England depends very much on climate, and the region supports both cool-season and warm-season pasture species. Coolseason species, which peak during November, include all the legumes (Trifolium and Medicago spp.); introduced annual grasses such as Oats (Avena sativa) and Brome grasses (Bromus spp.); introduced sown grasses such as Perennial Ryegrass (Lolium perenne), Fescue (Festuca arundinacea) and Phalaris (Phalaris aquatica); native annual grasses such as Blown Grass (Lachnagrostis filiformis); and native perennial grasses such as Wallaby Grass (Austrodanthonia spp.), Wheat Grass (Elymus scaber) and Weeping Rice Grass (Microlaena stipoides). Warm-season pasture species, which peak in January, include introduced perennial grasses such as Paspalum (Paspalum dilatatum) and native perennial grasses such as Paddock Lovegrass, Parramatta Grass, Redgrass and Wild Sorghum. In fact, most pasture swards are a mix of cool- and warm-season, and of native and introduced species. The Tableland’s wetlands and swamps reduce the grazing area for sheep because they harbour parasitic liver-fluke (Fasciola hepatica). Liver-fluke infections weaken the animals and can result in death from loss of blood. Adult fluke live in the bile ducts of sheep and cattle and their eggs are passed in faeces. Under wet and warm conditions, the eggs hatch to release the first larvae, which invade lymnaeid snails (both native and introduced Lymnaea spp.), re-emerging as tadpole-like cercariae that encyst on vegetation and can infect grazing animals.4 Sheep usually avoid wetlands and swamps, but in dry weather and drought they are drawn to moisture, exposing themselves to infection. Dingoes are another problem. They have been exterminated from most of New England but, along with wild dogs, they still live in the rugged wilderness and forests along the eastern escarpment. In the early phases of settlement wire fences, typically two metres high and of large-gauge netting, were erected to keep them from attacking sheep. However, the fences have not always been maintained and some areas remain unfenced, so losses continue. Many landowners in the east therefore graze cattle. Where sheep are run, graziers, with the help of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Rural Lands Protection Boards, run baiting and trapping programs, and continue to erect new fencing. Patches of wheat, maize and vegetables were grown on New England properties from the earliest times for household use and for sale. Following the Robertson Land Acts (1861), which encouraged closer settlement, the area under crops increased but most free selectors found it hard to make a living from their allotments. Most of the region cannot sustain cultivation on a regular basis, the soils being relatively infertile, of poor structure and easily eroded because of the undulating landscape and the quantity of sodium in low-lying subsoils. The opening up of more reliable and productive farming districts to the west of the Tableland, and the advent of rail transport, bringing copious supplies of good South Australian grain, meant that in due course regular cropping ceased on most properties. The conversion of farmland to pasture has been helped by the resilience of some of the native and introduced pasture species, which

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Land and Livelihood readily spring up after cropping. Today, there are forage crops on small acreages and better soils, and sown pastures have been established on much of the more productive country. But in most New England shires the area cropped in 2001 was only 1–2 per cent of farm area.5 Grain production and cropping businesses are largely on the western slopes, and on the basalt soil around Glen Innes and Inverell.

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H O RT I C U LT U R E , V I N E Y A R D S A N D T I M B E R

Temperate stone fruit ought to do well in the New England climate, but there have been problems. After World War One, soldier settlement began around Uralla and Armidale, with the settlers growing fruit for sale in Brisbane and Sydney. The project struggled from the outset because of poor planning and boron deficiencies in the soil.6 Also, after World War Two, horticultural districts were established closer to the state capitals (around Stanthorpe, for instance), and only a few of the Armidale-Uralla orchards now remain. Fruit and vegetable businesses have done better around Tenterfield, which is closer to the large markets in south-eastern Queensland, but otherwise the few enterprises across the region depend largely on local demand. Grape and wine production has emerged in a small way in recent years. Although there are frost and hail hazards, the Tableland climate is well suited to cool-climate white and red grape varieties. Just as grain crops on the Tableland failed to hold up against outside competition, so (rather later) has timber production. In the early twentieth century, there were many small sawmills scattered across the region, producing building material for nearby settlements. For instance, two mills were worked in the early 1900s on Newholme, a property near Armidale, harvesting the Stringybark on Mount Duval and selling the timber in town.7 But as transport services improved and terms of trade deteriorated, the number of mills dwindled. This decline was hastened in the 1990s as state forest was transferred to national parks, as easily won timber in publicly owned forests was exhausted and as competition increased from plantation-grown softwood and imported timber. Mills in Armidale, Glen Innes, Tenterfield and Guyra all closed during this time. There are still a number of smaller timber mills in New England, but only one large mill, Fennings, at Walcha. Most of the smaller mills produce fencing material, pallets and so on from trees on private land, whereas Fennings takes advantage of state forest to turn out large quantities of value-added, featuregrade timber products.8 About 32 per cent of the timber harvested in New England is trucked to mills on the north coast. In 2000, about 5 per cent of the region (170 000 hectares) was native forest managed by the state government for timber production, with a further 12 300 hectares of softwood timber plantations, mainly near Glen Innes and Walcha. However, a vast resource of largely unmanaged native forest exists on private land. The private timber resource is largely second-growth Stringybark, which has regenerated over the last century or more, after logging and

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❈ The late nineteenth-century saw various irrigation schemes throughout Australia. The great Moree Bore (851 metres deep) was completed in 1895 and during 1900–10 supplied artesian water to this experimental farm, which grew various grain crops, plus oranges, lemons, apricots, quinces, figs, almonds and mulberries. There was a similar experimental farm at Glen Innes. (photo: unknown)

the ringbarking of old-growth forests. These forests are either unmanaged or ‘high-graded’. In other words, they are managed only by the occasional selective removal of the best trees, which over time lowers both the value of the remaining resource and the genetic stock. I M PA C T O N T H E N AT U R A L E N V I RO N M E N T

Water is essential to agriculture, horticulture and forestry, but it is hard to measure the precise impact of such activity on New England’s water resources. Detailed records of the original distribution of wetlands, water quality and aquatic life are rare. The initial impact of European settlement was obviously severe, because much of the wetlands sedimentation can be traced to that period, when large flocks of sheep were penned in small areas close to permanent water. For instance, within ten years of first settlement over a metre of sediment had been deposited in Little Llangothlin Lagoon, near Guyra.9 The need to improve pasture and reduce sheep parasites also led to the draining of swamps on valley floors, a major transformation of the environment.10 Today, the state of most New England streams is fair to poor.11 The low relief and substantial weathering of the Tableland environment promote meandering streams that are easily silted up. Vegetation in and along streams and rivers has been affected by clearing, dieback and overgrazing, while nutrient and sediment accessions to streams have probably increased (from erosion, animal excreta and

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Land and Livelihood fertiliser drift). In turn, shading from fringing vegetation and natural debris is likely to have declined and average water temperature increased. This would mean that the production and decomposition processes in Tableland streams now depend less on external litter inputs and invertebrate grazers, and more on algae and herbivorous invertebrates.12 This in turn means a fundamental shift in aquatic ecosystem structure and function and, ultimately, poorer water quality. Astute graziers realise that clean drinking water is important for livestock performance. Similarly, rotational grazing can be a means of controlling the damage done to streams and farm dams.13 Such changes may well lead to an overall improvement in the health of wetlands and streams. Erosion along gullies and streams is widespread. In the catchment area of the Gwydir River alone, there are 180 kilometres of moderate to severe streambank erosion. In the Uralla area there are 76 kilometres of gully erosion.14 Around Uralla and Tingha such erosion is mainly a result of the destructive way mines were worked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 But elsewhere the main cause, once again, has been uncontrolled grazing, the trampling of soil and the stripping of vegetation by the water’s edge.16 Evidence of topsoil acidification resulting from tree clearing and livestock grazing has recently come to light. At Newholme, near Armidale, UNE student surveys since 1995 show a reduction of about half a pH (acidity) unit in the topsoil in going from wooded to open areas of native pasture.17 This means that the topsoil has become more acid with the loss of native trees, potentially lowering production from pasture species sensitive to acid soils. Other work has shown not only the beneficial effect of the canopies of certain eucalypt species (Eucalyptus viminalis, Eucalyptus melliodora) on topsoil pH in grazed pastures, but also the link between fertilised, commercially grazed pastures and increased topsoil acidity.18 Light tree cover may help in maintaining productive pasture soils. However, New England’s perennial pasture base and the mix of actively growing species throughout the year hinders the loss of nitrate from around pasture roots, with the result that the area suffers less from soil acidification than other parts of Australia.19 One heavily grazed and fertilised pasture on well-buffered, alluvial soils at Chiswick, between Armidale and Uralla, has been tested over 50 years for topsoil pH, with no sign of change.20 Less fertile, duplex soils on the same property have registered an increase in acidity over a 30-year time frame with the development of sown fertilised pastures. Over much of New England, ground-storey vegetation has suffered from clearing for sown pasture and cultivation, fertilising and selective grazing. Intensive management has reduced species numbers overall and changed species composition (see Chapter 5). Tree cover has not fared well either under European settlement. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trees were cleared from grazing country by ringbarking, with regular removal of sucker regrowth and ringbarking of saplings. John F. Campbell, a surveyor in the region between 1888 and 1903, recalled that most of the ‘pasture plants of the tableland . . . required direct sunshine for the true development of their fattening properties, hence the indifferent average carrying capacity of four acres to a sheep, as

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estimated by the pastoralists prior to the destruction of the timber’.21 (Four acres to a sheep equals 0.6 DSE, to use the modern formula, or ‘dry sheep equivalent’ per hectare.) Ringbarking became widespread in the 1870s, as free selectors and squatters began to improve land to which they now had more secure title, thanks to the Robertson Land Acts. The Taylor family had settled at Terrible Vale, near Kentucky, in the 1840s. Today Jon Taylor tells how by the mid-1950s they had reduced tree cover to about 25 per cent of the original, largely through ringbarking and the control of regrowth.22 Pasture improvement has done even more damage to trees. Exotic pasture grasses and clovers were originally introduced in the nineteenth century. Squatters spread White Clover, Perennial Rye and Cocksfoot seed by letting it trickle from a small hole in bags tied to their saddles as they rode across their runs.23 However, the advent of aerial fertilising and extensive sown pasture development from the 1950s, together with the resulting growth in stock numbers, meant that tree populations fell out of balance with the new land-use regime. In years of high rainfall (particularly the 1950s and 1970s), defoliating insect numbers built up on the remaining eucalypts, particularly those of pasture scarab beetles, which have a soil larval phase.24 These beetles flourished because of increased nutrition for the larvae in and around pasture roots. Under natural conditions parasitic wasps (scoliids, tiphiids), parasitic flies and

❈ Dieback: eucalyptus trees dead before their time. (photo: P.J. Clarke)

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Land and Livelihood smaller insectivorous birds help control pests, but the nutrient content of trees standing in fertilised and sown pastures probably increased, and high stocking rates and continued clearing eliminated the forbs and shrubs that provided habitat and food for these creatures.25 The former Walcha settler, Albert Norton, reported the widespread death of eucalypts early in the 1850s, so that outbreaks of defoliating insects and widespread tree death are probably a natural phenomenon.26 However, under natural conditions, eucalypt seedlings grow up to replace dead canopy trees. Now seedlings and sucker regrowth are killed by browsing sheep (cattle do less damage to eucalypt regrowth). The result is ‘dieback’, the decline and death from the 1950s of millions of eucalypts in the more intensely developed pasture lands of the lower parts of central and southern New England. Dieback continues today, and is extending its reach as new pasture is developed. Grazing and associated light burning also affect forests along the eastern escarpment. Forest and woodland grazing leases in those areas were once managed by regular late winter and early spring burning (probably following Aboriginal example), to promote grass growth and reduce woody understorey and fuel. The usual fire return time was two to three years, but in some seasons and areas graziers burned twice a year.27 Frequent fires and cattle grazing may maintain open, grassy understoreys but they also prevent shrub development and forest regeneration, reduce diversity in ground cover, shrubs and small trees, and decrease litter cover.28 Fire and grazing have thus had more impact on the structure and composition of escarpment forests and the variety of animal life than logging. The conversion of many grazing leases to national parks over the past ten years, and the increased logging of remaining state forest to supply mill quotas, will have major, and perhaps opposite, impacts on the escarpment forests.

77

THE FUTURE

The main drivers for resource use throughout New England will continue to change rapidly. In particular, the likelihood of global warming has several implications. Increased temperature will favour warm-season pasture species at the expense of cool-season species. Under the climate experienced for the last 100 years, the annual productive potential of warm-season species has been only 63 per cent of that of cool-season species. If warm-season species now crowd out the other, more productive species, overall pasture production may decline. This trend would be reinforced by the more variable rainfall patterns that are expected to come from global warming. Also, diets in developing countries are changing as income level improves. The use of cereals and roots is declining, whereas between 1965 and 1998 meat consumption increased by 150 per cent and milk and dairy products by 60 per cent. By 2030 the consumption of livestock products of all sorts could increase by a further 44 per cent.29 If the price of wool does not rise in line with the price for sheep and beef meat, more Australian graziers will turn to meat production. However, meat (or dual-purpose sheep) production demands better nutrition for greater rates of reproduction and growth, and that means

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changes in farm management to ensure better pastures. More graziers may adopt best-management practices, including periods of rest from grazing, and thereby reduce selective grazing and loss of palatable species and worm infections, while helping pasture growth. The use of fertiliser and legume species will probably change in response to climate variations. Cool-season species will probably be encouraged even more, to make up for new disadvantages to their growth. Already, the timing of fertiliser application is typically in autumn and winter to favour such species at a time of year when rain is scarce. There is room in New England for more timber plantations. Not only are extensive parts of the region suited to Radiata Pine (Pinus radiata), but recent research on native hardwoods shows that the higher-rainfall, southern and eastern zones might be used for eucalypt plantations.30 Shining Gum (Eucalyptus nitens) is the standout species, but several other eucalypts almost match it in terms of form, early growth and resistance to frost, waterlogging and insect attack. If global trading in carbon becomes a reality and native production forests continue to be transferred to the nature conservation estate, large areas of New England could eventually be given over to timber and pulpwood plantations. The consequences would be profound, particularly in the western catchment area, since most of the water for the irrigation industries in northwestern New South Wales rises in New England. Timbered landscapes retain and transpire much more rainfall than pastured catchments, so the farming and grazing communities on the plains and the whole ecology of the northern Murray-Darling Basin would be considerably affected. It is useful to think of the benefits we derive from the environment as ‘ecosystem goods and services’.31 Many such benefits, including agricultural commodities, have well-defined markets, but others do not. They include attractive, biodiverse landscapes, clean water generated from farming catchments and carbon sinks that stabilise the global climate. Some of the most vexed natural resource management issues in Australia arise from the question as to how farmers can be encouraged to continue providing ecosystem goods and services for the rest of us when there is no way of rewarding them and when they would do better commercially from other forms of production. Some farmers are prepared to be land stewards at their own expense, conserving natural resources and undertaking works for the public good. But with the best will in the world, it is not economically possible for farmers to provide all the ecosystem services now demanded by society, such as on-farm nature conservation, protection for healthy rivers or sensitive management of recharge zones to prevent salt outbreaks lower in the catchment. Mechanisms are needed to make it commercially possible for them to do so. The catchment management authorities being established across Australia will be at the forefront of developing equitable ways of balancing the public and private interest in ecosystem service provision. However, so far governments and bureaucracies have proved to be relatively poor at dealing with such complex ecological issues. Success may ultimately depend on the way the challenge is met by wider networks of interest and expertise, particularly by the agricultural industries themselves.

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Part 2: First Peoples

❈

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CHAPTER 7 ❈

Se e in g Re d : Mu s ing s o n Ro ck Ar t Ju ne Ro s s

The plaintive gwarr gwaaar of two foraging crows is the only sound that greets our arrival at Mt Yarrowyck Nature Reserve, half an hour’s drive west of Armidale. The pair swoop and swerve between the stringybarks, keeping a sharp eye on the activities of all who enter the area. More alert than military sentinels, the crows watch over the Aboriginal sites found on the slopes of the mountain. Like us, most visitors to the Reserve are keen to see one of the few publicly accessible examples of Aboriginal rock art on the New England Tableland. Our interest aroused by tales of totemic birds and ceremonial grounds, we take the marked track to the art site, edging along the fringes of a sandy plain, cleared for agriculture decades ago.1 The path climbs into more densely vegetated slopes at the base of the mountain whose rocky summit rises to more than 1200 metres, dominating the Gwydir River valley below. A single discarded stone tool, a small grey-green silcrete flake, provides tantalising evidence of past Aboriginal use of the region and sharpens our anticipation. The track broadens and brings us to a grassy clearing bounded by a group of massive granite boulders, their grey shapes rolled together in nature’s chance arrangement, so that their irregular forms lie balanced haphazardly on the western slope of the mountain. The granular surface of the boulders, etched by the erosive action of wind and rain over millions of years, provides an unlikely artist’s canvas. Before us, on the rounded underbelly of a boulder, nestled in an alcove, is the rock art—a frieze of red ochre motifs, glowing like warning lights against the powder grey of the substrate.

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❈ The tors that conceal the Mt Yarrowyck rock art are a typical geological formation in the granite country of New England. (photo: J. Ross)

Like other such assemblages on the Tableland, the rock art comprises a series of repeated motifs painted using a pigment of red ochre, and applied in thick bold lines with brush or finger. Motifs have been painted over each other in what appears to us a random composition. A small range of motifs is repeated across the rock face, with bird-like tracks the most numerous. The tracks have been arranged in scattered clusters or in vertical trails as if the birds had strutted up the sheer rock face. Enigmatic groups of short parallel lines, several rough circles, a cluster of dots and two small human-like stick figures add variety to the assemblage. The abstract nature of the motifs, where the artist has included only those aspects of the subject deemed essential to allow identification of the appearance and character of the animal (or idea), means that we can only speculate on the original meaning of the rock art. The ideas conveyed in the motifs are condensed into a sort of minimalist visual shorthand. Art historians might judge the art before us in terms of ‘the artist’s skill’ or the ‘realism of the motifs’, and with the ‘aesthetic presuppositions’ of today’s values, but these approaches to rock art seem inappropriate given the small assemblage of monochrome motifs, which lack frame, perspective or complex composition, and where a natural bush setting replaces hallowed gallery space.2 The apparently haphazard arrangement of motifs on the rock face might challenge concepts of the value of art, and the over-painting of some motifs with others might be viewed as a disrespectful disregard of earlier works.3 Art

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Seeing Red: Musings on Rock Art historians might rail against the difficulty of categorising the art or placing it in chronological order to be neatly labelled as an ‘ism’. Nor would they find in some dusty archive a long lost manuscript or Rosetta Stone that might contain the key to deciphering the symbols. Ethnography (written records of Aboriginal life) does not provide us with meanings for the motifs before us. Though distant descendants of those who created the paintings live in the region today, the abrupt interruption to Aboriginal traditional life resulting from the impact of nineteenth-century European settlement means that this art cannot be studied as an integral part of today’s Aboriginal culture as can similar work in some other parts of Australia.4 However, the importance of Mt Yarrowyck is recognised by today’s Aboriginal custodians, who consider the art site to provide a ‘tangible symbol of past cultural practices’, and many are actively involved in the site’s management.5 The original meanings of the art might be lost, but clues about the site and its role can be drawn from knowledge retained by the artists’ descendants. Little of past Aboriginal cultural practices and nothing of the rock art of the region was recorded by early pastoralists or by that pioneering group of explorers, religious ministers and hardy adventurers who provided so much invaluable information on customs and beliefs in other regions of the country. Without the aid of detailed ethnography or written records, and with a more functional view than that of art historians, we archaeologists look at the art mainly in the hope of discovering something of the lives of the people who painted the motifs on the rocks so long ago. Rather than viewing the art simply as an object, like a painting in a frame, as an art historian might do, we see the creation of art as a practice that results in the production of a tangible visual image. The image conveys a message to a viewing audience, provided they share an understanding of the artistic conventions the artist uses to communicate meaning.6 We can thus investigate the decisions past artists made in relation to what, how, where and when to paint, in order to help us to understand why they produced the art. Studying rock art in this way means that the clues we need are found, not only in the art itself, but also in the surrounding landscape and any artefacts found nearby, as these may provide evidence about the social context in which the art was produced. Questions spring to mind as we gaze at the art. Why are the paintings on this particular rock face and not on other boulders? How old are they? Were the motifs painted as an integral part of ceremonial rites or were they produced as part of more mundane subsistence activities? Is this an isolated example of rock art or are there similar sites secreted in other rugged corners of the Tableland? Who were these people producing paintings so long ago? Potential answers to these questions lie tangled in the art, the topography and the archaeology, waiting to be teased out. Investigation reveals that little can be established from the physical qualities of the artwork. The source of the ochre (haematite) ground to produce the pigment for the paint remains a mystery, and we cannot determine if it was traded over long distances, as in other parts of Australia, or if it was quarried

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❈ The birds’ feet and circle shapes painted in red ochre on the granite tor. (photo: I. Davidson)

from a local source yet to be discovered.7 Complex and expensive analysis of the organic content of the pigment, which might establish the binder used in the paint, has not been undertaken because the ochre at Mt Yarrowyck has sunk deep into the substrate, as ink sinks into chalk, leaving little pigment remaining on the rock face. As a result of this fusion, the motifs have survived far longer than any produced with today’s commercial paints might do, but there is no paint residue from which to take samples. In other rock art assemblages around Australia testing has identified animal fats, saliva or plant juices as pigment binders. The damp and acidic nature of the granite soils below the art panel at Mt Yarrowyck may also have played a part in denying us evidence. Any rough brushes of chewed stick or bark used to produce the paintings would have deteriorated rapidly, as would any organic material left on the sandy surface of the overhang, leaving no trace in the dirt below. However, we can discern two distinct ochre colours among the motifs— a strong clear red and a more subdued red-orange. The variation in pigment colour suggests to us that motifs could have been added to the panel on separate occasions, a conclusion supported by the difference in the weathering of the motifs, with the underlying motifs taking on a faded appearance, which contrasts with the brighter overlying paintings. So it seems likely that artists painted at Mt Yarrowyck on several different occasions and that this was an important art site for some considerable time. We discover further evidence in support of this conclusion when a close inspection of the art panel shows that some motifs have

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Seeing Red: Musings on Rock Art been over-painted using the underlying motif as a template. We infer from this evidence of re-marking that some motifs also retained their significance over the period of time that people were painting at Mt Yarrowyck. Repainting, remarking or rubbing of rock art motifs was a relatively common practice among Aboriginal people in other rock art regions, especially in central Australia and the Kimberley. These practices have been tied to ritual activities that activate or reinvigorate the power believed to be contained within the motifs.8 While we have no evidence of similar ritual practices on the Tableland, we can speculate that the paintings before us have been produced as part of ceremonial activities. Keen to establish when the art had been painted, we turn our minds to issues of time. Dating of rock art has long been problematic and, while science (today’s fix-all, if television murder mysteries are to be believed) has added to the repertoire of techniques we can use, most methods require a sample of pigment large enough to test, and this, as we have discovered, is not available at Mt Yarrowyck. Further, the motifs before us, because of their abstract nature, convey no clues about the period during which they were produced, as similar work does in other areas of Australia where subjects can be used as time markers: no extinct animal species such as thylacines to invoke a deep-time dimension; no long-lost boomerang style; no recently introduced spear head; no domesticated animals such as camels or sheep; no clothed European riding on a kangaroo-like horse. However, the friable nature of the rock surface on which the art is painted would have limited the time the painting remained visible, allowing us to place the art within a broad time scale. The rock surface is exposed to the elements and would have suffered from the extremes of the New England climate. Seasonal heat, wind, rain and frost expand and contract the substrate, continually eroding away small grains from the rock’s surface and causing a gradual weathering of the motifs over time—leaving us finally, some time in the future, with a blank rock face. Although the past rate of erosion is not measurable, we can safely assume that the paintings, which remain clearly visible, are unlikely to be extremely old. Trying some less direct methods, we wonder if the results of an excavation of the deposit under the art panel, made more than a quarter of a century ago, might provide us with information on the period when people used the art site in the past.9 We might then, very tentatively, suggest that this was also the period when the paintings were produced. In 1980 two small, shallow test pits were dug into the deposit under the art, but the only charcoal recovered proved unsuitable for carbon dating, probably because of decaying action caused by damp seeping into the overhang. Casting our net further afield for even more general dating methods, we try to recall whether any similar art sites in the region have been excavated. We find that two—one in the southern area of the Tableland and another on the north-west slopes—provide some relevant information on the timing of the production of rock art in the region. At Bendemeer, to the south of Mt Yarrowyck, sandy deposits covering the base of paintings within a rockshelter contain dateable charcoal showing that the paintings at that site might

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have been produced as much as 700 years ago. We know then, that people in the region were using art as a means of communication by that time. More tenuous evidence comes from the results of excavations at Graman, north-west of Inverell, where small fragments of red and yellow pigment were recovered, but as ochre has many uses in traditional life in addition to the production of pigment for painting rock art, we cannot reach sound conclusions from the presence of ochre alone.10 However, drawing our dating evidence together, we agree that, based on the weathering of the art surface and our knowledge of other art sites, we may reasonably suggest that the art at Mt Yarrowyck is likely to have been produced in the last 500 years or so. Although the excavations at the art site have not provided us with useful information on the dating of the motifs, they do provide evidence of another kind: evidence that allows us to envisage the way in which the site may have been used in the past.11 Only a handful of stone artefacts was recovered during the sieving of the excavated deposits. The conclusions drawn at the time of the excavation, based on the paucity of stone tools, seem plausible, and it is clear that the art site was used infrequently and even then not as a general living area. In contrast to Mt Yarrowyck, sites where people participated in traditional habitation activities are characterised by numerous and varied discarded stone artefacts used in the procurement and preparation of food and in the making of tools and wooden implements. As quantity and variety of stone tools is not evident, it would appear that people coming to Mt Yarrowyck in the past probably made short and infrequent visits to the art site. The remaining clues lie in the topography. Features of the surrounding landscape suggest logistical reasons for the paintings being found at this specific location, rather than on similar boulders further down the mountainside. A permanent spring fills a tiny, almost hidden, cola-coloured pool just a short distance below the art site. The pool, although small, would have provided a convenient and reliable source of water for humans and animals visiting the vicinity. Our brief survey of the surrounding area indicates that, in all but the wettest times, people needing a drink would otherwise have faced a considerable walk to a distant creek line. Another practical consideration that inhabitants of New England have to consider, both today and in the past, is the variable nature of the climate: freezing winter frosts, cutting autumn winds and the heat of summer. The fortuitous spatial arrangement of abutting boulders on which the art is painted provides an enclosed area with passive solar heating elements that would be the envy of many an architect bent on designing a place to ensure a client’s comfort. The irregular U-shape formed by the boulders provides a secluded place where people in the past might have gathered together, sheltered from the wind and warmed by the afternoon sun. On the other hand, the shallow dimensions of the painted overhang suggest to us that the art site would have afforded little protection from the sudden sharp thunderstorms that characterise summer rains on the Tableland. We remind ourselves that, despite the film industry’s attempts to depict all hunter–gatherers as cave dwellers, Australian ethnography

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Seeing Red: Musings on Rock Art indicates that Aboriginal people were unlikely to use rockshelters as permanent residences, preferring to camp on open, sandy sites. Such overhangs were more likely to be used opportunistically as temporary shelters during periodic visits. On reflection, however, there are obviously a multitude of locations throughout the Tableland where a similar combination of physical attributes coexist. Additional factors must have led artists to select Mt Yarrowyck, in particular, as a painting site. Snatches of recorded Aboriginal knowledge provide grounds for speculation. Further to the east, high peaks such as Point Lookout and The Pinnacle have mythical stories associated with them.12 Other summits such as Round Mountain, where specific knowledge of related stories appears to have been lost, still retain significance for Aboriginal people today as ‘strong’ places.13 The absence of art sites at any of these other high altitude locations prevents us from drawing any necessary link between the mythological significance of art sites and mountain summits in general. Similarly, there does not appear to be a clear patterning in the distribution of Aboriginal art sites on the Tableland that might provide us with a key to understanding the role of the rock art in past regional societies. Rather, the patterns are varied. Rock art is found in closely related site clusters at Ottley, Graman, Yetman, Gravesend, Goonoowigal, Torrington, Moonbi and Bendemeer, while in contrast, single isolated sites are dotted in what appears to be a random manner at Copeton, Guyra, Aberfoyle, Warialda, Invergowrie and other widely separated locations. Neither is there a consistent pattern in the association of rock art sites and Bora grounds on the Tableland. A Bora ground or earth circle, believed to be used as part of initiation ceremonies, was located in the valley about a kilometre to the west of the Mt Yarrowyck art site, but it was destroyed in 1959.14 The proximity of the Bora ground to the art site suggests that at one time, at least, people were coming to the mountain to perform ceremonies, but we cannot be sure that the painting activities were undertaken at that time. While there are a number of other Bora grounds associated with rock art sites on the Tableland, the two site types occur independently of each other, so that we cannot tie the two together in a neat ceremonial bundle. In reviewing what we have discovered about the rock art on the panel before us, we find that we can speculate that ancestors of today’s Aboriginal custodians probably produced the paintings some time in the last 500 years, during infrequent visits to Mt Yarrowyck. The subjects they painted and the manner in which they produced them are typical of rock art assemblages spread across the Tableland. We can further surmise that the paintings were produced during unknown ceremonial activities, which may or may not have been associated with the lost Bora ground. We can appreciate the choice of location, which would have provided both sustenance and a comfortable and congenial environment for such activities. What we can never know with any certainty is the meaning of the motifs. But, just as we can while away hours deliberating over the mysteries of a piece of contemporary abstract art, so we can enjoy pondering the mysteries of the red motifs painted on the rocks so long ago.

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CHAPTER 8 ❈

Ab o rigin a l A rch aeo lo g y Wend y Be c k

The song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth, the ritual useless, and the tribal story lost in an alien tale. Judith Wright, ‘Bora Ring’ (1946)1 Observers of New England such as the poet Judith Wright have long been attuned to the traces of past Aboriginal inhabitants through their own experience of living in the land. As these lines from Wright’s verse attest, such men and women know how to read the landscape. Along with other experienced observers, New England archaeologists, through their own fieldwork and experience, have also learnt to heed and make meaning of subtle marks such as the Bora rings. The archaeological meaning of such traces is written mostly as archaeological accounts—as ‘alien tales’—in the sense that archaeologists do not try to replicate the hunter–gatherer meaning, or the landscape’s ‘tribal story’. However, the archaeological story of New England, as it has been pieced together since the 1960s, reveals the distinctive character of Aboriginal hunter– gatherer peoples’ past inhabitation of the landscape. In this chapter, I have chosen three common elements of the regional archaeological tales—ceremonies, cold climates and group movement—and I focus on their spatial aspects, rather than on their chronology or archaeological artefacts. My aim is to build up a picture of archaeologists’ evolving construction of the regional cultural landscape. This chapter is in three parts: first a

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QUEENSLAND 0

Tweed Heads

50 Kilometres

Byron Bay

yre

t cIn

ce Claren

Ma

er Riv

COASTAL r ve

Ri

NORTHERN

ir

yd

Gw

WESTERN River

TABLELANDS ZONE Black Mt.

Bora grounds Ebor

Recorded in field survey Reported in survey

SLOPES

Recorded in the literaure

Walcha

Kempsey

Quirindi Stone arrangements Recorded in field survey Reported in survey Recorded in the literaure

❈ Bora grounds and ceremonial stone arrangements in New England

brief description of the New England landscape, its archaeological sites and the kinds of societies that shaped them; then a sketch of the regional themes established by the work of archaeologists Isabel McBryde and Luke Godwin, together spanning the 40 years or so since archaeological studies began in New England; and, finally, a description of the issues I think are important for the future of New England archaeology. Most of the archaeological evidence so far discovered in New England is thought to be, in Aboriginal terms, relatively recent, that is, dating from within the last 9000 years or so. Most of the dated sites fall within the last 5000 years, despite the fact that eastern Australia was probably occupied much earlier in time. The lack of older sites is due both to a lack of suitable preservational environments and, perhaps, to the smaller human population in the Pleistocene (before 10 000 years ago). The oldest hunter–gatherer inhabitation of the region remains unknown at the present time, but it is likely that scattered remains of earlier settlements and social networks may yet be found. The present lack of dated sites precludes a detailed understanding of changes over time, leaving us with only speculative, but perceptive, models.

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Between 30 000 and 10 000 years ago, available data show that the whole of the south-eastern highlands of the continent, including the New England Tableland, was much colder than it is now. The Tableland would have consisted of cold steppe grassland, with some shrubs and eucalypt woodland in protected locations (see Chapter 5). It would have been a fairly harsh environment, with few food resources. By 10 000 years ago temperatures could have been warmer by an average of two or three degrees, which may have led to an increase in tree cover. After 5000 years, it is possible that the tree cover opened out and grasslands began to develop.2 The nature and rate of specific changes in the environment is another area for further research, which could clarify both the temperature levels and the seasonal movements of people in the past. A RC H A E O L O G I S T S ’ N E W E N G L A N D

Isabel McBryde’s Aboriginal Prehistory in New England: An Archaeological Survey of North-eastern New South Wales was published in 1974.3 From 1960, McBryde had systematically recorded hundreds of archaeological sites and excavated several. This book was the first (and is still the only) study of the archaeology of the region, and was mostly written while the author was at the University of New England. Indeed, it was the first systematic archaeological study of any region in Australia. New England therefore has not only a distinctive archaeological character, but also an important place in the history of Australian archaeology—as it does in the history of Australian geology (see Chapter 2).4 McBryde defined the study area as ‘north-eastern New South Wales, from the latitude of Tamworth and Kempsey, north to the Queensland border, and from the coast westwards to the Nandewar Ranges and the western slopes of the Northern Tableland’.5 In another publication she explained that: ‘In defining our geographical area we have interpreted New England broadly . . . but conform to the bounds envisaged by the late nineteenth and twentieth century New England New State movement’.6 (For this movement and its territory, see Chapter 20.) McBryde used the terms ‘north-eastern New South Wales and ‘New England’ interchangeably. McBryde clearly understood that there were three contrasting environmental zones in the region (coast, Tableland and western slopes), but she conceived of the region in a relatively abstract way, rather than consisting, for example, of specific Aboriginal territories. The zones existed in contrast with each other, and each was perceived as including several tribal territories (in recent pre-European times, Bundjalung, Gumbaynggir, Dunghutti, Aniwan, Yugambul and Gamilaraay).7 The New England archaeological region is large enough to encompass a range of possible social organisations and individual networks. For instance, general studies of hunter–gatherer movement patterns suggest that individual exploration ranges were likely to be no more than about 300 kilometres, and distances of this scale are feasible within the region.8 McBryde never put the specific boundaries of the three zones on paper, but a version which seems to accord with her geographic categories was mapped by James Belshaw and is

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❈ Stone artefact (small blade) in the landscape near Armidale. (photo: J. Appleton)

❈ Axe grinding grooves near Armidale—the result of many years of sharpening blades of very hard stone against softer sandstone. (photo: J. Appleton)

shown on page 89.9 Later archaeologists have used similar boundaries. Thus ‘New England’ was created as an archaeological region. The most recent geographic assessment of north-eastern New South Wales divides this area into three bioregions (North Coast, New England Tableland and Nandewar), which correspond fairly closely to McBryde’s three zones. This has had implications for how the archaeology of the zones has been perceived, because each zone has to be understood and explained in the context of the others.

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A RC H A E O L O G I C A L S I G N AT U R E S I N N E W E N G L A N D

Archaeological signatures are the human landscape traces left behind by previous inhabitants. They can be so subtle that untrained observers do not notice them. In New England, the signatures are archaeological objects such as stone artefacts, earth circles, grinding grooves and painted rock surfaces, each with its own spatial context. All the inhabitants of New England in the pre-1788 past were hunter–gatherers and, based on what we know of other hunter–gatherers, we can assume that they lived in relatively small groups (less than 25 people), and were self-sufficient for food and other major resources within each social territory. Larger groups of up to several hundred individuals might come together for particular social occasions, such as group hunting or ceremonial activities. Movement was not random but socially determined within environmental limits. For example, access to water was a prerequisite for journeys of any length. Labour was probably divided according to age and sex, food was shared within the family, and kin relationships were paramount. The relationship between the landscape and hunter–gatherers is now seen by archaeologists as consisting of places where people lived and worked, of tracks and pathways along which people moved between these sites, and of areas infrequently or never visited. (In this respect, Aborigines were unlike settled farmers, who tend to have plots of land with continuous boundaries, determined by houses, gardens and towns.10) There are five basic types of archaeological traces or ‘sites’ occurring in New England. Domestic sites exhibit open stone artefact scatters, isolated stone artefacts, shell middens and rock shelters with occupation deposit. Ceremonial sites include natural mythological sites and exhibit carved trees, Bora and ceremonial grounds and stone arrangements. Art sites exhibit stone engravings and rock shelters with art. Industrial sites have scarred trees, waterholes or wells, and axe grinding grooves, fish traps and quarries. Burial sites include human bones. Multiple site-types can also occur at a single place. Not all sites are preserved or visible on the surface, and not all areas are equally surveyed or sampled. Surface sites are difficult to date and may also be the result of various periods of use. All the same, analyses of these places have produced a basic archaeological knowledge of the New England region. The movement of people within the region is reflected in the nature and distribution of sites—for example, in the distribution of raw materials (such as stone for artefacts) among the sites—and in the landscape. In places where movement among areas was rapid, camp sites will be mainly along access routes, taking little account of environment and showing little re-use and little variation in type. Stone artefacts will be quickly made and discarded, irrespective of the distance from the quarry source.11 Movement in and out of the region can also be assessed from the movement of raw materials. The recording and description of archaeological sites require time and energy, and the database builds up only incrementally. In 1960, the New England database consisted of two sites, but by the end of McBryde’s fieldwork it included

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Aboriginal Archaeology 250 and by 1989, after the formal registration of sites was firmly established, it had expanded to 1291.12 While more recent estimates for the whole region are not available, a recent summary of site numbers in a small (about 10 per cent) cross-section of the region recorded 753 sites.13 The number of sites in the region must now be more than 7000, with many others as yet unrecorded. We still do not have a sophisticated understanding of the distribution of sites in New England, partly because of a lack of systematic regional site survey coverage. Since the 1990s most archaeological fieldwork (survey and excavation) has been the work of consultant archaeologists assessing the environmental impact of proposed development, rather than of academic researchers. Such work has not generally been incorporated into archaeological academic research because of difficulties in accessing unpublished reports. However, a recent research project has attempted to compile all site data for Gumbaynggir territory, from published and unpublished sources, and geographic modelling is underway.14 The figures are difficult to interpret, but they certainly seem to disprove the earlier idea that there is little to be discovered on the central Tableland. The need for more fieldwork is clear. McBryde discovered what are still the oldest known archaeological sites in the region.15 Her excavations on the coast revealed that the oldest known site, at Seelands rockshelter on the Clarence River, was first occupied about 6500 years ago. The oldest archaeological dates obtained for the Tableland itself are from two rockshelters at Bendemeer, the older of which was occupied from about 4300 years ago, while excavations on the western slopes, from rockshelters near Graman, revealed the oldest of all, dating from 9000 years ago.16 These dates still represent the oldest dated archaeological layers for each of the three environmental zones. All fall within the Holocene, or the period since the last Ice Age, when Aboriginal populations are thought to have been highest. The majority of sites recorded on the landscape have not been dated, but are assumed to date to within the last 3000 years or so.

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CEREMONIES

Places of ceremony and ritual are very evocative of spiritual power. Judith Wright’s poem ‘Bora Ring’ describes the kind of memories these places hold, at least from a European perspective, and the landscape traces they leave behind: Only the grass stands up to mark the dancing-ring: the apple gums posture and mime the past corroboree, murmur a broken chant. Ray Yarry, an Aboriginal elder, has described the invisibility of New England Bora rings, in information passed on to him by his elders: They used to just tell me like where they were but they wouldn’t take me near it. It was a secret they wouldn’t even show us or wouldn’t allow us to—we could’ve been walking over it and I wouldn’t even know, see. It’s

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❈ Tree carved with ritual designs, near Bingara. (photo: J. Appleton)

only just where they had it cleared years ago—real bare, but you see a lot of grass grew over it, you can’t see ’em. It’s just sort of like on that ground there, they just made a ring there, just a flat ring.17 Bora rings can be difficult to see on the ground. But an archaeologist’s perspective on landscape features, such as Bora rings, involves interpreting these features so as to understand where, when and how they occur in the landscape and how they fit into a wider pattern. McBryde mapped and recorded 80 ceremonial sites (see map on page 89), including Bora rings and stone arrangements, describing them as a ‘common archaeological feature of the region’, and they have remained a constant theme of archaeological studies.18 For example, a 1989 study of the Site Register noted that a high proportion (30 per cent) of Tableland sites were ‘ceremonial’.19 Indeed, one suggestion in the 1980s was that occupation of the Tableland at over 1000 metres altitude reflected male ceremonial use only.20 Luke Godwin has analysed the placing of ceremonial sites (defined as art sites, Bora rings, stone arrangements and carved trees) on the Tableland and western slopes, and has found that they were unusually frequent, especially on the Tableland. Out of a total of 129, 49 were clustered, with three or more within five kilometres of each other, forming six clusters in all. Godwin suggests that this clustering could be related to the regular use of these places by relatively large groups of people, compared with ‘local’ sites used by individual clans.21 In summary, ceremonial Bora rings are a distinctive part of New England archaeology and research suggests that they occur both singly and clustered together with other site types (such as art sites and stone arrangements). All seem relatively recent. We can still see some of them, circles of earth raised up to half a metre around their edges, in sites such as Tucki Tucki and Minjungbal,

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Aboriginal Archaeology but many more have been destroyed by white settlement. Clusters of sites may also be an expression of territorial claims to land.22 This gives us a picture of a region unusually rich in the physical traces of ceremonies, which in turn provides another kind of understanding of the way the place now called New England was once inhabited. There are very few surviving hunter–gatherer ritual monuments anywhere in the world, so Bora rings are significant for archaeologists everywhere. In Australia they occur only in New South Wales, south-east Queensland and southern Victoria. In short, the numerous New England Bora rings are an unusual and important part of the Aboriginal spiritual landscape.23

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C L I M AT E

The second theme in New England archaeology is climate. McBryde stressed the harsh environment of the Tableland compared with that of the other two zones, a harshness obvious not only in the region’s archaeology, but also in the historical record and oral traditions. The Tableland landscape seems to have been severely cold and relatively unproductive, whereas the western plains offered grass seeds and kangaroos, and the coastal strip had the rich resources of estuaries and sea.24 The Tableland’s cold climate was once considered by European observers of Aboriginal life as a major obstacle to year-round occupation, resulting, so it was thought, in a sparse distribution of sites compared with other zones.25 This is still a common understanding, but Godwin argues differently.26 He has come to the conclusion that the Tableland was not abandoned in winter, but occupied all year round by small, mobile groups. He shows that the severely cold temperatures and the frequency of frosts were very similar from the Tableland to the western slopes, making westerly movement to escape frosts unlikely. Temperatures in the gorges were similar, so that eastward movement to avoid the cold was also unlikely.27 He also points out that local factors, such as cold air drainage, might have had very important effects on temperature. Further research backs up his contention that there is little difference in cold temperature extremes in the region. The coldest regional (rather than township) mean minimum monthly temperatures are about –3°C on the North Coast bioregion and – 4°C for the New England Tableland and the Nandewar bioregions.28 Godwin’s second line of evidence comes from his re-examination of the ethnohistorical literature. He has found in the writings of travellers and station owners a number of consistent, reliable references to the presence of Aboriginal people in the Tableland during autumn, winter and spring. He also argues for the existence of occupation sites from the evidence of open stone artefact scatters and excavated artefacts above 1000 metres. Meat resources, especially macropods, were not sparse on the Tableland in winter. Daisy yams (Microseris scapigera) were possibly an important starchy tuber food, as were the resources of wetlands and lagoons during the winter months.29 Altogether this evidence seems to indicate that the cold climate of the Tableland was not a barrier to year-round settlement. Comparison with other regions is useful here. Hunter–gatherers are known to have lived successfully year-round in very cold climates, such as glacial Tasmania

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and Pleistocene Europe. In Tasmania, Parmepar Meethaner rockshelter was inhabited from 34 000 years ago, including times when the Cradle Mountain glaciers were only three kilometres distant.30 There are a number of other rockshelters in Tasmanian periglacial settings, with a cold, arid steppe environment, and similar cases of subsistence based on hunting wallabies. Hunter–gatherers could survive in cold climates—they had skin cloaks and footwear, and artificial shelters and natural rockshelters for protection from the cold. M OV E M E N T

The hunter is gone: the spear is splintered underground: the painted bodies a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot the nomad feet are still. The third theme in New England archaeology is group movement; that is, scheduled large-scale movements by most of the population of an area—the ‘nomad feet’. McBryde described the region as one with mobile populations moving east and west off the Tableland in winter and returning in the warmer months, with some movements related to ritual gatherings on the Tableland. In arguing against this view, Godwin has studied recent group movement, as an important means of accessing social and physical networks. He has constructed his own models, mostly from ethnographical and linguistic evidence.31 He concludes that group movement was directed both onto and away from the Tableland during winter and summer, and that it was dictated by more than environment. Sub-coastal groups moved backwards and forwards through the gorges and, on the Tableland itself, small groups travelled westward for ceremonies in summer. Godwin has also analysed economic movement. Archaeological material, including detailed analysis of the surface stone artefacts, suggests that the gorge country was used as a transit area, while the Tableland was exploited by hunter–gatherers who concentrated their activities in areas of high food-resource potential. Thus, the largest and densest scatters of stone artefact are found on good soils, or close to a range of soil types, and not necessarily around sources of stone. For Godwin, the significance of group movement lies in its implications for social networks and social transformations. He argues that, since 5000 years ago, changes in the way people collected, assessed and shared information about their surroundings may have transformed social organisation and language. They might have led to more inward-looking communities with clearer hierarchies, reduced geographical boundaries and produced a greater stress on separateness.32 This would have meant reduced group movement between the coast and Tableland—for social rather than ecological reasons. Godwin argues that there were two recent social networks, one on the coast and hinterland and the other on the Tableland and slopes. Linguistic studies, however, suggest that the language spoken by Tableland people was more closely related to the coastal languages than to the western slopes languages, a pattern that does not seem to correspond to the social groupings.

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Aboriginal Archaeology Godwin’s account shows how archaeologists have moved away from environmental explanations for the evidence they find, so as to give new weight to social factors, although archaeological data on the latter are sparse. For this region, new ideas about group movement now encourage us to imagine a landscape characterised by social ‘regionalisation’, with groups increasingly distinct over time.

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Only the rider’s heart halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word that fastens in the blood the ancient curse, the fear as old as Cain. So it seems that hunter–gatherers have inhabited the New England region for thousands of years. They are the ‘sightless shadows’ of Judith Wright’s poem. Speculative history suggests that the Tableland has been most heavily occupied from about 4000 years ago. At this period coastal peoples from the east and south-east migrated to the Tableland and, over time, formed relationships with western peoples. The work of archaeologists over the last 40 years has contributed to the identification of three landscape themes that make the region of New England distinctive. These may be summarised as ceremonial activities, patterns of behaviour associated with living in a cold climate, and group movement. The coast, the Tableland and the western slopes are unlikely to have been completely uninhabited at any time of year, although some places may have been infrequently visited. The Tableland was cold in winter, but not abandoned, and its inhabitation shows clear patterns. Activities in the landscape were focused on where people lived and worked (quarries, camp sites and ceremonial sites), with a preference for places with clustered resources, these being linked by tracks and pathways. Food and other material resources were exploited according to their availability and the movements for other purposes. Some ceremonial places were probably visited and re-visited by large groups, being parts of a landscape imbued with meaning. Archaeology can never recover the specific meaning of the Bora rings to the people that made them. The song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth. Maisie Kelly, a New England elder, once remarked that archaeologists might dig up all the sites they could but they would never find Aboriginal culture there.33 Archaeology cannot recreate particular songs, dances and dancers. Its goal is different. By using traces in the earth, archaeologists can look at how Bora ring precincts developed and were constructed, how they provided the localities for social interaction, for large-scale gatherings of people, for the production of feast foods and for long-distance exchange of goods such as stone axes. Archaeology’s strength is that it documents the physical presence of people in the past. Every site reminds us of the previous residents of the landscape.

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CHAPTER 9 ❈

T h e Fro n tier Davi d And re w Ro be r t s

In 1831–32 the Australian Agricultural Company laid claim to over half a million acres along the Peel River. The squatters it dislodged, and those who came thereafter, climbed the Moonbi Range and fanned out across the New England Tableland. Others arrived from the coastal valleys in the east. These men commandeered great swathes of land, though to begin with they lived in small, dispersed groups, scratching a habitation amidst the unfamiliar. They acted rapidly, entirely on their own initiative and without the support or permission of colonial administrators. Their stations were manned, stocked and built on, their boundaries were marked and, when required, their possession was defended by force. In these early years, frontier New England was insecure, contestable and potentially volatile. For the existing inhabitants, the strangers’ arrival was not unannounced. Over a generation or more there had been news from the south, and from across the ranges in the east. Curious and valuable objects had reached the Tableland through extensive and ancient trading networks. These were followed by strange beasts, stolen by convict deserters or strayed from southern herds.1 Great changes were already underway in New England before the first settlers arrived, as Aboriginal society wrestled with new explanatory frameworks to account for the new phenomena. There were also catastrophic smallpox epidemics. Colonists found on the Tableland an Aboriginal society already deeply wounded, and in a state of tumult and transition.

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The Frontier QUEENSLAND

Goondiwindi

99

Stanthorpe

Texas

ir

LOCATION

e

nc

Warialda

ve r

Bolivia

Deepwater

Gwyd

are Cl

Moree

Wellington Vale

Ri

Bluff Rock

Ashford

R AN G E

Tenterfield

Dundee

Glen Innes

Inverell

DIVI

Ollera

Guyra Ollera

Narrabri

Barraba

Ebor

mo

Na

Armidale i

Saumarez er Riv

Boggabri

Uralla

Manilla Bendemeer MOO

M a c le a y

RAN

GE

Walcha

T

Tamworth

R.

GR

l

Werris Creek

Kempsey

EA

Pe e

Liverpool Plains

Gostwyck Salisbury

r ve

Gunnedah

Darkies Point Cooney Creek

Ri

NBI

Mihi

Coffs Dorrigo Harbour

cean

r

Rive

Ben Lomond

Bundarra

Grafton

DING

Bingara

Pacific O

Myall Creek

Port Macquarie Land above 500m Land above 1000m 0

100

Sites of conflict ‘Trouble’

Kilometres

❈ Sites of frontier violence in New England, 1830s and 40s.

FIRST MEETINGS

The British Empire formally appropriated New England long before its agents came to locate and identify it. Explorers such as Oxley and Cunningham eventually brought the Tableland into the perceptual world of the colonists, marking routes by which it could be accessed and recording observations that registered the region in the colonial consciousness. Through their maps and literary descriptions, they imposed the first stage of order on the distant, alien landscape. It was the task of the early squatters to give substance and structure to that conquest. This they achieved first by veneering the Aboriginal landscape with exotic expressions and associations, supplanting Indigenous sounds and identities with evocations of their own heritage (Glenmore, Salisbury, Saumarez, Inverell), or with appropriated Aboriginal words (Guyra, Bundarra, Ollera). Frederick Cruckshank made a more concise claim of proprietorship by calling his station ‘Mihi’, a word which may sound Aboriginal but which is the Latin for ‘mine’.

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❈ Wallangra George, who was born about 1828 in the Wallangra district, near Ashford, and was therefore a young man during the 1840s and 50s. Memories of the first invasion survived for years on both sides of the frontier. This picture was taken shortly before he died in 1908. (photo: W.F. Baldwin)

But New England remained, for many years, an Indigenous landscape. What the newcomers imagined to be unclaimed wilderness was in fact steeped in associations and meanings, codified in law and ritual, and coloured by tradition, memory, experience and stories. To the traditional owners it was a home—their only home—and their emotional and intellectual connection to it was deeper and richer than anything the early colonists could have experienced. Settler culture had no local history in this new terrain: no lineage, no roots, no layers of personal, familial or community attachment upon which to build a sense of belonging and legitimacy. To them, New England was an alien space, a ‘beastly ugly sterile country’,2 characterised by sheer remoteness from the epicentre of their worlds. Their attachments belonged to distant communities to which they were only precariously connected. On the frontier, colonists were uncomfortable, unsettled and vulnerable. The first meetings between Aborigines and colonists in frontier New England involved a confrontation of elementarily different cosmologies, languages, material cultures and codes of behaviour. Most fundamentally, there were distinct and competing discrepancies in the logic of their presence, a differing sense of rights and conflicting agendas. In the shared space of the Tableland, all became entangled, each side providing for the other a great range of new experiences. Both were transformed by the encounter. Indigenes and newcomers alike stood before mirrors of difference, and were remade in the reflections. Each sought understanding through the lens of their own cultural norms and

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The Frontier knowledge, but when engaging with one another they improvised, finding ways of mediating difference in order to reach agreements and accommodations. On the most basic level they spoke a disjointed pidgin, exchanging loanwords which each believed belonged to the other. Occasionally, they communicated in the universal language of retribution and violence. Europeans understood their meetings with Aborigines within a broader pattern of colonisation, being part of an empire that was growing increasingly global, and each knowing of the experiences of their countrymen in other corners of the colony. But initially, there was great diversity in their encounters. ‘On coming for the first time in contact with them,’ said Hamilton Collins Sempill, a Hunter valley settler, ‘they are invariably hostile.’ But in his experience the passage of time bred mutual understanding, such that he could feel himself ‘as safe in the vicinity of Aborigines as anywhere else’.3 A traveller in the region, F. de B. Cooper, came across an Aboriginal camp at night and was offered a friendly invitation to sit and eat.4 Robert Muir, on arriving at Glenmore near Inverell, in 1839, embraced the assistance offered by Aborigines who cut bark for shelters and hunted kangaroos for food.5 Frederick C. Lamotte, in contrast, on reaching Ben Lomond the following year, ‘got the first sight of the blacks’ when twenty approached his party. ‘[F]iring a shot, and showing them a few muskets was enough . . . they withdrew.’6 The varied and localised nature of these encounters reflects the diversity of each group. Indeed, to speak in general terms of ‘Aborigines’ and ‘settlers’ belies that diversity. There were numerous distinct Aboriginal groupings—Aniwan, Bundjalung, Gumbaynggir, Dunghutti, Yugambul and Gamilaraay. As on other Australian frontiers, disease and invasion distorted divisions among and within these groups by eroding time-honoured boundaries and facilitating nontraditional movements and migrations, such that they were given, as Europeans understood it, to ‘distrust and fear of each other, and constant feuds’.7 Nor were the invaders a homogenous cultural entity. They were divided along lines of culture, class and circumstance—English, Irish and Scots, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists and even a few ‘Mahomedans’ (see Chapters 13 and 19). The squatters themselves were mostly men of means, though they differed in education, wealth, social standing and colonial experience. They were interdependent, reliant on one another for manpower, supplies, equipment and information, but there was much competition and rivalry among them. Also, as late as 1846, several years after the abolition of transportation to New South Wales, there were still 350 male convicts in New England, nearly all of them with tickets-of-leave. It was not unusual for a convict to find himself tending sheep on the remotest edges of the colony, but it was a fate he much resented. For those unaccustomed to the solitude and rigours of rural life, bitter New England winter nights spent in crude bark shelters, with blistered feet, half-empty bellies and unsettling sounds in the darkness, must have seemed truly purgatorial. The frontier also held little attraction for the colony’s free working-class population, particularly the new immigrants. Many hailed from cities and felt ‘a great reluctance . . . to quit the temptations of town life for the

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seclusion of country occupations’. In any event, those with families were often precluded from employment up-country because squatters were unwilling to maintain employees’ dependants. As an upper Hunter valley employer noted, ‘the fewer women we have about our stations the better; they do not render themselves so useful in this Colony, in rural occupations, as they do at home’.8 The result was a highly fluid population, with shepherds, tradesmen, servants and station-hands drifting from station to station, and with townsmen venturing to the peripheries only for seasonal work. But there were many labouring men who stayed, sowing tangible seeds of permanence and continuity. Among the earliest was William Dumaresq’s convict servant, John Duval, eventually recognised as a resident expert, with a local knowledge invaluable to newcomers. The reputations of others, such as ‘Terrible Billy’ Stephenson, ‘a terror to the aboriginals’, have remained in local folklore, their names immortalised in geographic and civic features.9 The frontiers of the 1830s were also places of opportunity. Wages were high and the shortage of labour allowed for negotiation and leniency. The early New England workforce included many ‘old hands’—ex-convicts, seasoned immigrants and their colonial-born progeny. These were specialist frontiersmen, wedded to the opportunities, freedom and anonymity of life on the margins, and suspicious of the powers and prevailing attitudes of the metropolis. Such men, and women too, sought seclusion and liberty on the fringes of civilisation, forging among themselves their own alternative world, free of harassment, persecution and ‘the many unnatural habits of old societies’.10 The frontiers provided legitimate employment for pastoral workers and lucrative opportunities for tradesmen, but also illegal, predatory forms of income such as robbery and stock theft. Typical of such shadowy practitioners was ‘Cooney’ of Cooney Creek, ‘hunted from the district’ by police and eventually hung in Sydney.11 In these nascent frontier communities, the line between honest citizen and outlaw was blurred. In dealing with Aborigines, ‘civilised’ men of manners and education might indulge in murder. Poor men might alternate between paid work and horse stealing.12 Bandits might find shelter and protection in the homes of ostensibly honest wage-earners, though allegiances were changeable. The bushrangers who robbed numerous stations in the district during 1836 (as mentioned in Chapter 1) were found to be based at Henry Dangar’s Gostwyck station. One of them, Thomas Walker, a shepherd at Colonel Dumaresq’s Saumarez station, panicked on the arrival of the Mounted Police and shot his sleeping companion, apparently ‘for the sake of procuring a mitigation of punishment for other offences which he had committed’.. He was tried for the murder and executed.13 The squatters found themselves prey to men who were skilled, cunning and intimate with their surroundings. In July 1839, for example, George Everett of Wandsworth was bailed up and robbed on his station by five men ‘well dressed and well armed’. Even the loyalty of his employees was doubtful. ‘[I]f our men would have assisted us we could have taken them . . . but there are not more than one or two instances on record in the colony of men assisting their masters.’14

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The Frontier It seemed dangerous in the extreme to let such communities evolve autonomously. ‘[S]cattered among wildernesses whither the sound of holy counsel and spiritual caution never reached’, men and women were ‘left to fester each in his own rankness of soul’.15 The early consequences, according to Governor George Gipps, was ‘a race of Englishmen . . . springing up in a state approaching to untutored barbarism’.16 The frontier was not inherently lawless, but official authority was weak and there was room for people to carve their own command—to establish their own customs, social relations and codes of behaviour. The interior was imagined, with some justification, to be ‘infested by gangs of cattle stealers and other disorderly persons’, conducting ‘mutiny on stations and taking possession of and robbing stores’. Those not directly implicated in criminal activities were none the less unsettled and unregulated, and ‘their demeanour to their employers is independent’.17 Such concerns seemed especially warranted in light of a cycle of ‘wanton and brutal conduct’ between Aborigines and settlers.18 Reports of ‘numerous outrages’ by Aborigines in New England first reached the Sydney press in January 1836, to be quickly followed by news of ‘several of the natives . . . shot by the whites’.19 Government was too remote to prevent such clashes. There was also an undercurrent of concern for the consequences of fraternisation and collusion between Aborigines and lower-class settlers, illustrated in the reactions to the case of ‘Gentleman Dick’s’ gang who worked the Bundarra region in the 1830s. The gang included at least two Aborigines, which raised the alarming spectre of ‘nasty cannibals aiding armed white ruffians in plundering peaceable settlers’.20 The government’s agenda was poorly served by its key instrument of frontier law enforcement, the Mounted Police. During the 1830s, New England formed one corner of the vast province of the Fourth Division of the Mounted Police, a corps of non-commissioned officers and troopers headquartered at Maitland, Jerry’s Plains and Muswellbrook, in the Hunter valley. Though generally an effective branch of law enforcement, the Mounted Police were responsible for an escalation of armed conflict and violence in the rural districts. They were widely distrusted by the local magistrates, who had little control over them, and deeply resented by the labouring classes and smaller settlers for their ruthlessness.21 They were, in any event, remotely situated and unfamiliar with New England, and easily outsmarted and outmanoeuvred. They were also a law unto themselves, as illustrated by the most infamous of their early New England sorties, in early 1838. When Major Nunn was dispatched to deal with the Gamilaraay on the Namoi and Gwydir rivers in January–February 1838, his junior officer, Lieutenant Cobban, led a detachment into New England to investigate the reported deaths of ‘several’ (that is, three or four) whites.22 Cobban refused to account for his proceedings during his six-week expedition, though it seems that New England Aborigines thereby learned something of the extremities of European barbarity, imbibing a fear that lasted many years.23 The Mounted Police foray of early 1838 may also have partially inspired the behaviour of those dozen or so stockmen (mostly convicts) who, on 10 June 1838, rode onto Henry Dangar’s property at Myall Creek, near Bingara. In

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what became one of the most infamous episodes in the British conquest of Australia, the stockmen rounded up at least 28 unarmed and unsuspecting elderly men, women and children, bound them together and led them a short distance to a clearing, where they were butchered with knives and swords. The bodies were piled together and set alight. The Myall Creek massacre was not a unique event, except that it was investigated by an unusually diligent Hunter valley Police Magistrate, was prosecuted by a government under increasing pressure to assert its authority on the lawless frontier, and was thus singular in its repercussions—seven of the murderers were executed.24 The example made of these men did little to change the nature of frontier violence, except perhaps to encourage discretion. For all the freedom and opportunity an isolated frontier afforded, when it came to dealing with Aborigines, colonial frontiersmen could not be relied on to behave with decency and honour. A NEW ORDER

In 1839, the government sought to bring New England into the fold, with the proclamation of the New England pastoral district (see Chapter 1). The personification of this extension of state power was the local Commissioner of Crown Lands, the chief instrument of state authority in the border regions, who was given well-defined responsibilities and substantial arbitrary powers under the revised Squatting Act of 1839. He was primarily responsible for the collection of

❈ Myall Creek, north of Bingara. Near this spot some 28 men, women and children were killed on a single winter’s evening, 1838. (photo: I. Davidson)

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The Frontier licence fees from squatters and the eviction of unlicensed occupants, and he had authority to mediate in boundary disputes. He was also a Protector of Aborigines, with the duty of investigating incidents between squatters and Aborigines. From 1839 he was assisted by the Border Police, a special constabulary for the squatting districts, financed by a levy on stock. In the wake of the Myall Creek massacre, the Commissioner was a conduit for humanitarian policies that emanated from the highest levels of Church and State. The squatters were wary of the Commissioner’s powers, though in practice they gained much from his appointment. His presence gave some legitimacy to their occupation of the land and his headquarters became a regional capital, with its own tiny bureaucracy. Moreover, he and his police helped to manage the behaviour of the rural workforce. The arrival of the Commissioner, with the concomitant appointment of a scourger, finally delivered some power of keeping convicts ‘in a fit state of subordination’, because they no longer had to be sent 250 miles to the Hunter valley for flogging.25 The free workforce, specifically absconding and unruly shepherds and watchmen, could now be punished under the Hired Servants Act. The New England Commissioner from 1839 to 1848, George Macdonald, was so diligent in this regard that the government demanded to know why local workers were committed for offences ‘so greatly out of proportion to that from other districts’.26 The Commissioner could also be called on in issues of domestic discord, as in 1845 when Trooper Jeremiah Giles brought in the convict, Sarah Armstrong, declared to be ‘illegally at large, and a runaway from her husband’.27 The Border Police were much occupied with the pursuit of bushrangers and the protection of stock ‘from aggression of the Aboriginal natives’. Among their notable successes was the capture of ‘Wilson’s gang’, tracked and overrun in the Clarence River district in May 1846 in a joint operation with the Mounted Police. Wilson was shot and killed, and two of his three accomplices were captured.28 As Protector of Aborigines, the Commissioner sought to mollify Aboriginal resistance by endeavouring to ‘impress on them the force of His Excellency’s instructions on their behalf ’, and communicating the ‘evil and impolicy’ of attacking European persons and property.29 If this approach failed, he could implement ‘summary measures’ with little accountability.30 Commissioner Macdonald was less than diligent in protecting Aborigines from white aggressions. He overlooked the behaviour of particular individuals, such as the Irby brothers of Bolivia station, and he effectively fabricated accounts of peace and harmony, ‘strict discipline and perfect tranquillity’, in his district.31 In this vital regard, at least, local and personal interests took priority over government directives, though the ultimate official aim—the safety of colonial property and persons and the end of violent resistance—was secured. The old Mounted Police, with their shady and ill-accounted movements, were now replaced by a locally based power, embodying physical force and legal authority, informed by local knowledge, but backed also by the corollary of power—record-keeping. The Commissioner brought the orderliness of bureaucracy and documentation to the frontier. The workings of his own establishment

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were meticulously recorded in accounts of employment, conduct, horses, stationery, arms, pouches, saddles, rations, forage, buildings, furniture and ancillary expenses. The itineraries and returns of his tours around the district plotted the spatial arrangement of the stations, measuring the distances between them and their composition in terms of habitations, residents, stock numbers and acres under cultivation. The business of description, definition and measurement would find precision in the work of the government surveyors, Gorman, Burnett and Mitchell. Private individuals also took it upon themselves to keep detailed records of their new surroundings. Of particular note is the work of William Gardner, a Scottish immigrant employed at Saumarez station. Convinced of the power of knowledge obtained through ‘a habit of observation’, Gardner compiled extensive volumes of notes on New England, illustrated with watercolours of landscapes, homesteads and Aboriginal ceremonies. Between 1842 and 1846, Gardner drew the first authoritative map of northern New South Wales, locating over 700 stations, which was presented to the Governor and published through the Survey Department. A landscape was thus transformed through the gaze of Europeans, a wilderness becoming a world of observable, classifiable phenomena, a world captured in narrative, maps and inventories, those other ‘weapons of imperialism’.32 Decades later, colonial culture was to enforce a spatial segregation on Aborigines, confining their movements and marginalising their presence. Homesteads were to be off-limits, and entering a fenced paddock was to be an act of trespass. Ultimately, Aborigines were to be confined to fringe camps or impounded on reserves, living under restrictions and surveillance.33 In the New England of the 1830s and 40s, such outcomes were still unimaginable. Aborigines might still remove themselves from the gaze and clutches of the colonists simply by departing a station or stepping off a pathway, or by setting fire to the grass when it suited them not to be followed. They might retreat into the ‘rough country’, the rugged, densely timbered regions left alone by the graziers, particularly on the eastern periphery of the Tableland, ‘where neither Man nor horse can follow’. There they found concealment and autonomy, ‘safe harbour and secure retreat’.34 These gorges and forests gave them space in which to measure the newcomers, to sample and assess their peculiarities, laws and customs, and to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of their presence. When it suited them to engage and negotiate, they could reappear, whether to exploit an opportunity or to seek protection, recompense or retaliation. Under cover of darkness, and exploiting the isolation that made colonists so vulnerable, Aborigines descended on huts, spearing and bludgeoning stockmen, stripping clothes from corpses, sometimes burning the huts and slaughtering or dispersing livestock.35 But Aboriginal resistance on the frontier was multi-dimensional. It could also be indirect, subtle and sometimes invisible to Europeans. Continuity and survival was a type of resistance in itself. In the midst of catastrophe language, cultural values and rituals were maintained. Native foods were procured and processed as before. Old trading networks were

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The Frontier kept up. Aborigines trod well-worn pathways and gathered for ceremonies on ancient camping grounds. On the walls of rockshelters they laid their hand signatures over those of their ancestors. They confronted enormous physical and philosophical challenges by drawing on their own culture, and their reactions, adoptions and adaptations were shaped by existing conventions and cosmologies. They accepted European gifts as something owed by right and obligation, then adapted them for their own ends, vesting them with their own social and symbolic values. Bottles were smashed to make spear tips. Hatchets and blankets were traded for ochre. Europeans themselves incorporated into Aboriginal culture by being given native names and embraced into kinship relations. A great transformation of Aboriginal society was imposed from without, but it was also generated from within through translation and negotiation, reassessment and re-orientation. Often subtly, even unconsciously, Aborigines absorbed and deflected the powers that sought to ruin them. Aborigines proved frustratingly ambivalent about the ideas and practices by which Europeans held themselves superior. Colonists might expect such ignorance and futile resilience from savages, who were apparently insensible of their own inferiority and pending destruction. It was more problematic when Aborigines proved their adaptability and acceptance of European ways. On the New England frontier, as elsewhere, Aborigines displayed an exemplary capacity to embrace new skills and technologies. Their assistance involved an extension of traditional techniques and an intimacy with the local environment—cutting bark, or acting as trackers, hunters, fishermen, guides, informants and couriers. By the late 1830s, Aborigines were shepherding and washing sheep, fetching wood and water, building stockyards, driving bullocks, digging holes, shooting game, sowing seeds and harvesting crops. They were employed extensively on Everett’s Ollera, at Windeyer’s Deepwater and at Robertson’s Wellington Vale.36 Their efforts forced Europeans to refocus. Such ‘aptitude and capacity for social improvement’ made it seem that Aborigines were not beyond hope.37

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Drawing on various strands of cultural conditioning, preconception and experience, colonists imagined Aborigines as inferior savages, ‘a nasty treacherous sort of fellows’, dangerous, unpredictable and inherently subordinate.38 But meeting them face-to-face on the frontier opened the probability of knowing them as individuals, and as human beings. The experience could be unsettling, but also reassuring. One might find, as did a New England clergyman, John Morison, that they were ‘redolent with good nature, and apparently susceptible of a great sense of kindness’.39 Either way, the engagement was formative and self-defining. On the peripheries of empire, they developed a heightened sense of themselves as Europeans, refined in contradistinction to what confronted them. Adrift in an alien wilderness, surrounded by those menacing ‘sons of the soil’,40 their sense of being white, civilised, Christian and modern was reinforced. It made them aware that they were agents of a broader imperial agenda.

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They arrived as workers, adventurers and escapees, but came to know themselves as conquerors. Frontier life was said to breed camaraderie among settlers and workers, ‘a sort of manly independence of disposition, which secured truthfulness and sincerity at least among themselves’.41 This included a shared sense of being misunderstood by government and metropolitan powers. Nowhere was this more evident than on the issue of relations with Aboriginal people. The government, in pursuing a humanitarian policy and by insisting on the arrest and trial of Aboriginal assailants, was supposed to have failed in its obligation to ensure the settler’s irrefutable right to protection. Settlers bemoaned what they perceived to be ‘one law for black and another for white British subjects’. Frustrated and driven to despair by ‘the supineness or impotence of “liberal” governments’, they were forced to ‘take the matter into their own hands’.42 In New England in the early 1840s, vigilante justice became commonplace. There was violence on Marooan station, and at Ben Lomond (north of Guyra), Bolivia, Deepwater, Dundee and Salisbury. In September 1842, Edward Irby led a punitive party that tracked Aborigines to a gully at Deepwater and ‘completely routed’ a group of about 100, making a bonfire of spears and possum-skin rugs before returning home, ‘well satisfied with our success’.43 That was but one of a series of ‘expeditions’ against Aborigines Irby led during 1842–45, in which he ‘gave it to them

❈ ‘Bluff Rock’s Heritage’ may refer to nearby Tenterfield, where Henry Parkes made his famous federation speech in 1889, known locally as ‘the making of the nation’. But Bluff Rock itself is better known for the supposed massacre of 1844. (photo: I. Davidson)

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The Frontier pretty severely’,44 a contribution to local history commemorated in folklore as the Bluff Rock massacre(s). Hostility by and towards Aborigines became a cornerstone of collective identity among New England colonists. Most antagonism was local and personal, but once the engagement descended into violence it came to have much wider ramifications. Men living in close relationships with Aborigines found their friendships soured by suspicion on learning of the death of neighbouring stockmen.45 It sharpened one’s racial consciousness and had a rallying, bonding effect. Men united to meet the Aboriginal challenge, convening what one Clarence River settler unashamedly described as a ‘council of war’,46 saddling horses, packing supplies, preparing cartridges, devising a strategy and steeling themselves with expressions of outrage and intent. Killing was a collective undertaking, uniting neighbours, binding the workingman with his master, levelling the distinctions between free and bond, and conscripting the reluctant. A dark intimacy and confidence among men was forged in moments of anger and barbarity.47 This dark camaraderie was solidified in the aftermath, through guilt-assuaging reassurances that each participant ‘had no alternative but to act as [I] had done’.48 It was further cemented by conspiracies of silence, by the need to remain resolute and ‘only true to each other’.49 From around 1840, most attacks on New England colonists seemed to come from beyond the Tableland, from the Macleay and Clarence rivers in the east and the Gwydir in the west. On ‘the central and more prosperous part of the district’ there was some measure of co-existence.50 Many Aborigines had become attached to particular stations and were associated with particular employers, widely identified as ‘Windeyer’s Blacks’ or ‘a civilised black belonging to Mr Boyd’.51 They seemed well-known and predictable—‘trustful, amicable and serviceable’—in strong contrast to those ‘strong great tribe[s]’ who descended in vast numbers from the eastern ranges.52 This distinction between ‘our Blacks’ and the ‘wild’ or ‘Myall’ people— between the tamed and untamed—was a marker of conquest, a measure by which colonists could claim to have subdued their new possessions.53 It allowed for a greater degree of accommodation, personified in useful partnerships such as that between Commissioner Macdonald and his Aboriginal tracker, ‘Harry Danger’, who was instrumental in overhauling bushrangers.54 Or between Archibald Boyd’s superintendent and the Aboriginal orphan he adopted and raised. Or between Alexander Patterson’s overseer, Thomas Williams, and the Aboriginal woman with whom he fathered a child, proclaiming ‘he would rather marry the woman than be separated from them’.55 It also allowed for disputes to be settled internally, according to locally negotiated laws, as in the case of those Aborigines attached to Everett’s station, who in 1848 stole stock from a neighbour and were punished by tribal law, to the satisfaction of all parties.56 This state of affairs involved dependency and despondency. But Europeans were mistaken if they thought Aboriginal people entirely broken. There was empowerment in reaffirmations of cultural identity, some of the most important of which were, in fact, aided by the presence of outsiders. New England

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❈ The issuing of ‘breastplates’ to Aborigines was usually an attempt to single out Aboriginal ‘chiefs’ who could act as cross-cultural intermediaries for the colonists. By the 1830s and 40s the practice was commonplace, but this one (now in the Museum of Antiquities at UNE) is a rare surviving example from New England. Discovered near Armidale in the 1960s or 70s, it is unusual in not being personalised (compare picture on page 113).

Aborigines continued to ‘congregate in force at certain seasons of the year’ for ‘Religious ceremony’, such as the ‘Kebarrach’ or ‘initiation’ rituals,57 gatherings that became larger on account of the provisions and facilities provided by Europeans. In other songs and ceremonies, Europeans were represented and sometimes mocked. Settlers in the Walcha district in the 1850s, for example, were presented with an ‘amusing and clever’ dance recreating an incident in which white murderers were chased from the scene.58 Through mimicry and parody, expressed in traditional mediums, Aborigines addressed the political and moral dimensions of their entanglement with colonists. And while cross-cultural encounters had given the colonists some sense of collective, regional identity, similar processes may also have been at work among Aborigines. Elsewhere, we know, Aborigines confederated against the European challenge. In the short-term, there was great disruption and fragmentation, breeding intertribal and interpersonal conflict that persisted beyond the frontier period. But ultimately, invasion and dispossession bred among Aboriginal groups a sense of shared predicament, resulting in new or reshaped regional alliances, through which they came to understand themselves ‘as a people’.59 In New England, regional alliances may have been manifested in an increasing dislike for those from distant terrains, as in the violence towards Aboriginal refugees from the Macleay during the 1860s.60 In these ways, it was the frontier—the entanglement of white and black, owner and invader—that made and defined New England.

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CHAPTER 10 ❈

Ab o rigin a l Pe o p l e an d Pas t o ralis m Rod ne y Ha r r i s o n

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Australia was producing the biggest wool clip in the world and was the main provider of raw wool to the mills of northern England and Europe. The rapid expansion of pastoral runs and their consolidation placed serious pressures on Aboriginal landowners. In the early to mid-1800s the recognition of colonised peoples’ property rights in land had been a continuing issue for British reformers until, in the 1840s, in response to lobbying from these humanitarian and reformist groups, the British Colonial Office had been forced to recognise ‘native title’ and usage rights over pastoral lands in New South Wales.1 The legal foundation for pastoral land use was thus established some time before this great expansion took place. In 1849 Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies—who was sympathetic to reformists’ demands—instructed the Governor in Sydney to enforce an interpretation of the Waste Lands (Australia) Acts (1846) and the consequent order-in-council that would guarantee Aboriginal people access to their traditional lands. This was to be in the form of ‘dual occupancy’ with pastoralists: a situation where Aborigines and squatters had ‘mutual rights’. Grey insisted that Crown leases to pastoralists allowed only limited rights, and that much of the rights of possession remained ‘reserved’ to the Crown. Further, Grey called for the establishment of small agricultural reserves for Aboriginal people. In 1850, 35 of these areas were approved as reserves across the new pastoral districts outside the nineteen counties. However, none seem to have been surveyed and it was not until after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 that permanent reserves began to be set aside. Some were allocated at the request of Aboriginal people

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themselves, but such demands were not always successful. At Armidale in 1883, according to the local Protector, ‘The half-castes who are rather intelligent are very anxious to get a grant of land from the Government, stating they are well able to manage it, but the general opinion is that they are better off without it’. Over time, as we shall see below, a few such reserves became extremely important for Aboriginal sense of place and heritage.2 On the New England Tableland, only two reserves were set aside in the period before World War One, near Walcha (282 acres) and near Uralla (100 acres). Other allotments, mostly much smaller, were added after World War Two. Sites were also reserved to the west, at Bundarra, Inverell and Ashford (the last 2750 acres in 1906), but equally important for the region as a whole were reserves on the coast (see below). Town commons were also used by Aboriginal people as camping and gathering places.3 In the 1840s, the pastoral lobby, which had become powerful in New South Wales, had strongly opposed any constraint on the rights given to pastoral lessees. Its later opposition defeated the implementation of Earl Grey’s instruction, although it did not invalidate his interpretation of the pastoral lease. The status of pastoral leases and Aboriginal rights would be a key issue, one that would return in the Mabo and Wik decisions in the 1990s, but by that time the great bulk of pastoral land in New England was freehold.4 G O L D A N D A B O R I G I N A L PA S TO R A L L A B O U R

The transportation of convict labour to New South Wales ended in the 1840s, and the discovery of gold in the 1850s produced employment needs in the burgeoning pastoral industry that were partly met by Aboriginal men and women. Robert Massie, Crown Lands Commissioner for New England, reported that there had been ‘no outrages whatever’ during 1851. Aborigines were working ‘as Shepherds, Grooms, and even as House-servants’, he said, with pay as high as £30 a year, and he could only praise their ‘good conduct and orderly habits’.5 From this time, many Aboriginal men and women were employed in this way. While some of this work was for rations, some Aboriginal labourers received cash wages equal to white labourers. This was most notable in the shearing sheds. Aboriginal women were employed on sheep stations as domestic workers as well as outdoor labourers, and more rarely as shearers. Aboriginal children often assisted their parents with domestic tasks and labouring work, such as feeding and tending to goats and pigs, and watering homestead gardens and orchards. This was particularly the case where Aboriginal people formed large resident encampments on or near pastoral stations. During the early 1850s, Aboriginal labour was important not only in shepherding and shearing but also on cattle runs. In this industry, where stock were mustered at regular intervals rather than tended all the time, there was less need for continuous labour, particularly after the introduction in the 1860s of perimeter fencing. The presence of an Aboriginal camp on or near a cattle

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❈ An Aboriginal ‘king’, 1900–10, wearing a breastplate typical of the time. This man, Robert, of the Gumbathagang people, near Oban and Ward’s Mistake, was grandfather of Frank Archibald, the World War Two veteran and Aboriginal leader, of Armidale (Chapter 11). He is also said to have worked on the building of Richardson’s, the main store in Armidale, in the 1870s. (photo: Star Photo Co.)

property was important to the industry’s irregular seasonal pattern. Aborigines could return to family groups during the off-season and, until the twentieth century, largely support themselves on bush tucker; during the busy periods they could be recruited rapidly.6 Camps established during the 1850s on the big runs continued for as long as the properties remained large enough to need significant numbers of seasonal workers, and yet with stock sufficiently scattered to allow the modified continuation of a subsistence economy for Aboriginal workers and their families. Pastoralists came to value the importance of Aboriginal knowledge of the land to locate feed, water and stock across vast distances. The work of shepherding and droving often gave Aboriginal people a relative sense of autonomy, the potential to continue ceremonial activities, hunting and gathering, and the opportunity to travel relatively widely through their country. This was in marked contrast with settlers, for whom it was often lonely, monotonous work in alien land. Aboriginal people were recruited from the extended family groups already resident on their land or seeking to return to it. They were embedded in a social network which itself was directly attached to the land. This offered a strong continuity in labour for the pastoralists rather than the rapid turnover of white workers. Aboriginal people also trained their young men and women in stock work, as well as in the knowledge of the country that made their work so valuable. In later years, as more white workers became available, pastoralists reduced the cash component of Aboriginal workers’ wages to virtually nothing, or

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entrapped it in the accounts book of the property store.7 By the beginning of the twentieth century, Aboriginal workers from resident camps were still making up around 30 per cent of pastoral labour in north-west New South Wales, but they were increasingly relegated to casual or seasonal jobs while the better-paid permanent jobs were for white employees.8 As goldmining slowed and as other economic and environmental change affected the industry, the levels of Aboriginal workers in pastoral work fluctuated. However, in most areas Aboriginal women and men had created a distinctive place for themselves in the rural workforce. SOLDIER SETTLEMENT AND A CHANGING SOCIAL ECONOMY

The subdivision of properties that began before World War One accelerated with the introduction of the Soldier Settlement Scheme. After each world war, the federal government purchased large parcels of Australian farming lands, which were divided up into small blocks and given to returned soldiers. State governments supported the scheme with low-interest loans of up to £500 for building, clearing, fencing and buying stock. Land was made available through subdivided Crown lands, unsettled or leasehold holdings, farming allotments carved from State government-purchased estates and individual farms bought by the State Land Settlement Authority. The Soldier Settlement Scheme, along with broader economic conditions, changed the social landscape of pastoralism for both Aboriginal people and settlers. Intensive grazing, interference with water supplies, the shooting of native game and the post-war subdivision of properties, coupled with the 1930s economic depression, the intrusion of the Aborigines Protection (and later Welfare) Board and the dispersal of Aboriginal communities by these government agencies, altered the social landscape irrevocably. Family-sized blocks needed few if any permanent workers, and owners had neither the means nor the need to support an Aboriginal camp as the pastoralists had once done.9 This was a time of increasing government control over Aboriginal people in rural areas. By the 1930s, in most parts of New South Wales nearly all Aboriginal pastoral workers were either fringe dwellers or ‘clients’ of the Aborigines Protection Board. The labour roles of Aboriginal women had largely been superseded, and pastoral work for men tended to be limited to contract shearing and stockwork.10 J.P.M. Long notes that by 1930 there was a major increase in the populations of supervised reserves. Large numbers of Aboriginal people found themselves out of work when it was made obligatory to pay Aboriginal workers the same wages as white workers.11 Also, the Aborigines Protection Board (1909–39) and later Aborigines Welfare Board (1940–69) forcibly removed Aboriginal people from ‘fringe camps’ to reserves and managed stations throughout this time. Heather Goodall describes the policies of the Aborigines Protection Board after 1934 in terms of ‘systematic segregation’, as it sought to concentrate Aboriginal people throughout New South Wales into a limited number of

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Aboriginal People and Pastoralism supervised reserves. By 1935, many had been forced off smaller, unsupervised reserves—many of them self-established farms—and the population of the small number of supervised reserves doubled. The 1936 amendments to the Aborigines’ Protection Act dictated that Aboriginal people would be confined on reserves until they had been educated so that they could be assimilated into white society. This was the first of three major contributing factors during the middle part of the twentieth century that severely undermined the stability of relationships established during 1855–1930.12

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To My Delight: The Autobiography of Bill Cohen, a Grandson of the Gumbangarri (or Gumbaynggir), published in 1987, is a remarkable record of one Aboriginal man who worked at East Kunderang in the New England gorges for much of his life.13 Bill’s father, Jack Cohen, had worked at nearby Wongwabinda as early as 1889, and on Kunderang with his sons throughout the early part of the twentieth century. Bill’s autobiography provides a detailed insight into life for Aboriginal people in the region during the twentieth century, and a starting point for examining the connections between historic heritage places such as East Kunderang (managed today as part of Oxley Wild Rivers National Park) and contemporary Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in New England. In what remains of this chapter I will discuss the relationship between Aboriginal labour and East Kunderang as an example of the wider Aboriginal experience of the twentieth century in New England. Bill, his sisters and brothers were born and lived at Wongwabinda, then owned by the Wright family. As a

❈ Branding cattle at Kunderang. (photo: unknown)

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child, Bill remembered seeing other family members living on various pastoral stations in northern New South Wales. Twenty years later, however, he stayed on Kunderang station for two- or three-month stretches during working seasons, while his wife and children lived on the Bellbrook Aboriginal Reserve. His story hints at the way Aboriginal people were left out of the documentary record at Kunderang, and how, by the mid-twentieth century, they had become increasingly institutionalised and segregated on Aborigines Protection Board reserves such as Bellbrook. Bill Cohen travelled widely throughout his life. Born in 1914, his first working experience was a droving trip to Queensland at the age of fourteen, during which he acted as a milkboy and groom. He accompanied his father on this trip and came back to New South Wales on another droving journey the following year. He returned to Kunderang, but left after a short period because of ‘prejudice’, then travelled widely from Burnt Bridge mission to Walcha and Tamworth, before ending up in Melbourne working as a boxer. He later returned again to Kunderang, where his father initiated him at a Dunghutti initiation site on the Tableland—Bill having run away from what he recalls as the ‘last initiation’ on Bellbrook in 1934.14 This time Bill stayed on Kunderang to work, and he married Esther Kelly at Bellbrook Aboriginal Reserve. Bill and Esther moved to Georges Creek, where his uncle and aunt and the Dunn and Naylor families lived, but the couple later returned to Bellbrook Reserve, where their two sons and a daughter were born. Bill was employed at odd times for many years on Kunderang station. When there was no work at Kunderang he would live at Bellbrook Reserve, working as a lantana grubber (removing roots) and trapping rabbits. He also used his hunting skills and knowledge to kill dingoes, for which he was paid per scalp. Rations at Bellbrook were withdrawn if it appeared residents were not looking for work, so Bill spent much of his time doing unskilled labouring, despite his talents as a stockman and drover. Bill described his dream of following in his father’s footsteps and working for the Wrights, on whose stations he had grown up as a boy: ‘Maurice Wright, his sister Tina were my childhood playmates and the Wrights kept Dad in work as a stockman and drover. Even today Dad is still with the Wrights at Long Flat, owned by Cecil Wright of Dyamberin’. A significant point here is that the Wrights supplied his father with regular employment—they ‘kept Dad in work’—which was a marked difference to the on-again, off-again conditions Bill experienced at Kunderang and elsewhere. Eventually he attained the status of head stockman at Kunderang, a position that he expressed great pride in. His first act was to take a ride around the boundaries, camping at various places and fishing. In this way, he claimed the Kunderang country as his, if only momentarily: ‘The following night, Top Yard. Then lifting up Black Camp Spur, on out to the Front Tablelands. Of course I had 2 dozen boxes of matches and didn’t I let the neighbours know there was a firebug in the area!’15 In 1939, Bill Cohen joined the army and was posted to the Gulf of Carpentaria. He returned to work at a number of local pastoral stations, including

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Aboriginal People and Pastoralism Towel Creek in the middle reaches of the Macleay. Key places in Bill’s life include North Hill Common, near Armidale, which included an unsupervised Aboriginal camp; the camp at Georges Creek; Armidale Reserve; Bellbrook; and the camp at Lower Creek. Other places he visited or travelled to include Greenhills and Burnt Bridge reserves in Kempsey, Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve, La Perouse Aboriginal Reserve in Sydney, Walcha Aboriginal Reserve and Melbourne. Pastoral stations he worked at or lived on as a child and adult included Kunderang station, Pee Dee station, Kindon station (in Queensland), Dyamberin and Towel Creek.

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Bill Cohen, in common with many of the Aboriginal labourers, had an intimate association with a series of camps and reserves on the Macleay River. Between 1883 and 1908, sixteen Aboriginal reserves were established in the Macleay, Nambucca and Bellinger valleys.16 The first of these were gazetted in 1883— Stuart’s Island Reserve, near the mouth of the Nambucca River, and a reserve on the Macleay River at Arakoon. Other reserves were established at South-West Rocks, Kempsey, Macksville, Bowraville, Nambucca Heads and Bellbrook. Later, during the 1930s, Burnt Bridge Reserve was gazetted. There were three major Aboriginal camps on the upper Macleay in the early part of the twentieth century. The spatial distribution of these camps corresponded with the labour needs of pastoralists. Camps were located at Bellbrook, Lower Creek and Georges Creek. Barry Morris records a number of Aboriginal families living in these camps semi-permanently, and the development of a reciprocal relationship between the property owners and a number of Aboriginal men and their dependants. Food (rations) and shelter were generally exchanged for a stable pool of skilled labour. Morris also notes several later historical changes affecting employment opportunities for Aboriginal people on the Macleay.17 The first phase dates from around the turn of the century and, indeed, the wages records from Kunderang and Moona Plains show very few Aboriginal people employed before this. The introduction of dairying in the lower Macleay in the 1890s made the difference. Previously, Aboriginal people competed with small white landholders for seasonal pastoral work such as cattle mustering, fencing, land clearing and fur trapping. Dairying, and the establishment of a butter factory near Kempsey in 1906, meant that small landholders on the lower Macleay could earn a monthly return for milk (instead of a yearly return for a single crop of maize). They therefore did not need irregular work on the pastoral stations and the working environment became more conducive to Aboriginal employment. At Lower Creek, pastoralists used Aboriginal labour exclusively for clearing land or stock work. If the men had work at some distance from the camps, whole families moved, and the women set up a new family camp near the work sites.18 As a number of families were usually involved in the work sites, this work pattern shared features with pre-contact Aboriginal economic and social

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life. The seasonally intensive work of the cattle industry enabled large numbers of people to congregate for periods of up to three months. Mobility remained an integral part of Aboriginal life as long as it coincided with the interests of the settler economy. Similarly, bush tucker remained an important part of the Aboriginal diet, supplemented by introduced goods such as tea, flour and sugar. This pattern of working life is consistent with the Kunderang wages records from 1919 to 1937, which indicate that both stockmen and their wives were paid for labour on the station. While Bellbrook and the camp at Lower Creek were largely populated by Dunghutti Aboriginal people, Morris believes that the community at Georges Creek was established by Gumbaynggir people from Grafton. From 1900 to 1930, this community provided the main labour force for Kunderang and several surrounding stations, but with the closure of the Georges Creek school in 1930, many Aboriginal people shifted to Bellbrook. However, the relationship with the settlement continued, as several older people stayed at Georges Creek, forming the nucleus of a community ‘holiday camp’, where children and wives of Kunderang’s Aboriginal workers would stay during the school holidays.19 Today, this function as a ‘holiday camp’ is what Aboriginal people from Armidale, Bellbrook and Kempsey remember about Georges Creek. Christine Kim, daughter of George Cohen (Bill’s brother), explains: We spent most of our holidays there. My Aunt Nellie Kelly, she was a Cohen, her Uncle Dan Hilton and Grandfather’s sister Grace reared her up when our mother died. She spent all of her childhood there and she used to take us up for the holidays . . . Dad would come down and have a couple of nights with us there, at Georges Creek, and then go back up to Kunderang . . . my brothers they just went up straight to Kunderang as soon as we got there . . . they used to go mustering and droving with Dad.20 The introduction of compulsory schooling and its post-1911 enforcement by the Aborigines Protection Board was another factor that changed this working pattern.21 Women and children tended to stay at Bellbrook Reserve, where there was a segregated school. As a consequence, Aboriginal men and their older sons spent more time working away from their families. In this context, ‘holiday camps’ on the edges of pastoral properties, such as the one at Georges Creek, became an extremely significant part of the social landscape. During the school holidays, women and children could travel to meet their husbands, fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who were working on the stations, while enjoying their time away from the surveillance of the mission managers. K U N D E R A N G A N D A B O R I G I N A L M E M O RY

There are particular aspects of the old buildings at East Kunderang that speak in special ways to local Aboriginal people. The authenticity and age of these buildings is paramount in their ability to tell this history.

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Aboriginal People and Pastoralism One important material trace of the working lives of Aboriginal men is contained in graffiti executed by (predominantly) Aboriginal stockmen.22 It consists mainly of their names and initials, worked into the ceiling joists and timber posts in the central portion of the forge building, a slab-sided, timberpole structure with corrugated iron roof constructed around 1900. The remains of the former Aboriginal stockmen’s quarters are also important in this respect, and for their associations with renowned Aboriginal stockmen from Georges Creek and Bellbrook. Little original fabric survives, but an initialled board has been preserved through its incorporation in repairs to the front corner of the homestead.23 The poverty of the hut, evident in the remains, speaks of the conditions under which stockmen, particularly Aboriginal stockmen, found themselves living, even as recently as the middle part of the twentieth century. There are four styles of graffiti: branded, carved, punched and nailed (using shoeing nails). Heather Burke has documented in detail the initials and other graffiti and mapped their location on a plan of the building prior to reconstruction works undertaken by the National Parks and Wildlife Service in 1994. Initials can be matched against the continuous series of wages records from 1919–47: ‘W Cohen’ (Bill Cohen); ‘GC’ (George Cohen); ‘Cohen’, ‘LWK’, ‘LW Kelly’ and ‘LK’ (Lewis Kelly); ‘BWC’ (Bill Cohen or William Crawford); ‘J Little’; ‘TD’ (Tommy Davison or Tommy Dureau); ‘FD’ (Fred Dunn)’; ‘ED’ (Edward Dureau?); ‘HD’ and ‘HD 1959’ (Harvey Dunn); ‘JD’ (Johnny Dureau); ‘W Little’; and ‘NRH’ (N. Hilton) are all names and initials of Aboriginal people from Bellbrook who are known to have worked on East Kunderang over this time.

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❈ Graffiti made from shoeing nails. (photo: R. Harrison)

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Another name is ‘Faint’, probably Cliff Faint, a non-Aboriginal man who worked on Kunderang in the late 1940s and 1950s and who later owned land and ran cattle in the surrounding area. Some of the graffiti is composed of numbers and motifs, or generic terms such as ‘breaker’ or ‘horse bre[aker]’, but 22 out of 39 sets of initials can be identified and 21 belong to Aboriginal people. This simple act of marking one’s name as part of the routine

❈ Plan of Kunderang homestead, showing the forge close to the main house and the Aboriginal stockmen’s hut further away, beside a creek. (drawn: R. Harrison and P. Johnson)

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Aboriginal People and Pastoralism of undertaking pastoral labour can be seen as an almost defiant act that works against the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the documentary histories associated with East Kunderang. For this reason the heritage fabric associated with this building is of great importance to the local Aboriginal community. The spatial relationship and physical contrast between the stockmen’s hut and the homestead buildings are also important evidence of the low status of Aboriginal people who worked on pastoral properties, despite their skill. Pierre Bourdieu’s work has demonstrated that houses provide a coherent ‘language’ in which to organise reality.24 This power and the distinction between the ‘big house’ and the ‘stockmen’s hut’ was destabilised in later years of Kunderang’s operations—a change in which most of the Aboriginal people rejoiced. ‘After a while when Alec was going away, the blackfellas used to go over and stay in the homestead . . . they thought they were kings in there!25 The skill of the Aboriginal stockmen is remembered particularly fondly. It is, generally, felt that their contribution is not well known:

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[I]f they, the black fellas, wasn’t there they wouldn’t be able to do it. And that Terry Olden the greatest buck jump rider in Australia he went down there just to go out for a ride with ’em and he went out and that evening he came home early before the other fellas and when they come home they said ‘What happened to you?’ And he said, ‘I’m not going out with you bloody idiots again. You’ll kill yourselves.’ They took some following when they took after cattle. Where the cattle went, they went.26 The renown of Kunderang’s stockmen, cattle and horses is intimately connected with the romantic theme of the ruggedness of the landscape and the remoteness of the pastoral property. For Aboriginal people, Kunderang forms a communicative bridge between past and present; its isolation allows them to vividly invoke the spirits of ancestors who worked and lived there. As a site associated with the sustained labour of Gumbaynggir and Dunghutti Aboriginal people, Kunderang also forms an integral piece in the jigsaw that is the twentieth-century Aboriginal history of New England. It is an iconic place, one that both evokes and represents the long history of Aboriginal work and domestic lives in the region. C O N C LU S I O N

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the links between pastoral labour and the reserve system played an integral role in the lifeworlds of Aboriginal people in New England. Today, the physical remains of this industry have become a symbol around which many Aboriginal people in the area can establish a sense of collective social identity. East Kunderang serves as a poignant case study of the ways in which the lives of Aboriginal and nonAboriginal people in New England during this period were linked, proving that the heritage of this period might best be considered ‘shared’ between nonAboriginal and Aboriginal Australians.

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CHAPTER 11 ❈

Ab o rigin e s a nd Cit izen s Mat t h e w Jo rda n

At the time of Australian Federation in 1901, Aborigines were described as ‘a dying race’. However, by the mid-twentieth century it was clear that, even from the point of view of numbers alone, they were not to be so easily dismissed. In New England in 1910, there were said to be 262 Aborigines (including what were then called ‘half-castes’), but by the 1950s there were nearly a thousand. Today, over 5 per cent of the regional population is of Aboriginal descent, and of those nearly half are under fourteen years old.1 From the point of memory and heritage their significance is far greater than even these numbers may suggest. T H E E R A O F A S S I M I L AT I O N

In the years following World War Two, the protectionist approach towards Aboriginal people taken by Australian governments since the nineteenth century was officially abandoned, so that they might be ‘assimilated into the general life of the community’.2 However, Aborigines remained ‘fringe dwellers’, accepted to a certain extent, depending on their skills, but never fully admitted into ‘mainstream’ society. ‘[W]hen I first came to Armidale,’ Vera Lovelock recalled of the 1950s, ‘you couldn’t even go to the cafes here. They’d give you paper plates and you’d have to eat in the park.’3 At the same time, Aboriginal people themselves were not willing to forfeit what was left of their cultural inheritance for the intangible benefits of assimilation. Bill Cohen whom we met in Chapter 10, ‘a grandson of the Gumbangarri’, on the eastern edge of the Tableland, was a gifted stockman, roughrider and sportsman.4 As he grew older, Bill learned

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Aborigines and Citizens an array of skills from his father, including bush lore and Aboriginal tribal customs. Station managers described him as a ‘top horseman’, and in time he became head stockman of Kunderang station. In this capacity, Bill kept himself busy with station work, but he also maintained a close association with the land he loved. Bill Cohen was no stranger to prejudice. An enlisted soldier during World War Two, he was ‘dishonourably discharged’ after his NCO insulted him—‘here again were these words “blackfellow”’—and he responded by raining ‘blow after blow on him, finally dropping him to the ground!’5 For all his achievements in the ‘mainstream’ community, Bill was in no sense an ‘assimilated’ Aborigine; he remained an outsider as much by choice as by the designs of white society. While ‘he saw life in ways his ancestors could not have done’, according to the poet, Judith Wright, who knew him, Bill ‘always returned to his own places and longed for them when away’.6 By this time, according to Jim Warburton, an early lecturer at the University of New England, ‘[t]he destruction of the old way of life of the tableland people ha[d] been thorough and complete’.7 Bill Cohen himself mourned the change:

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[O]nly a few elders of tribal law remaining. Others whom I know are sickly, even myself whom now age[d] sixty-seven . . . Elders of today may be running out of time. Sure, there is language now soon to be taught in schools, our culture may still be with us. Boomerangs are now being machine made. Our language now gone. Nevertheless, many New England Aborigines retained some elements of traditional knowledge and practices. Patsy Cohen, a relative of Bill’s, grew up on the Aboriginal reserve at Ingelba, near Walcha, in the 1940s and 50s. The people lived in tin humpies and had little if any cash to spend, but these deprivations were more than counter-balanced by their strong sense of kinship, deep respect for Aboriginal lore—especially among the older folk—and by their continuing dependence on the land for survival.8 There was a general acceptance that the Aborigines ‘had ter go the white fella’s way’. Patsy recalled that they still talked about ‘bone dust and mussing’ (Aboriginal magic), ‘but I think actually passing on the culture and the language and a lot of the ceremonies, like how they used to put young girls—the older women used ter—with young girls—and the young boys [initiation ceremonies]—that was gone’. 9 Unlike the men of Ingelba, however, who had been ‘stripped . . . of all their pride and respect’ by the direct intrusion of whites on their hunting grounds and sacred initiation sites, Aboriginal women were well placed to ‘keep the culture going’. Living a more private life, they had escaped the full brunt of European contact. According to Patsy Cohen, the ‘five matriarchs’ of Ingelba took it upon themselves to transmit the old customs and ceremonies to the younger generation in a manner that was often without practical application but still meaningful for the purposes of cultural remembrance and a sense of group identification.10

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On the outside looking in, the assimilationists were understandably blind to the continuing importance of traditional Aboriginal culture. As one Armidale assimilationist, Margaret-Ann Franklin, admitted much later, ‘like all the whites of our generation we thought that Aboriginal culture—except perhaps in a few remote areas—had been lost’.11 What some of them, including Franklin, did see was the utter destitution of many Aborigines, the lack of proper amenities—basic services such as electricity, bathrooms, even running water—in their living quarters, poor educational standards, sickly children who were frequently admitted to hospital and parents who found it difficult to find full-time employment. In a number of New England towns, including Armidale, large groups of Aborigines had set themselves up on local rubbish dumps, building ‘houses’ out of whatever refuse was available—hessian bags, sheets of corrugated iron and cardboard boxes. Deeply disturbed by the conditions in which most of Armidale’s Aborigines were living, in 1956 a group of women associated with the university formed an organisation committed to bridging the gap between the official policy of assimilation and its practical application. They called themselves the Association for the Assimilation of Aborigines (AAA), a name which reflected their desire to bring ‘all Aboriginal people into the Australian community on the basis of complete equality with the other members of that community’.12 From a national perspective, it was a pioneering effort. Over the next decade the AAA carried through several highly successful initiatives directed at improving these parlous conditions.13 Most Aborigines welcomed their efforts, especially when, in 1960, they resulted in the erection of fourteen cottages on a newly gazetted reserve. Patsy Cohen, who had moved to Armidale from Ingelba in the early 1950s, was one of the first beneficiaries. She remembered ‘the day when all the houses were finished and there was furniture and crockery brought around for each house by th’ assimilation [people] —we just had to walk into our homes—blankets, towels, sheets, crockery— everything was there’.14 Frank Archibald was Bill Cohen’s uncle and, like him, a man who had served in World War Two. As the head of a prominent Armidale Aboriginal family he too embraced these changes. While members of the AAA had taken up the cause of assimilation with gusto, many Armidale people remained unwilling to accept Aborigines as neighbours. In 1957, the Catholic Church’s decision to build a house for the Archibald family in the township itself brought sharp criticism from a member of the local Council, and Frank felt compelled to defend ‘his people’—and he did so in thoroughly assimilationist terms. Local Aborigines, he said, did want to settle down, did want permanent work, did want their children to receive an education, and did want the same material comforts as white people. For Archibald, the move into town was ‘the first step for us. Now we can live decently as we always wanted to. We can cook good meals and wash properly. Now our children can go to school clean, without shame, as we always wanted to’.15 The AAA was approached by other groups in country towns, including Moree, Kempsey and Coffs Harbour, seeking advice on setting up similar

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Aborigines and Citizens organisations.16 But many Aborigines, while welcoming efforts to improve their living conditions, anxiously maintained connections with their Aboriginal roots. Archibald himself was a fully initiated elder who spoke seven different Aboriginal languages and worked to perpetuate a ‘genuine Aboriginal culture’.17 The AAA’s approach has since been criticised as ‘paternalism’, and perhaps it was. But it was due not so much to a desire to change the Aborigines as to the conviction that New England’s Indigenous people deserved better. As one founder, Florence Le Gay Brereton, later commented: ‘We did what seemed right at the time. To ignore the situation, to close our eyes to the way those people were living—that would have been wrong’.18 These sentiments received a ringing endorsement from Patsy Cohen. Members of the AAA, she said, were ‘the only ones that cared’. She agreed, in retrospect, that it was unfortunate that ‘the Assimilation [people] couldn’t come up with a better name’, and when Florence stumbled over the issue, Patsy reassured her: ‘[Y]ou weren’t there to assimilate us Flo—I think you were there to help us through’.19

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C I T I Z E N S I N T H E I R OW N R I G H T

In 1959, Jim Warburton organised a conference at the University of New England on the subject of New South Wales Aborigines, which drew delegates, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, from across northern New South Wales and from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Its keynote speaker was the eminent University of Sydney anthropologist A.P. Elkin (whose lecturing career had begun at St John’s Theological College in Armidale). Elkin drew the attention of his listeners to the growing number of ‘mixed-blood’ Aborigines claiming ‘a sense of solidarity with each other’. They claimed, he said, ‘a common experience different from that of whites’. They saw themselves as ‘a distinct group’ intent on preserving their collective identity ‘through inter-marriage (among themselves), and by cherishing customs, attitudes and traditions in common’. He followed up these comments in the following year, again in Armidale, when he suggested that the realisation of Aboriginal citizenship would ‘come through the development of strong Aboriginal groups, through their own community groups and co-operatives, all aiming at the maintenance, at least for the time being, of an Aboriginal minority in Australia’.20 Organisations such as the AAA still thought mainly in terms of assimilation. There was little empathy for the more accommodating and pluralist principle of integration. As late as 1964, Vern Williams, President of the AAA, claimed that there was ‘no alternative for [the Aborigine] but “assimilation”’. ‘People of Aboriginal descent in New South Wales know nothing of the tribal culture of their ancestors,’ he insisted, ‘and it seems to me that they have nothing to maintain.’ In fact, while many Aborigines demanded the same basic rights as white Australians—decent living standards, equal employment opportunities and, most importantly, full citizenship—they also insisted on being recognised not as ‘token whites’ but as citizens in their own right, possessing cultures, attitudes and experiences quite distinct from those of ‘mainstream’ Australia.

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❈ Jim Miller (left), first Indigenous lecturer at the Armidale College of Advanced Education, here shown with Vicki Williamson, college librarian and Gus Plater, chair of the college council, who holds Miller’s new book, Koori, A Will to Win: The Heroic Resistance, Survival and Triumph of Black Australia (1985). (photo: unknown)

‘Leave us as we are,’ implored Jim Smith, of Armidale, ‘and let us come into the community in our own way.’21 Many Aborigines now thought that the costs of absorption, at least in cultural terms, were too high and its benefits too slight. In 1964, a student at Sydney University, Charles Perkins, a man of Arrernte and Kalkadoon descent born at Alice Springs, organised a bus tour of northern New South Wales in the manner of the ‘freedom rides’ staged in the United States to highlight discriminatory treatment of African Americans. A group of about 30 Sydney students visited towns such as Walgett, Moree, Boggabilla, Kempsey and Bowraville, conducting surveys of Aboriginal living conditions and trying to gauge levels of discrimination. They met a particularly hostile reception at

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Aborigines and Citizens Walgett and Moree, where discriminatory treatment ranged from segregated hospitals and cinemas to Aboriginal servicemen being excluded from the local RSL and Indigenous children denied entry into the council swimming pool. The students protested at those places where discrimination was most pronounced because, as Perkins told a crowd outside the Walgett RSL, ‘we just want to show them that we object to this on principle, we don’t think this is a good thing, and we’re doing it in a passive way’. The group’s activities infuriated segments of the local community. On leaving Walgett, their bus was rammed by a local grazier’s pick-up truck and forced into a ditch. In Moree, they were jostled by a mob outside the public baths, spat upon and forcibly ejected by the Mayor himself. These confrontations received national, sometimes international, coverage and led a number of reporters to conclude that racial discrimination was ‘an ugly fact of life in northern NSW’.22 Perkins believed that the ‘freedom ride’ had given hope to Aborigines in country towns. ‘We stirred their imagination,’ he said, ‘their desire for human rights, and we have cultivated a feeling of oneness, of unity among the Aboriginal people.’23 Lyle Munro, an Aboriginal activist born and raised in Moree, agreed. He was one of the children who accompanied Perkins to the Moree swimming pool that day in February 1965. Taking part in the demonstration which forced the local council’s reluctant decision to rescind the colour bar was a deeply profound experience for young Munro. As he remarked in 1978, ‘I saw the power of direct action that day in Moree.’24 Meanwhile, in Armidale, a quieter revolution was taking place. The growing influence of Aborigines within the AAA—as members, not just beneficiaries—prompted a name change. ‘Assimilation’ was dropped so that ‘AAA’ now stood for Armidale Association for Aborigines. In the same year, 1965, some Aboriginal members, led by Jim Smith, established the Aborigines Education Foundation. There was now ‘a fierce racial pride’ within the Aboriginal community, said the AAA’s President, Ralph Berman, which ‘was becoming rapidly more cohesive and responsible in its own affairs’.25 In a highly critical report on land rights, Aboriginal members of the AAA warned that ‘dispossession is not past history but is continuing today’, and during the 1967 Referendum campaign they handed out ‘How-to-vote’ cards and explained the implications of a ‘Yes’ vote. In New England, as elsewhere in Australia, an overwhelming majority favoured universal rights for Aborigines (82.67 per cent compared with 89.67 per cent at the national level). These changes were symbolically important, paving the way for a more assertive and confident Aboriginal community to take charge of the AAA in July 1971. Margaret-Ann Franklin recalled her surprise: ‘It was interesting to learn about Aboriginal problems from the people themselves, and I was enormously impressed.’26

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S E L F  D E T E R M I N AT I O N A N D B E YO N D

The growing dissatisfaction with assimilation led to a cautious acceptance of the integrationist philosophy. There would remain ‘one Australian society’, Prime

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Minister William McMahon said in 1972, and Aborigines were still expected ‘to identify themselves with that society’, but they would now possess greater ‘choice about the degree to which, and the pace at which’ they made the transition.27 Gough Whitlam, in turn, initiated a massive spending program for Aborigines, envisaging educational opportunities in ‘no way inferior’ to those available within ‘mainstream’ society, a plan to improve Aboriginal housing within ten years and a new ‘offensive’ to address the deplorable standards of health in many Indigenous communities. Aboriginal history and culture would be introduced to school curricula and, in accordance with the principle of selfdetermination, an Aboriginal-elected National Aboriginal Consultative Council was established to advise the government on matters which affected Aborigines. These were exciting times, according to one Armidale elder, as Aborigines rallied across the nation ‘for one thing only, and that was to get Black people a better deal’.28 Aborigines looked to education as the way forward, and the Armidale College of Advanced Education (ACAE) responded by introducing Australia’s first unit on Aboriginal education—‘The Aboriginal Child in the Classroom’— into its existing Diploma of Teaching. Millie Douglas, who taught the unit, was also instrumental in setting up the Walgett Aboriginal Education Conferences, at which former students of the ACAE could discuss strategies for Aboriginal children’s education. In 1978, again at the suggestion of Millie Douglas, the College offered the first Graduate Diploma in Aboriginal Education, designed mainly to train teachers ‘to analyse and understand the needs of Aboriginal children’.29 By 1980, the ACAE was responsible for training half of all the Aboriginal teachers in the state.30 An Aboriginal Fellow was appointed to develop and teach the Diploma and Aboriginal students were given a room where they could socialise and study. In 1982, the College introduced a ten-day Pre-Orientation Program, designed to introduce Aboriginal students to tertiary studies. This strategy greatly improved retention and completion rates and in 1984 an Associate Diploma in Aboriginal Studies was introduced, which allowed students to explore Aboriginal culture, history and tradition and provided a fully accredited qualification for Aboriginal people interested in the processes of self-development and self-management. The course was highly successful, attracting students from across Australia. In 1985, UNE set up the Oorala Centre, in a modest wooden hut behind the Faculty of Arts, to cater for its increasing number of Aboriginal students, with a graduate of ACAE, Lynette Riley-Mundine, as Director. Oorala staff pioneered the ‘Tracks’ program, a bridging course to enable Aboriginal students to gain entry to UNE. In 2001, after ‘Tracks’ had been introduced to Aboriginal prison inmates, the program won the Australian Award for University Teaching for innovative and practical approaches to the provision of educational services to the local and regional community.31 During the 1980s early childhood centres for Indigenous children sprang up across the country. Armidale had had a preschool since November 1963— only the second institution of its kind in New South Wales. In 1987, it was

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Aborigines and Citizens handed over to the Armidale Aboriginal community and began to operate as an incorporated association, controlled by a board made up of parents, staff and other community members. The school was renamed Minimbah—‘a place of learning’—and Dianne Roberts, an accomplished Aboriginal educationalist with extensive experience in local health, employment and welfare bodies, became its first Director. Minimbah was now thoroughly ‘Aboriginalised’, with a strong emphasis on Aboriginal cultural and linguistic curricula. As Patsy Cohen said, ‘the littlies, that’s where we’ve got to start from, making the little kids proud of what they are’. In this respect, she added, Dianne Roberts was ‘really doin’ a good job. She’s startin’ at that little preschool age with the kids, doin’ their Aboriginal thing—dances and their storytime, tellin’ them . . . [to] never be ashamed’.32

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❈ The Principal of Minimbah, Dianne Roberts (right), with two other members of staff, Dorothy Roberts (back) and Lyn Hoskins, at an All Aboriginal Pre-School Conference, Coffs Harbour, 2004. (photo: unknown)

The project steadily evolved. In 1991, staff and parents realised that many children who were bright and excited learners nevertheless found it difficult to adjust to ‘mainstream’ schools once they left Minimbah, and a Transition Classroom was established. Trepidation about the public school system’s failure to meet at least some of the children’s needs remained a primary concern and during the mid-1990s Minimbah began to lobby for an independent primary school—against some opposition from competing schools. Enormous efforts by Dianne Roberts ensured that in 1997 a new school, with three classrooms, was erected on land gifted to Minimbah in Galloway Street. In 1999, a new

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preschool was added to the site. A Nutrition-Administration Block, built in 2000, reflected Minimbah’s holistic approach to education—its commitment to students’ physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual needs. Minimbah prides itself on low staff–student ratios, and on low fees for the economically disadvantaged. The school’s vision is to cater for the specific needs of Aboriginal parents and students within an Aboriginal decision-making framework, and it deliberately recruits staff from Indigenous backgrounds. And yet, Minimbah remains a broad-based association. Today’s students, while mostly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, come from many different cultural backgrounds, including international student families and ‘mainstream’ Australian society.33 Aboriginal people enjoyed better employment opportunities in Armidale than in other country towns. As Vera Lovelock remembered, thinking mainly of her own family, in the 1970s ‘everyone had a job—all our sisters worked at the [UNE’s residential] Colleges—Wright, Mary White, Robb’.34 Work was also available at the hospital, the railways and surrounding properties. Typically for rural New South Wales, this was mostly physical work—building, process-working and labouring. Farm labourers made up 13 per cent of the Aboriginal workforce but only 3 per cent of the ‘mainstream’ working population. There were no Aborigines working in shops, and few in professional and technical trades (although this was changing).35 Aborigines were still in the more menial jobs in the community. Worse, most had no work at all—even in Armidale around 70 per cent of Aborigines were unemployed. ‘[A] worse employment situation existed in [earlier] days than exists today’, according to a report compiled in the mid-1980s. But, the authors said, there was nevertheless a pressing need for governments to move beyond ‘their hand-out mentality’ and to develop ways of understanding and applying ‘the complex Aboriginal work ethic of time, energy, pace and space’.36 The Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) was introduced by the federal government in May 1977, primarily to provide Indigenous people with skills needed in the ‘mainstream’ labour market. Participants in the scheme would work for their local Community Councils for the equivalent of unemployment benefits, alleviating (so it was hoped) the social problems connected with chronic unemployment, as well as strengthening community cohesion and promoting self-determination and self-management.37 In most New England Aboriginal communities, these programs ranged from recycling waste to outdoor maintenance at public institutions and supporting local Aboriginal services. During the 1980s and 90s, the CDEP succeeded in some respects, but it was an abject failure in bringing Indigenous people into ‘mainstream’ employment. Even now, in 2006, around 80 per cent of Aboriginal families in north-west New South Wales depend on social security and CDEP support.38 A recent review of the program called for community-centred outcomes, for non-CDEP jobs and for participants to be accountable through Shared Responsibility Agreements (SRA).39 Whether these initiatives, including SRAs and what the Australian Council of Social Service has damned as their ‘paternalistic forms of delivery’ and ‘detailed regulation of personal behaviour

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Aborigines and Citizens by Government’, succeed in improving employment opportunities for Aborigines remains to be seen.40 Members of the Indigenous community in Armidale began agitating for a community-controlled medical service, but it took ten years of planning and negotiating before Armidale District Services Incorporated (ADSI) began operating the Armidale Aboriginal Medical Service, with weekly clinics in Guyra, Tingha, Uralla and Walcha. In accordance with its holistic, primary healthcare approach, ADSI developed dental and hearing programs; educational programs in women and men’s health; support programs for young mothers and the elderly; counselling and clinical services; and school health programs for the whole New England region. The North West New South Wales Mobile Aboriginal Dental Service was even more comprehensive, serving approximately 12 000 Aboriginal adults and children from Tamworth to Toomelah on the Queensland border. A similar area and population was covered by ADSI’s North West New South Wales Aboriginal Children’s Hearing Health (Otitis Media) Unit and its ‘Yarn Up’ Mental Health Counselling Unit, an innovative program which included timely work by the ‘Bringing Them Home’ Stolen Generations Counselling Team.41 Aboriginal communities benefited from the emergence of new leaders, ready to engage in ‘mainstream’ politics at the highest level. In Moree, Lyall Munro (senior), a Gamilaraay man who had been active in the freedom rides, became Chair of the ATSIC Regional Council. He is a powerful public speaker and an influential figure at the local government level. ‘Keeping Lyall informed,’ recalled Dick Estens, a Moree cotton-grower (speaking of his own considerable efforts for Aboriginal employment), ‘helped keep the community on side. He loved us, he constantly promoted Moree, he nullified the “radical” side, being an old radical himself. We gave him as much publicity as we could and we still do—he loves it!’42 An especially remarkable, and inspirational, leader was Pat Dixon. A Dunghutti woman, she was removed as a child from the Bellbrook Reserve, north-west of Kempsey, by the Aboriginal Protection Welfare Board. Apprenticed as a domestic servant to a white family in Sydney, Pat Dixon returned to Armidale in the early 1970s and in 1983 was elected to the Armidale City Council, becoming Deputy Mayor in 1995. She was the first Aboriginal woman elected to local government in Australia and worked hard to promote Aboriginal involvement at this level. It is in no small part due to her commitment that the former Armidale City Council—now the Armidale Dumaresq Council—has had at least one elected Aboriginal representative continuously since 1983. As she told the Australian Reconciliation Convention in 1997, local government was a forum in which ‘Indigenous people and other citizens [can] come together’. With a distinctively Aboriginal understanding of place and community, she argued that the local and regional level was ‘where big issues at the national level have their base. Local communities are where Aboriginal people meet white people, it is the place where we talk, play sport, shop, have a laugh and a cry’.43

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❈ Pat Dixon in 1991, launching her video ‘In the Mayor’s Chair’, produced to encourage Aboriginal people to stand for election to Armidale City Council. (photo: unknown)

Pat Dixon was Aboriginal Policy Officer for the Department of Local Government and Cooperatives and for the Australian Local Government Association, she created the Local Government Aboriginal Network to support Aboriginal councillors across the state, an initiative followed elsewhere in Australia, and she served on several national bodies. Her efforts to promote greater levels of understanding and cooperation between Aboriginal and ‘mainstream’ communities is a legacy which survived her death in 2001. The Narwan Eels, a rugby league football club, was formed among Aborigines in Armidale in 1977 by four local men, Michael Morris, Gary Davidson, Colin Ahoy and Lance Moran. The brilliance of the Narwan players soon became evident. After reaching the Grand Finals three times, in 1980 the club won the Premiership, as well as taking the Northern Division Caltex Cup and the Clayton Cup. Kinship and family ties were central to Narwan’s make-up. Canterbury-Bankstown may have the Mortimer, Hughes and Gearin brothers [remarked the Armidale Express], but collectively they don’t number up to Narwin’s [sic] Moran family. There are 10 Morans— Lance, Bryce snr, Bryce jnr, Tom, Clarrie, Cecil, Pritchard, Alistar, Derek and Shane. There are six Ahoys—Colin, Les, Bill, Michael, Clive and Kenny—and four Kellys—Eric, Lewis, Dennis and Bobby.44

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Aborigines and Citizens Narwan won nearly every Grand Final between 1981 and 1986 and twice won the Aboriginal Knockout Competition. The players are positive role models for young local men, and many of its juniors continue to be offered contracts with major clubs in Sydney, Canberra and Newcastle. The remote and recent past bears down on the present in intricate ways— both inspiring and challenging—and during the 1990s the emotional problems associated with years of racial discrimination began to be better understood. In 1997, in collaboration with the Centre for Research in Aboriginal and Multicultural Studies (CRAMS) and UNE’s Oorala Centre, ADSI secured Commonwealth funding to establish a Centre for Aboriginal Social and Emotional Well Being. From this followed the Diploma in Aboriginal Family and Community Counselling, which was accredited in 2003 and produced its first seven graduates in 2005.45 At this time, however, ADSI was itself suffering what its then Director, Pat Dixon, described as a ‘relentless ongoing pressure from government agencies to “mainstream” services in the name of efficiency’. She complained of a ‘constant battle’ for Aborigines to uphold the principle of ‘community control’. ‘[T]he only effective way to improve the situation of Aboriginal people’, she said, ‘is to let them manage THEMSELVES’. These warnings went unheeded and ADSI was forced to withdraw some services from Tingha, Guyra and Tenterfield. However, in recognition of ADSI’s success (one doctor was now attending 8000 people and its Women’s Health Team had achieved the highest breast cancer screening rate in New South Wales), it was given its own new building in Armidale, the Pat Dixon Clinic. ADSI still services large areas of northern New South Wales, but its struggles are far from over.46 In spite of undeniable progress, Indigenous communities seemed powerless in their dealings with state and federal governments. In 2004, nine communities established a group of elders entitled the Northern Tableland Aboriginal Communities Planning Forum (incorporated as the Northern Tablelands Aboriginal Elders Sovereign Authority, or NTAESA). This body asserts the authority of the past by highlighting the knowledge, dedication and wisdom of those identified by their communities as elders. In an interwoven system of authority, each of the nine has also established its own Council of Elders, representing all local family groups, and has working parties exploring community needs—health, education, employment and training, the environment and natural resources. These are important moves towards regional collaboration. The high rate of confrontation between police and Aboriginal youth in some Tableland towns remains a problem. Since the mid-1990s, members of the Armidale Aboriginal community have conducted informal patrols in an effort to keep their young people off the streets late at night, and in 2005 the Armidale Aboriginal Community Justice Group (ACJG) was formed. The ACJG, made up of local elders, holds monthly meetings with the town’s Police Commander and has begun to experiment with ‘circle sentencing’ in the hope of reducing local levels of Indigenous crime. Circle sentencing makes Aboriginal offenders accountable to their own communities and it makes those communities

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❈ Snacks make it easy to work hard at Minimbah. (photo: unknown)

responsible for sentencing. It is another means of reinforcing traditional Aboriginal authority, and also the legitimacy of sentences, ‘because penalties handed down will no longer be seen as white man’s law rather than Aboriginal community law’.47 The program was successfully piloted in Nowra and has already been adopted elsewhere in New South Wales, including Walgett, Kempsey and Coffs Harbour. Armidale hopes to follow examples elsewhere by achieving a 90 per cent success rate in preventing repeat offences.48 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Aborigines on the Tableland have gone some way towards regaining their lost voice. The traditional authority, structures and legitimacies of Aboriginal law and culture, which survived despite the efforts of ‘mainstream’ society to ‘whitewash’ the Aboriginal people, are today understood to be the way forward for individual Aborigines, their communities and society at large.

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Part 3: Newcomers

❈

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CHAPTER 12 ❈

Pa s s in g T hro u g h Mar t i n Au s t e r

This is memory territory. Changing gears up through the Moonbies through Bendemeer, Uralla unparched Armidale, the Pinch, Black Mountain, Guyra, Llangothlin, Glencoe—unalliterative buggers— stage coach settlements like tableaux in a mystery cycle: warts on the knuckles of the tablelands Jack Bedson, ‘New England Idyll’1 At Stonehenge, between Glen Innes and Glencoe, let us pull off the highway, in our imagination, to stretch our legs. There is a recreational area, here in the middle of nowhere, with poplar trees and picnic facilities, and white wooden fencing enclosing an oval. One can walk across to inspect the remarkable granite outcrops which give the district its name, and which might almost be enormous sculptures. The air is clean, the views are extensive. The turf is lightly covered with sheep droppings. The only sound is of the big trucks hammering along the highway. In the middle distance, beyond the rocks, the old railway line still crosses the open landscape. No trains have passed this way for many years. The track, where it still exists, and the embankments, the cuttings, the wooden bridges— modelled on the ones designed by Brunel for the extension of the Great Western Line into Devon and Cornwall—all have fallen more or less into ruin, have

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become a kind of monument, a sad memorial to an era in which the railway, rather than the highway, was the spinal cord of the region. Conrad Martens, the painter, who was on the Beagle with Darwin, made a sketch here in 1852, long before the railway was built. The Stonehenge property, where he was a guest, had been the first to be taken up in the area, and over the following decades European settlement was to become more established, although never as intensively as some imagined at the time. Surveyor Galloway, in 1851, had written: I extended the survey of the features of the country to Stonehenge, with a view to ascertain the best site for a town in this neighbourhood, and it appears to me that Stonehenge will form a very excellent site for that purpose . . . the only drawback being a few very large granite boulders upon the surface of one of the gently elevated hills, which could easily be blasted and removed when required. It is in a central position, the main roads of the district run through it, and I apprehend that if the Government were to patronise this place by forming a nucleus with a police establishment and a post office it will soon become a flourishing town.2 In 1866, the Armidale Express described the groups to be seen moving northwards in that era: the bullocks or horse drays, with sometimes a cart containing the younger members of a family, followed by spare bullocks, horses, brood mares and milch cows, and a few men or women on horseback. Some of these parties, remarked the writer, ‘forcibly remind an observer of scenes described in the Old Testament, when patriarchs moved in search of fresh pastures accompanied by their descendants’.3 One such group would have been, for example, the Taylors—Samuel, Thomas, Josiah and their families, driving their bullock wagons and stock for three months, in about 1877, to take up selections in the Glencoe and Graham’s Valley areas, near Stonehenge. By 1880, according to a descendant of the family, Samuel was campaigning for schools to be opened in the district.4 We shall hear from Samuel’s grandson Archie later in this chapter, recalling his days as a young boy at Glencoe school. Twenty years on, following the opening of the northern railway, the New South Wales Railway Guide was predicting that the township of Glencoe, with its splendid climate and excellent communications, ‘must steadily progress’.5 But it never did, although a little grid of streets had been laid out, in the usual rectangular form, by the government surveyor. (Individual buildings come and go, but street plans may last for centuries, or even millennia. At night, from the air, a traveller may see in the endless blackness of the land below the lights of some little town, laid out in squares, the lights themselves powered by a national electrical grid, its lines strung across the country, crackling with the force of civilisation.) And now, a century and a half later, the high tide of settlement has long passed. The mood, these days, is rather of what was than what will be. At the

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❈ A less contemplative way of passing through. While the railway track remains, the trains themselves—including this one, shown in 1985—are part of local memory at Glencoe. (photo: C. Stratton)

entrance to the oval, here at the recreation ground, there is a little plaque attached to a boulder. The inscription reads: ‘MEMORIAL TO STONEHENGE PUBLIC SCHOOL 1882 TO 1982’. There is no other immediate evidence of the school ever having existed. It was one of the earliest settlers, Colin Fletcher, who gave Stonehenge its European name. Surveyor Galloway was unsentimental about those boulders. But to other Europeans, they were a feature of great interest. The rocks particularly struck the European imagination, although according to a person who looked into place names in this region at the turn of the twentieth century, the Aboriginal name for the place could be translated as forest oaks near big plain—no mention of the rocks.6 Today the Stonehenge stone formations are included among the Cultural Landscapes listed on the State Heritage Register. In a small way they have become, as it were, a European sacred site. In 1879, the Town and Country Journal carried a lengthy article from a correspondent travelling through this part of the colony, who was much impressed by the rocks at Stonehenge and especially by what is now known as Balancing Rock. Of the Indigenous people, he wrote as follows (in terms that now seem unfortunate but which were characteristic of those days): The plain on which these rocks are has also another thing to add interest to it. For years, which may have been centuries, it was, before the era of the white race, a playground and camping retreat for the aborigines. Round these rocks they used to spend the winter nights taking them as a

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shelter from the cold blasts of Heaven. Here they held their corroborees, and how weird and strange they must have looked, as their fires blazed and crackled lighting up the strange masses of stone . . . but these wild children are dead, and the happiest use it can now be put to is to make it a playground for schoolboys to break their necks in.7 Public liability insurance was not a big issue in 1879. THE GAP IN THE UNIVERSE

People, wrote Vance Palmer in The Legend of the Nineties, ‘cannot really feel at home in any environment until they have transformed the natural shapes around them by infusing them with myth’.8 What is the fascination of rocks and boulders, like the ones at Stonehenge? Perhaps, that they inhabit the borderland between nature and culture. A monument, of marble or granite or concrete, evokes the permanence of a rocky outcrop, and a rocky outcrop, if sufficiently distinctive, is a proto-monument. As soon as a rock, or a place, is given a name, it rises from the natural into the cultural sphere. But if its name is forgotten, it sinks back. Medusa’s gaze, in Greek mythology, turned her victims to stone. But there is a more universal urge, a tendency in all of us in one way or another, to want to turn transient things to stone. It is hopeless, of course. The cosmic fire rages; life becomes death becomes life. Even the land itself is not to be relied upon. ‘The angry granite / the hungry range, / must crumble away, / must melt and

❈ The fame of the Balancing Rock—‘a perfect photo opportunity’—has so far earned it 60 references on the worldwide web. (photo: I. Davidson)

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Passing Through change’ (Judith Wright, ‘Wildflower Plain’). It has been, of course, a poetic obsession, a platitude, but no less a reality, the sorrow and the beauty of our lives. ‘The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands’ (Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam’). But in any case, to build a monument—to an event, or a person’s life, or to a little school that no longer exists—is not to keep the past alive. On the contrary, to thus mark a specific moment in time, to make that moment concrete and visible, which instantly begins to recede into an irretrievable past, is to set a clock ticking, and thus to undermine any notion of an all-encompassing present. It is to transform a world of primitive being, where past and present and future are not sharply distinguished, into a world of becoming, a world of history. To make a monument is, ironically, to separate ourselves from the past. Another way of holding on—or is this, also, to distance ourselves?—is to put memory into words, and to set those words in print. The making of literature is the shovelling of words into the ravine forever opening up between Present and Past. That crack in the world can never be filled. One may, however, fossick in the rubble, searching for precious stones as it were, with the kind of leisurely afternoon pleasure that many people enjoy in the old mining areas and creek-beds of New England; and if the soul be sent aloft in dreamlike flight it will perceive that, from above, the uplands and the incised ravines are indeed all part of a single landscape, wherein time seems hardly to matter. One might think that monuments, in bronze or granite, or in long lengths of steel rail, would outlast the merely verbal, the merely textual. But words— ‘well contrived words, firm fixing, never forgotten, / Always comforting the remembrance’—will often survive longer than physical relics.9 When the last remnants of the abandoned railway line in the landscape around Stonehenge have disappeared from view, the written records of the rail system, the mass of documentation still preserved in the archives of RailCorp or the Australian Railway Historical Society, may still be around. It is still possible to browse through the timetables for, let us say, 1958, for the Armidale to Wallangarra section, to find that, for example, on Mondays, the diesel train leaving Ben Lomond at 11.44 am will arrive at Glencoe at 11.58 and depart from there one minute later, stopping at Stonehenge to set down or pick up only by request, and reaching Glen Innes at 12.17 pm. Or to go back another 40 years, fossicking even deeper in the rubble, in the hundreds of pages of the General Appendix to the Book of Rules and Regulations and to the Working Time-Tables, published in 1927 by New South Wales Government Railways, one can still discover that, for instance, Sydney time will be observed at all stations and that the time will be sent to all Railway Telegraph or Telephone Stations daily at 1 pm, except on Sundays, and that ‘all concerned must be on the alert to receive the Time Signal’. In the same volume are several pages of requirements relating to departmental picnics, including a rule that tickets for these events may include railway employees, together with their wives and families, ‘or a lady friend in the case of a single man’. Perhaps—who knows?—such a picnic may have been held at Stonehenge.

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R E PA I R I N G M E M O RY

There was a Dutch mathematician, named Luitzen Brouwer. He thought the fundamental perception of the human intellect, the insight crucial to everything, even to mathematics, was the way we notice the falling apart of each moment into a part that is passing away and a part that is becoming. The primordial intuition, he called it. Everything followed from that. The idea of sequence, the idea of causal order. But that which falls apart must somehow be held together. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in an essay, once wrote of ‘the hooksand-eyes of the memory’, and apologised for the metaphor; but it catches rather well the fastening of past and present, the clothing of human beings in the material of history and experience. Even in casual conversation, the fabric of memory may be patched and stitched, and made to last a few years longer. Here is a random snatch of communication taken from the internet, from the Aus.rail newsgroup, a group of rail enthusiasts: • Subject: [NSW, QLD] Travelling • From: Rob Kearey • Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 15:28:37 +1000 . . . Just south of Glen Innes, the line crosses the highway just in front of an intact platform (with no building, alas). Does anybody know what station this may have been? • Subject: Re: [NSW, QLD] Travelling • From: “Chris Stratton” <[email protected]> • Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 15:46:41 +1000 It was most likely Glencoe. Was there still a pub on the highway not far from the platform? • Subject: Re: [NSW, QLD] Travelling • From: “Barry Campbell” • Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 21:52:09 +1000 Hmm. Glencoe station was near the pub (The Red Lion?) but the railway line ran parallel to the road there. It crossed the road at Stonehenge. • Subject: Re: [NSW, QLD] Travelling • From: Rob Kearey • Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 23:27:28 +1000 Hard to tell from memory. I normally have a preternaturally competent memory when it comes to pubs, but not, alas, in this case. • Subject: Re: [NSW, QLD] Travelling • From: “Chris Stratton” <[email protected]> • Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2000 09:22:09 +1000 You could be right. Memory fades with time and it is 12 years since I have been up that way and 15 years since I have photographed a train at Glencoe or Stonehenge.10

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Passing Through W E A R I N G D OW N M E M O RY

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Every possession of a land is also, of course, a dispossession. The newcomers care very little about that. The hills are given new names, the land is seen through new filters; and from time to time, in the years to come, monuments are raised, as solemn memorials, or as symbols of permanence. In all likelihood, whether it be centuries in the future, or perhaps almost imperceptibly, over generations, the settlers themselves will be displaced. But for the time being, they get on with making themselves at home. That sense of being at home, someone once said, comes only when a newcomer stops converting the place into what he expects it to be and lets it be what it is. Nevertheless, for the early colonists, there was no question of ‘letting it be’. There was work to be done, a land to be fenced, cultivated, brought by hard labour from wilderness to prosperous arcadia, and ultimately to be possessed not merely physically but spiritually; and not merely with axes but with speech. The day-to-day conversation. The political rhetoric. The auctioneer’s chant. The local newspaper editorials. The prose and the poetry. ‘It will take four or five hundred years’, Judith Wright remarked, ‘for us to become indigenes, and to write poetry, unless you are an indigene, is very difficult’.11 Still, even in the early days, one can picture the words strung together, formed into sentences, their linear forms moving across the land like trains, each phrase a carriage, clanking, loose-coupled; the trains, as it were, in their to-ing and fro-ing, constituting a kind of communication with the country, inadequate as it might be. And today, on the highway, beneath the outward evidence of a century and a half of settlement, beyond the immediate moment and the immediate scene— the long ribbon of bitumen seen through the windscreen, the glare of oncoming headlights as the daylight fails, the motel signs luminously competing to attract the traveller—behind all this, there must sometimes be, for those who have lived here for many years, an intimation of something else, not easily expressed, and for which no monument or memorial can adequately stand. Though it has to do with memory, and the passage of time, it is not to be found in metal plaques or carved inscriptions or written records. It is a more inward experience. A geography of introspection rather than circumspection. A geography of the interior: of venous channels, of cranial chambers and cerebral fluids. For those displaced, who walked the land in earlier times, there were no doubt equivalent emotions. Over the range he fled, Over the water-shed, Carrying his ghastly dead In the caverns of his head.12 It is a world in which certain localities or place names, certain landmarks, have a meaning, or a resonance. They generate a web of mental associations. They comprise a way of knowing which is not grasped by strangers and is only available to those who belong, to those who recognise certain things as being

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not just names, but signs pointing to a deeper reality. At the heart of scientific enlightenment, a professor of geography once declared, ‘is a darkness accessible, if at all, only to the night vision of the poet’.13 Wanted: cartographers. To fashion a chart, on which will appear Soundings, and safe harbours, And interior regions, moral blind spots, As yet imperfectly explored; With lines of emotional latitude, And a compass rose; also, a scale; Cherubs, blowing winds from the four corners; A title, in a fine cartouche; And a legend, to interpret the symbols.14 Language, one might say, is a kind of liquid, a transparent medium in which we are submerged like fish in the sea; and the land is the sea floor. But if the sea were drained: if there were no words, what then? What would we see? There is a visionary moment in David Ireland’s novel BloodFather, when young David Blood looks at the trees he loves, the shrubs and bushflowers, the friendly rocks, and not a word comes into his head. Everything is itself, as if words haven’t been invented . . . as if the word has been slipped off each object like a glove and the object stands there naked, to be felt and seen as it was before words came. An exquisite image. To suggest another metaphor, it is as though language, wherever and however it begins, becomes detached from the physical world, the words rising like a layer of morning mist from damp meadows, and taking on a reality of their own; or like a cloud of locusts, rising from a dry land. Or is it, on the other hand, possible to imagine a tongue so native, so expressive of a land and its history, that somehow the place and the words, and one’s own life, are a part of each other? One might hear the slow spinning into being of a sentence of indefinite length, a sentence winding like a lowland river, drifting into parentheses and qualifying phrases—a sentence to trace the long continuities, the lethargic summer days, but also to emulate the hesitations, the little eddies, the sudden rushes in the stream of life; or perhaps it would represent a mere luxuriating in the drift of sound and savour and sense, in the soft bumping and jostling of words piling up against each other, of meaning flowing into meaning. A divine and mysterious thing, a language. Ghosts—young voices, and more ancient voices—hover in the wind. In imagination, we can sit with those children, at their desks, years ago, at Stonehenge Public School, barefoot some of them, out here on the edge of civilisation, reluctantly learning their letters—for is not civilisation practically synonymous with literacy? Did not Kublai Khan himself have an alphabet prepared for his nomadic Mongols, learning their lines from Tennyson, perhaps, or Coleridge?— the cane resting on the corner of the teacher’s desk, the stove only just keeping

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Passing Through out the winter cold of the Tablelands, the whistle of a far distant train momentarily audible, while the hands of the clock seem to walk so slowly around their path. And through the window of the little schoolroom, in those long minutes while the train can be heard to draw nearer and trundle past and then recede into silence, we may see in the sky, as in a dream, from one horizon to another, ragged black streams of words, armies of words, migrating, settling, like birds, millions of birds; and the sky itself, turning, and the children growing old, the children dying. The weather. It is time’s main weapon. It works not only for the nurture of life but for the wearing down of anything that aspires to permanence. The weather god, whose voice—and is not all sound and speech a disturbance in the air, a matter of breath and vibration, of variation in pressure?—is a god of destruction as well as creation. It is prudent, perhaps, to remain ambivalent. Great memorials, it has been observed, are curiously non-committal. But even when its inscription has been worn away by time, a monument communicates, and almost seems to speak more movingly. Let the lichen grow, let the weather do its work.

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M E M O RY ’ S PAT T E R N S

Even half a century of settlement, or less, just one generation, is enough to put names on headstones, to create a sense of local ancestry, fragile as it may be. It was necessary for the newcomers to dig themselves in: to place themselves, and each other, in the land, in body and in spirit. They were bound to develop an awareness of topography, a sensitivity to the ground from which they drew their sustenance, in which they and their children and their children’s children, or so they assumed, would one day be buried. In a sense, it is not language and life, but rather death that animates the land. Outside Glencoe there is a little cemetery, where a grave may be found marked: ‘John Wetherspoon, Born 13th August 1843, Died 12th June 1928, Rock of Ages’. Wetherspoon was, among other things, an amateur versifier, as well as a Member of the Legislative Council. He was hesitant about publishing his work, ‘the production of one who has not received the benefits of a school training’. He wrote of Stonehenge: See where yon hill is rising, o’ergrown with mighty gums, Whose thick and dusty shadow athwart the valley comes; Stonehenge in all its grandeur stands conspicuously there, Though shrouded by the mountains from the sun’s departing glare.15 Archie Taylor (1896–1977) lived with his grandmother, who kept the little shop at Glencoe at the turn of the twentieth century. He went to school there in 1903, at the age of six. The school at Glencoe was in charge of Miss K. McCann, Irish, Catholic and devout. Miss Mac, as we called our middle aged teacher, at one time

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had 64 pupils enrolled and the only help she had was that of a senior girl to take the infants for periods . . . Each morning the school started its work with ‘the morning Offering’, a devotional prayer of about five to seven minute duration. At its close the Catholics crossed themselves but others did not. That was the only distinction evident. I belonged to a Protestant family and on Sundays we went to the little church with Grandma till I could repeat much of the ritual by rote. I still can. We kids, Catholic and Protestant, studied and played together and couldn’t have cared less what the other was. These differences were among our parents, they were not ours. We were British, Christian and White, and absorbed the idea that these virtues identified us as the chosen people of God, as once the Israelites had been according to scripture lessons. But that was long ago and the Israelites had fallen from God’s grace and we had somehow come to fill the place.16 An interest in family history inspires many people to rediscover ancestors who might otherwise slip quietly into historical oblivion. The Englebrecht family, for example, traces its descent from John and Christina Englebrecht, who migrated to Australia from Germany in about 1859, and lived near Muswellbrook. John and Christina’s son Charles, born in Germany, married Annie Graham, who in the 1890s worked as the railway gatekeeper at Ben Lomond, earning seven shillings a week. To her relations, railway people like herself, she was known as ‘Auntie up the line’.17 (The railway regulations for 1927 specify that gatekeepers when opening, closing and attending to level crossing gates ‘must do so promptly, and are not to delegate this duty to children of immature age’. No doubt a similar rule applied in Annie Graham’s day.) South of Stonehenge there is a turn-off to the right, to a place called Graham’s Valley, from which there is a lovely drive up to the township of Ben Lomond. But to most travellers on the highway, Graham’s Valley remains a mere name. It is as if, in reading a book, you notice that around the understood words there are others, less clear, hundreds of them, away from the highway, beyond your field of vision, a landscape of verbiage, of words that seem to carry no significance; although to other readers, strangely enough, meaning might reside in just those words and names that to you are silent; and if only you were not always travelling so fast, if only you had time to explore, they might become familiar to you too. Franz Kafka, travelling by rail in Europe in 1911, once noted in his diary that Goethe’s observations on his travels, a hundred years earlier, were different from those made in his (Kafka’s) day because they were made from a mailcoach, and the slowness of movement by road encouraged a more leisurely development of ideas. A calm, so-to-speak provincial form of thinking sets in. Since the country offers itself unscathed in its indigenous character to the passengers in a wagon, and since highways too divide the country much more naturally than the railway lines to which they perhaps stand in the same relationship

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as do rivers to canals, so too the observer need do no violence to the landscape and he can see systematically without great effort.18 But now, as far as New England is concerned, we have reverted from rail back to road, and it is from the highway, at 100 kilometres per hour, that we observe the country. Perhaps indeed it is movement, or difficulty of movement, that shapes our perception of the region we live in; lines and directions of repeated movement, of ourselves and of traffic in general—a regular or occasional travelling of certain roads, for one reason or another, and an almost never travelling of others. But also, it is the words and the sounds. In the words that blow across the land like a ceaseless wind, like leaves or litter in the breeze, spoken, sung, printed, broadcast—regional news bulletins, local sports results, weather information—we become attuned to rhythms and formulas, forms and phrases; much of this communication being inconsequential, hardly attended to, instantly forgotten, but the regularity, the routineness of format, contributing nevertheless to a sense of who and where we are. Though all shall pass away. And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls’.19 To grow familiar with a place, with New England for example, to get our head around it as they say, is to work on a jigsaw puzzle, seeing where things fit in, making connections, enjoying the moment of realisation—so that is where that road comes out!—the pieces of the puzzle being at first few in number and quite large but, frustratingly, becoming smaller and more numerous the longer we continue, for as we see at last, it is a puzzle that can never be finished: our knowledge can never be perfect, and besides, the whole picture is in a state of gradual but perpetual change, of historical and geographical evolution. (Is it not also true, besides, that the magic tends to fade as you come to know a place too well? Is the romance, the strange poetry of a place, its distinctive aura, more visible to a stranger than a long-term resident?) There is a board game, not widely known, called Upwords. It is a three dimensional version of Scrabble. The difference is that words may be changed into other words not only in the usual Scrabble way but also by stacking one tile on top of another—gone, for example, can be changed into, say, done, by placing a d on top of the g—so the array of letters on the board grows not only horizontally but vertically; not only geographically, one might say, but historically. It is how a nation evolves, by the steady piling up of new letters on old, the accumulation and displacement of names, the substitution of terms, the turning of one story into another, over the years. A landscape of language, stratum deposited upon stratum, infinitesimally thickening as the centuries pass. A landguage.20 We have paused long enough. The breeze is picking up, here at Stonehenge. Our reverie is over. It is time to take to the highway once again.

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CHAPTER 13 ❈

Co l o n ia l Se ttlemen t Al an At ki nson and Jo h n At c h i s o n

The origins of European settlement in New England are now deeply buried, both among old and scattered papers and within the landscape itself. There is no single and certain date for first arrival, as there is for settlement at Port Jackson in 1788, Swan River in 1829 and Adelaide in 1836. Use of the Tableland in a continuous way by Europeans began in the 1830s, but it is impossible to pinpoint when the first of them found here even a temporary livelihood. We can only speculate from fragments of evidence. Little Llangothlin Lagoon, for instance, is a small sheet of water lying at the highest part of the Tableland and about eighteen kilometres north of Guyra. Sediment in its bed, more than a metre deep, hints at the impact at some stage in the 1820s, or even earlier, of the disturbing feet of cattle (see Chapter 6). A kind of recollection in the soil, in other words—a fleeting memory manifest in pollen and minerals—suggests (though it does not prove) that men with livestock had reached that point very early in the history of settlement, living for a time by the water’s edge.1 As for documentary evidence, the record kept by Allan Cunningham of his journey of exploration in 1827 shows that in July that year his party found a timber hut near what is now Warialda, on the north-west slopes. ‘Upon examination,’ he said, ‘it was quite evident that it had been erected by white men, knowing well the use and application of the broad-axe.’ Cunningham thought its builders were probably convict escapees from Port Macquarie or Wellington Valley.2 Men of this kind, New England’s first white visitors, might well have lived off their own livestock or depended on the Aborigines for food. One

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Colonial Settlement escaped convict, George Clarke, known as ‘Barber’, seems to have done both. He lived with Gamilaraay people along the Namoi River during the late 1820s, wandering as far north as the Gwydir and south to the Liverpool Plains, where he recruited his supply of cattle from the runs of squatters. Similarly, in 1829 Richard Craig escaped from the penal settlement at Moreton Bay and travelled south, apparently making his way across the Tableland. After two years in the bush he was captured by Aborigines north of Port Macquarie and surrendered to the authorities there. His knowledge of local languages and landscape was to be valuable to others later on.3 It may be, too, that during the drought of 1826–29 flocks and herds were sent from the settled districts, the Hunter valley in particular, onto the Tableland in search of pasture.4

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T H E S Q U AT T I N G P I O N E E R S

The beginnings of permanent settlement are better documented. Squatters— the Baldwins, for instance—began to move stock and to set up establishments beyond the Liverpool Range in about 1826. They came mainly from the Hunter valley and the Hawkesbury. Parts of the Liverpool Plains were settled thus and within five years there were runs further north. Hamilton Collins Sempill was at Walcha by 1832 and the men and stock of Henry and William Dumaresq were in the neighbourhood of what was to be Armidale by 1835–36. A mounted policeman seems to have been stationed at Henry’s run, Saumarez, as early as April 1836.5 However, the squatters’ use of pasture in the remote parts of the colony—everywhere beyond the ‘Limits of Location’—had no kind of endorsement in law. The Australian Agricultural Company was given more than half a million acres freehold on the Liverpool Plains and Peel valley in 1833. But this was a dramatic exception to the rule. From 1836, squatting beyond the ‘Limits’ was legitimised by the issue of licences (see Chapter 9). From 1839 commissioners were appointed to maintain minimal law and order among the Europeans and, more urgently, between Europeans and Aborigines. The Commissioner for New England was, once again, stationed near Saumarez, and it was he who gave his headquarters the name Armidale. Increased security of person and property encouraged further settlement. Also, a serious economic depression in the early 1840s led many squatters, hitherto living in the better settled parts, to cut costs by moving altogether onto their runs. In 1841, according to the census of settler population, there were 1003 males and 71 females within the Commissioner’s domain (defined in Chapter 1). Sixty of these women described themselves as wives.6 Families, in other words, made up a very small part of the whole. By 1846, however, the population had doubled and 21 per cent was female. The number of wives had risen to 223. With wives came children and, sometimes, domestic servants. The presence of women quickly led to the building of better houses and to a more complex way of life. The second half of the 1840s also saw the beginning of a more familiar kind of public order. Magistrates of a conventional kind were appointed and the pastoral districts were broken up into police districts. These were used for

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census purposes and, as a result, it is now possible to say something about the distribution of people from place to place. In 1851, in terms of total population, four areas—the Liverpool Plains to the south and west, the southern parts of the Tableland (centred on Armidale), the northern parts and the coast beyond the escarpment—each contained between two and three thousand European souls. To the west, in the police district of Warialda, there were said to be 867. The 1851 census also noticed embryonic villages. Armidale (population 556) appears on the Tableland, Tamworth (254) and Wee Waa (68) to the south, and Grafton (319), Port Macquarie (519) and Kempsey (123) on the coast. Alone to the west, once again, was Warialda (45). The main centres then, were along the highway and the sea.7 This census also showed where people had been born. It was a relatively new population, in the sense that there were slightly more immigrants and fewer native-born than the colonial average. There were few of the long-settled families already common in areas closer to Sydney. Throughout the Tableland and neighbouring areas almost two-thirds of the population had been born in some part of the United Kingdom: 34 per cent in England, 21 per cent in Ireland, and 8 per cent in Scotland—numbers very roughly reflecting the relative size of the three mother nations. These national groups were concentrated in varied places. On the Liverpool Plains, the numbers of English were three percentage points about the average throughout the region. Around Armidale, including Walcha, the Irish were five points above, but in the old coastal settlements they were five points below. In the north (the police districts of Tenterfield and Wellingrove), the Scots had congregated in distinctive numbers, again at five points above. Clearly, settlement from place to place was not random. Certainly, there were no dramatic ethnic differences and, like the rest of colonised Australia, this region was fundamentally ‘British’ (a term including the Irish at this stage). But significant variations did exist, perhaps originating by chance, but then, for a time, perpetuating themselves so as to give some places a particular character. PAT T E R N S I N T H E M A S S

In this chapter we examine the way European people gathered and put down roots as they spread across the Tableland and its margins. We are interested in the way the invaders first came to terms with this part of Australia. The place itself, in all its diversity, shaped the pattern of settlement, but larger events mattered as well. The goldrushes of the 1850s made a significant difference to the process of settlement throughout eastern Australia. The goldfields were scattered widely in and around New England, and they varied in wealth and permanence. In November 1852, within eighteen months of the first rush to fields near Bathurst, there was an embryonic community of miners at Rocky River, south of Armidale. Other fields opened during the 1850s at Nundle, near Tamworth, at Bingara and at Timbarra, east of Tenterfield. Rocky River was the richest field and for some years the settlement there, with as many as 5000 people, had the

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Inverell Bingara

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LOCATION en ar Cl

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Timbarra Au

Port Macquarie

Minerals Au Gold

Main Road

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Railway

100 Kilometres

Ag Silver

❈ Nineteenth-century mining settlements in New England.

look of a prosperous town. It nourished the nearby village of Uralla and it drew population and capital into this part of the region. The hordes of prospectors meant a market for meat and grain, enriching those already in possession of the land. But the discovery of gold also gave a new complexity to the population, multiplying the numbers—and magnifying the importance—of labourers, shopkeepers and small farmers.8 The figures from the 1861 census show how the pace of settlement varied from place to place at that point, and especially from town to town. The village of Tenterfield, thanks to its nearby goldfield, was now more than twice the size of Glen Innes—132 households compared with only 53. But many households in Tenterfield were made up of single men; Glen Innes had a higher proportion of married couples. Such figures can also say something about the sophistication of daily life. Armidale stands out, and its statistics are a reminder of its central importance for the Tableland. At a time when good wives and mothers were understood to be pivotal to civilisation, Armidale was supreme in the proportion of its households managed by married women. And at a time when

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❈ A mining village in about 1880—the main street of Tingha, whose life depended not on gold but on tin. (photo: unknown)

every civilised married woman thought that she needed at least one good girl to help her, nowhere else were houses so well supplied with female servants.9 Armidale might be tiny compared with Sydney, or even with Maitland and Bathurst, but in 1861, with its courthouse, solicitors, clergy, doctors, banks, newspapermen and large-scale shopkeepers, it was certainly a place where the process of regional settlement had reached a new stage. Ethnic differences had become more distinct by 1861. Chinese now appeared in the census, all of them men and most of them goldminers, ranging from 409 near Tamworth (mainly at Nundle) to 102 near Tenterfield (mainly at Timbarra). They always seemed exotic to the Europeans, fascinating and sometimes frightening. Massed in such numbers on the diggings they seemed a real phenomenon, their ‘yabber’, as one European writer called it, ‘sufficient to silence even the very cockatoos’.10 In fact, deafening noise—music, shouting, shooting—was part of every Australian goldfield, and all kinds of men were responsible. From the 1870s, Chinese were also found in large numbers on the tinfields. At Tingha, Chinese families were present in various aspects of town life. Wives now came from China, although some Chinese men married local women. Chinese shepherds and shearers were also common, working sometimes in teams, contributing in ways fundamental to the life of the Tableland. Once again, the sound of their speech fell strangely on European ears—their talk among themselves, for instance, when they knocked off at lunchtime.11 In due course Chinese market gardens became a feature of many New England towns. Germans also sought each other out. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of mass emigration from Germany (mainly to the United States).

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Colonial Settlement Germany had no substantial overseas empire and English-speaking countries were a common destination. Here and there in the homes of Prussia, Württemberg, and so on, New England place names may well have been the stuff of daily talk. During the goldrushes, Germans gathered on the diggings at Rocky River, Nundle and Bingara. However, carefully managed and governmentassisted immigration from Germany to Australia was already in progress by the time gold was discovered. Between 1849 and 1859, 52 single men and 84 families arrived at the port of Grafton, via Sydney, thanks largely to the efforts of a German merchant, Wilhelm Kirchner, and of Edward Ogilvie, a Clarence River squatter. Some of the immigrants settled in Grafton itself, where their social and economic impact was far greater than their numbers. Others found work on nearby squatting runs.12 Further inland, the Dangars, squatters at Gostwyck, south of Armidale, employed German shepherds, wool-classers and overseers, imported, probably, with Kirchner’s assistance. Germans were also brought out to build the homestead and to work as shepherds at Ranger’s Valley, between Glen Innes and Deepwater. Others came north under their own steam to Nowendoc and Walcha from large estates at Gloucester and Stroud.13 German settlement depended partly on chain migration, with later arrivals following where friends or kin had gone before. Highly successful immigrants might be especially effective in drawing others after them. Also, some who made a name for themselves, especially in the towns, might be instrumental in persuading others who were already in the colony to gather in the same place. At Tenterfield, Johan Heinrich Sommerlad, from Hessen, via Brisbane and Stanthorpe, had a profitable orchard. He was an

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❈ A German family, Hermann and Louisa Hartmann and their children, on their farm, Beulah, near Dundee, in 1899. This couple lived to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary in 1922, with 63 living descendants. (photo: unknown)

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active townsman, mixing easily with his English-speaking neighbours (all of his children married non-Germans). It was partly because of him that several other German families made their homes nearby. At Gunnedah, the same seems to have been true of the Prussian, Jacob Westerweller, who was the town’s principal shopkeeper. There were also numerous Germans in and around Armidale.14 A little to the south of Armidale, at Kelly’s Plains, there was a community of German Catholics—Brandscheids, Posts and Eichorns.15 Some of them appeared frequently at the local Court of Petty Sessions, often laying charges against each other. Their knowledge of English being slight, compatriots from the town—Alderman Johann Schmidt, a dealer in tin-ware, and Carl Joseph Hirschberg, a cabinet-maker—acted as translators.16 Such cases provide a microcosm of the stark variety of this generation of New England settlers. When the Kelly’s Plains Germans took their neighbourly disputes before the world, they must have felt the strangeness of British law and legal process. And yet they and other ‘alien’ immigrants knew how to use the law and customs they found here—the rules surrounding civil disputes, landed title and the workplace—in making their way forward. What they thought about the country itself, how they argued about its beauty and its coarseness, its bright mornings, its golden chances and its heartless dead-ends, we cannot know. Language difference and, in most cases, their Lutheran faith, made the Germans a distinctive minority. The Irish-born also tended to stick together. Most were Catholic, but a few were Protestant. Their accent and idiom, especially among the poor, made the Irish unmistakable. At least in these parts of New South Wales, they were typically—but by no means exclusively—a rural people.17 They were also more obvious than usual on the southern parts of the Tableland, especially in Armidale and Walcha. Some of Armidale’s leading shopkeepers were Irish-born, including Protestants. ‘The Irish Protestants’, John Ferry says in his book, Colonial Armidale, ‘held some of the most valuable assets and the most influential positions in town’.18 Thomas Markham, for instance, was Armidale’s first physician and George Allingham its first mayor. The families of these two men, from Kinsale and from County Fermanagh, were intermarried. Armidale’s well-to-do Irish Catholics included Owen Gorman, a storekeeper who had been an officer in the 80th Regiment of Foot and who gave generously to local Catholic causes. The Kilkenny-born Dunkins (John and Mary) started the New England Bakery, with a factory attached where they made cordials and aerated water. They moved on later to the Great Northern Bakery. The Dunkins’ son Charles, also a baker and an eminent townsman, has his memorial today in stained glass in the Catholic cathedral.19 One of Walcha’s leading squatters, Abraham Nivison of Ohio, though a devout Presbyterian himself, made a point of employing Catholic men with families. Some of those from Ohio and from neighbouring Bergen-op-Zoom—shepherds, shearers and wheelwrights—gathered on small allotments near Walcha, at a place known as ‘Irishtown’. Only a few families, the Blakes, for instance, were Protestant. It was a short-lived community, already dwindling by the 1870s, and today only remnants of its houses survive.20

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Colonial Settlement The Germans and the Irish were often gathered together in particular places by the efforts of employers and other men of capital. But such efforts would have been ineffectual without the motivation of the people themselves, their desire to live side by side, to work and worship together, and to intermarry. Armidale was always the main focus of Catholic activity on the Tableland, becoming the seat of a Catholic bishop in 1869. All this up-to-date piety—priests, schools, choirs, sodalities, guilds—must have made Armidale a pleasant place for men and women for whom refined religious ritual was an important part of modern life. Armidale and Grafton were the two principal towns in the north-east corner of New South Wales, and there was more movement between them at that time than there was to be in later years. It was said of Grafton in the 1860s that four languages could be heard in the streets, Gaelic, German, English and Aboriginal. Gaelic was the language of the Highland Scots. Scots living around Grafton were typically small farmers who had come to New South Wales in the 1830s under the guidance of the Presbyterian minister, John Dunmore Lang, and who had lately moved together from the Hunter to the Clarence valley. In 1861, nearly a third of the people along the lower Clarence, including the villages of Ulmarra and Maclean, were Scots Presbyterians.21 Today Maclean calls itself ‘the Scottish town in Australia’ and (though level with the sea) stages an annual Highland Gathering. The Scottish experience adds another dimension to the process of settlement. The Scots were a small minority in New England and many came from the more remote parts of Britain. But all were educated, at least to basic literacy, nearly all spoke English (a few were limited to Gaelic) and some had capital and influence. Their methods of settlement varied accordingly. The 1851 census registered a high number of Scots in the police district of Wellingrove. They included many of the first squatters near Inverell and eastward to Glen Innes.

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❈ Beardy Street, the main street of Armidale, in February 1872, with the New England hotel on the right. (photo: unknown)

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Preferring sheep to cattle, many of their shepherds and shearers were also Scots. At Byron Plains, Peter Macintyre was especially active in bringing labourers from his native country, as government-assisted immigrants. On some stations the people might be nearly all Presbyterian, their homeland memories largely of Perthshire and Argyll and their language spiced with Gaelic. Inverell and Glen Innes likewise had some claim to be called ‘Scottish’ towns. In 1861 Presbyterians made up a quarter of the population of each.22 Some called this part of the Tableland and slopes not New England, but ‘New Caledonia’.23 Certainly, the landscape, if we can imagine it without its eucalypts, leptospermum, banksias and hardenbergia, resembles Scotland more than it does the green and pleasant land of the Sassenachs. New arrivals were greeted by high outcrops of granite, balancing rocks and beetling vantage points, as well as shallow marshes and wetlands—happy sights, perhaps, for Highlanders. To the east, on the other side of Glen Innes and along the Chandler and Wollomombi rivers, Scots were drawn together for different reasons. This is ‘Scots’ Corner’. About 40 kilometres across and centred on the Presbyterian church at Kilcoy, the area was opened up for free selection following the Robertson Land Acts of 1861. The related families of McLennan and McRae, both from Ross-shire, were already in the Wollomombi area in the 1850s. They intermarried with others who, like them, had come from Scotland’s central Highlands. So Scots’ Corner evolved into a self-complicating network of kin. Many of the families continue today on the land their forebears first selected.24 Bill Ramson, the celebrated scholar of Australian English, once joked that if the New England New State Movement ever came to anything, a smaller Scottish Nationalist breakaway might well follow. Within the triangle centred on Armidale, Inverell and Glen Innes he noted Ben Lomond and Ben Nevis, Glencoe and Glen Elgin, the Aberfoyle River, Dundee and Rob Roy.25 But in truth New Englanders, on the whole, have always been more interested in the way groups of different background might operate together. One of those who contemplated the effect of weaving varied nationalities into a single cloth was John Wetherspoon, from Fifeshire, owner of 460 hectares south of Glen Innes. (He appears in various chapters in this book.) The name he chose for his land, Glencoe, suggests an angry Scottishness. It recalls the English massacre of the MacDonalds in 1692. Wetherspoon was indeed chief of the local Caledonian Society, but also a Member of the Legislative Council, a leading man in the Farmers’ and Settlers’ Association and, as we have seen elsewhere, a poet. His verse included lines about the ennobling of Australia by the mingling of Scottish, Irish, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Teutonic’ blood. When he died in 1928 Wetherspoon was buried on a bitterly cold, windswept winter’s day, his coffin carried among pipers playing ‘Lord Lovat’s Lament’ and ‘Aber No More’.26 In the making of their own communities, the German settlers seem to have felt most strongly the tie of a common language. The Catholic Irish were driven mainly by common faith. For Scots it was clan and birthplace, especially the various parts of the Highlands and Islands from which they came. Writers and public figures such as Wetherspoon might talk in general terms of the Scottish

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Colonial Settlement nation as a whole, but most Scots probably thought more narrowly. The English, in contrast with the Scots, did not place much importance on networks of kin scattered far across valleys and moors. And yet old, familiar places were important to them too. Like the Scots, they often tried to recreate such places in the antipodes. The Everetts, a brotherhood of gentlemen squatters originating from Biddesden House, near Ludgershall, Wiltshire, settled at Ollera, west of Guyra, in 1838. Within the next twenty years they had managed to bring to Ollera about 50 people from their own small corner of England. The family names—Dudman, Cannings, Hutton, Cotterell, Reeves, Cummings, Coombs, Lansley—mimicked English village society in the Australian bush.27 An even more intricate example of chain migration from England to New England could be seen at Saumarez Ponds, west of Armidale. About a dozen families from rural Bedfordshire settled there together. Again, it was Henry Dangar who brought out the original settlers, Tysoes, Townsends and Frosts. Others of the same kind and origin gathered around Dangar’s immigrants when, in the 1850s, they established themselves on small farms at Saumarez Ponds. Since John Bunyan’s time, Bedfordshire had been a hot-bed of religious dissent and these people were of a Calvinistic frame of mind, fired with a belief that God’s grace belonged to very few. In due course their spiritual centre, and some

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❈ Peter and George Tibbs, Cornish goldminers at Mt Mutton, near Rocky River, a picture taken shortly before World War One. (photo: unknown)

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of the original families, moved from Saumarez Ponds to Black Mountain, near Guyra, where they built a tabernacle and where baptisms took place in a dam belonging to one of their leading men.28 Nowhere else in New England was the gathering of communities shaped so strongly by feelings of difference—in this case, difference for eternity. T H E I M PA C T O F T H E TOW N S

We have concentrated on events during the 1850s and 60s because it was during that time that a long-term pattern of settlement was laid down—one of communities and lines of movement. The impact of those formative years is part of the lasting demographic heritage of New England. Towns were vital, not only as communities in themselves, but because of their influence. To begin with, it was the coastal towns that mattered most. Morpeth and Maitland, Port Macquarie, Kempsey and Lawrence (the original port on the Clarence) were the gateways through which many people came inland. Moving through these places, settlers had equipped themselves with last-minute purchases. Squatting families established agents and depots there to support their inland concerns. From 1841 the Cohens, originally Jewish innkeepers in Maitland, broadened their influence as agents for pastoralists throughout the Liverpool Plains and the Tableland.29 The Hudsons of Balala and Uralla, the Burgesses of Armidale and the Grills of Guyra likewise had origins in Maitland. Archibald Clunes Innes (who owned much of Port Macquarie) established the first store in Armidale, originally to supply his own stations. At Lawrence many new families may have established useful contacts before scattering to Tenterfield and elsewhere in the north.30 In due course, inland towns were used in the same way. The storekeeper Colin Ross used towns like stepping-stones, moving his business from Armidale to Glen Innes and then to Inverell (where he was a pioneer).31 The highway across the Tableland was fundamental to the importance of the towns. According to the 1861 census, half of the urban population in New South Wales north of the Hunter was scattered along it. Armidale had 910 people, Tamworth and Tenterfield between 600 and 700 each and Glen Innes 288. Other town dwellers were divided between the coast (at Grafton, Port Macquarie and Kempsey), and the west, where none of the towns (Gunnedah, Inverell and Warialda) was larger than Glen Innes. The only other place which census officials saw fit to list separately was Walcha (355), on the road up from Port Macquarie. Armidale was the highway metropolis. It was much smaller than Grafton, but it commanded a larger territory and it had no rivals among the inland towns north of the Hunter. For twenty years it had been the centre of government for the Tableland. It was also an important staging post on the way north to Queensland, where the frontier was rapidly opening up to pastoral enterprise. Here we glimpse an important moment in the process of settlement. Today, in terms of wealth and size, Grafton is overshadowed by Lismore and Armidale by Tamworth. Indeed, Armidale’s early pre-eminence was brief. By 1871 Tamworth was already bigger, and the gap was widening quickly. The journalist Charles

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Colonial Settlement Lyne, visiting from Sydney ten years later, found ‘very little outside bustle’ as he walked Armidale’s streets (see Chapter 1).32 Even Glen Innes and Inverell, though always smaller, were growing more quickly. Armidale had been central, nevertheless, to the way men and women settled during the 1850s and 60s. Even today the town wears the medals of its early glory, with its cathedrals and colleges, like some antipodean version of Durham or York. At that time, railways were still a thing of the future. The Tableland was cut off from Sydney by long roads and difficult terrain. Although not far inland, it was also separated from coastal towns by the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range. It was fertile, rich in minerals and yet remote. Settlers wanting to make use of this territory had to come to terms with its advantages and disadvantages. Armidale was where the more expensive goods, including tools, could be bought, where financial credit was available, where courts were held and where government officials could be found. Armidale was a vital meeting place. There men and women could discover others with whom they had friends in common and who shared memories of some small place on the far side of the world. There they could take a view of the surrounding country, searching for their future homes, mustering their resources and consulting the local brokers of knowledge—bankers, solicitors, shopkeepers, clergy and anyone else they might meet in public bars and hotel dining rooms. These aspects of Armidale help to explain the creation of many of the welldefined communities mentioned above, those at Scots’ Corner, Kelly’s Plains and Saumarez Ponds. The squatters of ‘New Caledonia’, though they worked over larger distances, also depended on Armidale to begin with. But Armidale is only the most important example of a larger process. Walcha, for instance, played the same part in the making of Irishtown. The Tableland was highly productive, well-ordered and, from the 1850s, rich in settlements that quickly became towns, each of them shaping population movement round about. Small farmers, including free selectors, settled in large numbers, always keeping within reach of market places. The railway network, so important for the carriage of produce, would be both a cause and an effect of the growth of towns. The opening of new mines—gold at Melrose, Hillgrove and Metz, tin near Tenterfield and at Tingha, Emmaville and Cope’s Creek, and silver at Boorook (also near Tenterfield)—had repercussions just as complicated for on-going patterns of settlement. However, most of this happened after the 1860s. On the whole, the European invaders were by now distributed over the landscape in patterns recognisable several generations later, and even today. As we have seen, families were established in New England at an early stage. Family networks, focused on well-entrenched pastoral stations, small farming communities, villages and towns, spread quickly. In a region like this, it was easy for men and women to indulge in the rebuilding of old kinds of community, each with its own sheen of culture and faith. Habit and memory perpetuated the business of settlement. These silent imperatives are now buried, however, in the graves of men and women like John Wetherspoon, even deeper than the tell-tale mud at Little Llangothlin.

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CHAPTER 14 ❈

Ho m e s teads Ji l l i an O p p e n h e i m e r

For thousands of years, in northern New South Wales the Aboriginal people used rock overhangs or camps sheltered by slabs of bark to protect them from the elements, but few traces of these sites survived their transient lifestyle (see Chapter 8). When British settlers penetrated the highland plateau later known as New England, their original shelters were also of a temporary character. Driven by drought raging in the Hunter valley in the mid-1830s, men and their animals pushed north to find fresh pastures and in the hope of permanent settlement. They knew there was no official acceptance of stockowners’ occupation of the land, although the colonial government was powerless to prevent it. Transhumance—the regular, maybe seasonal, movement of livestock—was an accepted way of life in many parts of the world. Here it seemed a suitable response to climatic conditions and it resulted in the building of temporary shelters and other structures.1 In Australia the word ‘homestead’ refers to the main house or head station on a large holding, together with its associated outbuildings.2 From the 1830s to the present time homesteads have reflected financial conditions in the pastoral industry, the main basis of New England’s economy. The state and complexity of the homestead often demonstrated the financial position of the property owner. In good times, houses were improved and enlarged and the surrounding buildings extended, with flamboyant extravagance. In economic conditions, essential maintenance was all that could be achieved. John Oxley’s reports on the Tableland, following his expedition in 1818, did not result in immediate British occupation. It was to be climatic and economic

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Werris Creek

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Calala

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Langford

Kempsey

GR

Liverpool Plains

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Walcha Europambela

H

Moonbi

Tamworth

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Gunnedah

M a c le a y

Ohio Ri

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y

C

Boggabri

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LOCATION

ve r

Deepwater

Gwyd

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Moree

Ri

Strathbogie

Ashford

Port Macquarie Land above 500m

Building material

Land above 1000m

Stone Timber

0

100

Brick

Kilometres

❈ Some New England homesteads, showing building material.

conditions that prompted the movement of settlers from their land grants in the Hunter valley to the so-called ‘waste lands’ to the north. By the early 1830s, in Britain itself, the economy was transformed and social pressures brought changing conditions to all levels of society. With the growth of capital investment, particularly in the manufacture of clothing materials, there was an increasing demand for the quality merino wools that Australia had shown it could produce. The climate and land proved suitable to the growth of merino sheep, prices rose and wool production and its accompanying demand for land became a major economic benefit to the young colony. Land grants in the Hunter valley had been surveyed and stocked through the 1820s, but the long drought of the early 1830s halted fodder growth and severely affected flocks and herds. Climatic conditions immediately prompted the movement of men and animals over the ranges in search of fresh pastures for their starving animals. From about 1840 conditions deteriorated with another drought and devastating financial collapse, accentuated by uncertainty of land tenure, thereby halting pastoral investment. By the 1850s prospects had once more improved.

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Wool was in demand, and gold had been discovered, not only in the southern parts of the country but also in various parts of New England. There was optimism again for the colony and land sales drew money into the economy. This was used to subsidise passages for immigrants as a labour force to replace the convicts previously assigned as rural workers. Skilled tradesmen were needed to construct improvements such as houses, woolsheds and fences. Land legislation in 1847, giving promise of leases and approval to buy homestead land blocks, was followed by the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 with selection before survey, which assisted pastoralists to consolidate their land ownership. This was the beginning of over 40 years of prosperity, during which flocks increased, wool prices rose and there was a surprising absence of severe droughts. During this ‘long boom’ land titles were consolidated, and this resulted in new and more substantial homesteads being built throughout New England. BUILDING WITH TIMBER

Although the Australian climate was described as ‘salubrious’ by the first settlers and was less harsh than the extremes of North America and parts of Europe, New England was surprisingly varied in its winter temperatures. Its climate was also unreliable, its dry periods interspersed with showers and storms (see Chapter 3). The region was well supplied with extensive tree cover, mostly eucalypts. There were numerous spring-fed creeks and lagoons and native animals and birds abounded. With an apparently small, even timid Indigenous population, it seemed an ideal place to settle. Shelter from the elements was the first task undertaken by the incoming settlers. They had spent days and months on the way, camping beneath their drays laden with essential supplies, or under makeshift canvas tents. Most of the settlers had some experience of Australian conditions and had learned the uses of hardwood trees—and the difficulties of felling and cutting them up. There are

❈ Ollera, the original homestead of the 1840s, built of slabs and bark by the Everett brothers. (artist: unknown)

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Homesteads numerous descriptions of the first huts erected and letters back to Britain often included sketches of these campsites. Clusters of buildings were erected quickly for the immediate purpose of shelter but, thanks to the durability of the hardwoods, they lasted surprisingly well. Wooden slab buildings became a feature of early Australian homesteads.3 However, the first buildings had several problems. This was an unfamiliar countryside whose weather patterns included torrential storms which could cause sudden flooding upstream, and dwellings were often placed too close to watercourses. The combustibility of eucalypt timbers, particularly in dry times, meant that huts could easily catch fire from a smouldering spark. Huts usually had bark or wooden shingle roofs. In winter the temperatures, sometimes many degrees below freezing, sharp winds and even snow, could make life in such draughty dwellings a miserable experience. Split-slab huts, quick and cheaply erected, were usually considered suitable for temporary accommodation for the stockowner and his workmen. They were universal in the first instance because the land did not belong to the pastoralists. The colonial government insisted that ownership of land by way of free grant or purchase would not happen in New England, or in other parts ‘beyond the boundaries’, until it could be surveyed and settlement properly controlled. Most stockowners chose not to construct substantial homes until they could be sure of ownership. Such men were called ‘squatters’, a term used even after they had secured licences, leases and, after 1861, freehold tenure. Their first dwellings were usually composed of a number of separate huts or even larger buildings, each normally one room in depth, entered by separate doors from a verandah that connected them up and gave protection from the elements. The separate buildings had varied purposes. There would be a main hut for the owner or superintendent with an adjacent kitchen, store, dairy, meat-house, stable and milking-shed, together with huts for workmen, who lived, ate and slept there, and, at a distance, a woolshed. Split post and rail fences were constructed to enclose a horse-yard, cow-yard and a larger enclosure for other sheep or cattle. In January 1845, Eliza Marsh, a squatter’s wife, described her first home at Salisbury Court, to the south-west of the future Uralla. It was one of a cluster of slab buildings constructed by the previous owner, including a barn and huts for the 47 residents employed on the property:

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Our cottage, or as it is more properly termed ‘hut’ is considered the most comfortable of all the squatters’ places. It consists of a small passage about four feet wide with a door at each end; one door leading onto the verandah, the other being the main entrance and way from the kitchen which is another hut about five yards distant. On the other side of the passage is a skillion leading out of it used as Matt’s dressing room [this was Matthew Marsh, her husband] and at each end two small rooms seven feet long and six feet wide. As there are but three chairs, the others being stools I find my bedroom, when I want to lie down, the most comfortable place. The room looks quite nice, for you do not as in the

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sitting room, see daylight through the roof as there is a ceiling of canvas. My sitting room only has canvas round the sides . . . The whole hut is of wooden slabs, long pieces put upright but not exactly meeting, so if there was no canvas round the sides it would be airy enough. She was content for the time being, a new house being under construction: ‘We have fixed on a site . . . and the timber is waiting. We mean to have a good deal of stone about it to make the rooms more private, as through the wooden walls every sound can be heard all over the house’. The first homestead, which they afterwards called ‘Old Sarum’, was demolished in 1913.4 Of the numerous head stations thus constructed few have survived. Remnants may include a building used for farm storage or other purposes, or even a collection of farm buildings still associated with newer, more permanent homes. Among the few virtually intact are those at Wongwibinda, east of Armidale, at Balala, near Uralla, and at Ollera, near Guyra. Balala, built between 1841 and 1865 by business partners George Morse and Thomas Tourle, had a courtyard with a long slab schoolroom and bedroom on one side and bedrooms of basalt and granite on the other. A replacement weatherboard kitchen, built in the 1890s, completed the homestead. Its original slab outbuildings included a granary, barn and woolshed.5 The Wongwibinda homestead was completed in 1885 by Albert and Charlotte May Wright. Its late development ensured that, although it was also constructed of split slabs, its finish was more sophisticated than similar, earlier buildings. With its outbuildings, the original homestead is still the home of Wright descendants.6 Ollera, settled in 1838 by the brothers John and George Everett, also has a well-preserved collection of slab farm buildings, with the replacement family home built of brick and timber in 1913.7

❈ Some of the remaining timber slab buildings, now roofed with corrugated iron, at Balala, near Uralla. (photo: J. Oppenheimer)

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Homesteads These were all the homesteads of large pastoral properties. Smaller selectors followed the same pattern, though on a different scale. Homeleigh, a selector’s homestead at Irishtown, Walcha, has also survived, although now abandoned as a residence. Its collection of buildings dates from the 1850s, except that the single-room slab hut that was the original family home has been more recently replaced with a house of weatherboard.8 Within a decade of the initial establishment of station homesteads there was often renewal, extension or rebuilding. Many young owners had children who needed more room, and more belongings also needed more housing. Prosperity brought the income sufficient to pay for a larger homestead, which may have been built of sawn timber—weatherboards—pit-sawn or cut with a cross-cut saw. Such alterations also made use of the plentiful supply of local timbers. Made of hardwood, they might last for over a hundred years if maintained well. Weatherboard houses still survive from the 1850s, some with extensive alterations. The main innovation was corrugated iron roofing, laid over the original split shingles or bark. This was done after the arrival in the 1880s of the northern railway line, which could bring heavy materials from Newcastle. Sheets of iron were usually placed over earlier wooden or bark roofing, not only because the earlier materials had deteriorated, but also to catch rainwater from the roofs to be stored in iron tanks for household use. One of the best surviving examples of an early sawn timber homestead is Europambela, near Walcha, built in 1861 by C.D. Fenwicke. The first slab home on the property had been placed among its station buildings on a flat near the Apsley River. When Fenwicke bought the property, he planned a new homestead higher up the hill looking east towards the river. It has the usual detached kitchen and staff accommodation, dairy and pantry, joined by a covered way to the family quarters. All the earlier station buildings were left standing near the manager’s original cottage below the homestead. Some have now been demolished, but the newer weatherboard house, with some restoration, continues as a family home.9 There are many other surviving single-storey homesteads of sawn weatherboard, many on basalt foundations. A large number are to be found on the western plains beyond Inverell. There is a particular homestead style in this area, devised to cope with the extreme heat of summer in the days before air-conditioning. Examples are rarely raised on stilts, unlike the traditional ‘Queenslander’, but their wide gauzed verandahs, for sleeping in summer and protection against mosquitoes, have a special character. In the Moree district, Cleveland, Midkin (an interesting drop-log structure) and Combadello (with stylish weatherboard and architectural features) are good examples.10

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B U I L D I N G W I T H S TO N E

Settlers might have realised soon enough that Australian timbers were strong, sturdy and long lasting, potentially warm in winter and cool in summer. But to begin with, Scottish settlers, in particular, brought up among stone buildings in a cold damp climate, seem to have believed that their homesteads, whether

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❈ Haning, built of stone near Bendemeer by Andrew and Sarah Murray. (photo: J. Oppenheimer)

large or small, should be of stone. Many such buildings once existed in New England, but few survive. Near Walcha, the homestead at Ohio was built above flood level, near a permanent waterhole of a tributary of the Apsley River, between 1841 and 1865. It is of stone rubble, held with lime mortar and cow hair and rendered or ‘harled’ in the Scottish manner common in Dumfriesshire, where its creators, Abraham and Mary Nivison, were born. Split slabs from earlier huts on the site were recycled for the interior walls. The homestead consists of the main building, with one-anda-half levels of wall to make two storeys; a separate stone building, formerly the kitchen and cook’s room, and a three-roomed stone store with access only from the verandah along its southern side. All the shingle roofs remain intact under corrugated iron.11 Not far away, the Marshes’ new house at Salisbury Court also dates from this time. It is of single-storeyed granite with a central hall and doors opening onto the long, northward-facing verandah. This building was the centre of a pastoral operation including Boorolong, north-west of Armidale (15 000 acres), Maryland, near Stanthorpe (200 000 acres), and Salisbury itself (35 000 acres). Three other stone homesteads both date from the succeeding generation. The Murray family, also Scots, built Haning, north of Bendemeer, within reach of flooding from the Macdonald River and the house was abandoned for that reason. It had been constructed in 1867, by stonemasons from Port Macquarie, of beautifully crafted granite. Further down-river and above flood level are Longford and Glen Barra, built by the brothers Adam and Alexander Park. Extended over time, both houses are still features in their landscapes, while small stone workmen’s huts stand on remote parts of the properties.12 Further north, near Glen Innes,

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Homesteads in 1867 another Scot, Hugh Gordon, built Strathbogie, again of granite and to a design by the Sydney architect, John C. Drury. The house today has been carefully restored. An original slab hut, once the station office, remains in the garden, and there are a few stone and weatherboard out-buildings.13

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BUILDING WITH BRICK

From the 1860s brick was the usual material for new homesteads. At first bricks of local clay, fired in specially made kilns, were made near the site of the house. The quality and durability of the bricks has varied widely, according to the skills of the brickmaker and his knowledge of the variety of clays to be found in New England. Colour also varied from place to place, with the hard, dark gloss of ‘Armidale blue bricks’ especially distinctive. In due course some of these brick homesteads were to be among the most imposing in rural Australia, remaining today as powerful reminders of the golden age of wool. Some of the oldest surviving brick homesteads are in or near Tamworth. Calala, at first the headquarters of the Australian Agricultural Company’s vast land grant, became the company manager’s town residence, while Robert Pringle’s Bective stands to the west of the town. A little further north the twostoreyed Moonby House, the head station of John Gill, was built beside the Great North Road on a conspicuous hill above the Peel River.14 A little later, in 1867, on the Gwydir River east of Bingara, Margaret Munro and her sons used red brick for the two-storeyed homestead at Keera. A storehouse nearby, also of brick, had a cellar below for cool storage. Verandahs, rarely part of the original plans, were soon added to such houses so that doors might be opened in summer to cool the rooms, and as sleeping space for casual visitors.15 Extreme conditions were dealt with differently at Stonehenge, south of Glen Innes, begun in 1887 by Morris Simpson. There the homestead was of concrete poured between timber moulds to form twelve-inch walls, making it warm in winter and cool in summer.16 The fact that this method of construction was never used elsewhere on the Tableland may be testimony to the conservative habits of the settlers. Towards the end of the century a number of substantial brick homesteads were built for the second generation of Australian pastoral families, enriched by additional pastoral properties and by decades of good seasons and wool prices. Saumarez, close to Armidale, was used by the family of Francis James White as the head station of a number of holdings. Three successive owners had lived in the original house, which was begun in the 1830s and then extended, first in timber and then, in the 1860s, in brick. Its high-quality cedar joinery, tall ceilings and double-sash, six-pane windows show a sophistication of style rarely seen in such early buildings. However, in 1888 the Whites moved into a new homestead on the hilltop, designed by the Maitland architect, J.H. Pender, and constructed of Armidale blue bricks made on the property. In 1906 Pender added a second storey, doubling the size of the house.17 The Saumarez Whites were one branch of a large family established in the Hunter valley from 1826. In 1888, also near Armidale, F.J. White’s uncle,

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Frederick Robert White, completed what he himself termed ‘the grandest house in New England’, which he named Booloominbah. His architect was John Horbury Hunt, a North American, who had enjoyed the patronage of White’s brother James for other commissions. F.R. White’s local property was small but it was to be the centre of his operations and of his family activities. The homestead included the usual station buildings—stables, buggy sheds, dairy, farmyards—and it had a deer park, but there was no woolshed, usually the most important structure on a pastoral property. This was, in fact, virtually a town house, though three miles out of town. On White’s death in 1903 his sons inherited separate and distant properties and the building became an anachronism. It passed eventually to the University of New England.18 Despite falling wool prices in the 1890s, a severe drought in 1902 and an economic depression at the turn of the century, large property owners were able to ride out the storm, owing to the scale of their pastoral operations. Also, New England did not suffer drought on the scale of regions to the north and west. In 1904, another splendid house, Langford, was built outside Walcha by William Fletcher. By the 1870s, Fletcher’s father had owned Branga Plains, Walcha, Kentucky and Wallamumbi, and had built the Orundumbie homestead, south of Walcha, using local bricks. Langford symbolised a further degree of success. From England came sandstone columns for the entrance portico, circular castiron Colebrookedale staircases to link the lower and upper verandahs and a mahogany staircase with Fletcher’s initials on the newel posts. The interior joinery was of local cedar.19

❈ William Fletcher’s Langford, near Walcha. (photo: unknown)

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Homesteads The Dangar family was responsible for two large, brick homesteads between Armidale and Uralla. Gostwyck, a single-storey house overlooking the eastward flowing Salisbury Waters, was built in 1901 by C.C. Dangar. It was to be a holiday home but, following Dangar’s death in World War One, it became the residence of his widow and daughters. Mrs Dangar built a commemorative chapel at the end of the splendid drive of elms leading to the homestead. Additions to the house itself date from an expected, but unrealised, visit by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) in 1920. The homestead at Palmerston, another bungalow-style house, was built by N.N. Dangar. It had brick stables and other buildings in its homestead cluster, together with a brick gatehouse on the Armidale road.20 In the 1890s there were many substantial brick station homesteads built to the west of Armidale, including Clerkness, Torryburn and Abington, all near Bundarra. Near Glen Innes, similar buildings date from the early twentieth century at Waterloo, Wellington Vale (both 1908) and Ranger’s Valley. Further to the north-west, at King’s Plains, several generations of the Vivers family lived in the usual slab buildings until 1912 when, on inheriting the property, Dr Allan Vivers built a new homestead in the Scottish baronial style, designed by Rowe and Luckily of Sydney. It is a three-storeyed crenulated building of rendered brick imitating stone, built on stone foundations. Its entrance hall has coloured leadlight windows and a staircase leading to the numerous bedrooms, with a tower room at the top of a circular cast-iron staircase. On the ground level are the drawing room, library and dining room together with a kitchen, pantry and other service rooms. Once a property of over 61 000 acres, like other New England pastoral stations King’s Plains was greatly reduced in size during the post-World War Two period of soldier settlement. It remained in Vivers ownership until the end of the twentieth century.21

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The period between the two world wars saw economic pressures influencing financial returns to pastoral properties, with very low returns during the depression of the early 1930s. Original holdings were subdivided as members of large families took their share of old properties and as governments implemented settlement schemes through compulsory acquisition. Smaller homesteads were built for new families, taking advantage of new technology, including telephones, electricity, sewerage and mechanised transport and machinery. Examples of mid-twentieth century homesteads can be found throughout New England, some built of weatherboard, which was still plentiful due to the extensive forests to the east and south. Others were of brick, but after World War Two these were usually brick veneer over a timber frame. Mirani, near Walcha, is an example of the so-called ‘Federation’ style still influencing house design in the 1920s. It was designed by the Sydney architect Henry White, known for his elaborate State Theatre in Market Street, Sydney. Mirani features a tile roof of hips and gables and an upper storey for bedrooms

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❈ Mirani, one of the homesteads of the Nivison family, near Walcha. (photo: J. Oppenheimer)

above its one-and-a-half double-brick (Armidale blue brick) wall construction. Its maple panelling in the sitting room, leadlight windows and jarrah floors were typical of the time. Owing to the depression and falling wool prices its ambitious design was not realised, so that for the next twenty years it remained with one long northward-facing timber wall. The homestead was finally completed, with a new plan, in 1948. The property is a subdivision of the original Nivison property, Ohio, and like the Ohio homestead is still lived in by Nivison descendants. Its timber station buildings have had some alterations, with its woolshed and cottages dating from the wool boom of the 1950s.22 New England is still a place of primary production. Subdivisions have resulted in smaller rural properties and an increasing variety of intensive land use. New homesteads reflect less affluent conditions and a declining rural population. Some city-based landowners have built large homes, using capital from urban businesses to fund their rural hobby farms. Homesteads no longer require a large workforce and numerous buildings. Computers and mobile contractors working with sophisticated machinery have made them unnecessary. The nineteenth-century New England homestead was a cluster of buildings, often resembling a small village, in which a large number of people lived and worked. Over time, these homesteads have gradually changed so that, like the more conventional villages often found nearby, they have shrunk and lost much of their past purpose. A twenty-first-century New England homestead is usually a single house, accommodating one family, with several large iron sheds for work purposes. Members of the family may even spend their days at work in neighbouring towns, so that in nearly every respect the homestead is no longer the all-absorbing focus of their lives.

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CHAPTER 15 ❈

Sc h o ols Br u ce Mi t ch e l l an d Je a n Ne w a l l

F I R S T E F F O RT S

As the first Europeans were settling on the Liverpool Plains and spreading with their sheep onto the Tableland, the government in Sydney wrestled with the problems of providing elementary schooling for children in small towns and on isolated farms, far from the reach of bureaucracy and the churches. By 1848 the government was able to overcome weakening resistance from some of the churches and to introduce a system of ‘national’ schools alongside subsidised church (denominational) schools. The national schools, although sometimes described as secular, were really non-denominational Christian schools, seeking to inculcate a ‘common Christianity’—a notion hotly rejected by Catholic and most Anglican churchmen. For the time being, throughout New South Wales, the two systems, national and denominational, lived in an uneasy relationship. From the late 1840s the two largest churches—Anglican and Catholic—sponsored elementary schools in the bigger towns. At west Tamworth, headquarters of the Australian Agricultural Company, the Church of England clergyman helped the Company start a slab-walled school. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, in government Tamworth, a national school opened in 1855 with ‘no pen, desk or book’, and with living quarters described by the first teacher as ‘only fit for a good hen roost’. The church school was more successful in drawing pupils and the unhappy national school teacher soon transferred his skills across the river.1 In Armidale a school connected with the Church of England opened in 1847 and

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the Catholic Church gave its support to a lay school from 1848.2 The energetic agent of the National School Board, George William Rusden, tried in 1850 to rally enough support to start a government school as well, but Anglican resistance delayed the venture until 1861.3 The first two national schools in the region were in small settlements, Warialda and Dundee, where there were no churchmen to oppose the locals’ wishes. Warialda had only 45 residents and when the school opened in July 1851 its patrons were the largest local pastoralist, the Police Commissioner, the magistrate, the keeper of the store and post office, and the Clerk of Petty Sessions. Local supporters had raised £42, the required third of the cost, and received permission to proceed. The building had five rooms, one for boys, one for girls, and three, all small, to house the teacher. The first teacher was a Scotswoman, Margaret Geddes, but she was succeeded after only two months by a man with a wife and four small boys. There were only fifteen pupils, including the teacher’s own children, and thus the income from fees, on which he had expected to survive, was very low. He too left after four months. The school then closed, but it re-opened in 1861 and has been in operation ever since.4 Dundee’s school opened in August 1853, closed two years later, re-opened in 1875 and lasted a further hundred years. During the 1850s Walcha also achieved a national school. A third of the size of Armidale, Walcha had some prominent graziers who preferred the national system. Their one-roomed, slab-walled and shingle-roofed school opened in 1859.5 G OV E R N M E N T S C H O O L S

There have been some hints of a special flavour in New England’s educational experience. More importantly, perhaps, New Englanders themselves have believed, without looking very far into the matter, that such a flavour did, and does, exist. (See the ‘Prelude’ to this book.) Perhaps this has been a matter of perception rather than reality. As in other parts of Australia, and of the world, much has always depended on the habits and aspirations of parents and on the chance movements of teachers. And again, some parents have always preferred the schooling offered elsewhere. In the first decades on the Tableland wealthier settlers sometimes sent their children to schools in Sydney, where they lived with relatives or in suitable boarding houses. Others of this class employed tutors or governesses to teach their children in their own homes. William Gardner, for instance, was a Scotsman who worked as a tutor at Saumarez from about 1842 and afterwards at Moredun, Rockvale, Mount Mitchell and Oban.6 Gardner was a pioneer teacher on the Tableland, but he is better remembered for his detailed and invaluable writings on New England’s history and resources. And indeed, men like him—wandering scholars—might have been found in most parts of Australia at that time. Most obviously, government efforts applied uniformly throughout New South Wales. There was therefore nothing unusual about New England’s

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Schools 173

❈ The national school at Ollera, near Guyra, in 1862. (photo: unknown)

experience of government schooling. The growth of the region’s population, encouraged, among other things, by the discovery of gold and the expansion of small farming, meant that from the end of the 1850s until World War One there was an enormous increase in the numbers of government schools. The creator of the expanded school system was William Wilkins, appointed superintendent of national schools in 1854. Wilkins pioneered the use of pupilteachers, he introduced classifications of teachers and schools, and he decreed the books to be used and standards to be met. A network of district inspectors supervised the system with considerable efficiency through political upheavals, sectarian bitterness and two major legislative reforms (1866 and 1880). In New England the inspector from 1861 to 1868 was William McIntyre, a Protestant Irishman who had been employed briefly in the Hunter and who had since taught under Wilkins’ eye in Sydney. He was appointed as Inspector for the Northern District (all the colony north of the Hunter to the Queensland border) at the age of 31. McIntyre based himself in Armidale and for seven years rode his horses for what he estimated to be 3500 miles a year. During the first years of his incumbency, government schools were established in all of the significant towns of New England. With each of his new schools—totalling 45 in the end—McIntyre had to advise the local patrons on the choice of a site, inspect the building works, and then, if possible, visit twice a year to check the competence of the teachers and the progress of the pupils.7 The Public Schools Act of 1866 brought all national and denominational schools under a new Council of Education. National schools were now to be known as ‘public’ schools, and denominational schools, while continuing to receive government assistance, were regulated as if they were public schools. McIntyre reported that in the first year there were seventeen denominational

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schools operating in his district (which still extended far beyond the Tableland), nine run by the Anglican Church, three by the Catholic Church, three by the Presbyterian Church and two by the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Perhaps about half of these were in what we have called New England. The churches came under increasing pressure in these years to justify their government subsidies, as the public schools were clearly the popular choice. To meet this increasing demand for public schools the required enrolment was lowered from 30 to 25 pupils, and a new category of school, ‘provisional’, was introduced for which the figure might be even smaller. ‘Half-time schools’ were created where there were not enough pupils for a provisional school, with each teacher spending two days at one site and three days at another. Throughout New South Wales, between 1867 and 1879 these changes accommodated a three-fold increase in the numbers of children enrolled.

❈ Girls’ cookery class, Hillgrove public school, a photograph taken by the head teacher, Henry Tonkin, about 1895–1905. (photo: unknown)

In New England 26 public schools, many provisional, were established between 1867 and 1879. Half-time schools in the Armidale area included Killalee and McIntyres Flat, which shared a teacher from April 1873 until August 1874, when they both closed. The case of Gostwyck, near Uralla, which opened in 1874, shows how small schools might struggle to maintain enrolments and official status. A provisional school opened in 1874 and, by 1880, its increasing numbers enabled it to become a public school, a standing it maintained until 1892. Enrolments then apparently fell sharply, perhaps because of the economic depression, or else the departure of a single large family,

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Schools and Gostwyck became a half-time school, sharing a teacher with Big Ridge until 1908. Pupil numbers improved and Gostwyck was again a provisional school from 1908 to 1910. It then regained full public school status. It closed altogether at the end of 1942.

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P R I VAT E S C H O O L S A N D C H U RC H S C H O O L S

During the 1860s and 70s, the denominational schools faced a crisis. The churches did not have the funds or the teachers to establish schools even in small towns, and most parents were happy to support the public schools. Even Protestant clergy, especially nonconformists such as the Presbyterians, slowly swung behind the public schools. The Catholic Church, however, increasingly adopted an aggressively separatist policy. The bishops insisted that the government was obliged to support church schools and at the same time they challenged the very idea of government schools. In this they were following Vatican teaching, especially the ‘Syllabus of Errors’ of 1864, but in a strident manner peculiar to the Irish-dominated Church in Australia, with its long history of suspicion and fear of British rule. In 1879 Roger Bede Vaughan, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, and his bishops issued a Pastoral Letter drawing attention to ‘the extension of costly public schools in every direction’. They described the public schools as ‘seedplots of future immorality, infidelity, and lawlessness’, and they predicted that ‘this expenditure on godless education . . . will, in the course of time, fill the country with indifferentists, not to speak of absolute infidels’.8 Catholic parents were instructed to withdraw their children from the public schools in favour of the Catholic schools. This attack made it politically possible for the government to withdraw all aid from denominational schools, and it did so with the passage of the Public Instruction Act, 1880. During the 30 years to 1891 (according to that year’s census), throughout New South Wales the proportion of people aged from ten to nineteen who could both read and write rose from 69 per cent to 98 per cent. Also, by 1891 only 7.7 per cent of children from six to thirteen years were receiving no instruction. Hidden in this latter figure, however, was a wide divergence between urban and rural areas. Among urban children 4.8 per cent received no instruction, while in rural areas it was 11.9 per cent. The figure for rural areas would have been even higher but for the work of parents and tutors. Close to 10 per cent of all instruction was given in the home. Throughout the colony about three-quarters of all school children of primary school age were at government schools, with fewer (70.6 per cent) in Sydney and its suburbs, and more (76 per cent) in rural areas. In the city, but also in the larger towns, there were often more chances to attend church and private schools. On the Tableland, such schools flourished in Armidale and Glen Innes, and there were correspondingly weaker government enrolments. The pattern was almost the same in both Bathurst and Goulburn. As with government schools, then, even in church and private schools there was nothing distinctive about New

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England. In large provincial towns such as these, schools emerged and did well as soon as they were justified by population size and stability, including the numbers of administrative and professional workers. These towns were also church centres. Armidale, Bathurst and Goulburn were the seats of bishops. It is no accident that today these three have universities, Armidale’s being the oldest. Schooling of 6 to 13 year olds, 18919 (percentages) Type of schooling Town Armidale Bathurst Glen Innes Goulburn

Government 65.2 63.4 66.3 66.0

Denominational Private 20.7 23.4 22.0 22.3

12.6 11.1 10.1 10.8

Home 1.5 2.1 1.6 0.9

In New England, as elsewhere, small, privately owned schools were to be found in all country towns of moderate-to-large size from the 1850s until World War One, with some struggling on until overcome by the Depression of the 1930s. They were often run by widowed ladies who taught a few pupils in their homes. Some were larger and had especially built premises, a few catered for post-elementary level schooling as ‘grammar schools’ and all were attractive to parents who hoped for a level of respectability they believed was lacking in the government schools. Few records of these schools survive except for occasional references in newspapers, and their important role has usually been forgotten. They were typically small, mainly for girls and offered needlework, painting and music, as well as the ‘three Rs’. However, in the 1880s attempts were also made to establish private schools offering more advanced education. Inverell’s pattern was standard. A boys’ grammar school was opened in 1885 and lasted three years before the owner, who was also the headmaster, moved it to Glen Innes. Two schools for girls opened in the 1890s, one of which survived in various forms until about 1915. From 1900 to 1904 various private ‘high schools’ for boys and girls operated. There was a boarding grammar school from 1906 to 1909, another boarding school from 1910 for two years, and a school for girls, specialising in music, from about 1905 to 1918.10 At Glen Innes, two grammar schools survived even beyond World War One—the Glen Innes Grammar School and the New England Grammar School. The latter, which took some boarders, operated successfully from 1905 to 1939.11 Armidale’s private school story was similar, but with a different final result. From the 1870s to 1900 there were at least eight small schools run by ladies.12 The most successful was that founded by Angela Spasshatt, a doctor’s widow,

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Schools 177

❈ Boys of the New England Grammar School, Glen Innes, 1909, with their headmaster, William Reed, in the mortar-board. (photo: A.E. Neal)

lasting from 1875 until about the outbreak of war in 1914. At first Mrs Spasshatt took only girls, but competition from larger girls’ schools forced her to enrol boys as well and from 1892 she seems to have made her school a boys’ preparatory school. She was assisted by her daughter Rosalie, who carried on after her mother retired.13 Armidale also supported larger private schools. The New England Grammar School for boys (unrelated to the later one at Glen Innes) opened in 1873. From 1877 until it closed in 1899 its headmaster was Arthur Kemmis, a notable educator whose father had been founding headmaster of All Saints’ College, Bathurst.14 Church-supported schools such as All Saints now became the norm in Australia for secondary-level schooling. The withdrawal in 1883 of government support from denominational schools forced the churches to reassess their educational roles and, with few exceptions, the Protestant churches abandoned elementary schooling. Where they believed they had the necessary financial resources and support they turned to postelementary or, as it became known, secondary, schooling. In Armidale this new policy took only a few years to emerge. The Church of England already offered its support and encouragement to several private schools, two of which—one for boys and one for girls—were still stable and successful in the early years of the twentieth century. The New England Proprietary School for boys, which opened in Armidale in 1894, had antecedents dating back to the 1830s, including a succession of

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proposed sites in the Hunter valley. The money raised for this venture remained in the hands of the Anglican diocese of Newcastle until the 1880s when, after lengthy litigation, it was dedicated to the foundation of a new boys’ grammar school in Armidale. The school was to be associated with the Church but controlled by shareholders, predominantly the pupils’ parents, a system used in England but rare in Australia. The choice of Armidale rested partly on the belief that the ‘salubrious’ local climate was ideal for growing boys, being cool, bracing and free from the noxious vapours associated with the hotter and more humid climates in the Hunter and near the coast. The splendid new buildings were to represent a significant turning point for Armidale’s reputation as an educational centre. The school’s name was soon changed to The Armidale School (TAS) and it did well, attracting the sons of graziers and professional men. It was formally ‘sold’ to the Church in 1949, though no money changed hands.15 A key figure in the creation of TAS was Archdeacon James Ross, a Scot with educational experience and knowledge of new trends in schooling. In 1887, again in Armidale, Ross played a vital role in establishing the New England Ladies’ College under its remarkable first headmistress, Elizabeth Higgs.16 However, in 1895 the Church transferred its patronage to the New England Girls’ School, newly established by Florence Green, a talented teacher who had hitherto managed her own school in Victoria and who had been persuaded to come to Armidale by her brother, the recently elected Anglican bishop, A.V. Green. Miss Green retired in 1907, selling her school to the diocese.17

❈ Pupils at the New England Girls’ School, Armidale, 1901, with the founder and headmistress, Florence Green, seated on the verandah. (photo: unknown)

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Schools Meanwhile, the New England Ladies’ College continued with a series of owners, sites and names—Armidale Girls’ High School, Armidale Girls’ School, Armidale Girls’ Grammar School and Hilton. A group of local Presbyterians bought the school in 1937 and in 1941 it was transferred to the Presbyterian Church, as the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Armidale.18 The Catholic school system, in New England and throughout Australia, has been much more pervasive than that of any other denomination. The late nineteenth-century crisis in the relationship between the churches and government over education policy produced in the Catholic Church a reaction different from that of the Protestant churches. Convinced that Catholics could not safely use the government schools, its bishops and religious orders set up a complete education system of their own. Religious orders had been in Australia from the 1830s but from the 1860s they arrived in greatly increased numbers. They were the main force behind the growth of Catholic schools in New England. There had been small, Churchsupported schools from the 1840s and denominational schools mostly staffed by lay men and women. In Tamworth in the 1870s there were two privately owned schools attended mostly by Catholics. But throughout the region the religious orders, most of them female, gradually replaced the lay teachers. Four Dominican nuns from Maitland started a school in Tamworth in 1876 and immediately enrolled 50 boys and 40 girls.19 Similarly, in Inverell privately run Catholic schools were struggling until the arrival of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart in 1880.20 This was an order with Australian origins, founded by Mary MacKillop, and it made a particularly strong impact in New England. The order set up schools in fourteen towns between 1880 and 1909.21 Meanwhile, in 1882 the Ursuline Sisters came to Armidale from Germany via London, arriving in 1882 and at first teaching boys as well as girls.22 The Sisters of Mercy, founded in Ireland in 1875, established daughter communities throughout the Hunter valley and, in 1887, at Gunnedah. The latter in turn set up branches in New England—at Inverell, Narrabri, Walcha, Armidale, Mungindi, Deepwater and Emmaville.23 Male religious orders were also active at the secondary level. In 1889, the Patrician Brothers from Ireland opened St Patrick’s College in Armidale, taking over the teaching of boys from the Ursulines. Their departure in 1897 left the Ursulines in charge again until the French and Irish brothers of the De La Salle Order arrived in 1906 to establish De La Salle College.24 A similar pattern— boys and girls being taught by nuns until the older boys could be catered for separately—was seen in Tamworth. There Dominicans taught both boys and girls until the arrival of the Christian Brothers in 1918. By the 1960s a decline in the numbers of nuns and brothers in teaching orders and an increasing numbers of pupils meant that the Catholic system faced yet another crisis. Government aid was renewed when the Catholic Church accepted the validity of government schools, as the Church acknowledged in Vatican Two the moral legitimacy of the liberal State. But mergers were now the order of the day. In 1975 in Armidale the Ursuline and De La

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Salle schools were replaced by a non-boarding, co-educational secondary school in the former De La Salle buildings—O’Connor Catholic High School.25 In Tamworth in 1981 the Dominican convent school and the Christian Brothers’ school gave way to Our Lady of the Rosary College, a co-educational secondary school for Years 7–10, and in 2000, Our Lady of the Rosary merged with McCarthy Senior High School (established 1972) to become McCarthy Catholic College.26

❈ Music pupils at St Ursula’s Convent, Armidale, about 1900. (photo: I. Angus)

From the last decades of the nineteenth century the churches had answered a steadily growing demand for schooling beyond the elementary level. The government did likewise. In the larger towns, classes were added to the traditional public schools to create Superior Public Schools (later called District Schools). The Public Instruction Act of 1880 also allowed for academic-style high schools, but there were few of these established and fees kept their numbers low. In 1905 there were four high schools throughout the state, with only 560 enrolments. From about 1910, however, demand suddenly strengthened, owing to a new enthusiasm for the idea that children of ability should, whatever their background and wherever they lived, aspire to the highest level of education and to the professions.27 In 1911, this movement was spurred on by the Labor Government’s abolition of high school fees. In New England all the larger towns now demanded their own high school. After a hiatus caused by the war, the first was opened in Tamworth in 1919, followed by Armidale in 1920 and Glen Innes in 1928. These schools created a need for boarding accommodation for children who lived away from the main

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Schools centres but who wanted to prepare for the Leaving Certificate and university matriculation. In Armidale, the Anglican Church opened two hostels conducted as church boarding schools (rather than mere boarding houses)—the Memorial Hostel for Girls (1921–71) and St John’s Hostel for Boys (1927–72). The Methodist Church operated a hostel for girls from 1948 to 1957.28 Homes of the same kind existed in Tamworth. These first high schools proved popular and grew steadily. More followed. Inverell received its high school in 1939, and in the same year a specialised high school, Farrer Memorial Agricultural for boys, opened near Tamworth. Demographic growth and increasing demand after World War Two led to more again—at Quirindi (1954), Gunnedah (1955), Narrabri (1956), Moree (1961) and Tenterfield (1962). Second high schools then appeared in the bigger towns, in Tamworth (Oxley, 1968), Armidale (Duval, 1974) and Inverell (Macintyre, 1974).

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THE LIMITS OF THE SYSTEM

The problems of a thinly scattered population were less pressing in New England than in other rural parts of Australia. However, the region saw at least one example of another means of extending schooling to distant pupils, the travelling school. The teacher lived in a horse-drawn covered wagon with his books and equipment, and moved around the countryside visiting his pupils. From 1914 to 1921 there was a travelling school based at Inverell. In 1914 the teacher visited a total of 47 pupils in a circuit of over 1200 miles, including King’s Plains, Yetman, Coolatai and Gravesend.29 The schooling of Aboriginal children presented different problems for the government system. As the government schools established classrooms across the countryside it seems to have come as a surprise to many that Aborigines wanted to enrol. Teachers and officials accepted these pupils and it is estimated that in the 1860s and 70s hundreds of Aborigines attended schools. The only test was whether or not the pupils were ‘clean, clad and courteous’, a policy applicable to all. At Summer Vale, for example, about four miles east of Walcha, a school was established in 1886 on receipt of a petition which explained that eleven of the 25 children who would attend were Aborigines, living close by on the Walcha Reserve.30 In the 1880s, however, as racial prejudice increased in Australia, this attitude came under pressure from some white parents, who objected to Aboriginal children sitting with their own children. At the same time the New South Wales government was slowly moving towards separate schools for Aboriginal children. A new ruling dictated that if any white parent objected on any or no grounds to Aborigines in the classes, then all Aboriginal children should be removed. By the end of the 1890s ‘exclusion on demand’ had become the policy. Schools were to be provided for Aborigines whenever they were expelled from the normal government school, but in fact no effort was made to school them all.31

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Experience varied. At Summer Vale in 1925, when a demand for total exclusion of Aborigines was granted, there were 22 white and 14 Aboriginal children enrolled. Two petitions in 1926 demanded the Aborigines’ re-admittance, one from ‘White Residents’ and one from the ‘Dark People’. According to the teacher, four white parents wanted the Aboriginal children to stay, thirteen said they should remain if the building was enlarged, and only two were absolutely against them. The practice of exclusion remained until 1929, when Summer Vale officially became an Aboriginal School. White children, however, continued to attend until the school closed in 1943. By the 1930s attitudes were beginning to change, as evidenced by a dispute in 1937 about Woolbrook Public School. Aboriginal children from the Ingalba Reserve seem to have attended Woolbrook for many years—the school photographs for 1929 and 1936 show children apparently of both races.32 When some parents demanded that all Aborigines be excluded, the Minister for Education, D.H. Drummond, was torn between his opinion of the Aborigines as a ‘child race’ and the obvious unfairness of excluding children who were almost ‘white’ and who came from respectable families. He never resolved his dilemma. From the 1940s to the 1960s assimilation and equality in schooling became the government policy, and Aboriginal schools were brought up to the standard of the public schools. At length, segregation was discarded. Since the 1970s there have been new arrangements as Australians seek policies about schooling and other areas of life that are not racist but respectful of cultural differences, and that aim to remedy the wrongs of the past.33 Segregated schools became all the more impractical as the overall number of schools was in decline. As motor-buses became available in the 1920s and as roads improved, bush schools with small enrolments and provisional and half-time schools were closed and the children brought to larger centres. After World War Two there was also a decline in the rural workforce. The example of Vernon County, a large rural area with only one town, Walcha, illustrates the trend. Over the years from 1859 to 1947, 32 schools were established in the area. Some closed within a few years while some lasted for decades, but since the closure of Ingalba in 1968 there have been only two schools left of the 32—Yarrowitch with one teacher, and Walcha, now a Central School with many students going on to the Higher School Certificate. In Sandon County, embracing Armidale, Uralla and Guyra, only eleven of a total of 74 primary schools are still open, five of them in Armidale. At the same time, a new variety in education has emerged, with some primary schools using their own curricula. Armidale has a Rudolph Steiner Waldorf primary school as well as a preschool and primary school for Aboriginal pupils (see Chapter 11). But at the secondary level uniformity prevails. Parents want their children to have every possible opportunity to prepare themselves for standard certificates and university entry. The schools—government, private and church—are thus more and more inclined to follow syllabuses drawn up by statutory boards. This brief survey of over a century and a half of education has noted a series of revolutionary changes—especially the campaign to create a fully literate

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Schools society, and the extension of secondary education to a large majority of the population. The period also saw the opening up of tertiary education, with the foundation of Armidale Teachers’ College in 1928 and the New England University College ten years later. The latter became the University of New England in 1954. Another change has been the reversal of the policy towards the funding of church schools. After years of support, all aid ceased from the end of 1882. Then in the 1950s and 60s government assistance was reintroduced, and in increasingly large amounts. Thus the state governments still bear the main responsibility for government schools, while also assisting non-state schools. At the same time, while the Catholic Church has distanced itself from its nineteenth-century positions, in some educational matters governments have returned to positions characteristic of that earlier time. In 2004 the Prime Minister attacked the ‘values-neutral’ state schools, in terms echoing Archbishop Vaughan’s 1879 remarks on the ‘immoral’ public schools.34 There is, however, little nineteenth-century precedent for today’s politicians blaming the schools and teachers for a variety of social and economic ills. Their predecessors in state and federal parliaments were justly proud of the educational achievements evident in New England and throughout Australia, the fundamental legacy of which remains.

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CHAPTER 16 ❈

Re l ig io u s L ife Jenni f er Cl a rk

That part of Australia now known as New England was a spiritual place long before the white colonists arrived. The Bundjalung, Gumbaynggir, Dunghutti, Aniwan, Yugambal and Gamilaraay people knew the stories that marked the places and their feet had pounded the Bora rings deep into the earth (see Chapter 8). When the settlers came with their sheep, their history and their plans for the future, they marked their claims by building, for themselves and for God. Their spiritual language was spoken in fine churches, imposing cathedrals, school chapels and on the properties where they worked. Their hands toiled on the land, their minds pondered politics and prices, but on Sunday New England hearts were given over to God, most likely an Anglican, Roman Catholic or Presbyterian God. As time passed, the shape and needs of the communities changed. The places built for God seemed less important for worship and more important as heritage. Some churches closed down altogether and, instead of the swelling organ and the old hymns, the buildings echoed with the songs of the theatre or the chatter of preschool children.1 Religions other than Christianity grew in number and diversity. In the same way, wind and rain filled in the Bora rings and the Aboriginal people were forced to forget many of the stories that marked their places. H O R S E  B O R N E FA I T H

In 1841, when George Macdonald, Commissioner of Crown Lands for New England, took a census, he identified individuals as convict or free, male or

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Religious Life female, by age, by occupation and by another equally important determinant of identity—religion, which really meant ‘denomination’, as few would deny they were at least nominally Christian. Denominational association in 1841 was all about family history, self-identification and personal piety because the institutional churches were unable to keep pace with the insistent pressure of pastoralism. In 1841 there were no church buildings in New England and no resident clergy, but of the 1115 people permanently settled there, 651 called themselves Anglicans, 298 Roman Catholics, 156 Presbyterians, five Methodists, three Protestants of an unspecified kind, one Jew and one ‘Mahomedan or pagan’.2 Although Christianity dominated religious life in New England, other faiths were also present, both at this point and hereafter. The Chinese, for example, built temples in Tingha, Rocky River and Emmaville from 1857.3 The 1891 census also shows Muslim men scattered across the Tableland, but in numbers far too small to justify places of worship. Competition, especially between the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics, was a great motivator for the expansion of the churches into the pastoral regions. Sectarianism had deep roots in Britain, and flourished in New South Wales with ongoing arguments over the provision of education for children and stipends for clergy. In Sydney, the Anglican Bishop of Australia, William Broughton, had his own troubles with the Roman Catholic Archbishop John Bede Polding, as they struggled to bring souls into their respective folds. Denominational rivalry and the religious politics of Sydney were not lost on those watching and waiting in New England. On 12 April 1844, the Reverend William Purves, the first Presbyterian Minister at Port Macquarie, made the difficult journey across the mountain range to perform the wedding of Ann Boyd and Andrew Wauchope. One of the wedding guests, John Everett of Ollera, wrote to his brother, the

185

❈ The Rev. Archibald Cameron, who became first minister of the Presbyterian church in northern New England in 1854, at first including Tenterfield, Glen Innes, Guyra and Inverell. He served until his death, aged 90, in 1903. (photo: unknown)

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Reverend Charles Everett, about Purves’ visit: ‘We have today received a visit from a Scotch Clergiman [sic], the first churchman who has made his appearance in our parts, since we first settled upon our station’. And he continued, more ominously, that he had heard that Archbishop Polding was ‘threatening’ to visit. ‘I hope for the credit of the Episcopalian Church, that a Clergiman [sic] of our own persuasion will not be long in coming amongst us, as there is now a very large population outside the boundaries of the colony.’4 In fact, it was 1861 before Polding visited Armidale for the first time, when he performed the rites of confirmation for 180 people all at once. This was the first opportunity for such a ceremony and no one knew when it would occur again.5 They were right to worry. The Catholic Diocese of Armidale, created in 1862, did not receive a Bishop until Timothy O’Mahony was appointed in 1869.6 At that time the diocese was bound by the Namoi and Hastings rivers through to the Queensland border, an area of some twelve million hectares. Distance isolated the people and fatigued the clergy of all faiths. When Henry Tingcombe, the first Anglican vicar of Armidale, wanted to leave in search of better health, his bishop offered him a parish in the Hunter valley with the unusual advantage that ‘The clergyman need never sleep from home’.7 In 1866, the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Wandering Reporter’ wrote in the Armidale Express that ‘some of our town ministers would tremble with horror at the length of journeying that the less fortunate New England clergyman has to perform’. Well into the twentieth century clergy of all denominations regularly travelled vast distances across their spiritual jurisdictions. W.F. Wentworth-Sheilds, Anglican Bishop of Armidale, reported his rural encounters in 1921 as a source of mirth, and as evidence of the physical nature of rural ministry. ‘[O]nce again we were bogged badly’, he complained, ‘and my gaiters are still green’.8 Bishop Broughton, in the first years, was well aware of a desperate need for clergymen to follow the pastoral push into the bush and to ease his own burden of ministry. He despaired for Anglicanism in New South Wales without a steady supply of clergy. ‘Our obtaining, or not obtaining, them is a matter—as it were—of life and death’.9 In the meantime, the maintenance of Christianity relied on personal duty and commitment—such as that of Mrs Charles Marsh who, in 1840, rode on horseback from Boorolong to Port Macquarie, a distance of 275 kilometres, to have her baby baptised.10 It is impossible to estimate the level of colonial New England piety, even with such resolute examples as Mrs Marsh. The Presbyterian minister, Robert Blaine, could not do so either. He travelled a 1500 mile loop from his Hinton-Morpeth charge between November 1845 and January 1846, preaching, baptising and marrying, compelled ‘to discharge a duty which long pressed heavily’. He worked hard, but he could not tell whether his hot and dusty journey had made a spiritual difference. That was known ‘only to Him’. Even so, Blaine was pleased to find Presbyterians ‘carrying more or less of the knowledge of Christian doctrines, and the principles and practices of Christian precepts . . . such as family and private prayer and reading the Scriptures’. He recognised, however, that not everyone was able to tread the Christian way unaided. He described

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Religious Life how, when settlers left Sydney, they ‘only discovered how difficult it was to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, when they found themselves beset with surrounding wickedness’. This was not a unique observation of colonial life. Others equated a decline in morality with separation from organised religion.11 In 1856, James Buchanan, Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands at Rocky River, described that settlement as having ‘two places of worship, Episcopalian and Roman Catholic’, as well as ‘ten public houses, the latter much more frequented than the former’.12

187

THE YEARS OF BUILDING

Broughton journeyed thousands of miles each year throughout his vast bishopric (the whole of eastern Australia), preaching and performing marriages, baptisms and confirmations. On Sunday, 12 October 1845, he was in Armidale and preached in the courthouse. There too he decided to instigate the building of an Anglican church as ‘an outward sign . . . of the existence of Christianity’. He named it for St Peter and appointed the asthmatic Henry Tingcombe as its vicar in 1846, because ‘it was from the residence of a good Clergyman and not from his few occasional visits that I look for general improvement among the people’.13 Tingcombe despaired at his failures to eliminate what his subsequent bishop, William Tyrrell, described as ‘unblushing sin’, but he proved more resilient than the church building. He remained in New England until 1854, whereas the walls of St Peter’s collapsed before the roof could be added.14 To begin with, the nurture of Christianity in New England depended solely on the belief that the proper resting place of God was not a building, but the contrite human heart. Especially from the 1860s, however, through to the early twentieth century, New England Christians consolidated their pioneering efforts with permanent buildings, with the idea that man’s prosperity should be reflected in the condition of God’s house. A building and an individual for religious purposes proved the increased stability and respectability of the pastoral districts. What made Glen Innes a ‘thriving and interesting locality’, wrote an occasional correspondent for the Armidale Express, was the physical expression of civilised living. In the one sentence, Glen Innes was described as having ‘a strong and well-erected court-house’ and ‘a very neat parsonage house for the Church of England clergyman’.15 The first church building on the Tableland, constructed in 1848, may have resulted from the efforts of a Roman Catholic layman, Joseph Daley. In 1835, Daley had followed the squatter William Dumaresq to Dumaresq’s new station at Tilbuster, a little to the north of what was to be Armidale. Daley had already worked to build a Catholic chapel in Maitland and, when a meeting was held in Armidale in 1869 to discuss the building of a cathedral, he offered £300 to the fund. Then, having inherited £19 000, Daley bought land on the corner of Dangar and Barney streets, where the cathedral opened in 1872. In 1848, government surveyor J.J. Galloway had set aside parcels of land in towns for churches, but from the mid-nineteenth century ecclesiastical building ventures

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❈ Armidale’s two Catholic cathedrals, soon after the completion of the new one in 1912. The old building was then pulled down. (photo: unknown)

were commonly financed as in this case, by land donation and subscription. The Wesleyan Methodists opened their first church (again, in Armidale) on 10 July 1864. It is now the oldest surviving church building in New England. The oldest Roman Catholic building is St Mary’s Church Hall in Tenterfield, opened on 29 March 1868.16 In 1881, New England’s first incumbent Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Thomas Johnstone, laid the foundation stone of the new St Paul’s church, Armidale. It had been a long time coming. Johnstone told the assembled crowd how he had held services in a shop in Dumaresq Street when he first came to Armidale in 1857 because there was no church, and until 1866 there had been no minister’s residence either. The new St Paul’s was indicative of both the expansive optimism of the 1880s, which affected all the colonies, and the Presbyterians’ desire to show a suitable presence. ‘All the other denominations had good churches’, reported the Armidale Express, ‘and the Presbyterians resolved to build a substantial one themselves’. That cost money. Johnstone explained how ‘charity was the root of all religion’, and he asked everyone to subscribe as they could and to note the example of Mr Gibson of Bendemeer, who had managed to give £1000. There were a number of speakers at the ceremony that day, including the Reverend Dr Robert Steel, minister of St Stephen’s, Macquarie Street, Sydney, who reminded the crowd of the previous year’s good wool prices and invited them to come forward and place money on the foundation stone. This effort drew an extra £76 10s.17

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Religious Life St Paul’s—a ‘conspicuous object from every point of view on entering the town’—was opened on 30 April 1882, with services in the morning, afternoon and evening, and on the following Monday, a celebratory tea in the Town Hall. The reporter for the Express was astounded at the number of people who were served in human waves at trestle tables, with an apparently inexhaustible supply of tea and cakes. It was not until after seven o’clock that the crowds, including the ‘many juvenile mouths’, were satisfied. And yet, marvelled the reporter, ‘the iced sponge cake—facsimile of the new Church—still stood untouched upon the centre table, testifying to the self control of the Scotch character’.18 Outlying communities also raised funds to build churches, to be serviced by the closest incumbent minister. Such efforts often drew support from a range of people outside the immediate district or the intended congregation. The Presbyterian congregation at Kilcoy (see Chapter 13) followed the traditions of the Scottish Free Kirk by sitting to sing the psalms and standing for prayer, while the installation of an organ—the ‘kist o’whistles’—was seen by some as bringing ‘an instrument of the devil’ into the church. Even so, the subscription list for Kilcoy included business houses with no obvious geographical or familial connection to what was known as ‘Scots’ Corner’. When, in 1868, the Presbyterian community of Kelly’s Plains wanted to move their services out of private homes and into a church, William Nelson, an Anglican, offered a portion of his property, and 47 subscribers committed enough money for the building to begin and it was finished in time for Christmas 1870. The remaining debt was finally cleared in 1874.19 This did not solve all the worshippers’ problems, however. The road to the church was still impassable in rain. Certain clergy were renowned for their encouragement of the physical and spiritual growth of their churches in New England. Father Patrick O’Connor, for example, has been described as ‘the builder’ who arrived ‘to consolidate and expand the work of the pioneers’.20 As Roman Catholic Bishop of Armidale, O’Connor oversaw the planning and building of a grand new cathedral in Dangar Street, Armidale, to replace the now inadequate structure for which Joseph Daley had been responsible. Subscriptions flowed in from as far away as New Zealand, to the extent that on 6 October 1912 the Cathedral of St Mary and St Joseph opened debt-free, an achievement that drew a letter of congratulation from Pope Pius X. Bishop O’Connor continued with his plans for expansion, opening St Patrick’s Orphanage in 1921 and De La Salle College as a school for boys in 1926.21 Under the Reverend J.E. Carruthers, who arrived in Armidale in 1885, the Methodists, too, grew and prospered. Carruthers described Methodism as at first struggling for existence in New England, squeezed between ‘aristocratic episcopacy on the one hand, and entrenched Presbyterianism on the other’. In January 1877 there were only 21 Methodists in Armidale and Uralla, but in 1886 Carruthers instigated a spiritual revival which resulted in circuit numbers increasing by 30 per cent by the time he left in 1888. He returned in July 1893 to preach the first sermon in the new Armidale Wesley Church.22 The Baptist church also received a boost in 1884 with the induction of its first pastor, the

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Reverend Frederick Hibberd, and in 1886 the Salvation Army arrived to enliven Armidale religious life with much parading and open-air preaching.23 A.V. Green, Anglican Bishop of Grafton and Armidale 1894–1900, was also a man of vision when it came to expanding the infrastructure of his church and responding to the geographical challenges of his huge diocese. In his memoirs, Green reported on the state of the church when he arrived: ‘To cope with the needs of all this stretch of country our Church had practically nothing. The staff of clergy was very small; its insufficiency in number was intensified by a lack of coherent Diocesan feeling’. They had, he said, ‘no Bishop’s house, no Registry, no Schools’. Green set about to remedy the situation: ‘We set churches going everywhere, and we dedicated on the average a new church every month during my seven years’.24 Although born in England, Green was one of the first Anglican clergymen to be trained in Australia and the first to reach episcopal rank. This made him ‘an out and out Australian, right through’ according to his Archdeacon, John Forster.25 Green’s Australianness was also honed by the sheer physical challenge of working a rural diocese of some eighteen million hectares. Between August 1894 and March 1895 alone he travelled 10 000 kilometres, using eight horses. While his building program was far advanced, many of the distinctive aspects of rural life remained. ‘I held services in all sorts of buildings and in no buildings’, wrote Green, ‘sometimes in a woolshed, where my pulpit was a woolbale . . . on a verandah . . . or . . . under the shade of a great gum tree’. He was constantly reminded that he was preaching in an isolated environment, and close to the land. ‘At a critical moment in the service’, he wrote, recalling one Harvest Festival, ‘in marched the chief Turkey gobbler . . . and with loud cries of gobbler satisfaction . . . made for the sheaves’.26 Clergy of all denominations had to be able to cope with the rigours of bush life. To meet this need within his own Church, Green established St John’s College in Armidale, as an alternative to Moore Theological College in Sydney, its first students arriving in 1899. St John’s proved very successful, training men for rural dioceses throughout New South Wales, and in 1914, after leaving New England, Green published Australian Sermons Preached to Country Congregations for the use of laymen in the bush. W.F. Wentworth-Sheilds, his successor, also understood the difficulties of working a rural diocese, proposing, unsuccessfully, the establishment of a bush brotherhood.27 By the end of the nineteenth century, New England was dotted with churches and chapels. The physical infrastructure of Christian worship across the denominations was well established, and with it the Tableland’s ecclesiastical ‘look’. That ‘look’ is no better represented than in the work of the architect John Horbury Hunt, who designed St Peter’s Cathedral (1875), St John’s College (1899) and a number of Anglican churches—St Mary’s, Bundarra (1874), St Laurence’s, Barraba (1874), St Bartholomew’s, Ollera (1877), St Andrew’s, Tingha (1889) and St Augustine’s, Inverell (1878). Hunt’s bold creativity was appreciated by A.V. Green’s predecessor as Bishop of Grafton and Armidale, James Turner. Before entering the ministry in 1858, Turner had himself been

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Religious Life articled to a London architect, and he retained a passion for this work. Turner and Hunt developed a dynamic and productive collaboration—if tense and strained at times—and it was Turner, argues the architectural historian, J.M. Freeland, ‘who was to be the most important single influence on his [Hunt’s] whole architectural future’.28 By this time stone was preferred to brick for churches, but it was Hunt’s ability to express ecclesiastical purposes in brick, intricately patterned and meticulously laid, that set his work apart, especially in his masterpiece, St Peter’s Cathedral.

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❈ The choir of St John’s Anglican church, Uralla, on a picnic at nearby Wallaby Rocks, 1915. Only since the 1860s and 70s had women become central to Church of England ritual, as choir members. (photo: unknown)

Distance, and the labour-intensive nature of pastoralism in the nineteenth century, ensured that outlying pastoral stations were materially self-sufficient.29 The station shop was the commercial hub and the station chapel was central to the spiritual life of the grazing community. This was both the seat of family prayer and the preaching place. At Herbert Park, the chapel was built as an attached wing to the main house. Edwin Everett commissioned Horbury Hunt to build his chapel at Ollera in 1876. The result, St Bartholomew’s, was not deliberately Anglican in style because it was to be used by the Presbyterians as well.30 This was a remarkable display of cooperation. When church sharing was proposed in Glen Innes in 1858 as financially ‘less burdensome’ for the denominations, it was adamantly opposed by Father Tim McCarthy, who had arrived in New England in 1853 as the first resident Roman Catholic priest.

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Cooperation could go only so far. Sectarianism existed close to the surface in colonial society and by the end of the 1860s in Armidale, for example, fuelled by economic competition, it was clearly evident in a range of political and social decisions.31 P L A C E S O F M E M O RY

Once established, the churches of New England became places of memory, increasing whatever sense a New England congregation might have had of its own history. Each church stood as recognition of God’s place in the community and of the community’s deepening connectedness to the site. In Armidale, for example, the Johnstone Memorial Hall was opened in 1912 as an ‘everlasting monument’ to the 46 years of service offered by Thomas Johnstone to the Presbyterian church in New England. In the same spirit the congregation of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church raised funds during the meagre years of the 1930s depression to install a stained glass window in memory of Hugh Symington Buntine, their minister from 1905 to 1925. The dedication of the Buntine Window in November 1931 was also used to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Presbyterian Church in Armidale.32 There was no greater sense of generational passing than in the aftermath of World War One. Young men died from all denominations in New England and the dedication of Honour Rolls and special objects marked a new phase in church life. The silver Communion plate in St Paul’s is in memory of Harry Hopetoun Wharton, who died of wounds received at Gallipoli. Wharton’s father, John Henry Wharton, headmaster of Ben Venue Public School, 1913– 18, is remembered by a matching plate. For some, the church was not only a repository of memory, but also a final resting place. St Peter’s Cathedral houses the ashes of J.S. Moyes (died 1972), Anglican Bishop, Deputy Chancellor of the university and Freeman of the City. Nearby, the Cathedral of St Mary and St Joseph contains few personal memorials other than the stained glass windows funded as part of the original building subscription, and the altar, donated by Bishop O’Connor in memory of his parents.33 Nor does it contain an Honour Roll. But next to the building, and close to busy footpaths, are buried two bishops. In 1860, the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Wandering Reporter’ had written in the Armidale Express that ‘there are few places I have been in where the Sabbath is more religiously observed . . . Here, for one day in the week vice cowered and slunk into the wilderness’. It is hard to tell how distinctive the region was in its religious attitudes. Certainly, a century later, its reputation for piety extended even beyond the immediate infrastructure and control of the churches. The secular University of New England was reputed to be ‘the holiest campus in Australia’. Students regularly engaged in religious discussions and private prayer, nearly 50 per cent of first year students in 1961–64 reportedly attended church once a week, and the Student Christian Movement was the most popular association on campus.34 The students, most of them from New

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Religious Life England families, were politically and morally conservative, and religiously active and committed. By the 1970s, however, the mainstream churches were becoming heavy with history. Except among the elderly, throughout New England and Australia, their services seemed old-fashioned, their pews uncomfortable and their doctrine hard to swallow. Church attendance was in decline and young people looked elsewhere for meaning. Interest in Christianity began to wane even on the ‘holiest campus’. The churches in New England tried to modernise their services and to introduce new programs to attract youth, such as the Coffee Shop dropin centre in Marsh Street, Armidale, run by the Methodist church. The Coffee Shop was part of a much larger movement among Methodists, and indicative of that denomination’s broad, proactive approach to youth ministry.35 The Roman Catholic Church also broadened its ministry to include a mission to Indigenous people. The fifth Bishop of Armidale, E.J. Doody, described them as needing ‘special attention’.36 The mission was spearheaded by Father Francis Kelly, from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, later supported by Father David Perrett, from Moree. Both worked hard to improve Aboriginal housing and the capacity of the people to participate in the spiritual life of the Church. The John XXIII Religious-Cultural Centre was established in 1968 in East Armidale, as a centre for Aboriginal community life and worship. It also served as a focal point for Sister Rita Steptoe, when she began her mission to Aborigines from St Angela’s Convent in Mann Street in 1973. However, New England churches suffered the same same problems as churches everywhere—falling attendance, rising cynicism, the pressures of secularisation, modernisation and economic rationalisation. Young people gravitated to the larger towns and cities for work and grew away from the church. In an area so formed and coloured by distance, the popularity of the motor cars and the construction of better roads reduced reliance on the small outlying church as a gathering place. The little church on a property or in a small town became a casual preaching place for a sparse and elderly congregation and a mere reminder of the past. Clergy still travelled, but the distances seemed less and the demands fewer. More recently, on the other hand, while mainstream churches falter, interest in spirituality is increasing. As multiculturalism came to New England, religion diversified. In the 1980s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was established here, and a mosque was opened on the university campus. However, while spiritual choice widens and while day-to-day observance becomes more personalised and less directed by institutions, the community still retains and celebrates traditional connections with religion, family, history and place. Every year, for example, on All Saints’ Day, the chapel choir of The Armidale School sings Choral Evensong in All Saints chapel on Gostwyck station. The chapel is a memorial to TAS Old Boy Clive Collingwood Dangar, killed in World War One. The congregation is mainly elderly and drawn from Uralla, but the Sydney-based Attard family, descendants of the Dangars, come ‘home’ every year for the occasion.

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In the beginning, Christianity was brought to New England by people travelling, as Blaine described it, ‘beyond the boundaries of the colony’.37 It was consolidated by building, by settling clergy and the establishment of administrative networks. Christian communities thus grafted religion onto the land so that worship, place and people became intimately linked. Religious practice assumed a distinctly rural flavour. Bishop Green remembered one afternoon service when ‘a worthy matron rose up, just as we came to the [canticle] “Nunc Dimittis”, and addressed me thus: “Sorry sir, but me and the childer must be going. We have a goodish way to travel, and there’s cows to milk”’.38 In modern times, the urgency to travel home for milking may have passed, but the rural context of religious expression and practice remains. Religion in New England cannot escape its bonds with rural life. In August 2004, the congregation of St Mary’s Anglican church, Bundarra, celebrated the 130th anniversary of the laying of its foundation stone. It was impossible on this occasion not to see St Mary’s in all of its historical, rural and spiritual contexts. The cars pulled up where the horses and carts once stood and the black-faced Suffolks in the neighbouring paddock bleated at each new arrival. Although the regular congregation is small, on this anniversary day the pews were full. The choir, visiting from St Peter’s Cathedral and bedecked in red and white, sang Locus iste a Deo factus est, inaestimabile sacramentum, irreprehensibilis est (‘This place was made by God, An inestimable sacrament, It

❈ The anniversary service at St Mary’s, Bundarra, 2004, with the vicar following in the choir. The architect of St Mary’s was John Horbury Hunt. (photo: A. Grigg)

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Religious Life is blameless’). During the ceremony the congregation filed outside to the back of the church for the blessing of the foundation stone. A pony leant across the fence and nuzzled into the hands of children during the ceremony. In his anniversary sermon on this day, Greg Stanton, newly ordained vicar and a Latin scholar recently retired from the university, described how St Mary’s full-immersion baptismal bath had been freshly exposed as a result of excavation. Found at the doorway to the building and set below the floor, the bath was built onto the foundation course of bricks, thus creating an intimate connection between the physical expression of religion in the church building and the spiritual world of the community of the baptised—a link between people, place and spirit. ‘As a community,’ said the vicar, mindful perhaps of the history of St Mary’s as a microcosm of New England life but also of the existence of a wider church of believers over generations, ‘we have become a dwelling place for God.’39

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CHAPTER 17 ❈

Twe n t ie t h - c e n t u r y Immig ran ts Jani s Wi l t o n

During the twentieth century, New England, like other parts of Australia, was the destination of an increasingly diverse body of overseas immigrants. This chapter looks at a few telling aspects of the settlement process. It asks why—given the near stagnation of population growth in the region—new residents have continued to arrive, and what has enticed them to stay. It seeks the views of some of these immigrants about the region’s attractions and appeal. The focus is particularly on the Tableland—that part of New England which stretches from Walcha to Tenterfield and across to Inverell—and on the remembered experiences of a small number of immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Much is omitted. There is no room here, for instance, to say anything about the University of New England as a magnet for people from overseas. As Matthew Jordan points out in his history of the university, by 1988 its academic staff had degrees from 150 different universities from around the world, and its students similarly came from a great variety of countries.1 For many this contact with Australia and New England was long-term and/or permanent. During the mid- to late 1980s, and into the 1990s, a survey was conducted from UNE which asked a number of New England residents who were the children of immigrants, or immigrants, to share their memories of the migration experience.2 Their reflective explanations as to why migration had become a part of their history and why New England became their place of settlement were integral to their stories. Clearly, there were varied and complex reasons leading people to migrate and to choose this region—work opportunities,

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Twentieth-century Immigrants government policy, family and community networks, and climate, landscape and lifestyle.

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WO R K

Work was the main incentive, but there has been continuous change in work opportunities. The contraction of the labour force on Tableland pastoral properties, the development of pockets of smaller specialist farms, the boom-and-bust of mining, the growth of educational institutions in Armidale, the expansion of larger service towns at the expense of smaller settlements, the death of the railway beyond Armidale, the impact of the development—and at times closure—of small manufacturing and processing, together with wars, national legislation and other external events, all made their impact.3 For Jack Joe Lowe and his family, it was tin mining around Tingha that brought and anchored them to the region. Born in the Zhongshan district of China in the late 1880s, like so many of his compatriots J.J. Lowe came to Australia to work. By the early twentieth century the Zhongshan network stretched across New South Wales and well into the Tableland, and J.J. Lowe thus found employment at the Wing Hing Long store in Tingha. He later bought it. Established during the height of the tin mining boom of the 1880s, Tingha underwent an economic revival during the first few decades of the twentieth

❈ Jack Joe Lowe and Fong Quain Lowe and their children (left to right) Ned, Mavis, Marjorie and Ronald, in about 1918. (photo: unknown)

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century and J.J. Lowe extended his store and bought town property. When he moved to Tamworth in the late 1930s, to open another store with one of his sons, Wing Hing Long remained in the family. After World War Two, the store passed to J.J. Lowe’s daughter, Mavis Pratt, but by this time tin mining was in decline. The connection between family and store was representative of many such enterprises. Tingha’s economy dwindled, nearby Inverell took over as the main service centre for the area, and Wing Hing Long became more a place for buying top-up goods than for the weekly shop. Yet, Mavis Pratt remained anchored to the store and the town. She had a basic income, and it was the only business she knew. She finally managed to retire, and to leave Tingha, with the arrival of a new industry in the region—heritage tourism. The store’s distinctive history meant that it now turned out to be an asset of a different kind—in 1999 Wing Hing Long became a community-managed store museum.4 On the northern border of the Tableland, west of Tenterfield and stretching southwards to Ashford, immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds were attracted by quite different opportunities. Tobacco farming was first tried here in the late nineteenth century and, again, there was a Chinese presence. The rough wooden remains of tobacco barns stand as a reminder of Chinese labourers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was a revival and expansion of tobacco farming following World War Two, but now Italian immigrants made up a significant percentage of the labourers and sharefarmers. Their presence is evident in the census statistics. The 1947 census recorded only three Italians in the Tenterfield and Macintyre shires, but by 1981 there were 92, most of them in the tobacco-growing districts. Their presence was evident in the bocce court at Mingoola (bocce is a ball game, similar to French boule and English bowls), in letterboxes painted in Italian colours along the Bruxner Highway and in Italian conversation and social activities.5 In the era of multiculturalism in the 1980s, attempts were made to bridge these gaps and to encourage a shared heritage. For instance, Helen Andreoni, from the University of New England, worked with some of the women from Sardinia who had settled around Ashford, and together they established the Ashford Sardinian Craft Cooperative. The idea was to share weaving skills, languages and experiences of living in a rural area in order to counteract the sense of isolation and the burden of constant hard work experienced by many of the women. Their attachment to the locality was through marriage and children, not by involvement in its broader social life—let alone any strong sense of place and landscape or work opportunities for the women themselves.6 However, this project, and for many of the families the prospects of permanent settlement in the region, faltered with the end of tobacco growing from the early 1980s. Those families who stayed—and there were a number—did so mainly because they had bought property. They now diversified into growing vegetables, making wine and pig farming. In Tenterfield, another kind of livelihood attracted Karl and Clare Pieper.7 Born in Germany before World War Two, the Piepers were among many thousands of Germans who saw migration to Australia as an opportunity to

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❈ A tobacco barn and a game of bocce at Mingoola, near the Queensland border north of Ashford. (photos: J. Wilton)

find work and a new start, away from their war-torn native country. They did not necessarily intend to settle. Karl Pieper had trained as a watchmaker and he was determined to continue with his trade. The couple waited and waited in the migrant hostel at Greta, in the Hunter valley, refusing offers of work until at last the right request came, from Tenterfield. In mid-1955 they boarded the train to travel north. Clare Pieper described the trip in letters home to her parents. Her description captures this as a moment of transition: We have finally escaped from the camp and now the true Australian life will begin. In the camp we were always among Germans and the

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unofficial language was German. We didn’t need to know any English at all . . . But this was over as soon as we sat in the train to Tenterfield. From Monday 5.12 pm to the next morning 8 am we enjoyed the Brisbane Express! A horrible journey and so cold at night that we were chilled in the morning. Travelling by train is an interesting experience . . . You are not allowed to throw anything out of the windows, specially not flammable objects because of bushfire, thus everything gets thrown under the benches: fruit peel, cigarettes, paper, empty bottles etc. Can you imagine what it looks like after a long journey?8 Clare Pieper’s first impressions of Tenterfield provide a counterpoint to the difficult train journey: If we had thought that Tenterfield with its five thousand inhabitants was somewhere at the end of the world, we were surprised to see how nice and neat this little town is . . . Here you will see only one-storey buildings and constructed of timber. Mr Windridge [Karl’s employer] is really nice with us and does not treat us like migrants, as is the case elsewhere.9 This pleasant surprise and the warm welcome set a tone for the Piepers’ Tenterfield experiences. Clare Pieper’s letters home track the change. Her accounts indicate how the couple adjusted and eventually settled, so as to regard Tenterfield as home. Their children were born there, they bought the business that had originally given Karl employment, and they became a part of the community. By 1972, when Clare Pieper finally made her first return visit to her hometown of Telgte in Germany, she wrote home to her husband: ‘Imagine, apart from your and Mark’s [her son’s] letter, I got another ten today. It feels really good to know how much they care for us in Tenterfield and to see that we really belong to them.’10 Peder Christensen’s introduction to the Tableland came from a different source. Born in 1941 into a farming community on the island of Jutland in Denmark, he migrated to Australia in 1966. On board the ship, he met members of a pastoral family with a property to the east of Armidale. Through Englishspeaking compatriots he told them he wanted work on a farm. By the time the ship arrived in Sydney in mid-1966, he had a place with them and within two days was en route to his new job. Expecting sunshine—‘they [the Australian Embassy in Denmark] . . . told me the average temperature was about 25 degrees and I thought it was like that all over the place’—he was unprepared for the cold of a Tableland winter. ‘I froze at night time actually . . . I was used to the European eiderdowns and we only had a few blankets on.’ Christensen also found the social isolation difficult and after three months moved to a property closer to Armidale where, through Church of England youth groups, he developed a social network. Work opportunities and preferences next took him to the cotton farms around Narrabri. Theo Verbeek also came to the Tableland for work. Born in Indonesia of Dutch parents, he studied medicine in the Netherlands and practised as a doctor

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Twentieth-century Immigrants in his native country until 1964. The political instability in Indonesia then caused him to look elsewhere for a livelihood and home for himself and his family. He finally decided on Australia. Here, however, he encountered prejudices against overseas qualifications, the medical profession’s closed-shop practices and different attitudes towards health care for urban and rural areas. As he explains:

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I came to New South Wales because that’s where I could practise. There is a rule they call regional district. There are certain areas where the government would like to have a doctor but which are not appealing enough for an Australian doctor to come . . . That’s how I ended up coming to Bundarra. There was a place open there. I went there and I liked it—well, I come from a little town in the Netherlands and I had lived in the jungle in Indonesia, so I didn’t mind little towns. While he was in Bundarra, Verbeek got to know the doctors in the district and, when there was a vacancy in Inverell, he moved there. The experiences of the Lowe family, of the tobacco farmers in the north, and of individuals such as Karl and Claire Pieper, Peder Christensen and Theo Verbeek highlight the ways in which different employment opportunities have attracted and sometimes anchored immigrants to the region. Their stories can be multiplied many times over to capture the full range of work and patterns of opportunities. REFUGE AND PLACEMENT

The destination of some twentieth-century immigrants has been a result of government policies and practices. People such as Theo Verbeek were partly directed by policies about the recognition of qualifications, although he had some choice about whether to accept an appointment or not. Others have had less choice. Angelo Cavallaro was among a number of Italian prisoners of war who, during World War Two, were sent to the Tableland to work as farm labourers.11 This was part of a government initiative to offset the shortage of labour in rural areas caused by the recruitment of young men into the armed forces. The Italian prisoners of war were seen to be a low security risk and potentially useful. Cavallaro, with two other prisoners of war, was sent to Kingstown, near Uralla. For him, it was a good experience. He worked there for three years, and at the end of the war was sent back to Italy. However, as he recalled, he was so disillusioned by his treatment as a returned soldier that he decided to come back to Australia. His boss at Kingstown had kept in touch with him and offered to sponsor his return. Angelo Cavallaro arrived in 1950 with his wife and family. They lived at Kingstown until the late 1970s, when they retired to Armidale. Following World War Two, the Displaced Persons Scheme heralded an assertive immigration policy initiated by Australia’s new—and first—Minister

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of Immigration, Arthur Calwell. The aim of the scheme was to attract around 170 000 immigrants per year, so as to strengthen the labour force and to increase the population for future defence and development purposes. The government’s preference was for British immigrants, but too few were available and Calwell looked to mainland Europe, setting up a program to bring out people left homeless by the war and currently in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria. In return for their passage to Australia and initial accommodation, immigrants had to agree to work for two years in jobs allocated by the government.12 One new arrival in New England under this scheme was Fred Kokaev. Born in Serbia in the 1920s to Russian parents, during World War Two Kokaev had been taken to Germany as forced labour. At the end of the war, reluctant to return to a communist Yugoslavia, he put his name on a list to migrate to Australia. He recalls the selection process: ‘When your name come up, they call you over and you got some screening but you had to be 100%—that’s like picking a horse—you had to be 100% healthy—if you have a cavity in your tooth, you have to fix it.’ On his arrival in Sydney, Kokaev was taken by train directly to the migrant hostel in Bathurst, but he wanted to leave there as quickly as possible: I didn’t like stopping in camp . . . I said send me anywhere. If I didn’t ask to send me anywhere, I would stop there maybe three months . . . I went to the employment office and told them that I go anywhere . . . and they give me a job on a farm in Moore Creek. Conditions on the farm were appalling and Kokaev asked for a transfer. He was sent to the sawmills at Kootingal, where he served out his two-year contract. From the sawmills, he went to work for the railways at Werris Creek. Then, after fourteen years, he set up there as a builder, in 1967 moving his business to Tamworth. The Community Refugee Settlement Scheme (CRSS), established in the late 1970s, was one of a number of twentieth-century government projects designed to encourage settlement outside the main cities.13 It was the CRSS that brought Thanh and Phuong (their first names) to Inverell in the early 1980s. As Thanh explains: In 1981 we left Vietnam and went by boat to Malaysia. In the first refugee camp, there were about 15 000 people . . . There was no accommodation and there was mice everywhere. When it rained, we stood in the rain for a wash. It was very bad. After three months we were moved to a transit camp near Kuala Lumpur. It was better. We stayed there three months before we were sponsored to come to Australia. We spent ten days in a hostel in Sydney and then we came up to Inverell. We were simply told ‘nice people, nice country town’. Flying over we saw all the fields and farms and it was so big. We arrived in November and all the flies! There is nothing like that in Vietnam. And

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Inverell looked like a slum after Saigon. And then there were all these people—talking, talking. We couldn’t understand any of it. It was so hard. No language. No other people. No work. If not for our sponsors, we wouldn’t have stayed. Work opportunities were limited in Inverell. There was some employment at the local nursery, an attempt to go grape picking around Griffith, and periods of no paid work at all. After two years, Thanh and Phuong were thinking about moving to Sydney, when one of the Chinese restaurants in Inverell came up for sale. They jumped at the chance, found financial assistance and went into the restaurant business. FA M I LY A N D C O M M U N I T Y N E T WO R K S

Family and community networks, often stretching across time, place and cultural difference, easily became entwined with work opportunities and lifestyles. Among the region’s Lebanese and Greeks, many early arrivals came primarily through recommendations and contacts within their own communities. Moses Hanna came to Australia from Lebanon as a young man early in the twentieth century. He was brought out by his father, who had first migrated in the 1880s. Moses, like other Lebanese immigrants before him, first established a warehouse in Redfern, Sydney.14 Such warehouses were an initial base for the so-called ‘Syrian’ hawkers who could be found travelling rural areas, selling haberdashery and other goods, with new bases established later in country towns. The wholesalers became retailers, but still hawked goods. They attracted and employed family and other community members. In due course Moses Hanna established Hanna’s department store in Armidale, which is still owned by his family. Sarquis and Dora Solomon arrived in Sydney in the late 1890s. They soon moved to the Lismore district, where they began their Australian working lives by hawking goods. They bought a store in Casino, but then followed other Lebanese to Glen Innes where they opened a haberdashery and grocery business. Their daughter Ida thus met and married Joe Joseph, a member of a Lebanese family settled in Glen Innes. ‘J.S. Joseph, Draper’ opened for business in 1922 and continued to operate until Joe Joseph’s death in 1980. Ida Joseph’s sister, Dorothy, married into another of the local Lebanese families. Her husband, Abraham Correy, was one of three brothers who had taken over their father’s hairdressing and tobacco salon in Glen Innes.15 Community networks, marriage and family responsibilities brought these first- and second-generation Lebanese-Australians to Glen Innes, and kept them there. The strength of this commitment is well captured in Dorothy Correy’s explanation as to why, following her husband’s death in 1963, she decided to stay in Glen Innes: After my husband died, what was I going to do? I wanted to sell up and go to Sydney. I really did. I wanted to get away from Glen Innes and I

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❈ The hawking van of Norman Correy, originally from Glen Innes but operating from Quirindi when this picture was taken (about 1925). (photo: unknown)

said, now, while I’ve got a bit of money I’d go and buy a home in Sydney and get a job. Then I said no, if I go to Sydney my kids will leave school, they won’t have an education . . . my children would all leave school to get jobs in Sydney. So she stayed. Similarly, the Greek-owned cafés which became a feature of so many country towns during the first half of the twentieth century evolved from family and community networks. In 1907 James Sourry left his island home of Kythera and travelled to Glen Innes to join an uncle who owned a café in the town. About two years later he moved to Uralla where, after managing what his daughter Eleni Dedes described as ‘the first café’ in the town, he eventually built the White Rose Café, which remained in the family until 1947. Eleni Dedes describes the way this and many other Greek-owned cafés worked: My father would bring out young men, relatives—cousins or cousins’ relations, and give them jobs in the shop and train them and teach them English. And they’d learn to cook and learn to serve over the counter and then, as soon as they got about a thousand pounds together, they’d go and open their own café.16 Not long after the Sourry family sold up, a new immigrant from Konia, in Cyprus, found work in the White Rose through contacts at the Cyprus Club in Sydney—the new owner, Jack Feros, was looking for staff. Henry Pavlou

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Twentieth-century Immigrants worked in Uralla and then in various cafés and fish and chips shops throughout New South Wales, before coming back to Uralla to buy a fruit shop. And again, in 1939 Nick Mentis followed his Kytheran networks to work for his uncle in the Paragon Café in Tenterfield, eventually buying the business. He retired in 1977.17 It is a common story. Family members, some of them already working in cafés, formed a network within which new arrivals could find employment. They did not need to be able to speak English to start work, and they could be sure of help from fellow Greeks.

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❈ Charlie, Matina and Effie, the three eldest children of James and Maria Sourry, of the White Rose Café, Uralla, in about 1923. (photo: unknown)

For some of the Italian women married to sharefarmers in the tobacco-growing districts help like this was sorely lacking. They had arrived and settled well after their husbands and were often poorly prepared for what was to greet them. Caterina Russo remembers how confronting she found her first year in Australia: It was horrible. I cry all the time. I couldn’t speak one word [of English]. I understood nothing. Soon after I arrived, I went to hospital to have my first baby. In the hospital they’d say ‘You eat eggs?’ I didn’t know what they were saying. For the first year I cry, cry, cry. I want to go back. No amici, nessuno [no friends, nobody]. Some wives had married by arrangement or by proxy, and did not get to know their husbands, or even meet them, until after marriage and settlement in the

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district. Marianne Stojan is an example. She was born in the province of Reggio Calabria in the late 1920s. Members of her extended family had migrated to Australia and, after World War Two, a cousin was working on the railways at Werris Creek. One of his workmates was Jan Stojan, who had migrated from Romania in 1954. As Marianne Stojan explains, the cousin’s wife, who was still in Italy, decided to visit her husband, and she suggested that Marianne go with her: and my cousin [in Australia] said to Jan one night . . . that his wife is coming and that his cousin is coming, and Jan said, ‘What she look like?’ . . . We got married three months after he saw my photo . . . and I came out after six months. In this case, the bride at least found herself within a small family network. Marianne Stojan and her new husband lived at Werris Creek for some years before moving to Tamworth, where Jan Stojan set up as a builder. C L I M AT E , L A N D S C A P E , L I F E S T Y L E

Work opportunities and family and community connections have both played their part in bringing immigrants to twentieth-century New England. So too have aspirations and dreams of a better life and varied visions of new climate, landscape and adventure. Willem and Annefie Brantsma accepted an assisted passage to Australia from the Netherlands, their country of birth. As Annefie explains, they wanted to ‘go and see the world for a couple of years before you go and decide to settle down . . . so we decided to go and migrate. After all, if you don’t like it you can always come back’. On arrival in Sydney they stayed with a relative before moving to Balmain, where they bought a home. In the mid-1970s they visited friends in Armidale. They liked what they saw and, as Willem recalls, ‘in that time was born the idea that we wanted to get out of Balmain and that this might be a good place to move to’. Three months later they visited the district again and they ended up buying a house in Uralla. When asked what it was that so appealed to them, Willem answered: I think that the most important thing was for Annefie that it had four seasons here, something that is hardly perceptible in Sydney. And Annefie is very fond of autumn for some reason or another, probably because it’s close to winter, and the colours, the much more relaxed lifestyle, the lack of traffic. Annefie joined in: we had been reading that magazine Earth Garden for some time and that really made us restless. Beside which that was the time in Sydney that

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there were kidnappings, we had had prowlers and the traffic in Balmain was really getting bad and especially the oldest child was starting to make moves every now and again to get out, to open the gate and go and enquire into what was out there by himself . . . So, beside getting restless ourselves, the idea was that we’d better start doing something because Sydney wasn’t getting any safer. Willem added: ‘our friends were living here, Armidale had a very good education system, and it was as rural as you could get without getting completely in the bush’. Peter and Willy Nillesen, also originally from the Netherlands, similarly focused on landscape and lifestyle. Peter Nillesen had been working in the building industry in Brisbane when, in the late 1970s, the couple decided to move to the country. They wanted space and a less pressured lifestyle. The family had regularly gone on camping trips in the Tenterfield district since the early 1960s and, as Peter Nillesen explained, ‘we knew the climate and the values’. After four years living on their small beef cattle property and despite being at the end of a drought, they described the move as the ‘best thing we ever did’. In 2005, Randy Gauger, a member of the USA-based Bruderhof religious community that had bought property in the Inverell district a couple of years before, explained the decision of the Bruderhof to establish a settlement in Australia. Among the reasons, he included the attraction of the landscape: ‘The gum tree green and the beauty of the wide open spaces, the rolling hills and the great big sky, it was like stepping into a bit of another world. We fell in love with the nature straight away’.18 A sense of space, four distinct seasons, a more relaxed lifestyle: these are among reasons offered as attractions of the region and as reasons for staying. Comparisons are also made with the countries left behind. Theo Verbeek, for example, warmly declared, ‘Loved it . . . the space and the room . . . it wasn’t the jungles of Indonesia but it was . . . land without people’. PA S T, P R E S E N T A N D F U T U R E

Job opportunities, family and community networks have all helped in bringing such men and women to New England—and they probably also encourage people, especially the younger generations, to move on and away. Questions of lifestyle are also important. New England offers open spaces, a more leisurely pace, a seemingly safer environment, especially for introducing children to life and education, and more affordable housing. Once these advantages would have been counterbalanced by the difficulties of isolation. Now, other worlds are increasingly brought into the home through mass media and the internet. Also, relatively new activities—heritage tourism, local museums, local and family history groups—have the potential to tap back into the immigrant stories which will help people of all backgrounds to understand the region better. This encourages families to affirm their own histories,

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especially twentieth-century immigrant families whose connections to, and stories about, New England now extend into the second, third and fourth generations. Reflecting on the past, sharing memories, offering explanations for the big decisions in life—all these activities are influenced by hindsight, by regrets, by hopes. They offer hints and suggestions about what attracted immigrants to New England in the course of the twentieth century and, in the process, they provide insights into the social, economic and cultural life of the region.

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CHAPTER 18 ❈

Tr a ve l l in g a n d Co mmu n icat in g Al an At ki nson and Jo h n At c h i s o n

The most obvious gateway to the New England Tableland is the Moonbis. Taking this steep haul northward the traveller by car passes up from the Liverpool Plains and the valley of the Peel, through seeming air-borne stages, to the high country. Hitherto in ruins, an old stone outhouse belonging to the Moonbi Inn, at the foot of the first Moonbi, has lately been rebuilt. It stands now as a relic of the era of bullock teams and horses, for which this was a much harder road. It evokes images of bullockies stopping for a bender, either before they goaded their charges up the escarpment, or after they had come with relief southward down its slippery slopes. Another inn at Dorothy’s Downfall at the foot of Duval’s—later Devil’s— Pinch, between Armidale and Guyra, conjures echoes of yarns, jokes and advice swapped backwards and forwards, and of songs and ballads sung to the ‘banjoes, fiddles and bones’. Such sites were like punctuation marks, points of relief during long, hard journeys. Who now knows the site of the inn at the foot of Sinclair’s Lookout, west of Glen Innes on the way to Matheson, or of that at the foot of Bolivia Hill? However, the Red Lion Tavern still stands at Glencoe, creating as it has always done a slight bend in the road and acting as a latter-day reminder of other times. Judith Wright used verse to remember one of the New England bullockies, Ted Chalker, of Wallamumbi: While past the campfire’s crimson ring the star-struck darkness cupped him round,

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and centuries of cattlebells rang with their sweet uneasy sound. Grass is across the waggon-tracks, and plough strikes bone beneath the grass, and vineyards cover all the slopes where the dead teams were used to pass.1 However, not all the waggon-tracks are covered with grass and crops. Some are buried beneath lines of bitumen. Current highways are their best memorial, the old network perpetuating itself in the new. The horse-drawn stage coach represented a degree of sophistication one step beyond the bullock team. Coaches quickened the pace and the volume of movement. In New England, regular coach routes are today little known in the popular consciousness, but the tell-tale architecture of buildings in Wingen, Walcha Road, Bendemeer, Bolivia and Tenterfield parallels that of the Moonbi Inn. Similar evidence survives among a straggle of vegetation and stone near Tom’s Gully, along a stretch of road near Kingstown (a large tree marks the spot), and amid a thick spreading plantation above Saumarez Creek at Arding. A tumbledown hut at Bald Nob, on the way to Newton Boyd, is a similar mute reminder. Patchy traces survive as well along the by-ways of popular anecdote. The Great North Road, as it was originally laid out from Sydney— together with the Great South Road to Goulburn and Yass, and the Great Western Road to Bathurst—led via Wiseman’s Ferry to Wollombi and Maitland, and from there to the foot of the Liverpool Range at Murrurundi. During the 1830s it began extending northward to Tamworth and in due course it went all the way, via Armidale, Glen Innes and Tenterfield and across the Darling Downs, to Brisbane. This was New England’s first proper road. Other tracks led up to the Tableland from the coast, over even more difficult terrain. The first mail run up the range was managed by Major Archibald Clunes Innes, who established a line of communication between his headquarters at Port Macquarie, with its sea-link to Sydney, and Armidale, which he used as a focal point for his New England pastoral interests.2 Other roads led upwards from the ports at Kempsey and Grafton. Long into the twentieth century New Englanders hoped that such places, closer than Sydney and more their own, would be an outlet for traffic of all kinds from the Tableland. The possession of such a port or ports would perhaps have justified New England’s independence as a colony or state separate from the rest of New South Wales. However, the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range was a major obstacle. It might have been breached efficiently by a railway line or a major highway had the government in Sydney been prepared to fund the difficult engineering works involved, and indeed, during 1865–81 £125 000 was spent on the Glen Innes–Grafton road.3 But such efforts, dangerous as they seemed to both the prosperity of Sydney and the unity of New South Wales, were too rare.

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❈ The Dalmorton Tunnel, about 60 metres long through solid rock, dug in 1867–68 on what is now the Old Grafton Road, with the hope of creating a main road from the Tableland to the coast. (photo: I. Davidson)

A region takes its shape, in the minds of its people, partly from the lines that run across it, from the strong threads of movement and communication that tie together one parcel of humanity. To maintain those threads, to strengthen them and to link them to the networks of a wider world are all matters of moment. New England residents—men and women from Nowendoc and Niangala, from Bendemeer and Tenterfield, from Jennings and Mallanganee—often think and talk, as they have always done, about transport and communications. Sometimes these are local government issues. Often they touch on the self-serving geographical ignorance of the decision-makers in Macquarie Street and Canberra. C.E.W. Bean, in his book The ‘Dreadnought’ of the Darling, remarked on the way in which the government of New South Wales made itself much more directly responsible for the welfare of Sydney than it did for the western parts of the state. The same can be said with respect to New England.4 But neglect, as much as government, creates communities. Talk about roads, railways, radio and so on, as with the use of such things, draws people together, forcing them to find a common interest. T H E I RO N R A I L S

From the initial incursion in the 1830s until the advent of the stage coach in the 1860s, bullock teams and lone horsemen, as well as drovers, provided all of New

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England’s long-distance connections.5 A family plot in West Tamworth cemetery is the resting place of a couple whose lives epitomise travel in this period. John Lonergan was a small child in 1841 when his parents left Newchapel in County Tipperary to sail as bounty emigrants to Australia. John remained in Ireland with an aunt and uncle until he was in his early twenties, when he joined his parents and his unfamiliar siblings at Ohio, near Walcha. Presumably he travelled from Sydney to Morpeth or Port Macquarie by one of the regular steam-powered coastal vessels. Between Sydney and the Hunter valley the Great North Road led through difficult and thinly settled country and the steam-ships were a much better means of communication between the metropolis and the north. In 1865 Lonergan’s betrothed, Johannah Smith, likewise arrived in Sydney, waiting at the Hyde Park Immigration Depot as he travelled down-country to meet her. They were married at St Mary’s Cathedral, across the street from the depot, and set off for Walcha. We cannot know how John had earlier made his way up the escarpment from the coast, but together they presumably took a stage coach, a little additional comfort being justified for a bridal journey.6 John Lonergan worked as a stockman on Nivison properties near Walcha before free selecting with his sons at Woolbrook and Danglemah, between Walcha and Tamworth, during the 1880s and 1890s. The free selection of farming land began with the Robertson Land Acts of 1861. Free selectors partly depended on the railways for the successful sale of their produce to the main colonial markets. From 1854 railways had been built outwards from Sydney and from Newcastle and, during the 1860s, a line of tracks was extended from Newcastle along much of the Hunter valley. After a brief hiatus during the early 1870s, the network was expanded quickly until by 1880 trains were running across the Liverpool Range westward to Gunnedah, and northward to Tamworth, with a junction at Werris Creek. From Gunnedah the track was taken to Narrabri, Moree and Inverell, and from Tamworth to Armidale, Tenterfield and the border, where it met the line from Brisbane. This rail communication with the coast made a great difference to the inland wheat industry. It was particularly important for the region around Gunnedah and in due course the Tableland also began to send grain by rail to Newcastle and from there by steam-ship to Sydney.7 The Lonergans’ produce was freighted out from a siding at Danglemah (although their fresh bread and other groceries came south from Woolbrook village). Until 1889, when a link was completed between Newcastle and Sydney, the northern rail system was separate from the rest. Maitland was the main market for northern New South Wales, and Newcastle, a little further on, was not only the railway terminus but also the point for shipping, with plentiful coal on hand for steam-ship use. However, the creation of the Newcastle–Sydney link drew business to Sydney. With every such improvement, the metropolis increased its power over all the people of New South Wales. The railway through New England was built with surprising speed and it remains now (much of it unused) impressive proof of engineering and construction skills. It includes some of the highest platforms and sidings in Australia—at Black Mountain, Guyra and Ben Lomond. The Limbri tunnel,

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Travelling and Communicating the slow meandering track from Blaven through Danglemah to Walcha Road and the demanding ascent though the Woolbrook Gap are matched in railway folklore by the challenge of depthing at the Bolivia Range cutting. Who can help but admire the splendid brickwork of the high culverts between Woolbrook and Limbri? These are the railway equivalent of the road up the Moonbis. Trains changed New England. Inn and tavern licences on the old bullocky and stage coach routes were now transferred from huts to more substantial brick buildings close to the parallel lines of steel. Out on the western plains the licence for the Millie Inn, on the dirt track from Narrabri to Moree, was

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❈ Tenterfield’s welcome to the Governor of New South Wales, on the occasion of the first train reaching the town, in 1886. Tenterfield railway station is now a museum. (photo: unknown)

transferred to a building at Bellata. James and Catherine Duff thus moved to a newly erected two-storeyed brick hotel, leaving behind in their old village a monument to their trooper son, James, a casualty of the Boer War, killed at Elands River in August 1900. Made of granite and six metres high, this is now all that remains of Millie—a town destroyed by the railway network just as others were created and nourished.8 Blanch’s Inn, on the line just south of Uralla, tells another kind of story about the railway. Set in Church Gully, it evokes images of navvies—a short-lived community in themselves—trekking across frosted pastures to hear liturgies led by itinerant clergy.9 Postal traffic was also affected by the railways. Archibald Clunes Innes had the first run, from Port Macquarie, but from the late 1840s postal stations were set along the great original road. In 1848, for instance, a Hunter valley man had a weekly run between Murrurundi, Tamworth and Armidale. At Armidale his agent handed over any mail going further north to John Gill and Abraham

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❈ One of the last of horse-back carriers of mail. John Brauer, whose run was from Tenterfield north-west to Bonshaw, on the Queensland border, is pictured here in about 1910. He died in 1926, aged 64. (photo: unknown)

O’Dell, who sent horsemen fortnightly to Warwick, Ipswich and Brisbane. By the end of the 1850s, contracts were being offered for the delivery of mail to points further out—to Walcha and Inverell (both a weekly service from Armidale) and to Kempsey (once a fortnight).10 As quantity grew, single horses were no longer adequate. ‘On the line from Tamworth to Warialda’, according to a postal official in Sydney in 1862, ‘they have to employ in some cases three pack horses, besides a horse for the mailman to ride’. This was largely, he said, because of the vast numbers of Sydney and British newspapers to which bushdwellers subscribed.11 Mail coaches now gradually took over on the main routes, but at the same time the communications system as a whole became more intricate and manylevelled. By the end of the 1860s the district was criss-crossed with routes contracted out to local men. Further, the telegraph had arrived.12 As with the main road, the line of wire stretching north across the high country formed an original line of communication from which others one by one diverged. However, distinct lines also led north-west from Tamworth (to Gunnedah, Narrabri and Moree) and from Bendemeer (to Bundarra and Inverell). Before this time, the slopes and plains to the west of the Tableland had never been anything but a frontier. They had no highway equivalent to the Great North Road. But the building of separate telegraph lines, soon followed by a separate railway from Werris Creek, increased their self-sufficiency, making even more tenuous their inhabitants’ dependence on New England proper.

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Travelling and Communicating The history of local newspapers shows a similar split between the Tableland and the west. For some years the Armidale Express (founded in 1856) was the only paper on the Tableland. Even Tamworth and Grafton were without newspapers for most of the 1860s and there was nothing at all to the west. But the trains carried city newspapers and magazines, and the telegraph increased both the quantity of news and the hunger for it. From the 1870s, Armidale, Glen Innes, Tenterfield, Tamworth and the northern rivers all had at least two papers, translating news into local opinion and vice versa, and fighting local battles with rival voices—sometimes around the issue of ‘free trade’ versus ‘protection’. Then the west began to speak. The Narrabri Courier was founded in 1873, the Inverell Argus in 1874, the Inverell Times in 1875 and, in Moree, the Gwydir Examiner in 1881. In later years in Tamworth the ‘New Stater’ Charles Victor Thompson was to transform the Tamworth Observer into the Northern Daily Leader, a paper designed—but with limited success—for the region as a whole.13 From the moment the trains arrived, coach routes were refashioned to suit the railway timetable. It was now possible to take coaches in several directions from the main railway stations down to the coast; from Armidale, via Wollomombi and Jeogla to Kempsey; from both Armidale and Glen Innes to Grafton; and from Tenterfield along what is now the Bruxner Highway to Casino. Walcha, in the south, was linked to the station at Walcha Road, and the goldminers from Melrose might go by coach to meet the train at Uralla or at Armidale. In the north, coaches ran from Tent Hill to the station at Deepwater and from Clive to Bolivia.14 Some of these places are now little known and the pattern of traffic has further evolved, long after the advent of the trains.

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M OTO R  C A R S

Trains and horse-drawn vehicles remained the principal means of long-distance travel around the region until World War Two. For shorter distances, bicycles were in common use from the 1870s, especially among labouring men. They coped well with most kinds of Australian landscape. Motor vehicles, an invention of the late nineteenth century, gradually became more important but, like the horse-drawn coaches, they were first used mainly to supplement the trains. From 1919 Ezra Purkiss managed a daily motor-rail service from Armidale to Hillgrove, three times a week to Bundarra via Uralla, to Yarrowyck and to Kingstown, and twice a week to Kempsey.15 The mail was likewise carried in this way. There were very few private cars. P.A. Wright, of Wallamumbi, was one of the pioneers in this respect. As he says in his memoirs, in 1909 he went to Sydney to take delivery of his first car, an Italian ‘SPA’, driving it back via Wiseman’s Ferry, Wollombi, Maitland and Kempsey. On the fourth day, near Bellbrook, between Kempsey and Jeogla, the main drive-shaft broke, and a new one had to be ordered from Sydney before the journey could be completed.16 W.G. Hoskins (1908–92), the pioneer English historian of landscape, writes vividly of the way travellers negotiate hard, high places. He tells of Daniel Defoe crossing the Blackstone Edge between Lancashire and Yorkshire in the early

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eighteenth century, and of the crossing of the Andes in his own time.17 The hardships of travel are relative, and even in the age of motor vehicles parts of New England seemed just as difficult. As late as the 1950s, dwellers in the gentler parts of the Tableland might have thought with trepidation about a car trip to Point Lookout and Dorrigo Mountain, high in the escarpment. Until the state government began rebuilding the Walcha–Wauchope road in 1966, Tamworth people travelling to Port Macquarie might prefer going round by Maitland rather than endure the corrugated, gravelly torments of the shorter route.

❈ A six-cylinder Hudson, 1915, here proudly displayed by Jack Vivers, of King’s Plains, near Delungra. The boys in the back include his sons Bill and Jim. (photo: unknown)

However, by the second half of the twentieth century, the age of automobile travel had certainly arrived. The numbers of cars owned by Australians vastly increased in the decades immediately after World War Two. In 1952 there were still less than 300 000 cars across the nation, but within ten years that number had more than tripled and by 1972 it had nearly doubled again. The public roads were improved accordingly. By 1953 the New England Highway (to Wallangarra, on the border with Queensland) had been sealed with bitumen, and over the next twenty years the same was done to the roads from Tamworth to Coonabarabran (the Oxley Highway), and so to Goondiwindi (the Newell Highway) and from Glen Innes to Moree (the Gwydir Highway). Bridges of concrete and stone, suitable for heavy traffic, replaced creaking timber structures. Others spanned watercourses where for a century traffic had made its way wet-footed through the shallows.18 As it developed after World War Two, the network of roads within New England largely followed the lines laid down during the initial phases of

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Travelling and Communicating European settlement. That original pattern must have been influenced, at least a little, by the ways in which the Indigenous people had made their way through the bush. Thousands of years of movement may well have left its imprint on vegetation and topography, shaping the routes taken by each new invader. The sealed roads themselves answered various purposes, and in that way the difference they made was more finely articulated than the impact of trains. On the smallest scale, sealed roads and motor vehicles were part of the fabric of neighbourhood, making it easier for families to live some distance from work and school. (Bitumen was also much kinder to bicycle tyres.) Villages thus prospered within the orbit of larger towns. Traffic was heavy, for instance, in the short distance between Uralla and Armidale, between Tingha and Inverell, between Emmaville and Glen Innes, and between Wee Waa and Narrabri. Yet such roads also boosted the influence of the main towns. Their leading stores were easier to reach from outlying points, store owners gathered trade to themselves, and as a result the big towns began the long, remorseless process of smothering the smaller ones.19 In the beginning, motoring enthusiasts, mechanics and garage proprietors in every town were inspired by the thrill and efficiency of motoring and by the challenge of the new machinery. In Armidale, Herbert Hoy, Curly Hardman and Stan James were leading men. In Walcha, Bowden’s Garage, which has now been a family business for five generations, is extraordinary testimony to the way in which a phenomenon at first attractive for its wonderful novelty might become part of the regional heritage. In enterprises such as Bowden’s, expertise originally drawn from the great industrial centres of the world has been interwoven with a strong sense of place—with local feeling and local needs. At Woolbrook, with such services in place, motoring excursions, to wherever one liked, gradually replaced the once popular holiday weekends (travelling by train) on the pleasant banks of the Macdonald River.20 Compounding this development was the increasing use of telephones. The telephone’s first golden age in Australia was the decade after Federation, when usage increased more than tenfold.21 The same period saw the rapid multiplication of exchanges beyond the capital cities. No new long-distance lines were necessary at first, telegraph lines being already available. Indeed, the telephone was not understood to be a long-distance (including, say, Sydney–Brisbane) method of communication because telegrams seemed to meet that purpose. Telephone exchanges were a focus for conversation within small communities, the young women at each switchboard managing the to-and-fro of familiar voices. Local calls were cheap and, although private hand-sets were rare to begin with, the telephone gave a new dimension to neighbourhood. But the wider world was closing in, especially after World War Two. The sealed roads, with their accompanying service stations and motels (the Armidale Motor Inn dates from 1958), made it easier for people to move through the region, especially between central and southern New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia on the one hand, and Queensland on the other. The

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New England Highway thus drew traffic away from the coast road (the Pacific Highway) into the high country. Within the larger scheme of things, the road network of the Tableland and its western slopes became an inland corridor, for freight, commercial and tourist traffic between the Australian north and the Australian south, and (with some qualification) so it remains. THE AGE OF AIR

From the 1920s, inhabitants of the western world undertook the organised conquest of the air. The interwar period has been described as an ‘Aerial Age’, a time of ‘airmindedness’.22 New Englanders also began to travel by plane. Similarly, with radio, imagination wandered through the airwaves. Here were methods of travel and communication posing peculiar challenges, but also peculiar opportunities, for regional awareness.

❈ New England learns about aeroplanes. The great aeronaut Bert Hinkler brings his biplane down on Armidale Racecourse in 1928. (photo: unknown)

Today, radio provides the most pervasive expression of community within New England, both ABC regional radio out of Tamworth (also the headquarters of ABC regional television) and more localised commercial and community radio. In northern New South Wales, local radio dates back to 1923, when Marcus Oliver established one of Australia’s first commercial stations in Gunnedah. All the announcing was done by Oliver and his wife, Babe. They kept to no particular roster and Oliver ‘would . . . talk about anything he thought would interest the locals’.23 Feeding off the newspaper press and other means of local information, the Olivers set a powerful precedent. ‘Interesting the locals’, with music, interviews and news, with comfort and controversy,

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Travelling and Communicating with the familiar and the strange, is the on-going and continuously challenging task of country radio. The history of air travel in New England throws up more troubled questions about local and regional community. In 1946–47, immediately following World War Two (and making use of wartime aeroplanes), an airline was founded with a deliberately regional purpose. Its original planning focused on Inverell, Moree and Glen Innes, with a service linking those parts to Grafton and, perhaps, to Port Macquarie. This was yet another project designed to connect the Tableland directly with the sea. Contradicting the north–south dimensions of travel in these parts, the enterprise was called ‘East–West’. However, market constraints led its founders to pin their hopes mainly on Tamworth and on the Sydney–Tamworth route. Ted Wilkinson, an optometrist, Arthur Yeates, a motor mechanic, and Basil Brown, a former RAAF wing commander, were the originators of East–West Airlines, and the founding board included men from Inverell, Tamworth and Armidale. Commercial success was immediate. By 1948 there were eighteen weekly flights between Tamworth and Sydney, and the planes had been licensed to carry mail.24 During the 1960s, the founding chairman of East–West, Don Shand of Puddledock, near Armidale, looked forward to a University of Air Training, working in association with the University of New England and making use of Tamworth airport. Unhappily, in Armidale enthusiasm for air travel seems to have been slight and city councillors resisted such a partnership with their southern rival.25 In short, hopes for the region as a whole clashed with that ‘intense parochialism’ noticed by the New England historian Robin Walker.26 Also, East–West’s early amibitions were shaped by the need to extend north, by leaps across the Tableland from Tamworth to Glen Innes and so to Brisbane. Thus the air became yet another avenue from New England to the established coastal cities. It was a disappointment for regional idealists but a happy outcome for many others, including tourists and those local men and women who made money from tourism. Also, East–West’s planes were used for cropdusting, and farmers at Moree and Narrabri were soon familiar with aircraft technology. Today, in Tamworth, BAE Systems Flight Training Australia operates with a national and international range. In Armidale, Fleet Helicopters, a locally owned family business, runs a training school, especially for Top End mustering helicopter pilots, and tourism entrepreneurs exploit the wonders of the gorge country—doubly wonderful from the air—along the Tableland’s eastern edge. The increasing impact of helicopters, especially in giving access to the wild places, is matched by the intrusive effect of Telstra and CDMA towers on the visual landscape. Much more than old forms of radio, and even more than air travel, broadband technology promises to eliminate distance with breathtaking ease. Equally symbolic of the future are the Lockheed Martin disks on Big Ridge, Uralla. Boosting commercial communications satellites into geostationary orbit 36 000 kilometres out, and linked with a similar operation in New Jersey, these technologies draw on a need, felt in New England since the 1830s,

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for ever-better means of travel and communication—a need to improve life on the Tableland by breaking its geographical boundaries. PRESENT AND FUTURE

Distance creates place, and place creates community. On community depends the cultivation of the humanities, arts and sciences. The best things about New England are a result of distance, and yet distance, if not a tyrant, can be an irritant. Trains are still fundamental to the way the region sees itself. They are capacious and cheap. But by train, it takes a day to reach the outside world. For New Englanders, rail remains locked into past infrastructures, and centralised management systems fail to take account of present frustrations and future possibilities. Only a complete reconstruction of routes and track within a national land transport system can restore the trains to their former usefulness. In 1971 an Australian Academy of Science proposal argued for a network of middle-ranked cities west of the escarpment, with fast transport links to the coast.27 Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government (1972–75) put some effort into regional development, but it failed to follow through as far as New England was concerned. About the same time, a project for a port on the north coast was prepared in the Department of Decentralisation, in Sydney, under a Coalition government. It was judged viable and would have done much for regional growth, but the government fell and the incoming Labor administration (1976) let it lapse.28 And indeed, in recent times such thinking has been overtaken by continuously widening horizons. Mobile phones and email (you take your number and address with you, wherever you go) dissolve any clear sense of place. Year by year New England, as with all parts of Australia, finds itself within ever-larger patterns of contact and exchange. Today, advocates of a renewed north–south rail link accept that freight is more urgent than passenger movement in justifying continued service. Population trends, on a national scale, work against them in such matters. In addition, how are freight movements to be achieved when there are minimal back-loads from the north? Where will the export facility be for freight traffic northwards: Gladstone or Darwin? Will there be an inland junction point, say at Toowoomba, for a Melbourne to Darwin line? What difference will it make further south? All this is for the future. As for the past, in our own imagination New England lies at the centre of a multi-lined pattern of reverberating movement. We can imagine, within half-a-dozen Tableland generations, the sound of Judith Wright’s cattlebells, interleaved across the span of years with steam whistles and screeching tyres, with the unceasing gabble of radio and television, with the exchange girl’s ‘Putting you through now’ and the computer’s ‘You have new mail’, with the soft grumble of old wooden bridges and the ephemeral whine of Air Force planes in training overhead. All these, and more, make up the history of regional traffic and communication. On the other hand, New England also has more than its fair share of stillness and silence.

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CHAPTER 19 ❈

En t e r p ris e a n d In g en u ity G. R . He n n i n g

New England, like similar parts of rural Australia, has a complicated pattern of independence and dependence on the outside world. This is especially obvious in the history of its town-based industries. The story is, at first sight, a simple one—of rise (in the second half of the nineteenth century) and decline (in the second half of the twentieth). During those three or four generations a complex body of skills was learned, handed down and adapted to continuous technological change, and is now largely—though not wholly—forgotten. A network of traffic and trade evolved, focused on local manufacturing, and a sense of collectivity and cooperation developed, sometimes with important political implications (see Chapter 20), all of which has now more or less passed away. Often the remains of buildings and machinery survive as relics of this vital period of New England’s history, concealing stories that archaeology can partly uncover (see Chapter 21). The story is one of a triangular relationship, with the three parties being, first, Tamworth; second, the smaller towns of the region; and third, Sydney and Newcastle. Tamworth’s uniqueness has been partially a result of its geographical position at the meeting place of roads from the Hunter valley, and so from the coast, on the one hand, and from the north, north-west and west on the other. Armidale was at first envisaged as the leading town of northern New South Wales, but from the 1870s Tamworth was the main industrial centre. During the twentieth century, Armidale’s population fell from about three-quarters that of Tamworth’s to about two-thirds. Only in Tamworth has it been possible to find the capital and the diversity of skills necessary for much large-scale manufacturing. However, even Tamworth could not provide the larger type of

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heavy-duty engineering equipment needed for mining on the Tableland.1 This came from Sydney and Newcastle—and, more recently, so has much of the financial and managerial initiative shaping New England. Tamworth’s long-term advantage shows very clearly in the history of flour milling. During the nineteenth century, wheat was grown in most parts of the region and flour milling became a key industry in most New England towns. However, by the 1870s it was clear that the best areas for grain were to the west of the Tableland and south of Tamworth. High-quality flour was also available in South Australia, and brought to the region by rail (see Chapter 6). Roller mills began to replace stone grinding, an additional expense that small, traditional mills found increasingly hard to justify.2 By the 1890s Armidale’s five mills had been reduced to two. But even the new technology was not enough on its own to guarantee long-term success. In Glen Innes, for instance, J.F. Utz, whose mill had opened in 1882, modernised and expanded after 1912, and by 1921 was turning 40 tonnes of grain each week into ‘Sunlight Flour’ and selling into southern Queensland. But in 1929 the company closed, and its assets were sold to Fielders of Tamworth.3 In Inverell the four-storey brick-built Millennium Flour Mill managed to survive beyond most of its contemporaries because much of the plant was automated and because its men worked around the clock, producing 155 tonnes of flour per week. The by-products sustained the local commercial poultry industry. But when, in 1949, a fire destroyed the building, it was not replaced.4 Only in Tamworth was there long-term success. There, the most successful miller, George Fielder, won prizes for his flour in Sydney, Melbourne, Paris and Philadelphia in the 1870s, and by 1890 he and his partner had the largest steel roller mill in the area. Fielder was always open to technical change. In 1904 the firm was among the first in the north to install a Crompton electric generator. Flour mills were especially vulnerable to fire and electricity meant much safer working conditions.5 Fielders gradually took over all its local competitors. The firm’s first major subsidiary, Fielder Gluten, was the basis of the Australian starch and gluten industries and, by 1951, Australia’s largest starch producer. Later agreements with American and Dutch interests led to the production of dextrine, glucose and dextrose—essential for making corrugated paper, adhesives, confectionery, and invalid and baby foods—and by the 1960s Fielders was the largest miller and baker in Australia. In the 1970s annual turnover topped $100 million, and employees (not all in Tamworth) numbered 2800. However, from 1983 the business was dispersed among national and international firms, so that in due course more than a century of continuous production came to an end. The big fish had been consumed by others even bigger—a common story around the world. BUTTER, CHEESE, BACON

Producing goods for sale in places with a small, scattered population is not generally a good way of making a substantial fortune, or even a secure living.

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Enterprise and Ingenuity Success depends partly on how much capital, labour and diversity of skills are needed for the object in hand. With some products there is a good deal of room for ingenuity and originality, with only limited investment of capital and labour. Sometimes, however, the situation is just the opposite and there are uniform styles and/or standards that manufacturers have to meet if they want to stay in business. In that case, it can be mainly quantity that matters, and manufacture of quantity can be hard to achieve and even harder to sustain. In the mid-nineteenth century, people with a few acres commonly had at least one cow, thus providing themselves with milk, cream, butter and perhaps cheese. Goats were sometimes a cheaper alternative. A few pigs allowed for bacon now and then, with some perhaps for sale. Except near Sydney, none of these were produced on a regular commercial basis before 1880. Technology was elementary—machine milking was uncommon before 1900. Butter was made from cream skimmed by hand from the top of milk left standing for that purpose, with separators being widely used only after 1900.6

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❈ The Glen Innes Cooperative Butter factory, home of ‘Golden Wattle’ butter, in about 1922, when there were 263 shareholders and a capital of £5000. Inset is J.F. Chaffey, who had been chairman of directors from 1900, and was also the owner of a substantial coach-building factory. (photo: unknown)

Small butter factories were established in New South Wales in the 1880s, often as cooperatives. Most of them were in the rich coastal valleys south of Sydney and north of Kempsey, where commercial dairy farming was taking off at this time, but there were also factories in and near Tamworth and on the Tableland. The work was not particularly costly or highly skilled, and the factories could be managed easily at a distance from town—but only while they were free of competition. There was a factory at Red Range, east of Glen Innes, as early as 1887. Another, begun at Guyra in 1895, soon failed, but one at Black Mountain lasted until 1920. In Glen Innes itself, the factory established by the Glen Innes Cooperative Dairy Society, which made ‘Golden

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Wattle’ butter, had a much better chance of marketing its products far afield, and it took milk from farmers at Red Range and as far north as Deepwater. By the early 1920s its suppliers numbered 149 and the factory was producing more than 347 300 pounds of butter a year—some 60 per cent of it being exported to Great Britain. From 1927 to 1952 the business also included a bacon factory and (from 1936) a piggery, with buttermilk used for fattening, but the butter factory closed in 1974.7 To the north-west, the Inverell Cooperative Butter and Bacon Company was even more diverse and for many years equally successful, but it succumbed about the same time. High freight rates and competition from factories on the coast, where the industry was more advanced, were too much to bear.8 Another problem was the increasingly elaborate hygienic standards imposed on dairy produce by government. In Armidale the New England Cooperative Dairying Company, founded in 1894, built a factory boasting Swedish buttermaking machinery, the first of its kind in Australia (‘a marvel of ingenuity, cleanliness and despatch’), and the means of pasteurising milk—an especially innovative feature. It lasted only eight years, but it was succeeded by the Armidale Cooperative Butter Factory Company (1910), which had a modern refrigeration plant capable of keeping all Armidale in ice. It ceased in 1921. Yet another modern plant was built for the New England Butter Factory in 1933. But the rules for quality, cleanliness and pasteurisation were an impossible burden even for such highly developed, middle-sized enterprises. New England Butter had plentiful suppliers. Its cream came from as far away as Ebor, with surplus being sold on to the Cooperative Butter Factory Society in Tenterfield, but it could not survive beyond the 1950s.9 By this time, the need to maximise output was increasingly important, herds were bigger, and hand-milking was no longer worthwhile. Every dairy farm needed stainless steel vats and refrigeration, and milk was taken away in a 2000 gallon stainless steel tanker. In the early 1960s milk quotas were introduced and many factories became little more than distribution points for pasteurised and homogenised milk.10 The Tamworth Cooperative Dairy Society, founded in 1901, had begun bottling milk in 1938 and pasteurising it in 1950. In 1960, its factory was greatly enlarged, partly to cope with the new regulations. And yet from 1970 even Tamworth ceased butter production. Local dairy farming was in decline and the town was getting its milk from as far away as Dorrigo and Raleigh, on the north coast. The Cooperative was taken over by the Hunter Valley Cooperative in 1986, and its factory closed in 2002.11 BEER AND CORDIALS

Until the 1890s, country breweries were small and relatively simple with respect to technology and technique. They mainly served local and nearby markets, although ‘New England Pale Ale’, produced in Inverell from 1885, sold more widely. Sydney breweries were extremely competitive, at first among

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Enterprise and Ingenuity themselves, but then increasingly throughout rural New South Wales. In the north of the colony, Tooth and Co., from their headquarters in Sydney’s Broadway, covered the area from Tamworth to Tenterfield. In Tamworth, local breweries withstood the pressure for a time. The Royal Standard Brewery was said to be the largest brewery in rural New South Wales and in 1914 employed more than 100 men. But it became insolvent in 1921, partly because of price competition from both Tooth’s and Toohey’s. Inverell’s ‘Pale Ale’ lasted to the 1940s, but even in that more remote spot it now made more sense to buy Sydney beer.12 C.J. Britten, owner of Tamworth’s Royal Standard, also had a cordial factory and an ice-making plant that produced three tons of pure clear ice a day. Many brewers also made cordial, and some cordial-makers tried brewing. But whereas efficient brewing called for expensive, up-to-date machinery, the making of cordial depended on a relatively simple combination of aptitudes and skills—an important advantage in smaller towns. In Inverell, F.E. Thomas, formerly of ‘Pale Ale’, turned to cordial-making, telling his neighbours that he used only Australian products—‘buying locally where possible’. The mixing process was crucial, because the appealing individuality of the product depended on it. Cordial-makers might well have their own distinctive recipes with which to win and keep a good share of the market.13 In nineteenth-century New England, some very small places had cordial factories, including Uralla in the 1860s and 1880s, Manilla in 1894 and Guyra in 1900 (closing only in 1940). Tamworth and Armidale had larger enterprises. In Armidale in 1871, Richard Jenkins and his son Charles were producing 2400 bottles of lemonade and soda water a day.14 Even after World War Two, it took a while for New England’s cordial-makers to fall to competition from supermarkets and city and international manufacturers. In Armidale, T.O. (‘Ossie’) Ryan and his son Bill ran Ryan’s Cordials from 1940 to 1977, making regular deliveries to Uralla and Kentucky, Walcha and Guyra. At its peak in the 1960s, Ryans employed seven men—with Ossie Ryan himself doing the mixing—and they produced eight flavours: lemonade, bitter lemon, soda, ginger ale, cola, lime, orange and cherry cheer. Inverell had three firms in the 1930s (also supplying Glen Innes) and one of them, trading as ‘Snowclad Cordials’, has continued into the twenty-first century as ‘a small family business producing old-fashioned soft drinks’.15 The history of cordial-making in Inverell also shows how country manufacturers could seize the day by taking advantage of a temporary need. During the 1930s, John Brissett, besides making cordials, developed an ice-making plant with a chilling capacity for 900 000 rabbits.16 This was during the Great Depression, when many men turned to shooting rabbits for an income, and when rabbit meat was a vital substitute for more expensive fare. More recently, vineyards have sprung up to take advantage of skills roughly comparable with those used for cordial-making, though at a far more sophisticated level. Indeed, Ross and Rae Thomas, of New England Estate Wines, near Delungra, who make chardonnay, shiraz, cabernet sauvignon and merlot from

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their own grapes, are descended from the founding father of ‘New England Pale Ale’ and of the cordial business that took its place.17 B U TC H E R I N G , S OA P  M A K I N G , TA N N I N G

In nineteenth-century Australia most commercial slaughtering was done by master butchers, some of whom also turned out sausages and other small goods. Only a few towns had abattoirs, and their history is much like the history of butter factories. Small ones might do well for a time, but they were hard to sustain for long. A freezing works at Guyra, for instance, employed 30 to 40 men in 1924 and sent rabbits, hares and poultry to Britain, but it had closed by 1930. Even in bigger places, during the later twentieth-century, shortage of livestock, decline in export demand, drought and tighter health regulations often combined to create an impossible burden. At Inverell, the North West Abattoir at one time had a workforce as high as 550, but it was forced to close in the early 1990s. At Guyra an abattoir owned by a group of local councils closed in 1981, but was reopened in 1985 as the Guyra Meat Packing Company. The operation had an export licence and its workforce increased to 400 between 1988 and 1990, but it folded shortly afterwards—a very painful outcome for the people of Guyra. At Tenterfield there were two abattoirs, which in the 1970s were killing a total of 260 000 animals per year. Each kept about 150 people in employment, obtained their livestock from near and far, and produced large quantities of by-products. However, in 1981 all livestock killing ended in Tenterfield, with 550 men and women losing their jobs.18 This is an industry in which size is the secret of success. In Tamworth in 1938, the Municipal Council, mindful of hygiene regulations, ordered the closure of all abattoirs and opened its own. Sustained by control of such a large market, by the 1990s, when it was privately leased, the business had a workforce of 248 and an annual throughput of 520 000 cattle, sheep and pigs. In Armidale, J.S.A. Jackson had an abattoir near the cattle saleyards from the 1930s, and in due course was selling meat throughout the neighbourhood and up and down the coast. This was a substantial foundation for further success and, in the 1990s, following the closure of abattoirs elsewhere, John Jackson, son of the founder, was able to give the firm wholly new horizons, with over 500 employees and an annual revenue (in 2004–05) of $160 million. J.S.A. Jackson now (2006) draws stock from northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland, and has abattoirs at Tamworth (trading as Peel Valley Exporters) and at Wallangarra (Southern Queensland Exporters).19 It is the biggest manufacturing enterprise of any kind managed from the Tableland, making it a local business which runs against the grain of New England experience. Sometimes the passage of generations allows for success to be added to success. On occasion, as with the Thomas family, successively brewers, cordial-makers and vignerons, the story is of one enterprise closing and another, related enterprise taking its place. With J.S.A. Jackson, the original business has remained, with each generation adapting and building as the times required. There are

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Enterprise and Ingenuity similar patterns, of course, among family firms in the cities, but perhaps among a scattered population continuity of this kind is particularly useful as a means of conserving aptitude, skills and capital over the long term. In any type of manufacturing, success normally involves making the most of the raw material—Jackson boast that in their abattoirs ‘nothing goes to waste’. The by-products from butchering have always included meat-meal, dried blood, fertiliser, crushed bones, tallow, casings, skins and hides, lard and dripping. Two vital aspects of nineteenth-century daily life, candles and soap, were made from tallow and lard, with supplies coming from master butchers and farmers as well as from abattoirs. There was not the same need for uniformity at this end of the industry, especially in matters of hygiene and, as with the making of cordial, there was room for originality and for the promotion of distinctive brands. This was where manufacturers might aim to use their ingenuity to match, or create, a range of tastes and needs.

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❈ Barnet Moses’s shoe factory in Armidale. (photo: unknown)

Some small manufacturers turned out a variety of objects. In Tenterfield from 1861, Charles Pavel, a saddler (original owner of the celebrated Tenterfield Saddlery, in High Street), had a tannery and soap works. In Tamworth, Nathan Cohen bought skins and also made soap and candles. Cohen’s business was taken over in 1873 by James Piper who, at the time of his death in 1897, was producing ‘Double Cream’ and ‘Single Cream’, as well as ‘Emu’ soap at ninepence a bar. Piper sold his various brands as far as the Queensland border. He also converted offal and bones into fertiliser. In Armidale, Mallaby’s New England Soap Works produced ‘Golden Bar’ and ‘Champion Cleaner and

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Pumice Sand’ soap. In the 1920s there were also two soap factories in Inverell— they bought excess cooking fat from housewives. But eventually soap-making succumbed, like much else, to outside forces. After World War Two, economies lay with mass production in the capital cities, and it was not long before every kitchen and bathroom in Australia used much the same soaps.20 Leather was another by-product of butchering. The use of horses and horsedrawn vehicles meant a constant demand for leather harness, up to and beyond World War Two, and the men who worked with horses were discriminating buyers. Many industries needed leather belting, and leather could be a useful substitute for metal. For instance, Cobb and Co. preferred heavy leather straps to the rigid metal springs originally installed in their coaches. Shoes and boots, most of all, tested the skill of manufacturers, who might make their name and their fortune with comfortable, long-lasting and/or stylish products. Before 1900, W.J. Smith in Tamworth, Barnet Moses in Armidale, J.J. Whyte in Glen Innes and Edward Whereat in Tenterfield were the best-known boot and shoe manufacturers in New England. Moses, the most successful of all, was a public-spirited individual and a paternalistic employer, but he was also the subject of the region’s first industrial strike (apart from agitations on the railways), when he cut wages in an effort to withstand competition from Sydney. He built cottages for his men near the tannery, some of which still stand. By 1882 he was exporting to Britain and he had 100 employees—a remarkable number for the time and place—producing up to 1500 pairs of boots and 500 sides of leather a month. His was very much a personal achievement. Moses knew how to make shoes and he knew how to sell them, but he retired in 1897 and his business did not survive without him.21 It may well have been poised for continuing success, but there was no new generation to carry it forward. In Tenterfield, Whereat sold boots as far afield as South Australia and deep into Queensland, but the inter-colonial tariff barrier reduced his profits. His main market, the north coast, could only be reached with difficulty and considerable expense. He made the most of such custom nevertheless, using as a newspaper advertisement a letter from a clergyman in Sydney: ‘I have tried three establishments in Sydney but their boots are certainly not equal to yours’.22 Whyte of Glen Innes did better in the long term. In 1908 his works were extended to cope with a new demand from mining communities, and he now had 60 men turning out 1200 pairs of ‘Blucher’ boots and 125 hides a week. Like Whereat, Whyte sold his ‘Granite Hide’ boots on the north coast and in southern Queensland, but he also turned out suede shoes for ladies. During World War Two the company, managed by the founder’s three sons, filled Defence contracts. Output rose to 400 hides a week, and in 1941 Whyte’s had already supplied the Indian Army with 27 000 pairs of boots when the factory burned down. It was immediately rebuilt and output returned to 2000 pairs a week, but the post-war styles brought challenges of a kind no one, perhaps, could have overcome. It was impossible to compete with city firms, as the demand shifted towards the new styles, including lighter boots, and as

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Enterprise and Ingenuity rubber became a common addition, and the business closed.23 From the 1950s, Australia became an increasingly motorised society and at the same time saddleand harness-making moved to centres of mass production.

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BLACKSMITHS

Virtually every nineteenth-century town and village had a blacksmith’s shop, relying on it not only for repairs to horse-drawn vehicles and farrier services, but also for general engineering work on agricultural and mining machinery. These could be sites of real ingenuity, if the manufacturer kept a close eye on the needs of his rural neighbours and adapted his product accordingly. William Harper, a Tamworth blacksmith, received a Certificate of Merit and a bronze medal at the International Exhibition in Sydney for a set of horse-shoeing tools which he had forged himself. Also in Tamworth, David Silver’s foundry and engineering works established in 1878 was much improved by his son, William, and by 1884 it was the largest enterprise of its kind north of Newcastle. In 1889, William Silver produced the Silver shearing machine, with local finance and considerable regional success. Improved variations, in 1894 and 1899, offered competition with the better-known Wolseley shears, and Silver was made an honorary member of the Parisian Academy of Inventors, receiving its Great Gold Medal and Certificate of Honour. However, his shears were found to rock

❈ The mining industry called for elaborate and expensive technology, and encouraged considerable technological skills. Here, in the 1930s, Tom Faint stands in front of his steam traction engine, hauling steam engines from Bingara to the mines at Hillgrove. (photo: unknown)

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in motion and sales eventually fell away. His sons, who succeeded him, continued in engineering but, like a number of others, ended up in the motor-vehicle business. W.C. Silver finally closed the engineering works in about 1944.24 Engineering, as a form of metal-working, emerged in New England in the 1870s, under the stimulus of mining. Indeed, mining, with its high physical and financial risks and its potentially high returns, was always a spur to ingenuity. H.S. Goddard, who came from Sydney to Uralla in 1872 to install the mill machinery for McCrossin the flour miller, stayed on and established the New England Foundry. The initial machinery used in the Melrose mine at Hillgrove was made at this foundry, as well as stoves and ranges. Les Young, who owned the business after World War Two, was especially inventive.25 Some blacksmiths were also coachbuilders. J.F. Chaffey, of Glen Innes, sold his coaches as far as southern Queensland, and in Armidale the Dewhurst brothers were one of several firms of builders and repairers of all kinds of horsedrawn vehicles. The arrival of motor vehicles, in the years before World War One, changed both work and work choices for those in smithing and engineering, leading some to concentrate on the new inventions. As early as 1893, Ezra Purkiss had set up his Armidale Motor Garage, Coach and Buggy Factory, which subsequently did extensive repair work to motor vehicles and all kinds of machinery. To some extent the willingness to change from horse-drawn to motor vehicles depended on the enthusiasm of younger men for the new machinery — another instance of the hazards and potential of generational turnover. In Uralla, Les Munro’s engineering business focused on shearing equipment, but when his

❈ Leslie Young, of Uralla (died 1979), a man of all-round technical ingenuity—blacksmith, foundryman, fitter and turner—as well as a chorister and amateur photographer. This picture was probably taken by his brother Frank, Archdeacon of Tamworth, also a skilled cameraman.

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Enterprise and Ingenuity two sons entered the business in 1906 the premises were enlarged to include a garage. They continued to make steam and petrol engines, electric light plants and agricultural machinery, but they also moved into motor-vehicle work and had both a car and truck agency (Studebaker, Morris, Chevrolet and Oxford). Elsewhere, repairs to the new machinery, which was far more complicated than the old, were often left to newcomers. However, some coachbuilders went into motor-vehicle trimming—working with fittings and furnishings, including the folding canvas roofs and side windows.26 Where capital and skills were available, there were many opportunities for engineering and other industries in the post-war years, as the economy grew rapidly, and demand became increasingly sophisticated. In Tamworth in the 1950s, the engineering works of T.B. Goddard began specialising in bulk-grain bins and agricultural machinery such as augers, afterwards expanding into the manufacture of bucket elevators, belt conveyers, chains, sprockets and pulleys. In 1971–72 Goddard added hydraulic equipment and air-cooled engines. N.A. Hodges, also in Tamworth, made spare parts for aviation, especially for East–West airlines. Post-war firms generally had fewer trained staff, but more complicated equipment—a trend that would culminate in the technological revolution of the 1980s and 90s.27

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THE FUTURE OF INGENUITY IN SMALLER PLACES

By the 1970s, Tamworth had more than 100 manufacturing industries and the number has steadily increased thereafter. At the same time, the number of specialist manufacturers to be found in or near New England’s smaller towns has dwindled. There have been, however, some telling exceptions, which suggest a hopeful pattern for the future. In Uralla the successors to the New England Foundry are the New England Brass and Iron Lace Foundry (specialising in iron-lace and ornamental wrought iron) and the Phoenix Foundry (brass plaques, artistic castings and bronze commemorative items). In Guyra, Ruddweigh International Scale Co. was originally E.H. Rudd and Co., a coach and buggy manufacturer established in 1920. It now produces electronic scales used in industries ranging from livestock to medical services. In Armidale, Jeff Kemp makes harps and guitars. In Barraba, Bill Bright builds harpsichords of the highest quality, sold throughout Australia and abroad. His neighbour, Rupert Richardson, a grazier, paints Australian pastoral scenes inside each lid.28 The arrival of the internet in the 1990s and the consequent decrease in long-distance communications costs have meant that firms specialising in information technology have also begun to accumulate on the Tableland. The creation of databases is a type of manufacturing that has extraordinary marketing potential, and with the right mix of skills it can be managed among small populations. In New England, the process has been much encouraged by the presence of the university. Some enterprises, such as the Agricultural Business Research Institute (ABRI), have been established by UNE. Described as a ‘virtual’ research centre, ABRI has in turn helped to set up the International

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Livestock Resources and Information Centre (ILRIC), which not only creates and pools research data on livestock production worldwide, but markets genetic and related exports (semen, embryos and seedstock), drawing on its own vast database. The IAC Group of Companies, with its headquarters in Armidale, uses similar means in matching crews and aviation expertise with the needs of international airlines and airports worldwide. In their case the university is useful partly as a source of multilingual expertise.29 New Horizons (owned by Graham and Barbara East), another firm using technology of this kind, is independent of UNE, but relies on the kind of skills found most easily in a university town. Established in Armidale in 1988, it was a world pioneer in creating and marketing educational software, and at its peak in 2000 supplied software to over half the schools in Australia, as well as trading overseas. Its successor, EdAlive, is a national prizewinner for its educational products.30 These are manufacturers whose produce is part of the new knowledge economy. They help in creating a new pattern for rural industry. The connections between old and new have been sketched within this chapter, and something of the relationship between habits and memory, on the one hand, and enterprise and ingenuity on the other—sometimes a hopeless combination, but sometimes the basis of a happy livelihood.

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CHAPTER 20 ❈

Po l it ics 1 Frank B on g i o r n o

It’s early morning on 9 October 2004—federal election day—in the village of Kentucky. I’ve driven half an hour from Invergowrie, near Armidale, almost ‘collecting’ a kangaroo on a back road. My task is to hang some placards outside the local RSL hall, where polling will occur, and leave how-to-vote cards behind for the guidance of the Labor Party’s (very) modestly-sized contingent of voters in this district. When I arrive, the village is quiet: there’s not a soul in its streets. I locate the hall, but immediately face the more difficult challenge of finding an object to which my placards can be attached. A little war memorial next to the hall is tempting, but the first name I read on it is Harry Freame junior. Freame was killed at Tarakan in 1945 but it’s the fate of his better known father I recall—an Australian spy, he was garrotted in Japan on the eve of the Pacific War and died soon after, possibly as a result. I look around anxiously.2 I leave the how-to-vote cards under a log near the entry to the hall; the placards I tie to a tree and a couple of poles, where they flap gently in the spring breeze. The political life of New England is best known for two features: the New State Movement and Country Party hegemony. Yet the heyday of these closely connected—indeed overlapping—movements was limited to the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. Now, New State sentiment is the preserve of a small band of enthusiasts, and the Country Party’s successor, the National Party, has suffered various slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in its old New England heartland. Both are only part of a longer story of political change

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and continuity. The Country Party’s achievement was that it created a political machine successful in responding to the enduring features of New England’s political culture as well as to changes in the social and economic life of the region during the years 1890–1970. This chapter seeks to place in their proper perspective the well-known and distinctive features of New England’s twentieth-century political history. There has been much change over the last century and a half. In 1889 payment of members of parliament became law. Before that, men of independent means had enjoyed enormous advantages in the quest for parliamentary honours. Wealthy squatters could leave their runs with a manager while enjoying a clubby parliamentary life in Sydney, representing conservative opinion, while local liberals, usually townsmen of modest means, were forced to look to middle-class Sydney men, often lawyers, to represent them in the Legislative Assembly. An early exception proves the rule. George Markham, an Armidale auctioneer and liberal candidate, moved to Sydney after winning the New England seat in 1860. To make ends meet, he had to sell his home and business, and in early 1862 he resigned to accept a paid government appointment. New Englanders were generally tolerant of such behaviour, especially if the member had made a reasonable fist of representing the electorate. After all, a man had to eat. In another case—that of Goldfields North in the 1859 election—a committee was formed to collect a voluntary levy so that James Hoskins, a local miner, could be paid to sit in the Assembly. He survived in this precarious manner until 1863 when, like Markham before him, he took up a paid appointment.3 New England electors who might otherwise have voted liberal were also prepared to support wealthy candidates once the controversies over land reform subsided in the 1860s. Theophilus Cooper, a Bundarra pastoralist, represented New England from 1864 until 1869, while S.H. Terry, a wealthy ‘gentleman’ and grandson of a rich emancipist, sat as the member for New England for most of the 1870s. Such men could support themselves without resort to government favours and, whether local (like Cooper) or not (like Terry), were able to familiarise themselves with the area’s needs. While such a member’s gentlemanly independence of the factions might have sometimes hindered his ability ‘to influence the government in the distribution of local public works’, Terry is credited with having been instrumental in securing the passage of the Great Northern Railway through Armidale in preference to the Inverell alternative. The rich country man—usually a pastoralist— was in a good position to play the part of the roads-and-bridges member in the factional system that prevailed in the New South Wales parliament before the late 1880s.4 By the late nineteenth century, ‘absentee’ members, though still common, were on the way out and local substitutes were increasingly standing for election. Henry Parkes represented Tenterfield in 1882–84, but even his decision to take up a seat elsewhere in the colony was described by the Tenterfield Record as ‘a standing insult to the people of Tenterfield’.5 The new style of country member,

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Politics ❈ Samuel Terry’s electoral pitch, from the Armidale Express, 26 August 1871.

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with deeper roots in his locality, was personified in Edmund Lonsdale. A convict’s son and not originally a New England man, Lonsdale had been a local resident for twenty years when he was elected to the Assembly in 1891. He had been active in the economic, civic and religious life of his community as a builder and contractor, an Armidale alderman and a Wesleyan layman with a strong attachment to the temperance cause. A free-trader at a time when political parties were forming around the issue of free trade versus tariff protection, Lonsdale promoted himself as the working man’s friend. He was also an advocate of Henry George’s single tax on the unimproved value of land, an idea popular in the emergent Labor Party of the 1890s. However, as a pronounced individualist, Lonsdale remained aloof from that party. Defeated on three occasions, he nevertheless served several terms in the colonial, federal and state parliaments before his death in 1913.6 Lonsdale was also a supporter of women’s suffrage—another legislative change that influenced political life in New England. Introduced for both the federal and New South Wales state elections in 1902, female suffrage encouraged the political parties to organise the women’s vote. In this regard, the Liberal Party seems, at first, to have been the most successful. In 1913 the Liberals apparently had ‘active women’s branches’ in Uralla, Guyra, Tamworth, Glen Innes and Armidale; by early 1914, the Armidale branch alone had over 200 members. The Country Party later developed a novel method of enrolling female voters in its ranks. When an individual joined—and that was most likely to be a man—his wife could receive membership at no extra charge!7 The major parties remained dominated by men, and no woman has ever been elected to a New England seat in either federal or state politics. Female parliamentary candidates, when they eventually emerged, were initially Independents (such as Jean Mitchell, who ran for Armidale in 1971), or minor party candidates (for example, Joan Byrne, Australia Party candidate for Tamworth in 1973). Nevertheless, the Country Party had an Armidale stalwart in Freda Mott, who managed many election campaigns and was a member of the party’s state executive and central council.8 In more recent times, in 1998, Patricia (Pat) Dixon, a long-serving Armidale municipal councillor and prominent Aboriginal leader and activist, ran as the Labor candidate, ‘the first Aboriginal woman federal candidate for the ALP’. She was preselected for the 2001 contest

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❈ Grace Munro, of Keera, near Bingara (1879– 1964), one of the founders of the Country Women’s Association—a picture taken in the 1920s. She was also a qualified nurse with the Order of St John of Jerusalem, and a member of the Bingara Hospital Board and the advisory council of New England University College. The organising work of such women was an important adjunct to the Country Party. (photo: unknown)

before her untimely death in that year (see Chapter 11). Women have also been prominent and active as the spouses of local members. Rosemary Leitch, wife of David (Country Party, 1973–78) and Thelma McCarthy, married to Bill (Labor, 1978–87), are Armidale examples. Rosemary Leitch went on to have a political career of her own, becoming Mayor of Armidale, while Thelma McCarthy stood unsuccessfully for Northern Tablelands in the by-election following her husband’s death.9 Distance has, in one way or another, shaped the political culture of New England from the beginnings of European settlement. There were massive distances within the electorates. The first constituency on the Tableland was called ‘New England and McLeay’ and encompassed a vast swag of territory in what is now northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. After 1859 a smaller New England electorate was created, but distances were still enormous, polling booths were few and roads were poor. Aspiring candidates could not tour throughout the electorates during campaigns, and voting was difficult for electors living far from the main centres. These factors tended to increase the political significance of the towns and, on the Tableland, Armidale was the only centre of any magnitude. Along with Tamworth, from 1859 the centre of the Liverpool Plains electorate, Armidale was a focus of political activity, especially on election day itself, when the streets were crowded until late and a festive atmosphere prevailed. Once the election was over, close relations between most electors and the ‘local’ member were impossible—before railway development a candidate could only visit his electorate infrequently and mail could take weeks between New England and Sydney.10 It’s mid-morning in Uralla—a town of 2500 some twenty kilometres south of Armidale—and there’s a steady stream of locals heading to a church hall to cast

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Politics their votes. It was once a ‘Labor’ town, but those days are gone. Placards, balloons and other election paraphernalia provide a splash of colour. There are supporters of the Nationals, the Liberals, Labor, the Greens, the Veterans, Tony Windsor and Fred Nile, all offering how-to-vote cards to electors on their way in. The electors are invariably polite, and many make a point of taking cards from everyone. Nevertheless, some look at the ground as they are approached by the party workers; they seem almost shame-faced, as if entering a cinema to see a ‘porno’. There’s plenty of polite chat between the workers from the different parties, while kindly Red Cross ladies offer them cups of tea as the morning grinds on. A National Party official appears. He’s immediately assailed by the woman handing out voting cards for the Greens—that is, they affectionately embrace one another and have a good laugh about their respective positions. He’s a lecturer at the university in Armidale; she’s a librarian there. Polling will end at six, but on Monday they will probably see each other at the university—and frequently after that until polling day, 2007. Even if they did not work for the same employer, they would encounter one another from time to time in the street or the shopping centre. Country towns are like that.

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Improvements in communications transformed campaigning, voting and parliamentary representation. From the 1870s, the coming of the railway to New England changed campaigning by allowing candidates to travel between the main towns rapidly and in relative comfort. Smaller centres located away from the lines could be visited by coach, or in a carriage provided by a local supporter. Rail also allowed parliamentarians to commute between Sydney and their electorates more easily, although that might mean covering hundreds of miles in a sitting week. The motor car had a major impact from the time of World War One, allowing candidates and parliamentarians to reach most corners of their electorate with ease.11 At the same time, improved communications increased the pace of campaigning, raising expectations about the territory a candidate could cover and how many addresses they could give in the course of a day. Victor Thompson, the federal Country Party member for New England between 1922 and 1940, recalled that he usually lost a stone (approximately six kilograms) during each campaign. In the early years of motoring, cars were also a boon to individuals and parties whose supporters were well enough off to own one. It was a major advantage for a candidate to have access to a willing driver, as did the young Progressive (later Country) Party candidate, David Drummond, during his initial—and successful—1920 campaign.12 The country press also played a role in overcoming distance, by conveying news from far-flung places to a particular locality, and by disseminating town opinion to outlying areas. The region’s first newspaper, the Armidale Express (founded in 1856), advocated the interests of the liberally inclined town and against those of the squatters. Local newspapers typically aimed to lead public opinion, not merely to report the news.13 They advocated a particular political ‘interest’ and, from the 1880s until the early twentieth century, where a

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❈ David Henry Drummond (1890–1965), originally a farm labourer and sharefarmer. Few of its political representatives have left a more substantial mark on the region. (photo: unknown)

town had two papers (which was not uncommon), one was usually aligned with ‘protection’ and the other with ‘free trade’. Later, the Country Party was to ‘sew up’ the regional media. David Drummond and E.C. Sommerlad, for example, amalgamated several newspapers and established their own regional publishing, radio and television empire, a development that goes some way towards explaining Country Party domination of New England.14 While ‘national’ issues were clearly important to local papers, their attitude was also intensely parochial. For example, in the 1880s and 90s the issue of tariff protection for primary and secondary industry was viewed, essentially, through a lens formed by local economic interests and issues—the desire to protect local farmers from competition by Victorian and South Australian grain growers, for example. Local papers advocated the interests of the town and the surrounding district, including (if necessary) articles at the expense of other towns. Of the papers in the district, only the Tamworth Daily Observer (later, the Northern Daily Leader) acquired anything resembling a ‘regional’ coverage, and from 1910 it was (and still is) the only daily paper in New England. Thanks to its crusading editor, Victor Thompson, the Leader was largely responsible for creating the twentieth-century New State Movement. The paper promoted a regional identity as against the parochial interests usually championed by local papers, but parochialism was a powerful and

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Politics well-entrenched foe.15 Here is Michael Bruxner, Progressive Party candidate for the triple-member constituency of Northern Tablelands in 1920, speaking to an audience in Tenterfield:

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If they wanted this end of the electorate represented in Parliament they must work hard for it, otherwise it was possible that they might have three representatives from the Armidale end. They must organise and see that a big block vote was cast.16 Bruxner was appealing to a local loyalty most sharply expressed in rivalries over the location of railway lines—such as the competition for the Great Northern Railway between Inverell and Armidale. Similar rivalries were to hamstring construction of a line between the Tableland and the coast. Every town had its own idea about where the railway should go, which allowed politicians embarrassed by the likely cost to postpone construction indefinitely. Parochialism also endangered members who had several substantial towns in their electorate. A federal member, as the representative of a far-flung constituency, was vulnerable to the emergence of a popular local man in a large centre, especially in the context of electoral boundary changes. Most such challenges came from Labor but the Country Party exploited the existence of preferential voting to practise multiple endorsements of candidates. It was a Country Party man from the Upper Hunter, J.P. Abbott, who eventually took the federal seat from Victor Thompson.17 Distance was also a major shaper of politics in a more obvious and enduring sense. The region’s distance from Sydney and its inhabitants’ sense of neglect at the hands of Sydney-dominated interests have perhaps done more than anything else to provide a sense of regional community in New England. Don Aitkin has explored the ways in which the problems of country areas such as New England—their declining share of the state’s population, lack of industrial development and opportunities for employment, inadequate infrastructure and services, and the fluctuating fortunes of primary industry—helped to produce the ideology of ‘countrymindedness’. According to Aitkin, countrymindedness asserted that Australia’s prosperity rested on the efforts and achievements of primary industry, which all Australians should therefore support. What was in the interests of the farmer and the grazier not only benefited the country town; it was in the interests of the nation. Farming and grazing were ‘virtuous’ and ‘ennobling’, as was country life in general, and the cities were ‘parasitical’ and city people a faceless lot. The countryman is the typical Australian—his efforts built the nation and continue to keep it strong and wealthy. Governments should discourage the concentration of the population in the city, but they were unlikely to do so because they were dominated by city interests. It was the Country Party’s role to represent country folk, but it was more than a sectional voice, because the good of all depended on the prosperity of primary industry.18 Hence, Michael Bruxner could argue unblushingly that country people should not have to pay

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for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but the bridge over the Clarence ought to be funded by all taxpayers because it would increase primary production.19 Opposition to the Harbour Bridge was a means of expressing anti-Sydney sentiment in the early decades of the century, and a popular rallying point for the countryminded. In the 1960s, the Opera House was a similar target for New State proponents—now proving the political, cultural and moral bankruptcy of country ideology.20 By this time, the old economic base of countrymindedness had been seriously eroded. Most importantly, the contribution of farming and grazing to Australian export income fell dramatically. In New England, the economy was much less dependent on pastoralism. The wool industry had prospered in the early 1950s when prices boomed, but in the 1960s it entered more troubled times.21 The Armidale district had become increasingly dependent on education, especially its university. Tamworth, the region’s largest town, had developed some manufacturing (see Chapter 19), a substantial commercial and service sector and, like Armidale, a salaried class. While there were new fields of agricultural expansion, such as cotton farming in the Namoi valley, they were capital rather than labour intensive.22 Primary industry provided declining opportunities for employment. Countrymindedness had depended on the notion of a ‘country’ interest that transcended the differences between rural townspeople and primary producers. By the 1960s, this relationship was unravelling, due largely to changes in the nature of the economy and the occupational structure to which it gave rise. It was increasingly difficult to argue that primary industry was the backbone of Australian prosperity. Even the larger towns in New England seemed less dependent on the buoyancy of agriculture and pastoralism. Since 1920, the Northern New State Movement had been an expression of this supposed common interest between regional townspeople and primary producers. Northern separatism stretched back to the early years of European settlement in New England,23 but the modern movement emerged at the time of World War One.24 Initially, there was little grassroots enthusiasm for the cause, despite the ‘noise’ emanating from Thompson and the Northern Daily Leader’s office.25 In the early 1930s, support for the New State Movement owed much to local hostility to Labor, and the movement went into a gradual decline after Jack Lang’s dismissal by the Governor and his subsequent electoral defeat.26 Its revival after World War Two again coincided with Labor governments at both state and federal levels. The New England New State Movement now adopted boundaries embracing Newcastle and the Lower Hunter; without this addition, its area would have only half the population of Tasmania.27 In 1967, after the conservative parties came back to power, a referendum was held. It revealed strong support for a New State in New England and the north, but opposition in Newcastle and the coastal ‘milk’ districts was fatal to the ‘Yes’ vote.28 The constitutional barriers to new states are substantial, but the critical factor in 1967 was perhaps the movement’s inability to construct a feasible

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Politics proposal anchored in regional consciousness. In the age of mass politics and democracy, maps need to exist in the minds of men and women before they can be translated into a political reality and, in this respect, the movement failed. The geographer Eric Woolmington identified Tamworth, the Northern Tablelands and parts of the Northern Rivers district and the North Coast as the New State Movement’s core area of support. Here, there was evidence pointing to a sense of region, based on a ‘community of interest’. But the population was small and industry scanty. Only with the addition of the Lower Hunter could these flaws be remedied, yet at this point ‘community of interest’ broke down.29 Throughout the entire area, parochialism remained powerful. One’s town or district was probably a much stronger source of civic identity than the more abstract ‘New England’ or ‘the North’. The movement was sustained primarily by hostility to Sydney and, at its worst, by the allegation of a Sydney-based conspiracy to undermine rural life.30 Yet, for all that, the region’s economic and social life was increasingly tied to that of Sydney. The coming of the railway, for example, reduced the movement of people and goods between the Tableland and the coast. The flow was now in a north–south direction, between Sydney–Newcastle and New England and the north-west. Moreover, the connection in 1889 of the northern railway network to Sydney, together with the completion of a line between Sydney and Newcastle, had bound the economic life of both Newcastle and New England more tightly than ever to the colonial capital.31 Cynics have been inclined to see New State agitation as a means of attracting government expenditure to the north, or as a tool by which Country Party politicians sought to collect votes and build careers. It was certainly harder for Country Party leaders to see the overwhelming importance of a New State as long as they occupied the ministerial benches of the old one. Concessions during the interwar years, such as the opening of the Guyra–Dorrigo railway, the Armidale Teachers’ College and the New England University College, also had the effect of dampening New State enthusiasm. The Northern or New England New State Movement can be seen partly as an effort by the ‘notables’ of the northern towns to enhance their own status within their communities and the nation. Whereas the Country Party leadership was dominated by farmers and graziers, the New State Movement’s élite had a strong middle-class ‘urban’ component.32 The New State promised to transform a provincial notable into a real ‘man of affairs’ at the centre of things. A local alderman might become a parliamentarian, a bishop an archbishop, a town clerk a senior state civil servant. Most importantly, a New State would take tax revenue out of the hands of ‘Sydney’ politicians. New State activity was about development and decentralisation, but it was also about improving the status of middle-class people living at the margins.33 A New State (at least without Newcastle) would also be effectively a one-party state, with the Country Party as king, although that raised the ‘unattractive’ prospect that the remains of New South Wales would be left to Labor. New England had been the Country Party’s heartland from the foundation of

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the party in the early 1920s. Its domination was sometimes absolute, as in the period between 1956 and 1977, when it won every election in the region. The Country/National Party also held the New England federal seat continuously from 1919 until 2001. Michael Bruxner, David Drummond and Ian Sinclair, major figures in the party’s history, have all come from the region. There have been two outstanding family parliamentary dynasties in New England: M.F. and J.C. Bruxner held Tenterfield for the Progressive/Country Party from 1920 to 1981, while the Chaffeys, father and son, had a similarly extended tenure in Tamworth between 1913 and 1973—although their association with the Country Party was shorter (1945–72).34 The Liberal Party has had no success in New England elections, although it has challenged the Country Party in Tamworth from time to time. Although the city-based United Australia Party held Tamworth as late as 1941, W.A. Chaffey soon jumped ship. The Progressive/Country Party has been the overwhelmingly dominant nonLabor Party in New England since its displacement of Nationalist candidates in the 1920 state election. New England has not, however, been the Labor wasteland sometimes imagined.35 Labor has rarely won seats on the Tableland, although Bill McCarthy’s 1978 victory in Armidale, and his success in holding Northern Tablelands from 1981 until his death in 1987, revealed what was possible with a strong candidate, a popular Labor government, and more than a little good, oldfashioned pork-barrelling. A Labor man, pharmacist Jim Cahill, had won the Armidale seat narrowly in 1953, while another, Alfred McClelland, held one of the three available seats under the system of proportional representation in use in 1920–27. Labor almost won Tenterfield in 1962. In federal politics, there has certainly been little for Labor to celebrate. Frank Foster held New England between 1906 and 1913, but this had much to do with the strength of his protectionist credentials. Labor also went close to winning the seat in the landslide federal election of 1943, and was not far from victory in 1929— remarkably, with a Tasmanian candidate.36 National Party leader Ian Sinclair only narrowly won New England in 1983, in a seat that he had occupied since Drummond’s retirement twenty years earlier. In the first half of the twentieth century, Labor tended to poll much better west of the Tableland, holding state and federal seats there. Indeed, on its first outing in 1891 it won Gunnedah and one of the two Namoi seats (based on Narrabri). The decline of the rural working class in the west, however, has helped to prevent a Labor victory there since the middle of the twentieth century. More generally, the diminishing size of the pastoral, agricultural, railway and mining workforces in the region has undermined support for a Labor Party that had once been competitive—and occasionally successful—in New England. The growth of professional and white-collar employment has never fully compensated Labor for this loss, although McCarthy benefited from it during his time in parliament. The Country Party became the National Country Party in the 1970s and the National Party in the early 1980s, but these changes have failed to obscure

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Politics the erosion of its position. Aitkin noticed its vulnerability in a 1972 study— a large proportion of its membership was passive, and it was attracting few members from the towns.37 The rise of the Independents has largely confirmed his analysis. Tony Windsor, a defector from the National Party, took Tamworth as an Independent in 1991, and held it until he resigned to contest (successfully) the federal seat of New England in 2001. The state seat of Tamworth, although briefly reverting to the National Party at a by-election, was subsequently won by another Independent. Meanwhile, in 1999, Northern Tablelands was secured by Richard Torbay, an Independent, former ALP member and ex-Mayor of Armidale. He retained the seat with a massive majority in 2003.

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❈ Tony Windsor (centre), Independent member for New England in the Commonwealth parliament, with his wife, Lynne Windsor, and Richard Torbay, Independent member for Northern Tablelands in the state parliament, at the opening of Windsor’s campaign office in Inverell, 2004. (photo: G. Nuttall)

The displacement of the National Party from its former electoral heartland has produced some bitterness in its ranks. The rise of the Independents and a declining attachment to the traditional parties are national phenomena, although particularly pronounced in the bush.38 In New England, parliamentarians such as Windsor and Torbay are little interested in ‘ideology’, and act as brokers between local individuals and groups, and governments in Sydney or Canberra. Here is an example of long-term continuity. Since the 1850s, a parliamentarian who could argue persuasively that he had ‘influence’ with government has been in a good position to keep his seat, although this aspect of political culture is by no means peculiar to New England.39 In that sense, Torbay, Windsor and

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the current Independent member for Tamworth, Peter Draper, are the heirs to Theophilus Cooper and S.H. Terry. Also, a State Labor Government may be willing to allow an Independent to take credit for government spending (as has happened with Torbay), in case his support is later needed to form a minority government. Labor, moreover, realises that it cannot win the seat, and an Independent is far preferable to a National. It’s late afternoon, and I’m back in Kentucky to collect the placards. The village is still quiet, but there’s now a woman sitting at a table, crocheting enthusiastically. She’s handing out how-to-vote cards for the Independent candidate, Tony Windsor; or would be, if there were anyone to take them. We start talking; she tells me about the toilet in the park across the street. It’s clear from what she says that gaining official support for the construction of this little outhouse had been no simple matter, its appearance a civic triumph. Perhaps those enthusiasts for decentralisation who once railed against Sydney and dreamed of a flourishing New England State would be disappointed with such an apparently meagre crumb from Dives’ table. Admittedly, it’s no Tableland-tocoast railway. The park, however, now has a toilet and, for this woman at least, in an age of disillusionment, the political system that produced it has achieved modest vindication.

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Chapter 21 ❈

Wa r a n d It s Memo ries Ian M . Joh n s t o n e

If you visit the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, in northern France, you will find an immaculately kept cemetery whose low white headstones have rising sun badges on them. There you can find the names of four young men from Armidale on the screen wall, whose names appear also on the War Memorial fountain in their home town. When I visited the place, there was a misty haze over rolling fields of stubble, and a crop of canola as bright yellow as the headstones are bright white and the grass bright green. You don’t need to be especially sensitive to pick up the special atmosphere of this serene place, sanctified by the self-sacrifice of so many young men. In the distance you can see the village of Villers-Bretonneux, where the school has a sign in the playground, ‘N’oublions jamais l’Australie’ (‘We will never forget Australia’), and a café is called Le Kangourou. The bodies of 82 more Armidale chaps are buried elsewhere in the north of France and in Belgium. They are part of New England’s permanent link to those battlefields. Three more Armidale names are to be found on the Lone Pine Memorial at Gallipoli. The bodies of thirteen more are buried on the Gallipoli Peninsula. On a clear day, by climbing up on the Lone Pine Memorial, as I did with my son Michael, you can just see the narrow strait of the Dardanelles, where the Allies lost the naval battle six weeks before the landing, giving the Turks plenty of time to marshal their troops in readiness for the Allied invasion. Wars are disruptive events, which the flow of following generations has to negotiate. They tear at the texture of society, like earthquakes (Newcastle 1989), cyclones (Darwin’s Tracy in 1974 and Innisfail’s Larry in 2006) and tsunamis

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(Aceh, Indonesia, 2004). The survivors of wars have the task of returning life to normal, a long, hard process of restoration which is achieved in many different ways. An important way is through Legacy. (Armidale Legacy was formed immediately after World War Two.) Other ways include the writing of personal stories, poems, plays and fiction. Cleve Potter, born at Glen Innes, served as a private soldier on the Western Front in World War One. His war diaries, poems and letters were published in 1999. One of the next generation, Andy Fletcher, born at Summervale, near Walcha, served with the 20th Infantry Anti-Tank Company in North Africa, New Guinea and Borneo, and he too published his war diaries, entitled NX 20365.1 More detached and questioning, Geoff Page, another New Englander, born in 1940, has published poems about both wars, including the memorable lines in which he compared the two, or rather their memorials: The next bequeathed us Parks and pools But something in that first Demanded stone.2 In remembering war, we resist asking hard questions. Selective memory is another form of healing, as we mentally shed what we cannot bear to recall. We remember the heroism and forget the cowardice. We recall the mateship and humour, and suppress thoughts of the physical agony, hardships and discomforts. We remember the Gallipoli landing more than we do the débâcle that preceded it and the ignominious evacuation eight months later. All these methods of restoration bind communities together. A pilgrimage to Gallipoli, or to any place significant in Australia’s war history, can help the pilgrim to a better understanding of the facts and aura of iconic battle sites. Here is part of my response to a visit to Gallipoli, searching for evidence of men who might have been my neighbours. Tread lightly Tread lightly, and think kindly thoughts of me, As my bones rot quietly here, on remote Gallipoli. Certainly I skylarked in Cairo, at the Wazir end of town, But that was my preparation, for bravery when the chips were down. I sent some money, and a letter or two, to my family and my girlfriend, And cared about coves in my section and platoon, right to the end. I was a mate, and had close mates, who knew the meaning of trust; I suffered wounds, lice and thirst, and very seldom fussed. Football, cricket and shooting, were the main things I knew, And how to dodge a shindig, and how to handle a blue.

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War and Its Memories I admit to indiscretions, of a playful young man type, And I never did anything deliberate, to deserve any sort of stripe.

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But when the call came, to climb out over the top, I was three parts deaf, to a small voice saying ‘Stop!’ I did only what was expected, of every Aussie soldier boy, With wordless regret I tossed aside, all those things I’d planned to enjoy. So spare a kindly thought, for the slowly rotting parts of me, As you potter about this haunting place, of suffering and cemetery.

❈ War memorial of sandstone and marble at Newton Boyd, on the Old Grafton Road, a settlement of which little but memories now remain. (photo: I. Davidson)

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The recoil damage caused by war to New England communities is exemplified in Armidale, my own town. The law of conservation of momentum, which explains the backward thrust when a missile is fired from a rifle, mortar or other artillery weapon, helps us to understand the repercussions of sending soldiers off to war on the communities which send them. Somehow families have to regroup, darn the holes left by the dead and stitch the survivors back into civic life. A community’s convalescence becomes, in part, a defiant response to the harm done to it. There is reinvigoration, as individuals strive to repay the debt they feel is owing to the fallen and injured. ‘They died for our freedom’ isn’t far removed from ‘Jesus died for our salvation’. Thus, not all the consequences of war are bad. Commemorations paradoxically transmit civic values of energy, initiative, courage, decency and humour. Just as injured or ill people tend to introspect and sometimes change their life direction, so can communities by grieving. Commemoration ceremonies promote some of the highest ideals of behaviour we know. The war dead silently admonish us to make the most of our affluence and freedom. They make us freshly aware that we are all beads on the thread of family and neighbourhood. War is a paradox. It is agonising, destructive and a waste of human lives and material resources. On the other hand it is an unmatched stimulant, and an individual and social energiser. It brightens up the blasé and ostracises the indifferent. Armidale’s memories of war go back to the Boer War (1899–1901), to which it sent 60 men, one of whom, Trooper Alfred Allingham, did not come back.3 The Boer War stories of New England as a whole include that of Major James Francis Thomas, solicitor and owner of the Tenterfield Star, who served in that war and whose client, ‘Breaker’ Morant, was killed by a British firing squad.4 World War One left much deeper scars. It took 762 men and 11 nursing sisters from Armidale, their names all engraved on the granite fountain. More than one in ten (112) died, their average age between 25 and 26. In 1914 Armidale’s population was 5255, of whom 1355 were males eligible to enlist, which means that more than half (56 per cent) of those who could enlist did so.5 Life was not always easy for those who, for various reasons, chose not to go, as one of them, Phillip Wright, recalled: ‘Most of my friends and contemporaries offered their services, and as time went on my position became almost unbearable. It was very much easier to enlist than to stay at home’.6 The First 33rd Battalion, part of the Third Division, AIF, included about 1000 men from the region. Most of A Company came from Armidale and Tamworth, most of B from Walcha, Uralla, Barraba, Bingara and Manilla, most of C from Narrabri, Moree and Inverell, and most of D from Guyra, Glen Innes and Tenterfield.7 Appropriately, when the First 33rd was disbanded in 1943 its Regimental Banner was ‘laid up’ in St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral, Armidale.8 The first commander of the 33rd was Leslie James Morshead (later Sir Leslie), who had been a master at The Armidale School (TAS), a boys’ boarding school. He also played the chapel organ—and tennis with the headmaster. He left TAS a few months before war broke out, with a farewell from the school magazine:

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War and Its Memories Now that Mr Morshead has left us, we are at liberty to speak in appreciation of his work with us. He was a cheery companion in work and play and gave his services gladly in cricket, football and wheresoever else he could help out the school. Of his many activities perhaps we may single out for special mention the fine work he did with the Cadet Corps, and his direction in the chapel music.9

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❈ A.H. Perrott’s memorial at Dangarsleigh. The five pillars at the base are for Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and India, the triangular pediment represents England, Scotland and Ireland, and the octagonal spire the eight combined, while the sphere at the top is the world. (photo: I. Davidson)

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On the Western Front, Morshead’s ‘organising ability and rigid enforcement of discipline [was] . . . largely responsible for the unfailing success of the battalion’. The historian C.E.W. Bean remembered him thus: Lt. Col. Morshead of the 33rd, was a dapper little schoolmaster, only 28 years of age, in whom the tradition of the British Army had been bottled from his childhood like tight-corked champagne; the nearest approach to a martinet among all the young Australian colonels, but able to distinguish the valuable from the worthless in the old army practice; insistent on punctiliousness throughout the battalion as in the officers’ mess.10 Morshead served at Gallipoli, and from there he wrote letters to Dorothy Simpson, daughter of an Armidale solicitor, which she kept. In World War Two, he achieved greatness as commander of the garrison at the siege of Tobruk, and in leading the Australian 9th Division (eulogised by General Montgomery as ‘that Magnificent 9th’) into victory at El Alamein. He ended the war as a highly decorated lieutenant-general. Many young men went straight from school to war service, and their adventures were followed in the classrooms and assembly halls they left behind. Harold Fletcher (‘Billy’) White from Bald Blair, Guyra, was at TAS for nine years, ending as Captain of the School, the First XI and the First XV. He fought at Messines with D Company, later commanded 36th Battalion, and when the 36th was disbanded, became second-in-command of the 33rd. Bean called him ‘imperturbable’ and ‘highly trusted’. He was awarded the CMG, the DSO and the Croix de Guerre, and was mentioned in dispatches three times by Sir Douglas Haig. He was to be a foundation member of the Country Party, a member of the New South Wales parliament and of the UNE Council, and one of the first people in New England to use superphosphate to improve pastures.11 Armidale’s most tragic World War One story is that of George Frederick Braund. Born in England, Braund had migrated with his parents and he succeeded his father as manager of the Armidale general store, F. Braund and Co. He boxed, he fenced and he played rugby for New South Wales. He was active in local literary and drama groups, and at TAS he coached gymnastics and helped with the cadet corps. In December 1913 he won the state seat of Armidale as a Liberal. In July 1914, he was given command of the Thirteenth Infantry Regiment and in August, when war was declared, he was appointed to raise and train the AIF’s Second Battalion. The battalion landed at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915. In the dark of night on 3–4 May, Braund took a short cut through the scrub when returning to his lines. For some reason, he failed to respond to the challenge, and was fatally shot in the head by one of his own sentries. He was a teetotaller, a vegetarian and a theosophist, and according to Bean he showed ‘every quality of a really great leader’.12 There is a huge plaque in Braund’s memory in the Legislative Assembly chamber in Sydney and in Armidale the Braund Memorial was dedicated in May 2001.13 Some 832 men and fifteen women from Armidale served in World War Two

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War and Its Memories and, of that number, 157 men and two women died. A plaque in the foyer of the town’s Memorial Library lists those who fell in both World Wars, but it includes sixteen small mistakes. (The fate of a soldier, as someone once observed, is to die for your country and have your name misspelt afterwards.) I have discovered the causes of death of more than half of the 159 casualties of World War Two. Eighteen lost their lives in air accidents and fifteen in air battles. Fourteen died as prisoners of the Japanese in Singapore, Borneo and Japan, and four as prisoners on board Japanese ships torpedoed by the Allies. Thirteen others were killed in action on the ground, and five died from wounds received.14 From 1938 to 1940 the commander of the 33rd (New England) Battalion was Ivan Dougherty, a former teacher at West Armidale Public School, who had joined the Citizen Military Force while in Armidale. He went on to command the Second Fourth Battalion and afterwards the 21st Brigade, Seventh Division. He fought at Tobruk and in New Guinea, and in 1945 he commanded one of the assault brigades at Balikpapan in Borneo. During this war New Englanders also made their mark in the Second Eighteenth Battalion, part of the Eighth Division, AIF. About 60 per cent of the battalion was raised in north-western New South Wales, with the rest from Sydney, during June 1940.15 Bill McDonald, a tailor from Armidale, served as a staff sergeant with the Second Eighteenth and survived the long march from Sandakan to Ranau, only to be executed by the Japanese on 13 August 1945, two days before Japan surrendered.16 Among later wars, 32 Armidale men served in Vietnam, conscripted in the controversial ‘birthday ballot’. One of them, Private Billy Brett, was killed on 30 September 1967, aged 21, in a Viet Cong ambush in Phuoc Tuy Province. There is a plaque in his memory on Armidale’s memorial fountain, and a bridge on the highway bypass skirting the town to the west is named after him. Two Uralla men also fell, Private Trevor Attwood and Lance-Corporal Ross McMillan. They are remembered on a plaque in Alma Park, Uralla. Memory has various uses. Men and women coped with life on battlefields and in prisoner-of-war camps and military hospitals partly by remembering what they had left behind—childhood, parents, families and all the happier circumstances of home. In March 1918, early in a European spring, young Charles McDonald wrote from camp in Wiltshire to his mother, at home—the lovely house called ‘Roseneath’, still standing on the Dangarsleigh Road. ‘It’s a glorious Sunday morning, just like the good old Armidale spring days, clear and not a breath of wind.’ He was in Belgium three months later, still comforted no doubt by thoughts of Roseneath days. He was killed on 30 July, aged 27.17 Armidale today is thick with memorials to war, and of the bad days that killed men and women such as Charles McDonald. Central Park alone has the fountain, a band rotunda (recalling the Boer War), a monument to HMAS Armidale (sunk in action in the Arafura Sea on 1 December 1942) and the National Servicemen’s Memorial. There are memorial entrance columns at the Apex Memorial Lookout and memorial gates at Douglas Street sports ground. Poplars on Waterfall Way and Desert Ash in Miller Street have been planted

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❈ Nora Dangar’s memorial to her husband, Major Clive Collingwood Dangar, Third Light Horse—a small chapel, now covered with virginia creeper and set within an avenue of 200 elms at the entrance to Gostwyck homestead. (photo: I. Davidson)

‘lest we forget’. The Memorial Library, the Ex-Services Club, Legacy House, the Folk Museum and the Freemasons’ retirement village all have their displays, and there is a military museum in Mann Street. There are honour rolls in most of the schools, and various memorials in most of the churches. In the Anglican Cathedral tower, one of the eight bronze bells is a memorial to the First and Second 33rd, and it rings during the minute’s silence each Anzac Day. At Dangarsleigh, a short drive to the south, Alfred Haroldston Perrott of Chevy Chase built an extraordinary triangular obelisk, 40 feet high, in memory of men killed in World War One.18 At Gostwyck, Nora Dangar built a chapel for her dead husband. At the university, there is a granite memorial to the four men, staff and students, killed in World War Two, and the University Regiment flagpole is dedicated to the three who gave their lives in Vietnam. Armidale, along with other New England towns, makes an emphatic answer to the monuments at Villers-Bretonneux, Lone Pine and elsewhere. The number of local memorials, and the obvious cost and trouble spent in erecting them, testifies to local feeling and the power of memory. They symbolise the survivors’ determination to create something worthwhile in response to war’s disruption and waste.

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CHAPTER 22 ❈

T h e A rc h a e o l o g y o f t h e New Peo p les Pam e l a Wa t s o n

In the sweep of time during which humans have interacted with the Australian landscape, the span of European engagement is minuscule. Nevertheless, during the last two centuries the impact of the new arrivals has radically transformed the visible face of this landscape. The process of colonising settlement and the accompanying changes in land use have left physical traces that can expand our understanding of past events. The archaeology of European settlement in Australia is referred to as ‘historical archaeology’, a term indicative of the collaborative relationship between historical and archaeological methods and resources. While history studies the human past, mainly through written texts, archaeology examines the material evidence left by structures, sites, features, artefacts and other deposits. These material remains are distributed across the landscape, forming through time patterns of relationships and overlays that can be surveyed, recorded and mapped. The physical evidence of archaeological information provides a perspective on the past different from that contained in historical records. It serves to complement and illustrate such sources, and to expose gaps and inaccuracies. Archaeological finds can speak to us with peculiar directness, providing as they do a physical link with past people, their activities and daily lives. T H E C O N T E X T O F H I S TO R I C A L A RC H A E O L O G Y I N NEW ENGLAND

Historical archaeology emerged in Australia as a serious area of inquiry in the late 1960s, with pioneering studies of nineteenth and twentieth-century sites

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at Port Essington in the Northern Territory, Irrawang in the Hunter valley and Fossil Beach in Victoria. In 1974, Graham Connah helped to establish a separate Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at UNE and initiated historical archaeological research in the region (see Chapter 8). Along with Judy Birmingham at the University of Sydney, Connah was one of the prime movers in consolidating the discipline of historical archaeology in Australia. Connah turned to sites in the local area, for his own research and as field experience for his students. In 1975 he surveyed, but did not excavate, the archaeological landscape of one of the earliest pastoral runs in New England, Saumarez station, established in about 1835 just outside what later became Armidale.1 He followed this with the survey and excavation of a stone homestead at Winterbourne near Walcha—the first historical archaeological excavation in northern New South Wales.2 Between 1979 and 1982 he surveyed and excavated at Bagot’s Mill, a ruined watermill on Ben Lomond station about halfway between Armidale and Glen Innes, and in 1981 one of his students investigated McCrossin’s Mill, a well-preserved steam-powered flour mill at Uralla.3 Another student examined four of the Tableland’s nineteenth-century watermills (Bolivia, Yarrowford, Mount Mitchell and Bagot’s Mill) as part of a doctoral

❈ An aerial photograph of the remains of Bagot’s Mill. The standing structure is the housing for the water-powered wheel, and the elongated remains to the left of it are the location of the timber processing plant. (photo: G. Connah)

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The Archaeology of the New Peoples thesis.4 Then, in 1987–89, Connah returned to Saumarez to excavate the site of the original homestead, built around 1840 and demolished in 1888. 5 The impetus for such work declined with Connah’s retirement from the university in 1995. Connah himself turned to the coastal flanks of the Tableland, investigating Lake Innes House, the home of Major Archibald Clunes Innes near Port Macquarie, but investigations in New England in the 1990s were for a time limited to unpublished archaeological consultancy reports and a few postgraduate studies.6 Consultancies achieved a good deal. The introduction of national and state legislation and funding programs for the protection and conservation of heritage had been critical for the growth of Australian historical archaeology in the 1970s and 80s. The 1990s saw a steep rise in the practice of historical archaeology through consultancies generated by the need to record information under threat of damage or destruction, or for planning purposes, rather than for more broadly strategic research. In order to give some coherence to this process, a reporting process was established, monitored by the New South Wales Heritage Office. But consultancy reports are usually unpublished and difficult to access, limiting their usefulness for wider research. There seem to be only about half-a-dozen active consultants on the Tableland. Some of their work is mentioned below. Growing community interest in local heritage, as well as the promptings of legislators and the New South Wales Heritage Council, have encouraged local councils to assess their own heritage resources. Most major towns on the Tableland prepared heritage studies in the 1980s and early 1990s, with conservation and planning policies in mind. These studies were written mainly by architects and historians, and concentrated primarily on standing structures. Anything hidden, ugly or badly damaged was usually ignored. In Armidale, a heritage study completed in 1991 failed to identify most of the town’s archaeological riches, but a later, detailed study by Heather Burke identified many such sites, a good number of them already destroyed or threatened by commercial development. A stretch of Dumaresq Street, for instance, was about to be subsumed under a new Coles supermarket.7 The Heritage Futures Research Centre (HFRC), established at UNE in 2001, included archaeology among its areas of expertise, and it initiated the rescue excavation of the Coles site. This was the first such excavation within Armidale, and was conducted by Pam Watson, with student volunteers. It revealed substantial underground features and artefacts relating to a flour mill and house-cum-store dating from the 1850s, together with a large store from the 1870s, all belonging to the early immigrant James McLean. The site was renamed ‘McLean’s Corner’ and a sample of the discoveries has been preserved for public display.8 Watson also developed an Archaeological Management Plan for Armidale (linked with an earlier plan for Indigenous archaeology), and student training programs surveyed the Old Armidale Gasworks site (afterwards demolished) as an exercise in recording industrial archaeology. In 2003, Saumarez station was revisited and the foundations and curtilage (or immediate

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❈ Excavations of the footings of the old store at Saumarez station, 2003. (photo: P. Watson)

❈ Excavations at McLean’s Corner, Armidale, 2001–02. (photo: P. Watson)

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The Archaeology of the New Peoples surroundings) of the original store, behind the first homestead, were investigated prior to conservation work.9 These projects were all a result of cooperation between community groups, government agencies and the university. Among its other work, the HFRC serves as a channel for regional historical archaeology issues, addressing community concerns within a broad framework of research and training. In 2004, for instance, a landowner near Uralla was concerned that an area he aimed to develop at Rocky River included the remains of an old post office from the early goldmining settlement. Most visible traces of this settlement were gone, there was no heritage listing and no impediment to its destruction. There had never been an archaeological investigation of Rocky River, despite its historical significance, its evident potential, its lack of planning protection and its vulnerability to development. A research project was set up through the HFRC to record the wider context of settlement there, using a field school to excavate the site.10

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E M E RG E N T T H E M E S

The scope of historical archaeological research on the Tableland has been limited to a small number of studies, variously motivated. Nevertheless, several themes have emerged, giving character to the area and its phases of settlement. Whether these are definitive of the New England region is more difficult to assess. The drive to settle the Tableland was prompted by the economic potential of wool. The first pastoral station was established in 1832 at ‘Wolka’, followed shortly afterwards by Saumarez, and it was the core of the latter property, on Armidale’s doorstep, that was to provide Graham Connah with his first historical archaeological project in New England. Historical documentation of the early pastoral industry is often patchy, and this was an opportunity to showcase the contribution of archaeological methodology to reconstructing unrecorded aspects of the past. Connah demonstrated the potential of survey, treating the landscape as an artefact with constructed features that can be studied and interpreted. Using a combination of maps, aerial survey, systematic field walking and local oral history, he identified the site of the original settlement, installations for wool production and other station work, numerous additional dwellings, evidence of land use (such as stone clearance and ploughing) and of a church, school, coach station and intended village site. He detected the relocation from place to place of various aspects of station work and the arrival and disappearance of certain features—evidence of changes in technology, land use, labour demographics and the wider industry. The result was a far more detailed reading of the pastoral and agricultural exploitation of a landscape than any written sources could provide. Australia is a classic ‘frontier’ country, where the process of cultural adaptation can be traced in different ways through historical and archaeological records. Initial European settlement on the Tableland was frontier settlement, and it was to this generic theme that Connah turned when he undertook his excavation at the remote homestead site of Winterbourne, north of Walcha. As

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a little-altered and well-preserved stone ruin, Winterbourne allowed for careful structural survey as well as sub-surface investigation of archaeological deposits. The house could be analysed as an ‘original historical document’. Connah’s primary intention was ‘to examine the degree of cultural adaptation on an early sheep run in northern New South Wales’.11 As with Saumarez, his focus was on prominent squatters. Design, constructional features and artefacts all contributed to a picture of intertwined cultural continuity and adaptation by the European settlers in the 1840s.

❈ The fast crumbling remains of the homestead at Winterbourne, north of Walcha, in 2006. (photo: I. Davidson)

Related themes emerged through these two studies—environment and topography, access routes and isolation. Winterbourne was established near one of the early tracks from the gorges to the Tableland, but the road was so difficult that others were soon developed, including a line similar to the current New England Highway. Thus, while Saumarez was central to future settlement, Winterbourne was remote. During the late 1990s, the great settler colonial themes were reassessed in Rodney Harrison’s study involving East Kunderang station, in the eastern gorge country. This area now forms part of Oxley Wild Rivers National Park and was included in a Conservation Management Plan. The planning process widened into a strategic research project on the ‘Shared Histories of the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales’, which involved moving beyond the customary

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The Archaeology of the New Peoples Eurocentric perspective. Harrison drew attention to the colonial landscape as one shared between the invading settlers and the Indigenous inhabitants (see Chapter 10). He brought into focus the dispossessed Aboriginal population, their reactions, their varying fates and their adaptation to changing realities. The neglected area of ‘contact archaeology’, post-invasion Aboriginal archaeology, was thereby integrated with colonial archaeology. The European expansionist perspective of a ‘pastoral frontier’ was replaced by the more interactive notion of a ‘contact zone’. The process of European settlement was seen not just as a oneway process of imposition but as a two-way engagement, producing negotiated intersecting histories. The other group missing from the traditionally presented model of frontier settlement is that of the common workers and their families. In order to gather the evidence of these relatively invisible groups, more than ‘woolsheds and homesteads’ needed to be examined. People operated within a landscape that was in fact a web of many kinds of ‘places’ and of physical and mental attachments. Harrison employs the continuity of attachment to present-day communities as a way of linking the material traces of the past with contemporary sensibilities of significance. By talking to people in Armidale and elsewhere, and using community workshops and oral history as a starting point, he was able to map the more ephemeral places in the landscape, such as mustering huts and camps. The linkages among these places revealed trails and patterns of movement, often identical with Aboriginal patterns. This demonstrates an entangled learning process involving both peoples. Singular geography and environment shape human engagement. Harrison’s cross-disciplinary approach—archaeology, local consultation, oral history and documentary research—demonstrated the intrinsic links between heritage, scholarship and the ongoing community. Investigations of a number of mill sites by Connah and his students had already dealt with experiments in early secondary industry on the Tableland, a different context for exploring cultural adaptation. The isolation of the early days encouraged self-sufficiency. Some pastoral stations, such as Yarrowford and Mount Mitchell, set up small water-powered flour mills to serve basic needs. Warwick Pearson’s survey in the early 1990s illustrates the remoteness of these enterprises from the nineteenth-century industrial economy, their reliance on local materials and unsophisticated methods of construction.12 Local knowledge was also lacking. Unfamiliarity with long-term environmental conditions led to the building of water-mills where rainfall was unreliable and unconducive to steady production. Commercial demand was also unpredictable. Water-mills in New England were less effective than the emerging steam- and roller-mills, and they did not survive the competition. One of the fifteen steam-powered flour mills operating in New England in the early 1870s was McCrossin’s Mill at Uralla. It is still standing, and Luke Godwin has made an archaeological study of its structure, besides excavating associated deposits. The structure is a testament to early building methods, materials and logistical constraints, the growth of local industries such as brickmaking and improved transport and distribution of goods. McCrossin’s Mill

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continued to operate a declining trade into the 1890s, but New England was not the best environment for growing grain, despite the enthusiastic predictions of local pundits (see Chapter 6). The closure of all local mills, whatever their source of power, followed the introduction of more efficient and more expensive technology by companies in major cities.13 Examination of another enterprise doomed to failure gives further proof of immigrant misperceptions. One of the earliest hydroelectric systems in Australia was built on the Gara River, south-east of Armidale, in 1895, to serve the gold and antimony mining town of Hillgrove. The steep terrain on the edge of the gorge country required a heavy investment in power for mining, lighting and transport. The terrain also suggested the solution—harnessing the power of falling water. The scheme failed, not once but twice. Design flaws, unreliable water flow (again) and economic depression all played their part. But, according to the archaeologist for the site, Denis Gojak, so did contemporary thinking, the novelty and allure of electricity blinding investors to physical and economic realities.14 The presence of gold, antimony, silver, copper, tin, wolfram, bismuth, arsenic and other minerals on the Tableland has ensured surges of interest in their exploitation over many years. Gold has been one of the most important economic commodities in the region, and goldmining has strongly affected patterns of settlement and land use, particularly in the north. However, no integrated archaeological research has yet been done on mining in New England. Historical accounts and consultancy reports suggest a significant and complex physical record, backed up by scanty documentation. The early goldmining strike in 1851 at Rocky River, soon followed by others, changed work habits on pastoral stations, encouraged settlement and the servicing of towns, and generally influenced the pattern of early development. Mining activity was often short-lived or spasmodic. The Rocky River settlement, 5000 people in 1856, now leaves no obvious trace on the landscape, and the later township at Hillgrove and numerous others have suffered a similar fate.15 Torrington, north-west of Glen Innes, includes the most significant geological area for gems and minerals in New South Wales, and the world’s largest deposit of industrial topaz. The first excavated lode tin deposit in New South Wales was mined here, and it had the first tin-crushing equipment in the colony. Aspects of arsenic and tin processing at the Ottery mine are a significant part of Australia’s national heritage.16 The declaration of Torrington as a State Recreation Area prompted an historical archaeology survey (1998) that recorded and assessed 41 sites, a fraction of the total of over 1300 mineral deposits. The survey revealed evidence of technology adapted to local conditions, and of the varied cultural groups who lived and worked there.17 Existing communities in and around Torrington, Emmaville, Glen Innes, Deepwater and Tenterfield strongly identify with the mining history of the area. Remains of mining processes are easy to see on the landscape, usually as scars in a degraded environment. However, their associated settlements and infrastructures are now barely visible. They tend to lie outside areas affected by

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The Archaeology of the New Peoples remediation or development proposals, and are therefore ignored in contracted studies, and the evidence they might offer about the European occupation of New England remains hidden. The appearance and disappearance of settlements is integral to understanding the formative processes of colonisation and development, including motivation, perception, adaptation and changing context. Remains are not always easy to see or to understand, and archaeological investigation is an essential tool in their recognition. At Irishtown, near Walcha, a cluster of small farming portions were taken up from the 1850s by Irish-born workers who also worked as labourers and shepherds on nearby large stations. Twenty years later the lure of the goldfields had drastically diminished the settlement, and the only surviving structures are a collection of slab and weatherboard buildings on one of the holdings, known as Homeleigh. These have been archaeologically surveyed at the request of the Walcha and District Historical Society, and with the support of Walcha Shire Council. The evidence uncovered shows the bond of shared cultural heritage motivating this Irish enclave. The relatively unaltered slab cottage and its outbuildings is a rare surviving example of the small selectors’ homes, a useful contrast to the many examples in New England of large pastoralists’ homesteads.18 (See also Chapters 13 and 14.) Part of a different type of village has been investigated by Heather Burke.19 Guy Fawkes lay near Ebor, on the road to Armidale, and it developed around a number of small farm holdings and a wine shanty built in 1884. The village lasted some 25 years (although the police station did not close until 1944), and it included at various times a hotel, store, bank, blacksmith’s shed, post office, telephone, butcher’s shop and dairy, two boarding houses and a school. Only the butcher’s shop and dairy were surveyed, as they were to be affected by a realignment of the road. To the passing motorist, the only visible evidence for this village is the occasional English tree. The settlement exemplifies the nineteenth-century pattern of small farm holdings, showing their degree of selfsufficiency and their networks of supply. Neither at Irishtown nor at Guy Fawkes has the full archaeological potential of the sites been explored. Systematic mapping and recording of these and other numerous ‘ghost towns’ would contribute to a rich physical picture of social and economic patterns, corridors and interactions through space and time. It would reveal the variety of vernacular settlements and land use across the Tableland, amid the iconic structures of the rich. Surviving towns are part of that pattern. In Armidale, the excavation of McLean’s Corner opened a new window onto the earliest domestic, retail and industrial endeavours of ordinary townspeople.20 More such windows, opening in various directions, would add greatly to our understanding of daily life in the past. None of the themes for historical archaeology described here is peculiar to New England. However, no rural area in Australia has received as much archaeological attention, as a result of the presence of the university. Much remains to be done. In order to see how distinctive New England is in the pattern of experience revealed by its archaeological remains, we need a larger variety of

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investigated sites and landscapes, together with work from other regions with which it might be compared. Nevertheless, a strong sense of attachment between contemporary communities and their past is eloquently demonstrated, say, by the research at Kunderang, Torrington and Irishtown. These localised examples may well fuse into a clearer conception of regional identity when the range and variety of the physical evidence are fully explored.

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CHAPTER 23 ❈

C o l l e c t in g a n d Pre sen tin g th e Pas t Ni col e M cL e nnan , Bi l l Oa t e s , And rew Pi p e r and Al a n At k i n s o n

MUSEUMS

As early as the 1870s and 80s it was common throughout parts of rural Australia for settlers to collect Aboriginal artefacts and curiosities of natural history— stone axes, snake-skins, unusual feathers, egg-shells and so on—bringing them home and putting them away in cabinets or drawers. Some collectors were highly discriminating and even created small private museums.1 Teachers also encouraged children to help in building up museums for their schools, hoping thereby to give them an intelligent grasp of their environment. This was an effort in keeping with contemporary educational theory. Many colonists of that generation showed a newfound interest in knowing more about the Australian countryside and especially their own corner of it. In New England, the school museum at Hillgrove was typical of its time. In 1903, the Town and Country Journal reported that it contained ‘a valuable collection of specimens of minerals, fossils, vegetable products, manufactures etc., which are used to illustrate lessons’. Its success was largely due to the efforts of the head teacher, Henry Tonkin, appointed to Hillgrove in 1888. Under his guidance, students were encouraged to learn not only from books but also through practical activities.2 New England had other collections, most of them in private hands and the result of individual quests to acquire specific sets of objects. Often these collections became too unwieldy or, when their creator died, formed the nucleus of

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❈ As with many of his generation, Henry Tonkin used his camera in his efforts to collect and preserve. Here his wife (third from the right) stands with others beside a Bora tree, near Hillgrove. (Compare this tree with the stump on p. 94, which may have been sawn back by souvenir hunters.)

public museums in New England and beyond.3 One such collector was Alfred Pike, ‘discoverer of the Copeton diamond field’, who died in 1933. Pike was described as ‘simple-hearted and genial, without a relative in the world, but with an all-absorbing passion, viz., to collect and to show the gems of New England’. He originally offered his collection to the Australian Museum, in Sydney, but the authorities there would not accede to Pike’s condition that he go with it, as curator. He refused to be parted from his gems, and in 1931 the Armidale City Council accepted the collection and the collector as well.4

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Collecting and Presenting the Past It formed the nucleus of the Armidale Municipal Museum, which opened in December 1933—‘the first municipally controlled museum’ in New South Wales, according to Armidale’s mayor. The local member of state parliament, D.H. Drummond, was impressed, but he was anxious that future material be gathered carefully and deliberately. A rural museum, said Drummond, should be a place for objects that are ‘intimately bound up with the history of the district’, and with its industries. It ‘must not be allowed to become a mausoleum or a dumping ground for curios’ of miscellaneous provenance. During World War Two, the museum was taken over as an office for the town’s Chief Warden, but the collection later passed to the Armidale Folk Museum.5 Probably the most significant single figure in the development of museums in New England has been Eric Dunlop (1910–74). Dunlop briefly lectured in history at the Armidale Teachers’ College in the mid-1930s, then taught in high schools, before returning to the college in 1949, where he spent what John Ryan has called his ‘productive and innovative middle years’.6 As with Henry Tonkin at Hillgrove, Dunlop’s main concern was with museums as an educational tool. His interest in recreating the past was possibly sparked by a visit to the 1938 sesqui-centenary exhibition mounted for four weeks in Sydney, which had attracted almost 60 000 visitors, an exhibition Dunlop later came to view as a missed opportunity for a permanent museum of social history.7 On returning to Armidale, he almost immediately secured approval for a museum of education. The original plan was for a slab school to be reconstructed in Armidale and equipped as a ‘typical 19th Century bush school’.8 The plan took some time to realise. Late in 1953 Dunlop embarked on a nine-month tour of Europe, aiming to study folk museums in Britain and Scandinavia and to ‘gather ideas’. In his diary of museum visits he noted features that might be incorporated into his museum, including fake glowing fires, costume displays and period rooms. He returned full of enthusiasm for the folk-museum approach. He believed that there was an opportunity for Armidale to ‘give some small lead to the rest of Australia in a similar presentation of relics of other days’.9 His ideal was a folk museum that not only preserved the past, but also portrayed it through recreations and/or typological arrangements. The ‘daily life and work of ordinary men and women’ was to be on show, rather than the glamour of colonial mansions.10 Dunlop now aimed to complete the Museum of Education in Armidale, but also to garner enthusiasm for a folk museum and to encourage local groups elsewhere to collect material for museums of their own. By September 1956, the original public school building at Pallamallawa, near Moree, had been moved to the Teachers’ College grounds. It was equipped with original furniture, and reopened as the Museum of Education.11 The way had already been prepared for a folk museum when, in September 1955, Dunlop addressed the Armidale City Council on the subject. The council were ‘wooed’ by local relics, by slides of overseas museums and by college students in period and contemporary dress. The Armidale Express boldly announced, ‘Armidale to Have First Folk Museum in Australia’, and Alderman Robert Madgwick (also

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Vice-Chancellor of the university) declared, ‘I would like to start tomorrow even if we haven’t a penny in any fund, and nowhere to put the material we should get’.12 By early December enough material had been collected for a week-long historical exhibition in the Armidale Literary Institute. Dunlop and his committee also staged a smaller display for the New England Pastoral, Agricultural and Horticultural Association’s rodeo—dubbed by the Express ‘Culture and Cowboys’. Some 450 individuals and sixteen school groups visited the week-long display, and another 1000 people visited the rodeo exhibition.13 Encouraged by such support, the committee soon gathered enough objects to begin work on a permanent display, and on 20 November 1958 the Armidale Folk Museum was officially opened by D.H. Drummond, in the Literary Institute building. ‘[S]omewhat overshadowed’ by a general election, the occasion was nevertheless proclaimed as proof of an ‘awakening interest in history’.14 Dunlop was not the only person establishing folk museums. The Richmond River Historical Society now had ‘a very useful’ social history museum at Lismore, and at Port Macquarie, a local teacher, Lionel Gilbert, had begun a museum for the Hastings District Historical Society. Others followed, taking advice from the pioneers. In 1958 Louise Daley wrote from Lismore to the Tenterfield historian, Norman Crawford, promising that he could ‘count on’ her help in establishing the Henry Parkes Memorial Museum. Dunlop himself, now attached to the university’s Adult Education program, conducted schools on local history and museums in places as far afield as Ballina, Boggabri, Gulgong and Murrurundi. By 1959 he was able to talk with confidence about New England’s ‘Folk Museum Movement’.15 Three years later Dunlop moved to a position in Sydney, and was replaced at the Teachers’ College by Lionel Gilbert, who had a rare combination of experience in teaching and museum work. By 1971, there were museums at Armidale, Bingara, Boggabri, Bundarra, Glen Innes, Inverell, Moree, Nundle, Tamworth, Tingha, Uralla and Walcha, at least half of which were run by local historical societies.16 There was no uniform pattern. At Glen Innes, the ‘Land of the Beardies History House’ initially had much in common with the ‘folk parks’ that had developed overseas. It was ‘a museum on the move’, according to its president, R.F. Robinson, ‘preserving century old skills in a living cultural centre’. Housed in the old hospital building, it included period rooms, a slab cottage erected in one of the wards, and machinery and household paraphernalia. Under the same roof, as Robinson explained, was a ‘human working model of life as it was lived in the age depicted in the static displays’. Mineral and gem clubs, ceramicists, spinners and weavers all had workshop space. A shearer might be seen clipping wool with a hand-driven plant, the fleece passing to spinners on the verandah, who wove it into cloth. The museum and the craft centre were seen as ‘inseparable’. However, as the collections grew, the workshop areas were progressively absorbed into the museum.17 In early 1972 the Gunnedah Historical Society began converting the town’s water tower into a museum. A year later the Tamworth Historical Society took possession of Calala Cottage (built 1875) and grounds. In Tamworth, as at

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❈ One of the early displays at History House, Glen Innes—the ‘Miscellaneous Room’ (photo: unknown)

the region’s other museums, the emphasis was on ‘authenticity’. Rooms were furnished in period style and a slab hut was ‘restored to its original condition’.18 And again, displays focused on the region’s mining and pastoral heritage. By 1977 there were 22 museums and six galleries in the New England region.19 These included some of the earliest folk museums in Australia, but the rush to create them eventually caused problems. Dunlop himself was disappointed that few organisers had followed his lead in display principles, and often the result was ‘overcrowding and clutter’.20 Further, in the hurry to collect objects, rarely had anyone taken the trouble to record their provenance. Besides, a new generation of museum managers had established different principles, unforeseen by the pioneers. While a number of local groups had saved buildings from destruction by moving them to a safe location and reusing them as museums, this practice was now frowned upon, because it made it impossible to recover their original context. Also, the first museums were often created with a Eurocentric outlook, charting only the progress of white settlement. Artefacts of Chinese or Indigenous origin (if collected at all) were displayed as curios. On the other hand, Drummond’s original warning about museums becoming dumping grounds was also valid, because they were used to house anything that seemed old and interesting. More recently, while the traditional themes continue to resonate, there has been more specialisation. Transport museums reflect the

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passions of their collectors, whether for farm machinery or for classic cars. Other specialist museum groups, such as the Tenterfield Railway Preservation Society, have a more local provenance. McCrossin’s Mill, in Uralla, houses important mining relics, including splendid reminders of the Chinese presence in the area. In Armidale, the Museum of Printing is the result of a chance acquisition by the then Director of the New England Regional Art Museum, Joe Eisenberg. The continuing task is to make museums relevant to their communities. As community expectations change, New England museums face the challenge of re-examining their collections and re-creating their displays accordingly. A RC H I V E S

From the beginning, New Englanders created and kept records relating to their lives. The churches continued a centuries-old tradition of record-keeping in their new parishes, and commercial enterprises, including pastoralists, kept wage-books and letter-books. Government agencies, community organisations and schools created and collected (and, in many cases, still retain) extensive local archives. Even in the beginning, some kept records for purely historical interest, recognising that their life and times would be of interest to future generations. The school teacher and diarist William Gardner, who died in 1860, handed over to the colony’s government his extensive descriptions of mid-nineteenthcentury New England and they are now in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.21 In the twentieth century, this concern with archival heritage provided fertile ground for a larger, regional archives—created by the New England University College, afterwards UNE. The local and professional use of archives began in 1940 with A.J. Greenhalgh’s Master of Arts thesis, ‘History of New England’, and two theses by Desmond Long soon afterwards continued the work. Long’s research was well publicised in the local press, as were his calls for ‘information about old records not necessarily of New England, but dealing with any areas of Northern New South Wales’. At the same time regional monographs on economic history were compiled at the college under the supervision of James Belshaw—some Belshaw wrote himself.22 In mid-1947, Mary Cumpston, a lecturer in history, wrote to Robert Madgwick, then Warden, complaining that Armidale courthouse records could not be seen by college staff and students interested in local history until after they had been sent away to the Mitchell Library in Sydney. As a result of Madgwick’s representations the records were transferred to the custody of the college.23 Madgwick went further. The research work of our university, he said in 1954 (the year of UNE’s autonomy), must include inquiry into the history of New England, and ‘This . . . can only be done with the sympathetic support and encouragement of the people of the region’. He therefore appealed ‘to all those who have family papers and records of any sort to get in touch with the University’. Part of the university library basement was set aside for an archives and the Minister of Education was persuaded that

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Collecting and Presenting the Past the library should be named as a State Archives Repository. In 1960, Frank Rogers, University Librarian, was given a seat on the new State Archives Board, and there began a series of transfers of relevant records from the State Archives to UNE.24 The university’s first full-time archivist, Ray McDonald, appointed in 1960, was entrusted with collecting ‘all research material likely to be of value in throwing light on the historical, economic and social development of Northern New South Wales from the earliest European settlement until recent times’. McDonald spoke of himself as a pioneer: ‘there was no existing institution with which we would have to compete. To all intents and purposes, if the University had not begun collecting records in this area they would never have been collected’.25 However, it was the second archivist, Alan Wilkes, who laid the main foundation. His travels over a period of twenty years, hunting down records, became something of a university legend. In 1964 he wrote to one potential donor, ‘I note your remarks about the inaccessibility of “Kunderang” except on horseback. Like Mr McDonald I am no horseman, but I am willing to risk my neck to collect these records if you can provide a not too mettlesome animal to carry me’.26 During this period staff and postgraduate students in UNE’s History Department made good use of the Archives. Robin Walker’s account of the colonial period, Old New England, published in 1966, was symptomatic of a new scholarly interest in Australian regional and rural history. It came six years after Margaret Kiddle’s classic work on Victoria’s Western District and a year before Gordon Buxton’s Riverina, but Walker could cite a body of previous research unmatched elsewhere in rural Australia.27 (Much the same has been said for other areas of New England scholarship, in chapters 2, 8 and 21.) Meanwhile, new methods of teaching school history were being explored, with an emphasis on the use of original documents and focusing on local circumstances. By the early 1970s there were museum collections at what had been the Teachers’ College—by now the Armidale College of Advanced Education (ACAE)—and the Armidale Folk Museum was being put to good use. In 1973 over 1000 children visited the museum in school groups. The staff of the ACAE, Lionel Gilbert in particular, now set about creating the Historical Resources Centre, with funding from the Schools Commission and based on a program of duplication of materials from the State Library, the State Archives Office and several government departments. The centre was officially opened on 20 February 1976.28 Gilbert’s plan for the centre involved copying enormous quantities of original material for easy student access. Indexing and cataloguing focused on themes and localities, adding much to the local flavour of the collection. The outstanding enthusiasm created in this way—by involving teachers, students and others across the region—became a distinctive feature of the centre. New material continued to be added long after Gilbert’s retirement, including the meticulous notes made by John Ferry as the foundation of his doctoral thesis (1994) and subsequent book, Colonial Armidale (1999).29

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New issues arose with the amalgamation in 1989 of the ACAE with the university. The director of the Historical Resources Centre, Graham Wilson, and the then University Archivist, Gerry Purkis, wrote a joint report recommending that the centre be combined with the University Archives, but with Purkis’s departure soon afterwards this proposal lost momentum. There was no archivist for three years, and Wilson himself resigned as director of the centre in 1992. The position was voluntary and no relief from teaching load was available to the appointee. After a period of hiatus, distressing to everyone with an interest in these remarkable collections, the university’s Heritage Centre was created in 1994, in the former library building of the college.30 An amalgamation of the Archives, the Historical Resources Centre and Dunlop’s Museum of Education, it is shaped by the aims and principles of a new generation of experts, and it is proof of what can be done by a regional community genuinely interested in preserving the records of its past.

❈ The ‘Australian Standing Stones’, to the east of Glen Innes, commemorate the Scottish links of the Northern Tableland. The circle of 24 stones represents the 24 hours of the day, two stones mark the summer and winter solstices, a pattern forming the Southern Cross symbolises the link between old and new worlds, the Gaelic Stone represents the Celts of Ireland, Scotland and Man, the Brythonic Stone the Celts of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, the Ogham Stone the Irish, the Gorsedd Stone the Welsh and Cornish, and the Australian Stone all Australians. (Compare the intricacies of the Dangarsleigh memorial, p. 249.) (photo: I. Davidson)

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Collecting and Presenting the Past PA C K A G I N G T H E PA S T

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The idea of ‘packaging the past’, and many of the current connotations of the word ‘heritage’, are part of a late-twentieth-century pattern of ideas, now coming to fruition in Australian rural communities. Taken together, they have vital implications for New England and its collective sense of its history. In the late 1970s, it began to be obvious that the interpretation of memories and artefacts from the region’s past was an important feature of tourism in New England.31 The rapid increase in motor-car ownership, the sealing of highways and the building of motels (see Chapter 17), together with the rebirth of the Australian film industry (many new films were set in the Australian bush—see Chapter 29), meant that the rural landscape began to draw growing numbers of travellers from elsewhere. Today, memories and information about the past are presented, interpreted and celebrated in a variety of ways. Technological advances such as the use of satellite and GPS technology to deliver information directly to the occupants of vehicles promise innovative new ways to engage an increasingly receptive audience. However, the traditional media of print and radio still dominate in the interpretation of past memories. Academic books have only ever reached a limited and specialised interest group. Within communities, memories of the past have been cherished, told and recorded through the efforts of local historical societies—and the work of these societies, throughout north and north-west New South Wales, is now coordinated at joint conferences held each autumn under the aegis of the Royal Australian Historical Society. In New England, many of these organisations play a principal part in interpreting the past by managing local museums and compiling publications. The Journal of the Armidale and District Historical Society is probably the best of its kind in Australia. Family history groups help to elaborate the long-term connection between families and places. Thus inspired, communities such as those of Wongwibinda, Aberfoyle and Ward’s Mistake, north-east of Armidale, have pulled together eclectic collections of their community’s memories, in their case with the fitting title of Our Grandchildren Won’t Believe It.32 Printed memories fail to span the chasm between what Andrea Ho has called ‘the dry perception of history and the lively reality of heritage’. As regional manager and breakfast presenter on ABC local radio for New England and the North West in the first years of the new century, Ho attempted to bridge this gap. She noted that, like all Australians, New Englanders love to tell and listen to yarns. She would find herself covering a contemporary event only to be bailed up by a local and whispered some tantalising story, such as ‘how the ladies would leave cooked dinners out for Thunderbolt, or about how Tom Roberts used to have a drink right at this bar in Inverell after painting out at “Newstead”’.33 Ho recorded these stories and through the medium of radio packaged them as ‘Breakfast Postcards’ to a diverse audience across the region. These little snapshots of history, told by the people of New England in their own voices, were immediately accessible memories from the past.

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It has been said that good oral stories bring us ‘closer to the humanity of the past and of the present and closer to understanding ourselves’.34 Stories are a potent means of packaging the memories of the past, even as they inspire our traditions. Such storytelling can also happen on guided tours. Armidale’s Visitor Information Centre oversees a free, two-hour tour of the city encompassing the major historic and architectural landmarks. A minibus stops to let participants inspect places in the light of knowledge newly acquired from the guide. This packaging of the past combines memory (the stories) with the actual fabric of the past (buildings and landmarks), thereby delivering an enthralling heritage experience. The commentary, delivered as a mix of information and stories by people who have a long association with the city and a deep love for its past, gives this experience an immediacy seldom attained in books. Festivals and special events are other means of using memories. Perhaps the best example of a New England town using its past in such up-to-date ways is Bingara. Bingara is proud of its contribution to the two world wars, with possibly more volunteers, per capita, than any other Australian town.35 An avenue of orange trees was planted as a memorial to Bingara men who lost their lives in those wars and, since the 1960s, Bingara’s school children have harvested the oranges in July. The annual festival held at this time emphasises the importance of the orange trees as a focal point around which Bingara can remember and make sense of its involvement in war. During the 2003 festival, film-maker Steve Webber worked with some of the town’s young people, recording the stories of older residents and debating the significance of the orange trees.36 This material was used in a community performance interspersed with live theatre by the North West Theatre Company (for which, see Chapter 27) called Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. In 2005, to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two, there was a particular focus on the sacrifice made by those who joined up to fight. Preceding years had been used to remember the Greek and Chinese impact on the Bingara community. Like many other nineteenth-century New England mining towns, Bingara once had a large Chinese community, although today it has but one family. The town has four large street murals portraying aspects of its past, and among them is one depicting the contributions made to its history by Chinese miners.37 Within every community, there is no single history and no single heritage, but an overlapping and interrelated series, with meanings that are manifold and ever-changing. The variegated nature of the cultural heritage landscape is one of the underlying principles of history and heritage’s wide appeal. It is essential that this reality be evident in its presentation, but this can be a significant challenge, particularly when there are contradictory and disputed accounts of the past, as with the history of contact between settlers and Aboriginal people. But it is a challenge that has to be faced. No one benefits from a shallow, glib and trivialised past. In selecting themes that confront unsavoury aspects of the past, communities have a chance to learn, and to compare past and contemporary values.

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❈ Lyall Munro senior speaks at the unveiling of the memorial to the victims of the 1838 massacre at Myall Creek, 8 June 2002, by the Governor of New South Wales (behind to the left), Marie Bashir. (photo: unknown)

Recently, there has been significant improvement in the way the stories of past conflict are told. As Max Eastcott, General Manager of Gwydir Shire, puts it: ‘The unnecessary violence and callous treatment of the Aboriginal people was an unfortunate chapter in this Country’s history that must be acknowledged and recognised as behaviour that was unjust’. This enlightened awareness is poignant, given that the notorious Myall Creek massacre of 1838, within the Gwydir Shire, occurred not far from Bingara (see Chapter 9). The Gwydir Shire Council has itself taken responsibility for a monument to the Aboriginal people killed at Myall Creek. Erected in 2000 on the site of the massacre and officially unveiled in 2002, it is a reminder of the violence of invasion and a testament to changing attitudes. It consists of a series of granite boulders with plaques telling the story. The last plaque carries the following epitaph: IN MEMORY OF THE WIRRAYARAAY PEOPLE WHO WERE MURDERED ON THE SLOPES OF THIS RIDGE IN AN UNPROVOKED BUT PREMEDITATED ACT IN THE LATE AFTERNOON OF 10 JUNE, 1838. ERECTED ON 10 JUNE 2000 BY A GROUP OF ABORIGINAL AND NON-ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS IN AN ACT OF RECONCILIATION, AND IN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE TRUTH OF OUR SHARED HISTORY. WE REMEMBER THEM NGIYANI WINANGAY GANUNGA.

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At each plaque is a stone bench, where visitors can sit and reflect upon a shared history, and on reconciliation. As Eastcott says, Myall Creek ‘deserves consideration as a place of national significance within our cultural environment’.38 The redevelopment of Bingara’s art deco theatre, the Roxy, shows how much heritage conservation can do for tourism. Bingara, in common with many small country towns, has suffered from reduced services, dwindling agricultural employment and depopulation. It ‘consistently rates as a severely disadvantaged community’, yet it remains remarkably cohesive. This is partly because the Gwydir Shire Council deliberately aims at ‘community harmony’.39 It sees built heritage as an asset—adding purpose to community activities and encouraging a strong sense of place. The Roxy, built in 1936 as a cinema, was mothballed in 1958. In 1999 it was bought by the Shire Council and restored with local, state and federal funding, as a working theatre. Magnificent in its refurbished state, it is now a cinema and performing arts centre, and home to the North West Theatre Company. The restoration and adaptive re-use of the Roxy has redefined Bingara and the wider region as ‘a light-house, cutting edge and vibrant community’.40 American Richard Florida has argued that ‘when talented people come together, their collective creativity is not just additive; rather, interactions multiply and enhance their individual productivity’.41 Here Florida was talking about the way much larger centres can prosper by attracting talent, but the argument applies also to places like Bingara. It had been anticipated that investment in the Roxy would make Bingara into a ‘Western Regional Bellingen’.42 Indeed, it was soon returning dividends, with visitors from across the region enjoying cinema, live theatre and other cultural events. In a fast-moving, computerised society, a strong sense of the past provides spiritual moorings. The challenge for heritage today is not to re-invent the past but to use it in shaping a viable future. Properly understood, the past is an asset for the present. In New England and elsewhere, ‘heritage’ was once synonymous with ‘old buildings’. This model denied people their place on the heritage landscape, and as they disappeared so did the substantial relevance of heritage for contemporary communities. As we now understand it, heritage is much more than physical fabric. It is an expression of social space, and of continuing life. Properly understood and properly packaged, it offers a deeply rooted vitality, as evidenced by the many new and engaging ways it is being presented and savoured in New England. A N U N F O L D I N G S TO RY

A people’s sense of history and heritage depends partly on the passage of generations. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, with the ageing and death of the European pioneers, New England settlers began for the first time to look around them with a sense of loss. In due course, this perception extended to many aspects of their environment, including wildlife and native vegetation (see Chapters 4 and 5). However, concentrated efforts to preserve important

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Collecting and Presenting the Past aspects of the history of settlement began mainly during the interwar period. During that time, energy was focused especially on the need to teach school children—the next generation—about the deeds and experiences of their forebears, and staff from Armidale Teachers’ College took the lead. From the 1940s, the work became much more complicated. At the New England University College, and afterwards at UNE, trained historians began to apply their skills to the regional past. Adult Education courses and their history seminars, flourishing in those days, spread the message further. The countryside was opened up to tourists, who were interested in distinctive aspects or rural life, past and present. From the 1970s, New England began to feel the impact of the worldwide conservation movement. By now, there was not only a university and a College of Advanced Education, where staff were keen to see how new ideas might be locally applied, but also some flourishing historical societies and museum groups. Nowhere else in Australia was it possible to find a richer and more elaborate sense of the rural past. A sense of loss, and of a generation passing, was especially keen during the last years of the twentieth century. The impact of new information and communications technology revolutionised ideas about the relationship between past and present. It also provided new opportunities for the collection and presentation of artefacts and ideas about history. The archives at UNE began to be digitally copied, in a federally funded project involving several regional universities, thus making documents available on the web. The database on New England’s past created by the Heritage Futures Research Centre has similar potential. At the same time there are new efforts to make past lives vivid and immediate. The reenactments of the New England Medieval Arts Society, staged every two years outside Armidale with participants from all over Australia and New Zealand, are remarkable for their authentic recreation of ‘living history’.43 Oral history— local voices telling their own stories—makes a similar impact. Every generation imposes its own demands on the past—collects in its own way, presents in its own way, packages in its own way. Ideally, within each generation, historians, archivists, curators and others not only build on the work of their predecessors but also leave room for imagination to work differently again, in generations to come.

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Part 4: Representations

❈

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CHAPTER 24 ❈

Im a gin in g New En g lan d Ju l i an Cro f t

During the 1830s, George Macdonald, afterwards Commissioner for Crown Lands in New England and founder of the settlement of Armidale, was stationed at Port Macquarie, where he frequented the great house of Major Archibald Clunes Innes, at Lake Innes. He stood one evening on the shores of the lake and looked west to the mountains of New England. He had a melancholic cast of mind and a deep reverence for the poetry and music of the high Romantic period, and his thoughts turned to the evanescent and mutable in beauty and life as he watched the sun set behind the hills of his home. He set out those thoughts in lines of his own: The day is done! And the grey twilight sails With sightless wing athwart the fading view, Enveloping the mountains, woods, and vales With the dim tinge of evening’s shadowy hue; While like thick phantoms gathering from the grave, The rising vapours cloak the lake’s chill wave.1 And indeed, the lush landscape and the colourful and cosmopolitan society at Major Innes’ establishment were soon to give way to the austerities and disappointments of life in Armidale. On the Tableland, Macdonald recorded in his diaries and logs his feelings about the local squatters and the bankruptcy of their conversation, limited as it was to the price of tallow at the Hunter, the weather and the blacks.2 Poets interested in serious music did not find life in Armidale as congenial as that on the coast, although Port Macquarie was still a penal settlement.

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But such a fate was to be expected. The life of the poet, as we find from Macdonald’s poem ‘The Fate of Poets’, is one of isolation, neglect, exile and early death! Envy en-rings them with her ardent eyes, Detraction dogs them with a life of lies, Till Death descends, and takes them to their ‘native skies’.3 Commissioner Macdonald took his own personal demons with him when he rode to Armidale up the track past the Cells River, which Major Innes’ convicts had recently cut. The Romantic cult of the outsider poet, the visionary whose insights meant little to the utilitarian spirits busy building their pastoral empires, was proof against whatever insults life in New England could throw up. The tension between life on the coast and life on the Tableland is not unexpected in poetic responses to New England. The difference in climate, landscape, modes of living and the hedonism of the subtropical life directly eastward, 60 miles as the crow flies, haunt much of the poetic response to the austerities of the four-seasonal life in the high country. One hundred and thirty-odd years after Commissioner Macdonald turned to his difficult task of regulating the European population there and protecting the Aborigines, in the latter case often unsuccessfully, the Brisbane poet John Manifold wrote of his feelings about New England on one of his frequent visits to the University Summer Schools, a feature of the academic calendar in the 1960s. The sonnet is unambiguously titled ‘New England’, and in the first quatrain looks as if it is in the style of a picturesque travelogue. But the mood then darkens, with a description of the nocturnal landscape, and the concluding sestet personalises the matter. This is a poem about the poet’s vocation, to choose either the bright creative colours and sounds of summer, with the poplars in full leaf and the cicadas in full song, or the autumn of cold moonlight and vain dreams and delusions: Poplar country, weeping-willow country Welcomes me in sunlight, with the poplars Mounting guard of honour, and the willows Trailing maiden tresses in the river. Moonlight makes it sinister: the heroes Stand in dedicated rank for dying, And along the watercourses witches Whisper in the dark and dip their fingers. Do I have a choice? Shall I be numbered, If I sojourn here, among Apollo’s Amber soldiers thrumming lyres in summer? Or be found, a lunatic autumnal Poet, in the moonlight vainly scrabbling To uncase a goddess from a willow?4

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Imagining New England The double response to the seasonal landscapes of New England, so similar to those of the Northern Hemisphere, is the poetic choice George Macdonald had confronted on the shores of Lake Innes—to celebrate the beauty of transience in the summer, or to submit to the melancholic pursuit of a beauty always out of reach in the cold climate of daily life. Manifold’s poem is a fine expression of that conflict, cast as a jewelled sonnet in the style of the French Parnassian poets of the nineteenth century whom he so admired. The poet Heredia is its model, and the exotic patterning of sound in the poem (it is unrhymed, but full of half-rhymes and assonance) underpins its theme: the creative project of the artisan poet bound in a landscape which, though it may be transformed by art, imposes on him or her its own transformation. The sense of dislocation, of competing systems of life, weather and hemispheres, is a mark of white poetry from New England. The differences between the subtropical coast and the seasonal Tableland are expanded in Judith Wright’s famous New England poems of the 1950s, written during her residence in south-eastern Queensland—‘South of My Days’ and ‘For New England’. In the latter the poet’s memories of her childhood home are stirred by a cold southerly wind, and images of the imported European trees that were planted as a hedge against the harshnesses of the Australian climate set in train a meditation on the dislocated imagination of the white settler, who becomes a Ulysses who can never return to his/ her origins, either the Ithaca of childhood, or the England of immigrant origins:

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Your trees, the homesick and the swarthy native, blow all one way to me, this southern weather that smells of early snow: And I remember The house closed in with sycamore and chestnut fighting the foreign wind. Here I will stay, she said; be done with the black north, the harsh horizon rimmed with drought. — Planted the island there and drew it round her. Therefore I find in me the double tree.5 The double stance, the sense of standing Janus-like between two realities, is clearly articulated in ‘South of My Days’, Wright’s most famous New England poem. Again, the duality is seasonal. The poet’s physical position in subtropical Queensland, while ‘south of [her] days’ circle’ the winter has its grip on the Tableland, provokes in her mind another set of dual realities, the past and the present. Summer, the past, its stories and the transformative power of the storyteller, Old Dan, with his legends of pioneering, stand against the ‘black-frost night’ of the present. The poet/storyteller is the guardian of the hearth and provides the warmth of the settler myth. Yet even at this early stage of Wright’s development, she knows that white summer mythologies are not proof against the cold reality of the New England. There are other, even older stories, that haunt this landscape, and dislocate the white imagination:

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Oh, they slide and they vanish as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards. True or not, it’s all the same; and the frost on the roof cracks like a whip, and the back-log breaks into ash. Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over. No one is listening. South of my days’ circle I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.6 Looking in, looking out, the sense of being at a threshold or interchange, neither here nor there, between two realities, seems to be the trope of New England poetry. In a 1997 paper, Felicity Plunkett called it ‘vestibularity’—and one can see it clearly in many of the poems by Armidale poets in the late twentieth century.7 Plunkett notes that many of the towns on the New England Highway define themselves as gateways—‘to horse country’, ‘to wine country’, ‘to country music’. I would suggest that that idea is deeply ingrained in the imaginations of those who live there and most potently seen in their poetry, where it surfaces as a preoccupation with the transition or gateway between states—geographical, historical, spiritual and cultural. Consider the case of Gregory B. Shortis, whose feelings for Armidale were much like Commissioner Macdonald’s, yet expressed in a much more forceful

❈ Greg Shortis, in 1980. (photo: W. Belmont)

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Imagining New England and demotic way. Shortis’s career and vocation over the last three decades of the twentieth century as a teacher of German language and literature at the university, and as a poet, were consciously modelled on those of his fellow Sydney University graduate, C.J. Brennan. Both saw themselves as poets in exile, wanderers in an alien world. Like Ovid on the Black Sea, Shortis feels he is far from the world of inspiration, set among redneck barbarians, but he gives his exile a surprising twist. He sees the poet’s position as that of Thunderbolt the bushranger watching from behind a rock—the predatory loner at war with all around him:

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Tablelands’ dawn and the death of poetry, Despite the rum glass that is clutching me, And impeccable frost ablaze. How write poetry after Pinchgut Or Port Arthur, as I might have said. Scabrous little dump, why should I give a stuff About your aldermen and your counterculture Making great stumbles forward into the future? Why should I stumble over your great poets? That bushranger was right Who observed people travelling in your direction From behind a rock. Your only exertion in all seasons Is trying to look like thin-aired Toledo In El Greco’s painting, before the storm, Your only storms Are those farts before breakfast faithfully reported.8 Shortis is an example of the deracinated intellectual of the mid-twentieth century, for whom there was no homeland, but a series of penitentiary stops on the way to oblivion. Armidale is a place of illusion, a place of pilgrimage for knowledge but also a place of forced exile. As he says of it in the same poem: You look as though you are here, Though many of your people don’t want to be here, And the names of those who do should be inscribed Next to Lord’s Prayers on valium pills. Some of the ones who do are excited and peripatetic— Sixty in the shade beneath your Trees Of Tertiary Knowledge. Some come from other states to have a slurp Of your Pierean Springs and— Rather strong but I almost said it—

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Come voluntarily, Like fifteen year old boys putting their age up To get to the Battle of the Somme on time.9 Michael Sharkey, from a similar generation and intellectual background, has a different take on New England vestibularity. Where Shortis’s door is locked like a prison, with views through the barred windows, Sharkey’s is wide open to the great vistas of history and world at large. In his poem, ‘History’, the view from within the bus on his way to work in Armidale expands to take in the last 200 years of white colonialism: The beautiful girl on the bus wears a jacket that comes from a sheep that was raised on a farm where men came with their shepherds and flocks and encamped in the place where a tribe performed rituals year after year on its way to the coast. … The beautiful girl on the bus wears our history over her skin and it wearies me. When I get off I have lived here for 200 years.10 The disadvantage of such a syncretic view is the weight of the insight it gives. Postcolonial anxieties haunt Sharkey’s poems, most explicitly in his major work, ‘Park’. The park is an enclosure, a place of control; it is both Paradise and Eden; it is a simulacrum of the real, outside world; it is controlled by a gate; it is a place of art and tradition; and it is the essence of vestibularity, being the

❈ Michael Sharkey, in 1990. (photo: unknown)

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Imagining New England gateway between the natural and the artificial, between the imagination and reason:

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It’s natural like yogurt here The fence divides the interfered From what is interfered with Each side’s kept in order so Imagination stays in check It is also the repository of everything in the poet’s mind. Like a Poundian Canto, the park contains scraps of many languages, allusions to sacred and profane texts, paths that wander and meander through ages and cultures, a hortus conclusus, or secret garden, which is consciousness itself: The model parent Rousseau knew A park was best where no child strayed To interrupt the thinker’s thoughts Upon his favourite subject I Armidale with its parks, New England with its national parks, and parks throughout the world, are all sites of vestibularity for the poet, sites of the imagination within the spaces of daily life, where one can pass from the real into the imagined and back again: When we leave the park There is no park No use refuting it The park does not exist But we were there11 Les Murray, who has always had a strong sense of the relationship between his heartland in the Manning valley and the mountains behind it, sees the Tableland as a bridge between earth and sky, the chthonic and the aerial divine. This makes New England another kind of vestibularity, between the material and the spiritual. In an early poem celebrating the marriage of friends, Murray conjures up a boyhood vision of the underworld beneath the mountains, of the organic energies of life and reproduction in spring and summer (fitting images for a poem celebrating marriage): a radiant season swelling through the horizons beyond September, mortality crumbling down till on summer mornings, a farm boy can see through the hills the roots of pumpkin-vines knotting clean under New England.12

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❈ Les Murray, with Gwen Kelly (left) and Shirley Walker, founding director of UNE’s Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies, at the launch of the centre in 1991. (photo: unknown)

But the most striking expression of this view of New England is in Murray’s poem ‘Granite Country’. The poem is a description of the granite outcrops found on the Tableland, but it is also an allegory of the creative act, and of poetry in particular, significantly signalled in the dedication to Murray’s Collected Poems—‘To the glory of God’. Poetry emerges as a sign from the underworld, like granite rocks forced up by the temperature changes of hard seasons, to fill the silence and give us an allegory of the journey from the inchoate to the ‘home’ of revelation: Out above the level in enormous room beyond the diagram fences eggs of the granite loom.

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In droughts’ midday hum, at the crack of winter, horizons of the tableland are hatched out of them and that levelling forces all the more to rise past swamp, or thumbwhorled ploughing, tor, shellback, cranium in unended cold eruption. Forces and strains of granite ascended from a kingdom abandon over centuries their craft on the sky-rim, sprung and lichened hatches, as, through gaps in silence, what made itself granite goes home.13

❈ Yve Louis, in 2002. (photo: E. Keidge)

Yve Louis, in her fine collection from the last decades of the twentieth century, Voyagers, uses much the same dialectic of earth and sky in the title poem.14 In response to a child’s question of ‘Who put the world where we are?’, the poet offers a series of images like beads on a string to visualise the world and our intellectual response to it. Louis follows Judith Wright in her sense of

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an organic epistemology, where perception, emotion and intellect fuse in the poetic construction of landscape, in many ways similar to Murray’s sense of revelation in the seasonal austerities of New England: the colours of sunset are transparencies of change, crimson through orange to gold (and the halo of your hair smoulders to rage-titian): or as bleached winter stubble reflects lilac and rose from a field of bronze, while pools of aqueous light fall chill around us: change . . . as the last luminous ring of the hills slips under and our daylight star becomes its own night-drowning. So take this bead (this drop of blood) my love, and with the colour for life spin the earth one more time.15 Possibly the most extensive treatment of the sense of the unease of dislocation can be found in the sequence of poems and prose called ‘Armidale’, by Louis Simpson. Simpson, born in Jamaica but a United States citizen for most of his life, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was writer-in-residence at the University of New England for several months in the late 1970s. Using Armidale as the central point of meditation, the sequence treats the experience of postcolonial vestibularity—a childhood in Jamaica, young adulthood in Europe, a career in the United States and temporary residence in Australia, all of which produce the imaginative sensation of life being a journey through all of these doorways. The epigraph of the poem reads, ‘Il faut voyager loin en aimant sa maison’ (‘You need to go a long way in order to appreciate home’). Simpson visualises Australia as the antimonies of inland and coast, and himself on the cusp between the two, between inner and unconscious

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Imagining New England Aboriginal realities and coastal white realities of beer, sport and TV. It is a problem he has felt all his life, in Jamaica and in France; it is the problem of white, European culture:

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I am not accusing the Australian—he is the white man everywhere, flourishing on the outside and empty within. This continent is like a projection of our inner state. We are all clinging to the edge and asking for distractions. Australia is like a screen on which we see the deserts of the psyche in an age of mass-production.16 Simpson suggests that we have taken nature for granted and do not see what is there in the landscape. In the poem entitled ‘Armidale’ he finds that sense again, a feeling he also describes in the poem ‘As a Man Walks’, where the conclusion incorporates all the contradictions of place in the synthesis of inner and outer worlds, a place on the cusp, the place of vestibularity: As a man walks he creates the road he walks on. All of my life in America I must have been reeling out of myself this red dirt, gravel road. Three boys seated on motorcycles conferring . . . A little further on, a beaten-up Holden parked off the road with two men inside passing the bottle. Dark-skinned . . . maybe they are aboriginal. I might have been content to live in Belle Terre, among houses and lawns, but inside me are gum trees, and magpies, cackling and whistling, and a bush-roaming kangaroo.17 The New England Tableland does not fit the usual duality of coast and inland in the geographical imagination of east-coast Australia. Not Alpine like the Snowy Mountains, nor a place for a temperate garden city such as Canberra, it is a strange other, located between the coast and the western slopes and plains, large enough to be a whole system of land 1000 metres above sea level, running for hundreds of kilometres north–south, with its widest extreme about half its length. Neither crowded littoral nor empty flatlands, it is like the transhumance lands of other pastoral cultures, where alternate but impermanent residence is taken up. It is a place where most poets have come from elsewhere, and where their stay in the seasonal cycles evokes the traditions of earlier immigrant

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generations. The poets are like Yve Louis’ voyagers, conscious of change, of the spinning of the earth and of the mutability of lives and seasons. Where the coast might promise release and escape and the remoter inland immensity and spiritual transformation, New England only reinforces the insecurities of apparent homelands and the inescapable sense of being in another reality. Perhaps this is what is behind the ‘vestibularity’ of New England poetry—the sense of being in a doorway between two very different geo-cultural landscapes and lifestyles. Many of these themes are picked up in Judith Wright’s autobiography Half a Lifetime. Like Commissioner Macdonald’s poem, the poem she chose to end that work is set at the coast (‘At Cooloolah’) but, like the prose epilogue which concludes Wright’s volume, it harks back to the New England property of the author’s grandfather, and to the sense of unease and impermanence brought about by the theft of land from its Indigenous owners that underpinned the Wright pastoral empire: Those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah knew that no land is lost or won by wars, for earth is spirit: the invader’s feet will tangle in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears. Riding at noon and ninety years ago, my grandfather was beckoned by a ghost— a black accoutred warrior armed for fighting, who sank into bare plain, as now into time past. In the epilogue she speculates on the causes of eucalyptus dieback, a shocking and telling feature of New England in the last quarter of the twentieth century, suggesting that it was a natural result of the theft of the land: Though it took the trees longer to react to what had happened to the land, they may have given up trying to return and are dying, or dying back, as we call it. We have begun to search out the reasons for what we call New England Dieback. But I think I felt them myself, when as a small child I believed I saw those dark bearded faces moving among the trees, dispossessed and silent.18 It seems that white poets in New England, no matter how settled and how far back in time their close relation with the land extends, have that sense of vestibularity, of watching on and being poised between two realities, neither of which they can claim wholly as their own—and that New England continues to inhabit uneasily Old Australia.

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CHAPTER 25 ❈

A Un ive r s it y Beco min g Don Ai t k i n

[The University of New England dates from 1954, when autonomy was granted to the New England University College, a subsidiary in Armidale of the University of Sydney. UNE was one of a small number of universities founded in Australia in the immediate postwar years, during an intense period of nation-building. Like the Australian National University (1946) it was designed to make the traditional humanities and the newer social sciences more pervasive and useful in daily life. Like the New South Wales University of Technology (1949, later the University of New South Wales), UNE was also meant to improve the skills and knowledge needed for national productivity, in its case with an emphasis on rural industry. But UNE was also founded as a community university. It was intended to show a strong attachment to its geographical and social circumstances, and it did indeed develop its own highly innovative methods of reaching the people of its own region and beyond. This chapter has been included for what it says about the heritage of the New England’s university, as a place in which several generations of students have passed the most vivid and liberating years of their lives. It is the adapted text of an address given at Graduation Day, October 2004, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of UNE. Don Aitkin was one of the university’s first undergraduates. When he gave this talk he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra, and during the ceremony in Armidale he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.] Graduation days are days of congratulation and goodwill, and I therefore congratulate all of you who have graduated today, and I do so with great

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goodwill—the more so because I have graduated myself. And if you will allow me to say so, this is the third time I have graduated here. I did so first in 1959, as a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History, and then again in 1961, as a Master of Arts with Honours in History. This third time, however, is the best of all. And I would like to tell you why. Let me start with some context. The first graduation ceremony I attended was also here, and that was in May 1954, just over 50 years ago. It too was held in the open air, but around on the forecourt on the north side of Booloominbah. The ceremony today is in what used to be the Rose Garden, which was where one went for deep and meaningful talks with a special other person—or indeed, with anyone who would have a deep and meaningful talk with you. I went to that ceremony because in those days each year’s new students, the ‘matriculants’, were formally admitted to the university. And in my first year, 1954, what had been the New England University College of the University of Sydney became truly independent, as the University of New England. Because my name began with ‘A’, and there was no other surname closer to the beginning of the alphabet, I became the first student ever admitted to the new university. An official voice commanded, ‘The matriculants will stand!’, and we did. The Vice-Chancellor addressed us briefly. I don’t remember any of his speech, save one unforgettable moment. ‘Look at the person on your right!’ he instructed. ‘Look at the person on your left. One of you will fail.’ He was right, too. About a third of first year failed, because university was not like high school, and too many of us didn’t know how to study by ourselves when we got to university. You’ll be pleased to know that I was not one of them. I failed second year.

❈ Robert Bowden Madgwick, Warden of the New England University College 1947–54, and first Vice-Chancellor of the University of New England 1954–66. He was afterwards Chairman of the ABC, and knighted. (photo: unknown)

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A University Becoming Oh yes, we had a Vice-Chancellor then, too. He was Dr Madgwick, and he wore a black gown over his suit when moving about the campus. I got to know Dr Madgwick in my time here and afterwards, when he was Sir Robert Madgwick and Chairman of the ABC, and I liked him. He was an excellent Vice-Chancellor, and I can say that with some judgement, because in later life I became a Vice-Chancellor myself. In those days there was no television, radio reception was terrible except for 2AD, which was not known either for its good music or for its news and current events programs. So we largely made our own entertainment, and we did a lot of singing on the buses that took us in and out. Not all of those songs could be sung on such an occasion as this, but I can tell you that our Vice-Chancellor was immortalised in our version of a famous song of the 1930s: ‘That old black Madgwick, he has me in his spell, that old black Madgwick that I know so well . . .’. You have an excellent Vice-Chancellor today, too [Professor Ingrid Moses], and I can say that with even better judgement, because she used to work for me [as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Canberra]. I’m sure that if the custom of singing is alive and well here, there’ll be a song or two about Ingrid. I’d be fascinated to hear one. I got to know the Vice-Chancellor of my day in part because of the small scale of the university. There were only a couple of hundred students here then, and virtually everybody was in residence. Our lecturers all knew us by name, and addressed us politely as ‘Mr Aitkin’ or ‘Miss Smith’. If we missed a class they knew it. If we missed a tutorial, whose numbers were very small, five or six at the most, our absence was embarrassingly obvious. We were also, of course, very young, and the university stood in the place of our parents—in loco parentis is the Latin, and we heard that phrase more than once. We did not become adults in those days until we turned 21. I was only sixteen and a half when I enrolled, and that was because secondary school only went to Fifth Year. The other thing that was distinctive about us, in the context of the day, was that when we went to university we almost completely disappeared from life. University was a world apart, and its life was unconnected with that of the town. So much has changed since then. Universities today are part of mainstream Australian life, and you don’t disappear when you enrol in them. This university is still quite recognisable, especially here in its centre, but its scale is so much larger. Today there are 17 000 students at UNE, and the 4500 who live and work here in Armidale make just the residential component of the university larger than Australia’s largest university in 1954, the University of Sydney, which then had only 4000 students. When I began as an undergraduate there were no colleges, though I lived in Wright College in its first year, 1958. We lived either in the Huts on the campus or in town residences. We ate together and worked together. A lot of us got married, too, when we were old enough. It was very cold here in winter. And when we arrived here at UNE we had come from a very different Australia, an Australia that was, in very many respects, much less interesting and enjoyable than the country we have today. It was then conscious of its

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British origins, but unsure of what it meant to be ‘Australian’. Most people left school when they were fifteen, most women went into paid employment only until they married, Australian music, art, literature, film, theatre and craft hardly existed, our politics was all about the threat of ‘communism’, external and internal, and over us hung the threat of a Third World War that would be waged with nuclear weapons. In our second year the men all had to do compulsory military service, and that obligation continued through the next two or three years for those in the army. Today, at least the shadow of global nuclear conflict has receded, even if we are now confronted with unpredictable terrorism. Australia has grown from eight million to twenty million people, and its GDP has risen from $5.3 billion to $800 billion. We are a much wealthier people, and you can see the wealth around us. In the north of New South Wales there was one tarred highway in 1954, and that was the New England Highway; it was tarred only about as far as Glen Innes. Driving to the coast was a real expedition. Armidale had a most unreliable water supply, and the city had no street trees. What brought about all the change? Three things, and they are all here today. The first was education, the second was wealth and the third was immigration. I will treat them quickly, and in reverse order. When I began as a student at Armidale High School, Australia had 7.5 million people, and virtually all of them could trace their ancestry back to the British Isles. In 2002 Australia welcomed our six millionth immigrant, a woman IT specialist from the Philippines. Our immigrants have come from every country in the world, they have transformed our culture and helped to create our wealth. We could simply not be the country we are today without them. Your Vice-Chancellor is one of them [having come as a young woman from Germany]. The migrants broadened our musical, artistic, culinary and creative life, and taught us how to be tolerant, to accept difference and to open our minds to other ways of doing things. The fact that Australia accepted six million immigrants in less than sixty years and created the world’s model multicultural society is one of its great postwar achievements. The immigrants were crucial, and it helped that we were wealthy when the past half-century began. The late Duchess of Windsor once said that a woman could never be too thin or too rich, and while countries don’t have to worry about their waistline, they do benefit from having money. Wealth allowed our postwar governments to build better roads and new airports and establish universities and schools and hospitals. Wealth allowed us to develop a health system that, despite its present imperfections, is available in some form for everybody. Wealth allowed us to have discretionary income so that we could travel, learn music, undertake further training, and so on. It helped provide the underpinning of Australian architecture, design and theatre. It is fashionable in some quarters to complain about wealth. I’m not one of the critics. I think it is important. It is also very important that we all benefit from the country’s wealth. But it has been education that has been the catalyst. We have learned over the past half-century that everyone is intelligent enough to go to university

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A University Becoming provided that they have the necessary encouragement, motivation and preparation. The same essentials would equip us all to be excellent surgeons, or tennis players, or musicians, again provided we were encouraged, motivated and prepared. Our systems still work on the assumption that there are only a few really clever people and that the rest of us are also-rans, but increasingly we are realising that the truth is entirely the other way. And it was the growth of the secondary school and university systems that provided the evidence. When I started here at UNE in 1954, there were only 30 000 university students in the whole of Australia. Today there are 850 000. About one person in every 30 in Australia is a university student. When I graduated with my PhD in 1964 I was one of a couple of hundred who did so across the nation. Today 5000 or so will graduate with that degree. You will hear people criticise this increase as ‘credential creep’, or say that the students of their day were better. Well, I have been in the system for 50 years, and I think that today’s students know more, work harder and are better-rounded people. A better-educated Australia is a more confident, a more responsive and a more tolerant Australia. Its citizens have learned how to make a better country. When you leave here you will quickly see how important it is that everyone is well educated. Where you can, assist others to become well educated too. We will all benefit from it.

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CHAPTER 26 ❈

St o rie s a n d Pro s e J. S . Ry a n

I’d gone to the country, where my spirit always expands and I’d gone to the place where the country was most articulate. That is the special glory of Armidale, and should be treasured. Les Murray, ‘North of My Days’1 This volume’s title, High Lean Country, is a phrase from Judith Wright’s retrospective poem,2 ‘South of My Days’, one commemorating her pioneering family’s richly storied past and encapsulating much of New England’s pastoral antecedents. The epigraph quoted now is a gracious compliment from an equally famed younger poet. It refers to Les Murray’s own cultural experiences from the 1960s and 70s at the dynamic University of New England, recognising perceptively the clarity of thought and expression encouraged here, the strong local ‘sense of region’ and its distinctive ability to nurture the spirit. Nowhere is this cultural stimulation more obvious today than in the university’s generous outreach work in identifying, nurturing and continuing the living stream of our most lucid prose. This writing may be pure or applied, imaginative or descriptive, physical or environmental, but is always reinforcing New England identity by its crisp portrayals of setting and ecology, life and thought, manners and lifestyle for those who follow. The American poet Robert Frost once wrote that ‘Locality gives art’. We have been blest by a sequence of regional and visiting writers seeking to express their observations, epiphanies and experiences here. That prose has often been spiritually significant, while also anchoring local white

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Stories and Prose settlers’ cultural and environmental perceptions. As A.N. Whitehead, renowned student of ‘mental climate’, once put it, ‘in literature . . . the concrete outlook of a country receives its expression, [there] we must look . . . if we are to discover the inward thoughts of a generation’.3

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R E C O R D S A N D P E RC E P T I O N S S E T I N T H E C O L O N I A L PERIOD

White Australian writings in New England may be said to have begun before there was any significant immigrant population. The Scot, Commissioner George Macdonald, penned his romantic Port Macquarie-set ‘The Evening Lake’ (1830) before his 1835 arrival on the Tableland (see Chapter 24, while his compatriot, William Gardner (1802–60), coming as a tutor to Henry Dumaresq’s Saumarez station in about 1841, soon afterwards published his pioneering map of the northern district. This was followed in 1851 by Gardner’s hand-written volumes4 on the production of the Northern Districts of New South Wales, significant beginnings to New England’s long tradition of (often intermingled) settler record, environmentalism and historiography. With similar concerns for proper record-keeping, during 1847–53 Gardner’s younger contemporary—and another Scot—the meticulous surveyor of New England, John James Galloway (1818– 83), explored and reported on its physical and social aspects. He left hundreds of letters and finely annotated tracings embracing subjects as diverse as roadlines, reserves, potential settlements and even the proportions of the Christian denominations. Galloway’s meticulous documentation of our places and landscape became the basis for future towns and the early determined infrastructure of the whole region.5 While other settlers, overlanding from the Hunter valley, left original station diaries describing the trials of establishment, pride of place in New England’s continuing chronicle genre must go to Judith Wright’s The Generations of Men (1958), a sensitive re-creation from her grandparents’ diaries and the records of her extended family in New South Wales and Queensland. Its text, retrospectively illuminating our frontier era, was well described by the Times Literary Supplement, of London, as ‘a beautiful feat of empathy, clearly inspired by a devout admiration for her subjects and a profound understanding of the ways of the country which, with flood and drought . . . nearly overwhelmed them’.6 The second literate prose corpus, often merging with the first, recorded the closing of the northern pastoral frontier. It deals with belated bushranging, the arrival of the telegraph, local newspapers and the building of the railway across the Tableland. Two local but nationally significant events had a bearing on such work. In the south-west of the district, in 1900, the part-Aboriginal bushranger Jimmie Governor and his brother Joe massacred their ‘enemies’. At the same time there was considerable local involvement in the Boer War, during which ‘Breaker’ Morant was convicted and executed for ‘war crimes’, despite a bold courtroom defence by Major James Thomas, from Tenterfield, an articulate lawyer and editor and a brilliant despatches writer.7

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❈ Thomas Alexander Browne (‘Rolf Boldrewood’), with his wife Margaret and their family, about the time they were in Armidale. Margaret Browne was a prize-winning gardener who in 1893 published her own book, The Flower Garden in Australia. (photo: unknown)

Many of these interwoven colonial stories would only become widely available much later, as in the revisionist narratives of the ‘Governor affair’ in Frank Clune’s Jimmy Governor (1959) and Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), the latter adapted for Fred Schepisi’s powerful film version (1977). This construct projected our embryonic myth-making beyond Australia’s shores, with its depiction of the gnarled eastern approaches and the southern Tableland landscape, much as the contemporary film, Little Boy Lost—based on events of early 1960—had done for the rugged ranges of the central part of the region.8 (For these films, see Chapter 29.) Symbolic of these reflective re-appraisals of historical movements are the cluster of publishing events beginning in the year 1884, when Thomas Browne (alias ‘Rolf Boldrewood’) (1825–1915) became Armidale Magistrate and Mining Warden, after similar experience in the central west of New South Wales. While in Armidale, Browne accomplished much, writing one nationally read serial, ‘Plain Living’ (later a novel), most of a second, ‘The Sealskin Mantle’, and working on his own family’s 1840s southern pioneering history in his Old Melbourne Memories (1884). Then he penned several poignant essays recording social transition—the landscape-transforming changes brought to colonial life by goldrushes, railwaybuilding and the varied stirrings of a potential nation of racially hybrid variety and vigour. This last topic is also limned in his essay, ‘Bendemeer’, containing his personal doubts—and even regrets—about the impact of European settlement on the face of ‘unspoiled’ Australia. This ‘plain-living’ tale, set in New England, is itself a pastoral moral fable about doing without social fripperies, contrasting the town and country lifestyles of two related families—the foolish and selfindulging Grandisons and the frugal and abstemious Stamfords.9 Another aspect of this high colonial period of New England story is the flurry of tales about Fred Ward (1835–70), better known as bushranger ‘Thunderbolt’. These analogues to ‘truth’—and others concerning his part-Aboriginal wife, ‘Yella’, and various young male associates/‘telegraphs’—constitute Ward’s still

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Stories and Prose expanding ‘Legendarium’, a body of associated stories inspiring continual recensions of the (putative) events of his life.10 Today, folk tunes associated with Ward and alleged details about his hiding places are still being ‘discovered’, as lines blur between historicity and the imaginative mass of further fictions.11 High points in this popular canonisation are the silent and later films about Thunderbolt, Annie Rixon’s researches into his alternative ‘identities’, especially in her book, The Truth about Captain Thunderbolt (1940), and Judith Wright’s charming Thunderbolt novel, Range the Mountains High (1962).12 This last records the steep ascent from the gorge country behind Port Macquarie, interwoven with a (putative?) incident of compassion for a miner’s wife struggling to reach the Uralla goldfield. These were followed in 1970, the centenary of Fred Ward’s official death, by a memorable re-enactment of his career and by linked publications. In 1988 Bob Cummins published transcriptions of the various tunes supposedly whistled by Ward and, more recently, Phillip Pomeroy adorned McCrossin’s Mill, in Uralla, with a sequence of Thunderbolt paintings.13 The most popular features of this myth-making process about Thunderbolt are his magnificent horsemanship, love of fine (stolen) horses, engaging personality, passion for music, skill as a dancer and ability to command total loyalty from the poor because of his mocking defiance of all mounted troopers. He has long since moved from a figure of history to one of folkloric stature, a victim of informers and magisterial injustice. Forced into ‘cross’ ways, he became something of a Robin Hood, righting the wrongs done to the poor. This first chronicling of New England included many tales of the early approaches to the Tablelands, notably from the Upper Hunter. Examples are the bushranging siege set in the 1870s, Castle Vane (1920) by J.H.M. Abbott (1874–1929), as well as the terrible tales of isolated women in Barbara Baynton’s macabre Bush Studies (1902). Later stories about this phase of the European southern ‘approach’ to New England include those by Frank O’Grady, The Golden Valley (1955), Goonoo Goonoo (1956) and The Sun Breaks Through (1964), all of them set in the middle of the nineteenth century.14

299

WA R A N D M O D E R N I T Y

Twentieth-century New England writing is dominated by the nation’s new great themes—the Great War and its aftermath, the Great Depression and the persisting harshness of the 1930s. These nation-shattering events, together with various extreme political views and behaviour expressing emptiness and social hopelessness and supposedly typical of a neglected corner of the state, are countered by stirrings of a new cultural dynamic. Finely representative is Annie Rixon’s regional text Yesterday and Today (1940), soberly lamenting losses in World War One, with returned men long victimised afterwards for their patriotism. The most memorable tale of that war’s impact on New England is the deeply compassionate Benton’s Conviction (1985), a musing by Clarence River-nurtured poet Geoff Page (born 1940) over an historical anticonscription incident in

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❈ Geoff Page’s book, Benton’s Conviction, published by Angus and Robertson in 1985.

1915 in Uralla, re-created as ‘Geradgery’, some miles ‘north of Armidale’. The period’s pro-war national politicians are largely presented through the attitudes promulgated by a brutish boys’ boarding school and an abhorrently militaristic Anglican bishop, himself a former rugby player and espousing a simplistic and singularly unreflective ‘patriotism’. Page had earlier written the challenging poem, ‘Christ at Gallipoli’, and in Benton’s Conviction he expanded that homily into ‘a 170-page version’, seeking to demythologise prevalent orthodoxies—about ‘courage’, for instance—in order to present a greater truth through the slowly dawning perception of the ghastly slaughter. The conviction comes to the reader, as to the protagonist, the Reverend David Benton, that the only true need for a cleric—or a politician— is to explore and respect simple men’s selflessness and individual mateship. This final message is articulated when Benton reads his soldier-brother’s last letter, written just before his death: ‘You don’t hear much of that God, King and Country stuff out here but you hang on just the same—and the other blokes hang on for you. What would you call that? Greater love . . . ?’15 Thus the book is the exploration of the possible spiritual salvation for (all) simple men, enigmatically foreshadowing the new nation’s tragic witnessing to ‘brotherly love’.16 New England’s great religious novel thus charts the via dolorosa of David Benton, an Australian Everyman, a gentle contemplator of landscapes and clouds, as he moves from religious loner and social isolate to one who has humanised Christ and found Him in all men, but is aware all the same of canting evil in his sleepy village.

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Stories and Prose Another novel about the aftermath of World War One is David Crookes’ The Light Horseman’s Daughter (1999). World-ranging through the 1930s and incorporating German fascists in the Spanish Civil War, its plot begins near the Queensland border, focusing first on a returned Palestine-theatre cavalryman, Captain Jack McKenna, grandson of an overlander of 1865. In 1931 McKenna is brutally evicted from his farm and shot, largely because of the machinations of big landowners, corrupt bankers and reactionary politicians. Many of these groups support the almost totalitarian New Guard, men ‘dedicated to bring this country back from the brink’ and targeting Jack Lang’s radical state Labor government. Scenes range from London to violent right-wing anti-Lang circles and sweated labour in Sydney, as well as giving vignettes of 1930s life at the new Armidale Teachers’ College. The book explores a Catholic orphanage, the brutal exploitation by graziers of Aboriginal women and the contemporary appeal of Fascism, or ‘firmness’, to many bush people. Thus we, like the hero, ponder sadly ‘how the radiant face of the land belied any trace of the complex and troublesome lives of the people who lived in its shadows’.17 Another fictional investigation of Depression-repressed New Englanders is the recent (2003) The Cry from the Dark, by Robert Barnard (born 1937). Barnard is a former New England academic and much of the earlier parts of his prize-winning ‘crime profiling’ text explores mid-1930s Walgett and Armidale, and the contemptible lewd pressures then threatening an intelligent young girl. A similar text is the late-Depression/wartime tale, The Shiralee (1955), by Glen Innes-reared D’Arcy Niland (1919–67). A largely autobiographic, reflective text, which became a London Book Society Choice and persisting film success, it traces the experiences of an itinerant shearer, wandering the north-west with his small daughter. Its style largely comprises a simple man’s thought processes, interspersed with sketches of memorable bush figures possessed of homespun wisdom, like the priestly Desmond, whose message is of a proud individual’s need for a burden of responsibility, which will then grow into a deeply satisfying love for the one being cared for. The shearer, Macauley, is an archetypal Australian figure, lonely itinerant, fiercely proud, moving slowly across a largely empty landscape. His daughter saves him from despair and alcoholism, teaches him responsibility and selfless love, and brings the healing gifts of ‘warmth and sympathy and generosity’.18 This New England tale is, seemingly, picaresque and pugilistic, but it is a compassionate variation on bush realism. The traditional harshness of the time is continually softened by the author’s care and (Irish and Synge-like) affection for the decency of poor folk, who understand all too well the humiliations accompanying mere existence. Another prose style from the earlier twentieth century is to be found in a cluster of often somewhat autobiographical New England writings set from about 1916 to the 1970s, best described as women reflecting on Australian bush and regional life. Included here are the Rixon chronicles and the regional, educational and moral conscience/controversy-based tales of playwright and novelist, Dymphna Cusack.19 These were followed by the family-focused and not-so-fictional explorations of relations between mothers, fathers and their usually numerous daughters by

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❈ The story in Darcy Niland’s book, The Shiralee, is tied to real places within a single well-defined area. This map shows the grazing properties and towns in north-west New England where the shearer-hero is said to have worked, or to which Niland makes anecdotal reference.

Gwen Kelly (born 1922), a deeply moral and reflective writer, resident in Armidale since 1947; and by the plain, post-World War Two popular tales of Barbara Vernon, who spent her early working life in radio in Inverell and, from 1967, created the popular television serial, Bellbird, and the 1970 novel of the same name. Dymphna Cusack, of Irish pioneer extraction—several of her heroic, patriarchal forebears are to be found in her story, Picnic Races—was nurtured in Guyra, and at St Ursula’s Convent in Armidale, where she acquired a fine education, powerful compassion for the socially unloved and a gift for language. Although none of her fiction is set formally in the north, many passages in her controversial Jungfrau (1936) present her distress at life in Sydney after being reared in the bush. This text, the memory-filled Picnic Races (1962) and others have timeless moments of quiet savouring of spirit-enriching colonial landscapes, some of which are rightly esteemed to be evocations of New England, as here in Picnic Races: She had a sudden nostalgia, a passionate aching for the pines which she used to know when she was a child, standing rigid, significant against burnished clouds. Curiously their memory always brought with them a subtle comfort, as of an age when life was simpler, the earth more intimate. Jungfrau must remind its readers of D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Sons and Lovers, another tale of painful growing up, as it tells of contemporary city life for three young modern women, each—like Dymphna herself—recent graduates of the University of Sydney. It contains angry feminine protests at the constraints of

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❈ Dymphna Cusack, on the right, at her graduation from Sydney University in 1925, with Honours in History and Psychology. Her university life and her earlier experiences in New England were interwoven themes in much of her work. (photo: unknown)

orthodox marriage, endorsing ‘freedom’ for its ‘heroines’ and, inevitably, focusing on the tragic end of the central figure, an impossibly romantic Catholic woman. Despite a Depression background, the emphasis is always psychological and personal, exasperated at current sexual hypocrisy and at the almost universal male cowardice in the presence of women and their bodies. As the strongest of the three women affirms, ‘Marriage should not be a limiting, but a stepping into a wider freedom’ and, later, ‘There’s only one worthwhile relationship so far as I’m concerned, and that’s the chosen companionship of two perfectly free people’.20 Gwen Kelly, a life-long educationalist and writer, has produced over more than 40 years a sequence of deeply probing and somewhat autobiographical fictions, in addition to numerous prize-winning short stories. There is No Refuge (1961), the longer, panoramic Arrows of Rain (1988) and the more obviously autobiographical compilation, Lifted From Life (2001), all focus on the relationship of mother and daughter, and in each case the heroine was born, as Kelly was, in 1922. The tales are well appraised in her (postmodernistic) reflection: ‘my memories have been shaped and edited to meet the demands of [the] form. And yet any writing is to some extent a fiction. Did the people in this book really say the things attributed to them or did I modify them?’21 Kelly is hauntingly successful in invoking the spectre of 1930s poverty and the problems of a family with an improvident or deserting breadwinner. Her heroines often take refuge in an Evangelical faith after losing a parent-companion. She focuses, too, on a young girl’s perceptions of workaday inner Sydney, as in the There Is No Refuge: ‘Cramped tenancies . . . trams packed with peak-hour passengers,

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the screaming traffic of the Parramatta Road, the cash-and-carry groceries, the syndicated cake-shops, the tinsel of Woolworths’.22 Her initial account of university life is like Cusack’s, but more hopeful, with a strenuous attempt to ‘know God’ through baptism. But then comes the heroine’s disillusionment at society’s selfishness, and her passionate involvement with a freethinker and fluent talker, to the release of all her hitherto inhibiting tensions. The sprawling chronicle Arrows of Rain ‘covers a span of forty years’, and tells of parents and two assertive sisters, Irina and Nola, and their life-long competitive feud. They continually manipulate their brother, Tony, soon shipwrecked after sea battle, and also the next generation. Here, as elsewhere in the Kelly canon, the males are too weak for their own good. There is, too, a distinctive framing device—ten-year slices of Australian cultural, political and external wars and foreign relations—and a fascinating development in the authorial figure, Nola, whose experiences clearly overlap those of an earlier fictional character, Mandy Brown, and of Kelly herself. The war is pivotal to the chronicle, its title coming from Edith Sitwell’s 1942 poem on the state of the world and the awe-inspiring manifestations of human evil, its key lines quoted to Nola: Still falls the rain— Dark as the world of man, black as our loss— Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross.23 Like Sitwell, Gwen Kelly cries for compassion for all the war’s combatants, praying for a new, more mature understanding in the postwar world. Three of Kelly’s other novels, The Red Boat (1968), The Middle-Aged Maidens (1976) and Always Afternoon (1981), carry the central theme that ‘duty is not enough’. This morality holds true, whether for a wife in a cold and fruitless marriage, for a boarding school demanding too much of its principals, teachers and students, and for young country women kept in emotional, religious and family thraldom during World War One. Thus, Always Afternoon is focused on the mindless treatment of German civilian prisoners incarcerated at Arakoon, near Kempsey, on the distant but horrific Australian military experience and on the persistent repression of Australian womenfolk. The regional intimacy of Barbara Vernon’s tales is best felt in her play on self-deception, The Multi-Coloured Umbrella (1961), and her novel, Bellbird: The Story of a Country Town (1970), the last based on the first twenty episodes of her television serial. The television scripts arose out of Vernon’s wartime psychology training and long postwar employment in rural radio, where her 1960s comedies of manners were enormously popular. As with Gwen Meredith, author of the earlier Blue Hills radio serial, Vernon unashamedly used Australian nostalgia for bush settings, and conveys a fascination with slowly unfolding relationships between ordinary characters facing problems of romantic love, business or the onset of old age. Obviously in debt to Jane Austen, Vernon missed nothing of a country town’s drama in Bellbird, itself a mix of voice-over, direct dialogue and authorial explanations echoing stage

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Stories and Prose directions. This comedy of manners fascinates. As the script says, ‘a small town grips you, catches your imagination, draws you back’.24 Vernon’s forte is the excellent handling of stock themes—town gossip, listening in on party phone lines, match-making by the middle-aged, and the slow decay of pastoral homesteads. Also encompassed are plans for a nearby tourist pioneer-village, the Vietnam call-up, and the ubiquitous fear of Sydney and its sophistication. These shrewdly encapsulated mores of yesterday, when marriage was the foundation of society and most had simple hopes for their lives, are doubly engaging today.

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The postwar period saw the arrival of numerous ‘professionals’ to the region, with the CSIRO base at Chiswick near Uralla, the slow expansion of the New England University College from 1947, and of the university after 1954. This time is signposted by the writings of the first regional historians, such as J.P. Belshaw, and Eric Dunlop of the Teachers’ College, a fine folk-life chronicler.25 Other postwar catalysts for regional prose writing were the provision of regional libraries and the university-encouraged historical societies—Armidale’s was founded in 1958–59.26 Then came the regionally focused Old New England (1966), by Robin Walker, followed by Lionel Gilbert’s various cultural/educational panoramic texts, John Robertson’s work and, later and more regionally, the late John Ferry’s Colonial Armidale (1999). Meanwhile, writing about European settlement had continued with Scots’ Corner (1971), by members of families long settled in that place; parts of J.R. Freeman’s Architect Extraordinary: The Life of J. Horbury Hunt (1970); Phillip Wright’s Memories of a Bushwacker (1972) and Owen Wright’s Wongwibinda (1985); Bruce Mitchell’s The House on the Hill (1988); and so on, down to the painstaking and community-created Our Grandchildren Won’t Believe It, about Wongwibinda, Aberfoyle and Ward’s Mistake (2003). A related but less prolific strand of writing may be defined as ‘ecological’ prose, a sequence finely begun with Life From the Soil (1953), written jointly by H.F. White, a soldier-grazier, and Sir C. Stanton Hicks, and concerned with the problems of human existence at the most serious level. Similar preoccupations appear in Peter Wright’s contributions to various regional collections (Wright also edited his grandmother Charlotte’s Memories of Far Off Days [1985]), and in Harry Recher’s A Natural Legacy (1979) and Exploring Nature in Forests, Woodlands and Heaths (1991). The tall stories of H.D. Williamson, in his Sammy Anderson, Commercial Traveller (1959), were a gleefully exaggerated account of the lives, public and private, of the peculiarly eccentric commercial travellers who crossed and recrossed New England by train, endeavouring to obtain orders for their wares in such resistant outposts as Tenterfield, Glen Innes and Moree. The other side of these travel-fraught episodes is the focus on the narrowness, sexual arrangements and eccentricity of so many of these towns. In the same vein, Keith Garvey (born in 1922 at Frog Hollow, near Moree), collected and published much Australian folklore, beginning with The Funny Bugger and Other Tales (1978).27

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This period is also characterised by bemused, or even shocked, prose pictures of the strangely interlocked mores of the dynamic new academe and traditional pastoralism. This tension is nicely caught by Mulaika Corben in her quirkish Not to Mention the Kangaroos (1956). There soon followed many wry fictions by other authors, concerning contemporary culture, and (secondary and tertiary) educational systems and the university at Armidale in particular. In most cases, the cultural experience was a novel one for the students and often, too, for lecturers recruited from the far corners of the earth. Perhaps the earliest harbinger of this mocking stance came from the recent Armidale arrival, David Denholm (an historian who wrote fiction under the name ‘David Forrest’), in his 1962 exposé of institutional corruption, The Hollow Woodheap. Next came My Brow is Wet (1969), by UNE graduate and Queensland academic, Keith Leopold, relating the hilarious malpractices of a teacher in a new university, gathering money in the hope of retiring to a gracious house such as Booloominbah. An inside story of academic intrigue in a 1960s new-style university is to be found in The Second Chair (1977), by Don Aitkin, also a former student at the university. Thomas Keneally, who taught drama at the university from 1968 to 1970, produced The Survivor (1969)—about the sexual guilts of a senior academic—and A Dutiful Daughter (1971)— about UNE college life, seen through the eyes of the awkward Damien Glover, whose simple, coast-dwelling parents are now metamorphosed into dairy cattle. The most famous of these satiric pieces is The Death of an Old Goat (1974) by Robert Barnard (mentioned earlier), an Englishman who had lectured here during 1961–65. New England provided the threshing floor for Barnard’s brilliant career as an academic and detective writer, now renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 40 crime novels. While this text is concerned with ‘motiveless’ murder, it is also a witty, often malicious, comedy of 1960s New England manners, deriving much from Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell and Agatha Christie. Drought, police brutality, grazier mores, genteel boarding schools, deference towards all things imagined to be ‘English’ and the community’s incomprehension of academics are hallmarks of this enigmatic yet hilarious text. To be linked with Barnard’s is the fine crime novel Bones (1995), by the prolific Gabrielle Lord, UNE graduate, moralist and significant contributor to those wry socio-cultural texts, The Brides of Christ and Growing Up Catholic. In Bones, as in Barnard’s New England fiction, the solution to the crimes is buried deep in the investigator’s psyche. This tale of 1990s New England and its university has many flashbacks to Australia’s and Catholic Armidale’s destructive legacies from preceding decades. The prose musings of poets is another New England sub-genre, several of them educated on the Tableland having woven their earlier experiences into plots which (re-)traverse the region much as their own lives’ patterns had done. Thus Edwin Wilson (born in 1942 near Lismore) gives us Liberty, Egality, Fraternity (1984) and Cedar House (2002). The latter, set in Armidale and on the lower Clarence River, is a fine, sympathetic identification with an Aboriginal youth seeking his true identity through desperate social experimentation.

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Stories and Prose Peter Skrzynecki, born in 1945 in Germany, lived in New England for a time, a sojourn that would have much environmental significance for his later life. His novel of journeying as a young adult, The Beloved Mountain (1988), complemented his earlier Jeogla–set poems. The plot of Wilson’s Cedar House enables us to note the several texts in which other white Australians show deep respect for old Aboriginal stories. Irish-born Roland Robinson traced old Koori tales to their Upper Clarence sources in his The Man Who Sold His Dreaming (1956); Patricia Wrightson’s more fictional The Nargun and the Stars (1973) is set in the Upper Hunter; and parts of Les Murray’s verse novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), have their derivation in the notion of Ulitarra, a Supreme Being potent to the east. Armidale-inspired fantasy texts were written here by sometime UNE lecturer, Victor Kelleher (born 1939), for example Forbidden Paths of Thual (1979) and The Master of the Grove (1982), and have attracted much local attention. Sophie Masson (born 1959), who has long lived near Armidale, has produced many richly cultured and European-grounded tales, but also two with clear regional settings, Fire in the Sky and House in the Rain Forest (both 1990).

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It may be argued that all these works have at their core general Australian themes, but their stories/versions of history and of environment also embody the very texture of New England, clearly capturing thoughts engendered, lives lived and sensitivities explored in this unique and deeply reflective place. Many of the writers discussed above rightly refer to the clear light or the closeness of the clouds in the central parts of this region. Indeed, this is given as an ultimate explanation of core criminal events in Tom Howard’s murder text, The Rim of Heaven (1986): ‘He thought that the clouds here in Baringa [Tenterfield] were masterpieces of God’s creation’.28 This particular illumination or epiphany is a metaphor, surely, for so many of our writers’ clearsightedness in the moral sphere, or in pondering their own involvement in the outer national life, a sharper perspective coming from open space, crisp air and, in Boldrewood’s farewell phrase, ‘fresh mornings’—far from the fevered centres of national literary life. In addition to the quotation at the head of this essay, Les Murray is also held to have observed that ‘New England is a state of mind’. It is this state of mind, as explored in the region’s prose, that this essay seeks to illustrate. For this high country has long been loved, and our reflective and creative prose has consecrated the personal landscape, capturing both our perceived behaviour and our often distinctive viewpoints. Further, similarly-illuminating perceptions, re-fashioned by memory and art, will continue to be told, published and read for renewal of spirit, because they enshrine quintessential New England societal and moral musings, and thereby present to readers much of our historical and reflective imaginings, and of our spiritual heritage.

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CHAPTER 27 ❈

Mu s i c R i ch ard Pet e r Ma ddox

This chapter does not set out to be a comprehensive history of music in the New England area. Nor will it attempt to deal with the music of the Indigenous people before European settlement—a task best left to others with the skills and knowledge to deal with it. Rather, it will sketch an outline of some of the important developments that have shaped the musical culture of the region since the 1830s. Note, however, that traditional music was performed long after the arrival of the Europeans. In 1888, for instance, the Glen Innes Examiner reported on ‘a corroboree held by the blacks of the [nearby] Oban tribe’.1 As for more recent types of music, Aboriginal bands performed regularly through most of the twentieth century, but a detailed examination of that topic awaits an Indigenous scholar.2 E A R LY D AY S

In 1839, when Commissioner Macdonald pitched his tent in the little valley that was later to become the site of the city of Armidale, he could not have foreseen—although he might, perhaps, have hoped—that it would become the location of a vibrant musical community. Macdonald, a lover of the music of the recently deceased Beethoven, was himself a poet and musician who, after his transfer to the Lower Darling District in 1847, was to entertain friends with performances of music and poetry.3 A large number of the bush ballads used by Russel Ward in his celebrated book, The Australian Legend, date from the mid-nineteenth century. Many of

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Music the tunes used were those popular in Britain and Ireland at the time, while others were original and written to suit new lines. The idiosyncratic ‘Wallabadah Manuscript’ of William Telfer, which describes bush life on the Liverpool Plains at that time, tells of an incident in which a group of horse thieves was taken unawares by the men they had robbed:

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they Could see a light in the hut and heard mens voices as if they had been singing a song . . . Tommy crept up to the hut peering through a Crack in the Slabs saw four men seated around a rough bush table Card playing on the middle of the table was a bottle Grog which long Jim was serving out to them in panikins the old hutkeeper was after singing a flash song they were all in high spirits.4 Elsewhere it was said of a performer at a New England drinking party: ‘He didn’t have the best voice, but O God Strewth! He could start at sundown and sing ’til sunrise, and a different song every time’.5 Drinking parties appear to have been common among working men, who made their hard lives a little easier with such entertainments whenever they could gather in groups. On the other hand, work itself did not apparently encourage singing. The sea-shanties and work-songs of people in other cultures, such as European peasants and cottonfield slaves, had no place here: ‘When Jim Lowe was asked whether he knew any work-songs, he replied wryly that, “I never saw enough pleasure in work to make me sing”’.6 Musical instruments were precious, and often remarked on. During his 1847 tour of the Tableland, Colonel Godfrey Mundy noticed ‘shepherds . . . sitting on a log playing the Jew’s harp’. In an account of a hold-up at Ollera, when the Everetts were robbed of their horses and other possessions, we hear that ‘John Everett was [later] able to identify the robbers and recover much of the property stolen except for their watches and his brother George’s flute’. At a Catholic school picnic on Armidale race-course in 1859, the availability of music made all the difference to the occasion: ‘During the afternoon, the clergymen were absent for a time, and, on a violin appearing, it was struck up, and several gentlemen contributed to the zest of the affair by sporting the light fantastic toe until they were tired’.7 It would appear that the ‘clergymen’ disapproved of such frivolous activity. Music and musical instruments were being disseminated through the region from the early days of settlement, either by itinerant hawkers, or by established merchants acting as agents for metropolitan suppliers. Into the latter category falls a newspaper advertisement addressed to the goldmining community at Rocky River:

500 PIECES

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Music—Music of MUSIC for the Pianoforte For Sale, at the Union Stores, Sydney Flat, Rocky River. M. HAYES & CO.

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The first piano in the Tamworth area was apparently owned by Mrs Eliza Crawford around 1855. By 1872 there must have been a number of pianos on the Tableland, since Thomas Carline, who found a substantial tin deposit near Glen Innes in that year, was ‘a wandering piano tuner’. Agents for city firms travelled from house to house selling instruments. The grazier P.A. Wright, writing in the 1960s, during his old age, told of an eccentric he had known as a child, named Biddy Morton. Biddy had been persuaded by a travelling agent to take a piano on trial. As well as making music, pianos were a telling indication of social respectability and this one was duly installed in Biddy’s sitting room. However, she declined to make any payments and the agent came to repossess it. ‘He found that in the interim she had reduced the size of the doorway, so that the piano could not be passed through it, and she dared him to touch the doorway’.8 As the white population grew, there were balls and dances, usually including individual items of music and recitation. In 1859, the Armidale Express carried the following advertisement: ‘Public Ball . . . at Mr. Monahan’s, The Old “Horse and Jockey”, Armidale on Feb. 23rd (the second night of the Races). Tickets for a lady and a gentleman, including refreshments, 15s’. In the same issue appeared an advertisement for a supper and ball in connection with the races at Rocky River, including ‘a First-rate SUPPER . . . with other Entertainments’. Tickets in the latter case cost only five shillings, and a couple of months later even cheaper festivities were advertised: Easter Monday, Rocky River! INVITATION TO THE LADIES THOMAS WILLIAMS, of the ‘Freemasons’ Arms

Hotel’, Mount Welsh, begs to inform his numerous friends (the fascinating sex in particular) that he intends giving a FREE SUPPER AND BALL

In his large Saloon, on the Evening of EASTER MONDAY, When all friends will receive a hearty welcome. N.B.—Good order kept, and good music provided.9 The references to ‘good order’ and ‘good music’ would suggest that it was not uncommon for both to be lacking. In the same year, the occasion of the Queen’s Birthday, 24 May, prompted several loyal hoteliers to organise balls, the most splendid of which was fully reported on two weeks later: QUEEN’S BIRTHDAY

The town ball and supper, however, at Mr. Tysoe’s inn, went off in a sparkling manner. The dancing commenced at half-past 8, in a large and commodious room newly built, and finished for the occasion; it was tastefully decorated, and literally crowded. The ladies, as usual, were

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numerous and charming, and under the influence of their bright glances and the lively strains of a band of musicians bachelors lost their hearts and influential men of business forgot for a time their love of pounds, shillings, and pence. The supper was excellent, and dancing was kept up until 7 next morning. It appears that balls and dances were rather strictly segregated, or separate, affairs, with the ‘upper echelons’ of society, the squatters and graziers, keeping their distance from the lesser-ranked ‘selectors’, let alone the miners and the working-classes. On one occasion, the pastoralist F.J. White, of Saumarez, ‘staged two dances, within a week of each other, one for his working people, the other for his own “set”’.10 In 1904 an account of a typical graziers’ ball, near Guyra, describes dancing until midnight, when supper was served, then continuing until after sunrise.11 The fact that such balls commonly lasted all night gives an indication of their importance in the social life of the era. It seems clear that people of all social strata needed to take every opportunity to get to know each other, and to assess prospective marriage partners. It is not clear whether the musicians for F.J. White’s 1904 ball were professionals, but there is a fair likelihood that this would have been the case. The miners’ dances, on the other hand, were provided with music by anyone who had developed a range of musical skills on the violin, concertina, accordion or mouth-organ.12 I N TO T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw an upsurge of organised music in New England. Music has always been central to the education of children, and school music was nourished by religious music, especially in those schools run by the churches, of which there were now a good number (see Chapter 16). Music seemed especially important for girls, who were thought to need the social refinements provided by musical proficiency. Schools for ‘young ladies’ might therefore play a particularly important part in bringing music to town communities and in creating a better sense of proper standards of performance. In Armidale in the 1890s, Miss Eliza Tindall’s Armidale Girls’ High School (see Chapter 15) was among the first in rural New South Wales to take advantage of examinations offered by the Trinity College of Music in London and the Royal Academy of Music, two institutions that did much for music throughout the British Empire.13 One of the most enduring images of the teaching of music throughout Australia has been that of Catholic nuns, who taught generations of children. In 1876 the Dominicans established a house in Tamworth, their convent being built in 1880 in Peel Street next to the Catholic Church. They founded a school, and were active in teaching music continuously until the school’s closure in 1976, although they continued teaching music within the convent until 1981.

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❈ Harry Seabrook, Alex McDonald, Olga Scott and Bob Brush, in the Tenterfield Musical Society’s production of Sidney Jones’ opera, The Geisha Girl, probably during the 1920s. (photo: E. Tooley)

In Armidale a similar pattern developed. In 1881 the then Catholic bishop, Elzear Torreggiani, invited a group of Ursuline sisters to set up a school. Torreggiani had met the sisters in London, where they had been exiled from their home establishment in Düderstadt in northern Germany. Ten sisters arrived in Armidale in 1882, and by the end of that year their building was full. The convent’s ‘Annals’ recorded: ‘Pupils for music, painting and languages, and other subjects pertaining to a higher education flocked to us in such numbers that it became a daily problem where to house them during school hours’. In the pluralistic society of the Hanover region of Germany, from which the nuns

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Music had been exiled, they had been accustomed to teach children from all religious backgrounds, and this pattern continued in Armidale. Parents wishing their daughters to acquire the necessary social graces were keen to send them to the new school, irrespective of their professed faith.14 The sisters not only taught the local children, they also provided regular opportunities for them to perform in public. In 1887, the Armidale Express described a concert including ‘Piano solos and duets, violin playing, choral and solo items’, presented in the Town Hall ‘to large and appreciative audiences’.15 Throughout the twentieth century, school concerts and other performances remained an important aspect of community music. Year by year, for instance, from the 1950s to the 1980s, performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas by the boys at The Armidale School reached a remarkably high standard, winning annual awards and touring throughout the region.16 During the 1880s and 90s, numerous attempts had been made to establish a musical society in Tamworth. These efforts eventually bore fruit in 1906, thanks to Erin Cleary and Thomas McShane (the latter being the local representative for Nicholson’s Music and, subsequently, Paling’s Music). The inaugural Tamworth Eisteddfod was held in 1909, and by 1911 a gala concert to mark the end of the Eisteddfod in September drew an audience of 4000. At the time it was regarded as the best Eisteddfod in Australia ‘after Ballarat and Sydney’.17 One of the beloved institutions that white settlers brought with them from their English backgrounds was the brass band. As far back as 1878, when the first train arrived in Tamworth, it had brought with it two bands, which joined

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❈ McMahon’s brass band, Hillgrove, a winner in competitions in Tamworth, Launceston and Bathurst during 1897–99 (photo: unknown)

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with Tamworth’s own band to provide appropriately stirring civic music to celebrate the occasion. The Gunnedah Municipal Band, formed in 1885 under the leadership of Barr Roberts, has survived to the present day and, under a succession of dedicated bandmasters, has become one of the outstanding brass bands of New South Wales.18 Dance bands are a more recent phenomenon. Professional, semi-professional and amateur dance bands proliferated in rural Australia in the days before television (and, to some extent, radio) when entertainment could be provided only through local activity. Much of the tradition of local bands continues. Today, a single issue of In Tune, issued weekly by the Armidale Express, announces the presence of ‘Ortizmo’ (gypsy-rock), ‘Big Bertha’ (rhythm and blues), ‘Maxwell Street’ (rhythm and blues) and ‘Axemen’ (punk-heavy metal), all of them semi-professional groups managing to survive with local performances. The same issue also carries a notice of the survival of cabaret in the region, with Tamworth’s Bill Gleeson and Richard Hutt advertising their program, ‘Two Men and Two Grands’, with the supporting vocalist Ruth Strutt.19 A C A D E M I C M U S I C , O RC H E S T R A S , C O N S E RVATO R I A

The opening of the Armidale Teachers’ College in 1928 was to be a significant event in the musical life of the Tableland, although at first the considerable music-making that took place there was largely confined to in-house affairs. One of the part-time staff, also employed at Armidale High School, was A.C.M. (Cam) Howard, who lectured in music.20 Soon afterwards full time, Howard was to remain until 1948. His activities included setting up an interhouse choral competition (1931), ‘To give students the opportunity to organise, conduct and participate in music-making’. He also drew in the Armidale community, organising, for instance, a monthly public ‘Gramaphone [sic] Recital’ in 1938. The college also had a jazz band, and there were regular Saturday night dances in the gymnasium. A former student, Dennis Williams, recalled of one such night: ‘The most unmusical hobbledehoys of seventeen or eighteen were bawling Clarrie [Gould]’s “Dance in the Gym” as if it were “O Sole Mio” and booming Cam’s “Anthem” far more reverently than they did the “National Anthem”’.21 In March–April 1943 an orchestra was formed in Armidale under the leadership of Lois Kesteven, music teacher at the New England Girls’ School, whose long experience included work with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Gonzales Opera Company and the ABC Orchestra. At a ‘largely attended and enthusiastic’ meeting in the Town Hall, Mrs Kesteven was named conductor. The orchestra played its first concert on 11 August, to a ‘packed and appreciative Town Hall audience’. ‘Amphion’, music critic for the Armidale Express, was effusive in his praise. The program’s ‘clockwork precision’, ‘lack of fuss and ostentation’, tasteful decor and ‘many other significant details’ made this concert, he said, ‘a memorable one’. We could look forward now to ‘something tangible in the way of cultural activity in the city’.22

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Music Like Gunnedah’s brass band, the Armidale Symphony Orchestra was able to attract notable players, such as the violinist Errol Russell, who had been a member of a major city orchestra. The various members of the New England Ensemble and the New England String Quartet also helped to strengthen the ranks. More recently, with a vibrant group of players and conductors drawn from the town community, the Armidale Symphony Orchestra has embarked on some ambitious programs, including the performance of Mahler’s Symphony no. 2, in conjunction with the Sydney-based TOPS Orchestra under the direction of Mal Hewitt. Together with major works (symphonies and concertos) from the standard repertoire, there have also been première performances of works by local composers.23 To begin with, the New England University College, founded in 1938, had little impact on regional music, but a University Choral Society was active in the 1940s and 50s, and there was also a Philomuse Society, for musical appreciation. However, on the birth of the autonomous university in 1954, the redoubtable Cam Howard was appointed to take charge of its Department of Adult Education’s Tamworth office. With twenty years’ experience at the Teachers’ College, ‘training the voice, the ear, and establishing an ability to read and appreciate music’, he was well positioned to make music a larger ❈ part of university life. By 1959 he was conduct- Campbell Howard ing the University Choir and presenting the first (1906–84), one of the great of a series of residential music schools, attract- organisers and motivators ing a group of leading musicians as tutors and a of music on the Tableland. wide variety of participants, originally described (photo: unknown) as ‘students’ and in later schools as ‘members’.24 In 1962 and for several years thereafter, he was able to bring Donald Peart, Professor of Music at Sydney University, as a special lecturer. The range of music covered in these schools was wide and eclectic, but with a leaning towards both ‘early’ and ‘contemporary’ works. It included choral, orchestral and solo works, groups of madrigals by Adriaan Willaert and Luca Marenzio, cantatas and concerti by J.S. Bach, works by Handel, Haydn and Mozart and, at the other end of the time spectrum, pieces by the twentiethcentury Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, English composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, and the Australian Nigel Butterley. As the

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schools became better established, participants (sometimes numbering more than 80) included many who were afterwards leading teachers and scholars in their own right. The last school, in 1967, was directed by Howard’s former assistant and successor, Graham Maddox (who subsequently moved from the Tamworth Adult Education office to the UNE’s Politics Department).25 One participant in the summer schools was Neville Fletcher, himself a product of the New England University College and of the University of Sydney. After completing his postgraduate work at Harvard, Fletcher had returned to UNE to teach physics. A fine flute-player as well as a researcher in acoustics, Fletcher, with Howard’s support, pushed for the establishment of a Department of Music. This was achieved in 1971 with the appointment of the gifted and eccentric Cecil Hill, formal classes being offered from 1972. Hill’s greatest contribution, in his own opinion, was the introduction in 1985 of the Bachelor of Music degree.26 In 1975 Hill persuaded the university authorities to fund the establishment of the New England Ensemble, a piano quartet consisting of Andrew Lorenz, violin, Robert Harris, viola, Janis Laurs, cello, and Wendy Lorenz, piano. This was the first university-affiliated performing group outside the Australian capital cities. It performed with distinction throughout New England and beyond, including south-east Asia and Europe. Harris resigned in 1980 and the Ensemble continued as a piano trio until the end of 1982.27 In 1984, Hill set up the New England String Quartet (David Saffir, first violin, Romano Crivici, subsequently Margaret Connolly, second violin, Peter Wilson, viola, and SueEllen Paulsen, cello), which lasted until 1987. These two groups had a profound impact on the music of the region, with their various members performing and teaching in many of the outlying centres as well as Armidale, and participating in the Armidale Symphony Orchestra and the New England Sinfonia. There were now movements for the teaching of music, at the highest level, as a wholly independent enterprise. When the Dominicans vacated their convent in Tamworth, the building was acquired by the Department of Public Works. Eager to maintain the local instruction in music, in 1984 a committee of interested people established the Tamworth Regional Music Centre, using parts of the building for individual music teaching. In 1990 the Music Centre changed its name to the Tamworth Regional Conservatorium of Music (TRCM) and soon afterwards secured a 25-year lease of the building (which had lately passed into the possession of the University of New England). The TRCM is now the largest regional conservatorium in New South Wales, teaching a full range of instruments and supporting several regularly performing youth orchestras.28 The TRCM grew organically from the teaching activities of the Dominicans, but there was no similar growth in Armidale. Opinion among Armidale musicians varied as to the desirability of such a development, especially since three attempts during the 1990s to establish the New England Conservatorium of Music (NECOM) had not borne fruit. Finally, a board under the chairmanship of local businessman and agricultural economist Arthur Rickards made a successful submission to the state government for funding that allowed the

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Music 2004 appointment of Corinne Arter (a graduate of UNE) as director. Since Arter’s appointment programs for beginning strings and vocal and choral teaching have been put in place, and an outreach program has begun to take shape, with the first centres in Inverell and Glen Innes.29 It would undoubtedly be a comfort to the late Cam Howard to know that the Old Teachers’ College building in Armidale echoes still to the sounds of music, with both the UNE Music Department and the New England Conservatorium of Music resident therein. Meanwhile, music was flourishing at a more widespread and popular level. Radio broadcasting across the region since the 1930s had established a more localised expression of musical tastes. Commercial stations such as 2AD Armidale, 2NZ Inverell and 2MO Gunnedah were ideally placed to play what their listeners wanted to hear. During the 1960s, station 2TM Tamworth introduced an evening program called ‘Hoe-down’, in an attempt to identify audiences for its broadcasts in the wake of the commencement of television broadcasting. The program of ‘country’ music proved so popular that it was eventually syndicated to other local radio stations across eastern Australia, which led staff at 2TM, John Minson, Eric Scott and Max Ellis, to promote concerts featuring well-known country music artists, including Slim Dusty. Eventually Tamworth was designated Australia’s ‘Country Music Capital’ and its annual Country Music Festival was established—a spectacularly successful event in various ways.30 Two celebrated Australian entertainers of the second half of the twentieth century have also helped to put the region on the musical map. Gary Shearston was born in Inverell in 1939 and spent his early years on a farm near Tenterfield, until drought forced his family off the land and they moved to Sydney. During the 1960s he became one of the country’s leading folk singers, in both traditional and contemporary styles. In 1992 he was ordained in the Anglican Church, but he continues to sing, releasing new CDs in recent years.31 Peter Allen was a Tenterfield-born songwriter and cabaret-style performer, famous since the 1970s and 80s. His albums included Tenterfield Saddler (1972), Bi-Coastal (1980) and Not the Boy Next Door (1982), and he composed the short-lived Broadway musical, Legs Diamond. He died in 1992, and a documentary video and a musical stage play, both called The Boy From Oz, have been based on his life and music.32 Equally significant, given the main themes of this book, has been the way in which the history of music in New England has been understood as a matter of memory and tradition. Russel Ward (1914–95) published The Australian Legend while he was Professor of History at UNE. Enormously influential throughout Australia (first appearing in 1958, the book has never gone out of print), much of Ward’s argument depends on his idea that bush ballads, handed down from one generation to the next, are vital to our understanding of past and present Australia. A younger colleague at the university, the Professor of Music, Catherine Ellis (1935–96), specialised in Aboriginal musical performance, and one of Ward’s former students, Barry McDonald, has worked exhaustively on the

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traditional music and song of New England, publishing his findings here and abroad. For instance, McDonald has collected remnants of two songs about kangaroo-hunting, one of them probably originating east of Glen Innes and handed down in the Lowe family; the other originally composed by a Walcha farmer, and similarly remembered and recounted by his neighbours and relations: ‘Oh me name is Alma Chandler, I’d have you all to know, / To make a little money boys, a-shooting I did go’.33 McDonald has also examined the interweaving of European and Aboriginal musical tradition. He tells of the family of Frank and Sarah Archibald, an Aboriginal couple whose origins were likewise to the east of Glen Innes and who taught their children, born in the early twentieth century, not only ‘lingo’ songs (using their Indigenous tongue) but also white folk music, ‘hymn songs’ and what they called ‘little choruses’—ditties conveying moral lessons. Brought up ‘in an intensely musical and spiritual environment’, the Archibald children handed on their skills and beliefs to the next generation, who continue to adapt and expand their repertoire (using country and western, for instance), while faithful still to the original patterns.34 McDonald himself is a musician and has published an album of New England folk music. He perceives, he says, ‘an essential New England folkmusical style’. He makes no explicit comparisons with other parts of Australia, but the Scottish and German influence he finds here may perhaps be less obtrusive, or operate differently, elsewhere. As for overseas comparisons, the music of the Tableland, he contends, ‘seems to embrace a greater simplicity and deliberateness of expression’ than Irish equivalents, for instance—‘a slower tempo, basic formal structure, and lack of ornate embellishment’.35 T H E T W E N T Y  F I R S T C E N T U RY

One of the exciting developments in the region in recent years is the creation of ‘Opera in the Paddock’ (see Chapter 28). Also, as we have seen, New England now has two major regional conservatoria, both developing outreach programs to outlying centres, as well as youth and adult orchestras. Radio stations provide a variety of popular music. Bands of all kinds—brass, rock and rhythm and blues—perform regularly at (mostly) hotel venues. Music programs in public and private schools offer strong teaching as well as performance opportunities. Tamworth, Armidale and Inverell boast major eisteddfodau that attract large numbers of competitors in a wide range of musical and other events. It appears that the future of music in the New England region will be lively and eclectic, building on the sound foundation of past and present generations.

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CHAPTER 28 ❈

T h e a tre Jud i t h L amb and C h ri s t o p h e r Ro s s -Sm i t h

On 21 October 1946, the singer Dorothy Helmrich, founder of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (afterwards the Arts Council of Australia), took a dramatic step in rooting out what she saw, rightly or wrongly, as the philistinism of New Englanders. Arguing for the uplifting power of the arts, she informed a group of local notables in the Glen Innes Town Hall that they were ‘peasants’ and ‘immovable pillars of salt quite content with radio and the cinema’.1 In fact, wherever people have gathered in communities there have been plays of some kind, and theatre was being performed in New England towns as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. On the other hand, Helmrich’s Arts Council certainly made a difference in the region, with branches being set up very quickly in many country centres. Also (mainly since World War Two), theatre has flourished as an extracurricular activity in schools, colleges and the University of New England. At both the Armidale Teachers’ College and the university, drama (or theatre studies) has been an academic discipline, and part of the process of widening intellectual horizons and winning a degree. E L E V E N TOW N S

The development of theatre in New England towns has been shaped in various ways. Larger towns have shown a strong interest in all forms of theatre, while smaller centres have favoured light entertainments such as music hall, pantomime and melodrama. Much has also depended on chance. Men and women

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with professional training and/or strong and charismatic personalities, together with the need to express themselves on stage, frequently generate the most interesting theatre developments, as in Armidale, Glen Innes, Uralla, Inverell, Barraba and Deepwater. The desire to restore an historic building for theatre purposes can also lead to the creation or strengthening of theatre companies, as at Glen Innes, Tenterfield and Bingara. Armidale (population 22 000) Amateur theatre was performed in Armidale at least as early as 1862.2 However, serious theatrical work first began at the Armidale Teachers’ College in 1930. Claire Napier directed revues. (She was later notable as the song and dance teacher of Peter Woolnough, world famous as Peter Allen.) It was not until 1953, however, that Norman Gould, Arthur Woodcock, Peggy Leask and others established the town-based Armidale Theatre Club. Gwen Foggon, a professional director, lighting enthusiast Harry Wadleigh, wardrobe mistress Enid Isaacs and, later, the talented actor Astrid Ross-Smith (Blake), made significant contributions to the group. The club flourished with the expansion of the university in the late 1950s, and with the foundation of the New England Dramatic Society and the Review Company. Members of the university staff—John Burr, Maurice Kelly and George Pittendrigh—became active members of the club, and in November 1958, English lecturer Harry Heseltine directed a performance of Reedy River, the first Australian musical to be produced in New England. Later, in the 1970s, the UNE Drama Department encouraged club members to enrol as mature students, strongly influencing the quality and range of club productions. From the club’s inception, members had worked towards building their own theatre and in March 1969 the Playhouse, an old classroom block relocated to a vacant allotment, opened with a performance of Sheridan’s The Rivals. The club was incorporated in 1986 as the Armidale Playhouse, and its repertoire expanded to include not only classical drama, comedy and musical shows but also more experimental theatre. It continues as a vigorous, adventurous and talented group, with hopes now of replacing the old theatre, which is too expensive to maintain. In January 1962, during a UNE summer school, professional actor Brian Barnes presented a lecture on ‘Decentralisation of Professional Theatre in Australia’. Subsequently, in July, with funding from the Arts Council and the state Department of Education, Barnes and actor-director Harold Bennett established in Armidale Australia’s first regional professional theatre, the New England Theatre Centre. With a company of young actors, some just graduates of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), it toured the region, including schools. The company had significant impact on local amateur groups, offering workshops, training and some roles in its productions to their actors, but lack of funding forced it to disband in 1965. Bennett marked the occasion with a production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, featuring club members Peter Rogers, Miriam Rogers and Judith Morsley (Lamb).3

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Theatre The Armidale Biennial Arts Festival was first staged in October 1976, with Colin Grigg as its driving force. It involved local performing arts groups, amateur and professional, including the Armidale Playhouse, the town orchestras and bands, the university’s music and drama departments, and Mrs O’Malley’s Music Hall, in Uralla. Several interstate and international performers gave popular workshops. The festivals, typically running for about ten days, featured literary and craft events, film festivals, fun fairs and street theatre. The 1984 festival won the ‘Events’ section of the New South Wales Tourism Award for Excellence. Sadly under-funded, however, the last festival was held in 1988.4

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Gl e n In n e s ( p o p u l a t i o n 6 0 0 0 ) In the 1940s, inspired by Helmrich’s Arts Council, the Glen Innes Musical and Dramatic Society established the Glen Innes Arts Council (GIAC), now one of New England’s most successful amateur theatre groups and the oldest continuously surviving Arts Council group in the state. Benefiting to begin with from centrally organised tours of professional artists and companies, by the early 1960s GIAC had absorbed other local groups, such as the Trinity Players and the Film and Theatre Club, and had become synonymous with theatre and musicals in Glen Innes.5 The group has been fortunate in its ‘movers and shakers’, with Jim Cotsell, Rex Wilson and Lorna Swann in the 1940s and 50s, and Derek Howland as an

❈ The Chapel Theatre at Glen Innes. (photo: C. Ross-Smith)

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influential president in the 1960s. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Monica and Barry Rutledge worked as planners, directors and performers, and Malcolm Kiehne, besides spending more than half the period as president, directed well over 100 productions. Other leading members were Dennis Haselwood, John Crofts and, more recently, Neil Horton, Jack Ritchie and Derick McPhie. Many were notable directors as well as actors, whose productions won several awards in state drama festivals. Since the early 1960s, GIAC has developed a reputation for high-quality light entertainment, including Gilbert and Sullivan, and well-known musicals and pantomimes, plus works by Noel Coward, Neil Simon and Michael Frayn. It was decided that the group’s financial survival depended on ‘middle-of-theroad, commercial theatre’, which allowed it to subsidise professional touring companies. This remains current policy.6 However, there have been some more challenging productions, such as Michael Gow’s Away, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Having long used Glen Innes Town Hall, in 1980 the group bought the local Methodist church building for $20 000. Following thousands of hours of labour from members, the Chapel Theatre was opened in November 1984 with My Fair Lady. Over $85 000 was spent on converting the building and several hundred thousand dollars have been raised since, in entertaining and ingenious ways, to make the Chapel Theatre one of the best-equipped amateur theatres and small cinemas in the country. Productions often play to 25 per cent of the town’s population, with annual net profits allowing for visits by professional companies. Senior citizens are admitted free to every local production and there is still money available for charity. In many ways, GIAC is a model for what can be done by a small town determined to maintain a stimulating theatre environment.7 Inverell (po pula t i o n 9 5 0 0 ) Theatre has a long history in Inverell. During 1918–28 the town enjoyed popular musicals performed by its Musical Company (later the Inverell Choral and Orchestral Society). By 1969 such activities had been revived by the Inverell Arts Council Dramatic Society, afterwards the Inverell Musical and Dramatic Society (IMADS), which produced a musical each year, including The Vagabond King, The Mikado, Brigadoon and Rose Marie. From 1978 another group, the Entertainers, founded by Paddy Ryder, performed in halls in and around Inverell. The Entertainers offered a wide range of plays, from comedy, such as Philip King’s See How They Run, to serious drama, including Pinter’s The Caretaker. Two of the group, Chris Newbiggin and Brett Stewart, specialised in audience participation, presenting Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution in the old Inverell court house, with the audience as onlookers and jury. In a show called Bailed Up, as the members of the audience were en route by bus to Elsmore Hall to watch a melodrama, they were ‘bailed up’ by a ‘bushranger’, who entertained them as they drove along (reflecting Tom Roberts’ painting, ‘Bailed Up’, painted nearby).8

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❈ The cast of the Inverell Theatre Company’s 1996 production of The Importance of Being Earnest—Andrew Hodkinson, Pat Alliston and Alexis Sendall (back), and Donna Fenton, Peter Caddey, Peta Morris, Judy Noad and Mark Wisemantel. (photo: unknown)

The two groups amalgamated in 1991, and the new Inverell Theatre Company’s first production, The Demon Barber, appeared in the Long Plain Hall.9 In 1994 the company came to an understanding with the trustees of Beaulieu Hall to convert the building into its own Beaulieu (locally pronounced ‘bohleo’) Memorial Theatre. There they presented Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the first Tom Roberts Festival in 1996. Since 2002, ‘Opera in the Paddock’ has been staged annually at Mimosa, a property near Delungra—in the fifth year an audience of nearly 2000 listened to professional singers performing on a covered stage. This event is managed by Mimosa’s owners, Bill and Peta Blyth, with Peta, an experienced opera singer, performing as well. Ba r r a b a ( p o p u l a t i o n 2 0 0 0 ) During the 1950s and 60s some memorable ‘Old Time Victorian Music Hall’ revues were organised by Harry and Mary Croxford, retired vaudeville artists from England, and performed at Barraba’s Bowling Club. The town’s current theatrical activity, however, is now focused on the annual BarrArbor Festival, a celebration inspired by the trees in the main street. Bill Bright, an internationally regarded maker of harpsichords who lives in Barraba, was the festival’s

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original director, offering classical music with a combination of local and imported talent. The first festival was in 1993, and it has continued annually in the first week of November, with an emphasis on music and street entertainment. The current directors, Andy Wright and Andrew Sharpe, have added a rodeo, a claypan, jazz and street dancing. A parade focuses on a different culture each year and the event has become a celebration with many theatrical elements. The festival’s success shows how effort and imagination can nourish local interest in the performing arts, attracting outside visitors and encouraging community pride.10 Bendeme e r (po pula t i o n 3 0 0 ) Bendemeer, on the southern borders of New England, had little local theatre until the arrival of Ruth Mathews, whose theatre background included singing on Australian radio and pantomime in England. In 1995 Mathews wrote and directed for the Bendemeer branch of the Country Women’s Association a highly successful variety show called Victory Over the Pacific, performed in the Town Hall. This was followed by Anzac Cavalcade in 1998, and in 1999 Mathews received an Australia Council grant to enlarge the hall’s stage and dressing rooms. With set designer Margaret Hemmings and lighting expert Andrew McFarlane, she established the Hour Glass Theatre. Its first production, in 2000, was a melodrama, She’s Only a Simple Country Girl, written and directed by Mathews. This format of old-time music hall entertainment with dinner or afternoon tea, and a Christmas pageant on the banks of the river behind the Bendemeer Hotel, brings busloads from Nundle, Tamworth, Manilla and Armidale.11 Uralla (p o pula t i o n 2 4 6 0 ) According to Uralla historian Arnold Goode, the Uralla Dramatic Club, known to be in existence around 1900, was ‘revived’ as the Uralla Players in 1925, and again in 1928 by Lloyd Wood, Uralla school teacher and semi-professional actor.12 Apparently, Wood’s first production was Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You, and in 1949 the company took Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green to Walcha for benefit performances. The Players survived until about 1954. In 1976 Kent Mayo, another school teacher who was also an experienced actor and director, chose, fortuitously, ‘Uralla Players’ as the name for a new drama group. Fanny Phelan Forever (written and directed by Mayo himself ) was the first of his ‘Mrs O’Malley’s Magnificent Music Hall’ melodramas—‘gory, gaudy, and bawdy’ presentations, as he put it, ‘in a cheap, homely but sensationally dramatic environment’. According to Mayo, they became the biggest annual event of their type anywhere in Australia: each season ran for more than twenty performances over five weeks, catered for over 3000 patrons per season, and involved up to 100

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Theatre people each night—actors, entertainers, technical staff, waiters and waitresses. Booked out for weeks in advance, they attracted regular patrons from all over New South Wales and Queensland. Performances were in the RSL Hall and later in the restored McCrossin’s Mill. The Uralla Players continued to produce melodramas, and other large-scale productions, until 1994.

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Te n t e r f i e l d ( p o p u l a t i o n 3 2 0 0 ) The handsome and spacious School of Arts building at Tenterfield has been a venue for a great range of cultural activities since it opened in 1876. In the early years of the twentieth century a Musical Society produced comic opera, musical comedies and plays there, beginning, apparently, with the British opera, Dorothy, by Stephenson and Cellier, with Susie Bentley (afterwards of J.C. Williamsons) in the lead role. The interests of the Tenterfield branch of the Arts Council, in the late 1940s, included theatre, and the Dramatic Group has operated from the 1960s.13 In 2001, Tenterfield Shire Council marked the Centenary of Federation with a project to re-establish the School of Arts as a cultural centre, with room for various activities, including a museum, library, cinema and theatre. The cultural

❈ Some of the performers at a ‘Competitive Variety Show’ held in the Tenterfield School of Arts in October 1941—a two-day extravaganza featuring the Municipal Brass Band, the Debating Society, the Boy Scouts, ‘the Wallangarra Midgets’, ‘the Merrie Makers’, ‘the Bankers’, ‘the Diggers’ and many others. The ‘bride’ was Harry Jacob, Tenterfield headmaster, the cupid, Alex Inglis, an accountant.

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centre is the cornerstone of many of the council’s promotion and development projects. The renovated Sir Henry Parkes Memorial School of Arts was opened in December 2003, at a cost of $3 434 100, funded mainly from the council, the Friends of the School of Arts and the State Library. It immediately became a venue for six movie screenings per week (including art house movies and the classics), as well as productions by the Dramatic Group. The restoration won an A.R. Bluett Memorial Award14 followed by a New South Wales Shires Association Cultural Infrastructure Award in 2004. The Railway Street Theatre Company, from Penrith, also performed there during the centre’s first year, with John Misto’s The Shoe Horn Sonata, starring Maggie Kirkpatrick and Belinda Giblin.15 Dorrigo (po pula t i o n o f t ow n a n d s u r ro u n d s 3000) Dorrigo Dramatic Club was founded on 14 June 1955, with a membership of 30. Its aims were set out in the original constitution: To foster an appreciation and understanding of all aspects of drama in its various forms through study, lectures and dramatic productions and to entertain the public through the production and public presentation of dramatic and other cultural activities and entertainment. Although operating on very small budgets, the club was able to donate its profits to local charities and to upgrading the old Memorial Hall. In 1972 it bought the former premises of the Don Dorrigo Gazette, with a grant of $30 000 from the state Department of Tourism and Recreation. The printing office was demolished and, with Art Union proceeds, local donations and considerable voluntary labour, the Old Gazette Theatre was erected in its place. The building seats 93, and the club presents at least two mainstream productions a year. It is also used for musical performances and monthly film screenings. The town also has a Youth Drama group, and each September its Schools and Youth Drama Festival draws students from as far as Maclean and Macksville. Dorrigo is one of those places where theatre has been inspired by a few enthusiastic individuals. Ralda Nash, a graduate of Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, directed the club’s productions for over 30 years, including, for nine years, its annual Shakespeare season. Betty Judd, also a great contributor, has written its history.16 Walch a (po pula t i o n 1 6 2 3 ) According to long-time performer, Frank Brazel, there have been ‘theatrical productions in Walcha’ since the turn of the century, mostly ‘music and comedy shows’. Doug Laurie, president of the Walcha Musical Society, has produced an annual show since 1977. Titles are revealing: Up Your Toga, Further Up Your Toga, Time for a Grope, and How the West was Warped. Another group, the

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Theatre Concert Party, offered annual shows from 1984 to 1987, including selections from Oklahoma and West Side Story.17

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Deepwat e r (po pula t i o n 3 0 0 ) The Deepwater Players was formed in 1982. By common consent, the group’s founder, Jenny Sloman, a history and drama teacher, directs all the productions. The Players use a ‘theatre restaurant’ format over five performances in the School of Arts building (capacity 150). They have no committee, no board meetings and no overheads, aiming to have fun and to raise money (usually about $12 000), for donation to eight to ten charities. The entire Deepwater community participates, on or off-stage. Occasionally, near-disasters are turned into triumphs as when, after a short circuit blew the stage lights and refrigerators, several farmers in the audience rushed home to bring their generators to the rescue. The Players have mounted eight productions, with a gap of two to three years between each. Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola and Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection were great favourites, but some choices have been more challenging, such as Louis Nowra’s Cosi and Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War!, a savage musical satire on World War One. To quote one participant, ‘We never forget that we are rank amateurs but try to avoid the crap’.18 Bingara (po pula t i o n 1 3 0 0 ) Driving into Bingara on a sunny day, it is possible to think of its location, at the base of the north-west slopes and the start of the plains, as the stage of a huge Greek amphitheatre, with the hills as the fan-shaped auditorium. There have been two remarkable contributions to theatre culture in this small town. Bingara has several art deco facades in its main street, the most handsome of which belongs to the recently renovated and re-developed Roxy Theatre, a fully equipped and licensed theatre which doubles as a cinema. The Roxy Cinema opened in 1936, in a building that also included a restaurant and lodging house.19 Its owners, three Greek immigrants, hoped that townspeople would dine before or after the film, and that ‘out of town’ families might take the whole package, retiring for the night to the lodging house. Advanced for its time, the scheme almost immediately ran into trouble. Another cinema across the street, the Regent, had better access to Hollywood film distributors and it played the ethnic card by appealing to ‘true blue Aussies’. Sadly, the Roxy’s owners went bankrupt and left town. Their building eventually came under the control of its rival, and closed as a cinema in 1958.20 Derelict for 40 years, it was acquired by the Bingara Shire in 1999 and, with more than $600 000 of federal, state and shire grants, was converted into a theatre, including a demountable thrust stage and five dressing rooms. The auditorium can seat over 400, depending on the configuration of audience to stage.21 (See also Chapter 22.) Play rehearsals are also held in two other local buildings, the Regent (now the Civic Centre) and the old Masonic Hall (now the Gwydir Arts Centre).

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The former inner sanctum of the Masons is used for performances of Theatre in the Round. In 2001, Bingara was central to the creation of the North West Theatre Company, a body bringing together actors from Moree, Inverell, Warialda and elsewhere. Clearly defined as a regional body, the company uses local directors, but hires one professional director each season. Except for an annual subsidy from Country Energy, it is self-sufficient and has to offer productions that make money (in 2003, for instance, Midsummer Night’s Dream and a tour of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita). It is committed to one ‘adventurous’, and preferably Australian, play each year—such as Katherine Thomson’s Diving for Pearls, performed in 2004. The company has developed a schools performance program and it has supported the development of a TAFE-managed Theatre Practice and Skills course, based in Bingara but drawing students from across the region.22 E A R LY T H E AT R E AT T H E C O L L E G E S A N D U N I V E R S I T Y

The Armidale Teachers’ College was founded in 1928 and the staff and students established a Dramatic Society in 1930. Performances, open to the public, took place in the college auditorium. The society flourished under the supervision of the college’s vice-principal, C.P. Gould, Fred Roberts and, later, Paul Lamb (a former student and later principal of the Armidale College of Advanced Education).23 From 1956 onwards, several local figures became important catalysts for a growing interest in theatre. The University Players, founded in 1957 by Arch Nelson, director of Adult Education at the university, worked closely with the Armidale Theatre Club and with members of the English Department such as Dennis Davison, himself an actor, and Harry Heseltine. Jim Warburton, also of Adult Education, inspired the creation of the university’s theatre summer schools, which drew contributions from professional theatre directors and teachers. Other influential figures included George Pittendrigh, warden of the University Union, who fostered many performances in the 1950s and 60s. Campbell Howard, Teachers’ College lecturer in drama and music and later deputy director of Adult Education at the university, assembled one of the best Australian play collections in the country, now in the University Library. John Ryan, of the English Department, was involved in many aspects of theatre in Armidale from the early 1960s to late 1970s, and is the historian of early university theatre, particularly the Players. Ryan’s work as an actor, director and lecturer was not without peril. He was once threatened with severe physical violence from a local identity for daring to promote a touring production of Alan Seymour’s controversial play, One Day of the Year, which questioned the iconic status of Anzac Day.24 The student-established New England University Dramatic Society performed in the Town Hall in the 1950s. Two highly talented actors emerged from this

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Theatre group, Ron Clayton and Tony Llewellyn-Jones (the latter prominent in films and television). The university colleges also promoted theatre, particularly from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, each establishing its own house style and hosting eminent theatre practitioners, including Ruth Cracknell and John Tasker. Earle Page College presented the amateur première of Bob Herbert’s No Names . . . No Pack Drill, well before its professional début (for which, see below).25 The influence of these theatre groups and individuals extended beyond Armidale, with productions and poetry readings taken to other regional towns as well as to Brisbane and Sydney. The regional effort culminated during 1967–69 when the young playwright and novelist Thomas Keneally ran a UNE outreach program to stimulate drama throughout New England.26

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T H E AT R E E D U C AT I O N AT T E RT I A RY L E V E L

The early training of students in theatre took place at both the Teachers’ College and the university. In 1962 Bill Crocker, who had studied Education Drama in the United States, was appointed to the college staff. He had an immediate impact and his production of the musical White Horse Inn in 1963 influenced the formation of the Armidale Musical Society later that year. In 1966 he was joined by former professional actor and teacher, David Rummery, and in 1972 by Ron Vickress. Together the three devised Theatre-in-Education courses for external students of the college (by now Armidale CAE).27 Meanwhile, at the university, there had long been acted play-readings in the University Union, both as a teaching exercise by day and as general entertainment on Tuesday evenings. The proscenium Arts Theatre, with seating for 300, was completed in 1967, with a fly-tower, dressing rooms and showers, and was licensed for public theatre performance. It proved a popular venue for most campus and touring Arts Council productions. The multi-purpose Lazenby Hall later became a second UNE licensed venue, and in 1974 Bob Herbert, formerly of J.C. Williamson, was appointed manager of the university theatres.28 Two years later, the university established a Department of Drama (later the Department of Theatre Studies), its head for many years being Christopher Ross-Smith, formerly deputy director of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). Ross-Smith initiated the tradition of appointing staff with experience in both the theoretical and professional aspects of theatre. The effect on the direction, quality and influence of theatre in Armidale and the region was profound. Bob Herbert supervised the early work of converting a lecture room into an intimate flexible theatre space known as the Drama Studio, where many of the department’s most exciting productions were mounted. Visiting theatre specialists and directors came for short teaching engagements, including Jeff Murray, who had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Through his productions, notably Douglas Stewart’s Fire On The Snow, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Peter Shaffer’s Equus, Murray established an exceptional standard for the department’s future. In 1977 he became artistic director of the New England Actors’ Company,

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whose productions included Steve Gooch’s Female Transport and David Hare’s Fanshen (performed at the 1978 Adelaide Festival), but with his departure from the university in 1980 the company collapsed. Meanwhile, the Drama Department expanded to include Launt Thompson, Geoff Borny and Wendy Blaxland. By 1983 they had been joined by John McCallum (now theatre critic for the Australian), Gabrielle Hyslop and Andrew McCue and in the 1990s by Rex Bunn, Susan Fell and Professor Adrian Kiernander. The department divided its work into ‘Teaching’ and ‘Public’ programs, and its public presence embraced both university and town, a highly unusual arrangement. Under its auspices, agronomy professors, chemistry research assistants, sheep farmers and many from the Armidale Playhouse appeared on stage. It had none of the ‘ivory tower’ reputation common among university drama departments.29 Introducing an external major in Theatre Studies was a considerable achievement as many had thought it was impossible to duplicate the practical components of the department’s internal courses. The question ‘How do you teach and assess practical theatre work by correspondence?’ seemed impossible to answer. There was no comparable example worldwide. Eventually, an external Theatre Studies major, complete with honours, was developed. Its practical components were worth approximately a third of all course assessments and culminated in a full-scale production directed by each student in their home community during their final year. Lecturers assessed these productions by visiting theatres from Cairns to Launceston. Thus the university came to the student, attempting to make its mark throughout New England and Australia in an unusual yet practical way.

❈ Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War!, a 1985 production by the Department of Drama at UNE, directed by Chris Ross-Smith. (photo: D. McClenaghan)

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Theatre In 1985 Chris Ross-Smith founded a semi-professional group, the Armidillos Theatre Company, to provide, through training and experience, access into the professional theatre for local talent. Under the artistic direction of Tony Turner and, later, Ross-Smith himself and Rex Bunn, it has been a steppingstone to numerous careers in film, television and theatre.30 In the early 1970s, Sydney’s Old Tote Theatre Company had sponsored a small professional company directed by Ray Omedei, to be based at UNE and managed by Anna Glover, Armidale’s Community Arts Officer. Its choice of plays was influenced by texts in the HSC syllabus and it toured schools and theatres in the region. However, Ross-Smith and Glover wanted a regional theatre company with no metropolitan ties. The university agreed to house such a venture provided funding was obtained elsewhere, and a small company of professional actors, the Travelling Playhouse, was established under the initial direction of Brian Fitzsimmons. The company toured schools in remote northern New South Wales, but Glover managed to produce one non-school production a year, including the professional world première of Bob Herbert’s No Names . . . No Pack Drill, directed by Richard Meredith—later directed by Richard Wherrett at the Opera House, starring Mel Gibson and Noni Hazelhurst, and eventually the film Rebel. In 1981 the company was renamed the New England Theatre Company, with Glover as executive director and Murray Foy as artistic director, and with state government and Arts Council funding. It was the only real regional touring company in the state, visiting more than 40 centres, including Cobar and Coonamble. Its stage director, designer and tour manager was NIDA graduate Timothy Clark, and its actors included many prominent Australian names.31 Over 50 per cent of the company’s touring productions were Australian plays, including some by Armidale playwrights Bob Herbert and Jim Graham. Its repertoire was generally safe and commercial, with plenty of comedies and farces, but it also offered serious drama, such as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Later the company mounted an exciting large-scale production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in a joint effort with Armidale’s Stage One School of Drama. Funding was a continuing problem, and in 1997 the New England Theatre Company merged with the Q Theatre to form the Railway Street Company, in Penrith. The New England Theatre Company had a considerable impact on New England. According to Margaret Kiehne, of the Glen Innes Arts Council, nothing has ever done more for local theatre enthusiasts than the company’s tours.32 The university established a chair of Theatre Studies in 1993, and appointed Adrian Kiernander, an authority on aspects of European and Australian theatre, as professor. Kiernander has attracted research grants, developed an online theatre database and begun an annual open-air Shakespeare festival. However, public production activities have been inhibited by a shift in the university’s priorities, resulting in a drastic reduction in Theatre Studies staff. Students still enrol in large numbers and there is a lively theatre environment on campus, but

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university theatre, on the one hand, and community and regional theatre on the other, now have their own agendas. It should not be forgotten, however, that from the 1970s to the early 1990s Armidale averaged some 50 live productions a year, many of which were either mounted or directly influenced by the Department of Drama (staff, students and ex-students). Members of the department, combating the ‘tyranny of distance’, toured from Darling Downs to Hobart. They played a considerable role in the formation of three professional theatre companies, and in the early 1990s developed the world’s first three-year Distance Education major in Theatre Studies, a course of study including many practical components.33

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CHAPTER 29 ❈

Fil m Ne i l R at ti g a n

It is a testimonial to the powerful appeal of cinema that less than twelve months after the first public screenings of ‘moving pictures’, in Paris in December 1895, such pictures were being both shot and exhibited in Australia. In this country, story films developed particularly quickly, and bushranger stories proved especially attractive. Thus, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) was followed by the first film version of Robbery Under Arms (1907), and in short order by films on other bushrangers, both real and fictional, including New England’s own Captain Thunderbolt, otherwise known as Fred Ward. Bush or outback settings therefore appear in many of the early films made in Australia, and not only for bushranger stories. However, the bush settings used for shooting were in suitably ‘authentic’ settings close to Sydney or Melbourne, even when dealing with historical figures or events known to have had specific locations. The 1907 version of the Thunderbolt story, Thunderbolt, was shot around Lithgow and the Blue Mountains, and certainly not in the vicinity of Ward’s bushranging activities. For the first twenty or 30 years of film-making in New South Wales, bush-located narratives were shot in such easily accessible places, and only rarely further afield. Any number of variables influence where (and how) a film is produced (or at least where it is shot). Of some importance to films in general, but especially to the films I call New England films, are concerns about authenticity and verisimilitude. These may include geographical or historical considerations or even, in the case of films adapted from literary originals, issues of faithfulness to what is already, paradoxically, fictional. Such factors (plus accessibility,

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availability, or mere technology) can blend in odd and intriguing ways. In the case of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), for instance, the story material of the film is a novel, but one based upon historically verifiable facts.1 Locations for some scenes and sequences were chosen because of a desire—a need, even—for a level of authenticity to a ‘history’ as well as faithfulness to the fictionalisation of that very history. N E W E N G L A N D ‘ FA C T ’ , N E W E N G L A N D L O C AT I O N S

T he Guyra Gh o st Myst e r y The first film shot in the New England region for the apparent purpose of commercial exhibition seems to have been an eccentric production called The Guyra Ghost Mystery, made in Guyra in May 1921 and based on some recent curious events in that town, alleged to be visitations from the spirit world or the activities of poltergeists, but possibly the result of an elaborate practical joke that had got out of hand.2 Produced, directed and acted in by John Cosgrove, a reasonably well-known stage actor, the film has long since disappeared. The Bowen family, the source of the ‘story’, appeared as themselves, and Cosgrove took the role of ‘Sherlock Doyle’, a name which suggests that he (at least) was not taking the whole thing too seriously. According to the Sydney paper, Smith’s Weekly, the film was shot in three days which, even allowing for the uncomplicated nature of film production at the time, sounds very rushed indeed.3 Its length is unknown. The presence of Cosgrove and his film ‘crew’ (if any beyond a camera operator) does not seem to have excited as much newspaper attention as the ‘mystery’ itself. Cosgrove’s arrival was noted in the Armidale Express on 12 May, with the prediction that the film (or ‘series of humorous pictures’) ‘will probably be shown here in a couple of weeks time’. Surviving issues of the Guyra Argus say nothing and there is no evidence of screenings taking place there or in Armidale. Ca pta in Th un de r bo l t It was to be another 30 years, almost to the day, before another feature film using a local story was shot in the region. Meanwhile, cinema had become a vastly influential and international medium. ‘Show biz’ had been born, actors had become ‘stars’, and the nexus of glamour and celebrity was firmly established in popular consciousness throughout the world. As a result, the reaction to the arrival of a production crew in Armidale in March 1951 to begin the location shooting for Captain Thunderbolt was not the passing interest that had apparently greeted Cosgrove. In real life, Thunderbolt was no Ned Kelly, and his legendary chivalry was more than matched by the fact that he does not seem to have shot anyone at all, not even the odd policeman. However, the film was directed by Cecil Holmes, a socially committed documentary film-maker, who used it to explore aspects

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Film of class and class conflict in nineteenth-century Australia, and much was made of such issues. Shooting took place between 5 and 22 March, in locations within Armidale such as the sheriff’s house and the courthouse, and at Kelly’s Plains and Kentucky. Locals were used as extras, including children and men on horse-back. A stagecoach from the period was also found on the spot. The production was intended for television, but as that medium had not yet arrived in Australia the release in this country was to be cinematic. After an unexplained delay, the world cinema première took place at the Armidale Capitol Theatre on 20 June 1955. Showings drew large numbers from Armidale and Uralla, including 95-year-old Mrs I.S. Gordon, who ‘had not previously seen a talking film’, but who could ‘recall incidents relating to Thunderbolt’s activities’. On the other hand, Robin Walker, of the History Department at the university, wrote to the Armidale Express following the première: ‘The falsities are so many that it’s far easier to enumerate the few points in which the film infringes upon truth’.4

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T h e Pi c t u re Sh ow Ma n Another quarter of a century passed before New England provided both the site and the material for another feature-film production, barring a couple of

❈ A scene from the film, The Picture Show Man. This is the landscape of the Liverpool Plains, very different from that of the high country. (photo: Limelight Productions)

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oddities to be mentioned below. This was a period in which the production arm of the Australian film industry seldom roused itself from a coma-like state, in which cinema attendance plummeted thanks to the implacable advance of television, and in which cinemas closed en masse. In the early 1970s, however, enthusiasm grew for revitalising Australian film production, encouraged by some early successes. Picnic at Hanging Rock and Sunday Too Far Away, in particular, demonstrated once again the cinematic potential of both Australian history and the bush. The first of a mini-flood of films using historical New England subjects and shot, more or less, in their historical locations was The Picture Show Man. The film was based, with a mixture of historical truth and cinematic licence, on the activities of that unique business, the travelling cinema exhibitionist of the 1920s and 30s, and on the biography of one Lyle ‘Pop’ Penn (in the film called ‘Pop Pym’), as recalled by his son.5 For years, the Penn exhibition circuit had been centred on Tamworth and had taken in the towns of the Peel valley, including Nundle and sometimes as far west as Gunnedah. Penn at one point had also gone north to Glen Innes, and his last circuit was to be based on the northern rivers. The film’s producers used only a few locations from these areas, although it is far from clear why they felt obliged to obey any sort of geographical imperative in the name of ‘authenticity’, since the film could have been shot elsewhere without detracting from its rural and period feel. At no time in the narrative are any places identified by name. Nevertheless, the Tamworth Northern Daily Leader offered in a front-page headline the prediction, ‘Film Seen as Tourist Drawcard’, going on to assert that ‘audiences will see all the beauty spots in glorious color [sic]’.6 Like Captain Thunderbolt, The Picture Show Man used locals as extras. The first call for interested individuals, in the Northern Daily Leader, resulted in the producers being overwhelmed—as many as 800 would-be actors turned up for interview.7 Most were used in a picnic-race sequence, shot at the Somerton race-course. Small groups of local people, suitably dressed and made-up to look like country folk of the 1920s, were also used in picture-show scenes. The interiors for these scenes were shot mainly in Tamworth, although a couple were shot in Sydney, sans the local extras. (Compare the shooting of Danny Deckchair in 2002—see below—where Bellingen people travelled at their own expense to Sydney to take part in a similar crowd-in-a-hall scene.) The film’s small budget seems to have prevented the frequent relocation of cast, crew and equipment, although for some reason the first scenes were shot some distance from Tamworth, at Murrurundi. Several rural properties were used, including Lalogooli, near Breeza, and, notably for exterior shots of the house and garden, Bective station. Latter stages of location shooting took place in late November and early December 1976 on the banks of the Clarence River, at Woodford Leigh—and actually in the river at one point, when a scene calls for a vehicle to be pushed into the water. A small number of local girls acted as pupils in a modern-dance class held in the suitably picturesque surrounds of

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Film the hall at Woodford Leigh. The Grafton Daily Examiner took a more prosaic view than the Tamworth paper, as much impressed by the ‘Revenue Pay-off ’ as the presence of ‘stars’.8 The film was released in May 1977, but there was no première screening in either Tamworth or Grafton. The Picture Show Man offers little insight into the actual operations of a travelling film exhibition business, although the producers went to some trouble to locate genuine period cinema machinery. The central dramatic conflict, if it can be so called, comes from the presence of a rival picture-show man, Palmer the American (played by Rod Taylor), which is fiction. There are some ‘typical’ incidents (life on the road, actual picture shows), and a couple of events borrowed from Penn’s memoirs. New England life is depicted in a nostalgic light—quaintly rustic, vaguely idyllic, unsophisticated or at least ‘unspoilt’, and clearly class-structured. However, in accordance with the prevailing ethic of Australian cinema, then and since, the film does considerable justice to the beauties of the landscape.

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T he Chan t o f Ji mmi e Bl ac ks mi t h Scarcely were the projectors showing The Picture Show Man to city audiences when the next feature film production to be shot in New England, and based, more or less, on regional history, began. The usual local harbinger of shooting, the call for residents interested in being extras, went out in Armidale, Walcha and Uralla in July 1977.9 The film was The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, based on the Thomas Keneally novel, itself based upon Frank Clune’s version of the real-life 1900 events surrounding Jimmy Governor and his brother Joe.10 The film was shot in a wide number of locations, not all within New England, but not as far afield as the range actually covered by the historical Jimmy Governor, nor by the novelised Jimmy Blacksmith. The choice of locations in and around Armidale and Dorrigo was determined by budget, suitability (looking near enough like the genuine article) and availability. There is, of course, no reason why a fictional account should be shot in historically correct locations, nor even those locations mentioned in the source material. If anything, the finished film is rather unclear as to the precise location of much of the action. For example, in the novel the trial of Uncle Tabiigi takes place in Dubbo, but in the film the courthouse is Armidale’s. Neither Dubbo nor Armidale is mentioned. Key scenes were shot in New England. The extras were required mainly for the beginning of the man-hunt, the murderous actions preceding it being shot on a property near Uralla. Brief shearing scenes were shot in a shearing shed at Ebor, while Woodpark Cottage, near Armidale, stood in for a clergyman’s residence near Gilgandra. A granite peak in the Dorrigo National Park served as an Aboriginal sacred site and later scenes were shot in the vicinity of Kempsey. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith premièred at the Capitol Theatre in Armidale on 21 June 1977, and was released simultaneously in Melbourne. Understandably, the première itself was a popular event, and it would be pleasant to be able to record that the film was an artistic and a commercial success. Certainly it was

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❈ Jimmie Blacksmith (played by Tommy Lewis) and his wife, Gilda (Angela Punch McGregor), in Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

one of the earliest Australian films to be screened at the prestigious Cannes film festival, but it did not garner any awards. The mixed response was possibly due to the subject matter, which included considerable violence, but even more to the didactic, even preachy tone taken by the film’s director-writer, Fred Schepisi, on the subject of racism. And again, in keeping with many Australian films of the time, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith shows the Australian landscape (rugged mountains, deep rainforest and undulating rural land) to splendid advantage. Li t t l e B oy L o s t Hot on the heels of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith followed the third and final production in the group, namely Little Boy Lost. This film was based on much more recent events: the four-day search in the Guyra district for a four-yearold boy, Stephen Walls, lost in rugged bush country near his family’s property in November 1960. Perhaps because it made particular sense to shoot the film where the events took place, for the most part the actual locations were used. Ironically, however, these locations—bush country, farm houses, a tiny bush church—are as generic of their type as particular to the actuality, and no greater sense of authenticity was achieved by using them. Shooting commenced in April 1978, and in addition to ‘imported’ actors— John Hargreaves, Don Crosby (also seen in The Picture Show Man), John Jarrett, Tony Barry and the young Nathan Dawes (who came from Rockhampton,

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Film Queensland, to play Stephen Walls)—the film used hundreds of locals from as far away as Glen Innes and Armidale. The recreation of the search, which had in fact involved about 2000 people, utilised perhaps 300 or 400 extras. Shooting finished on 3 May and, with considerable fanfare, Little Boy Lost was premièred at the Capitol, in Armidale, on 14 November, in the presence of the former prime minister, Sir John Gorton, who had done much for the rebirth of the Australian film industry in the late 1960s. According to the Armidale Express, Gorton said, ‘The [Australian] film industry is aiming at producing better films than those acclaimed in America, the United Kingdom and Italy’.11 It can only be presumed that he made these remarks before seeing the film. The same issue of the Express carried the headline, ‘“Lost” film applauded’, and published a review headed ‘Film deserves its success’, but perhaps most of the local enthusiasm was a result of the audience seeing themselves, and people and places they knew, on the ‘big screen’. This is not the place to analyse the shortcomings of Little Boy Lost, its banal and ill-conceived dialogue, its spurious attempts at dramatic conflict, its lack of convincing characterisations or its seemingly endless repetition of the stunningly obvious. There was no story, simply the retailing of an historical incident, more or less in its original setting.

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N OT N E W E N G L A N D S TO R I E S , N E W E N G L A N D L O C AT I O N S

After Little Boy Lost almost a decade of quietude descended on New England, as far as film production was concerned. During the 1980s the Australian film industry underwent a number of significant changes, including a loss of interest in period films based on a traditional sense of national identity. Nevertheless, when, after a long break, further films were shot in the region, they were yet again period films. Dealing with contemporary life in the bush seems to have had little immediate appeal for film-makers. Also, these were not particularly ‘New England’ films. They used New England locations, but they were not New England stories. The locations were ‘generic’ or else, as with The Winds of Jarrah, a New England location was standing in for another place geographically remote from city life. T he Win ds o f Jar rah In early 1983, the Film Corporation of Western Australia, ignoring what surely should have been its prime imperative—to promote film production in Western Australia—chose to shoot a film in and around Dorrigo. Presumably, it was cheaper and easier to shoot the film in New South Wales than in Western Australia, and Dorrigo was close to ‘tall timber’ and existing logging businesses, which were important for the story. A bullock team or two and the temporary removal of more recent timber-working technology took the set some way towards authenticity. None the less, even the title suggests a Western Australian location. Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) dominates the hardwood forests of the

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south-west of that state, and it is rarely found elsewhere in Australia. As the film’s narrative resolutely declines to identify its location, other than ‘Australia, 1946’ (as in an early caption), and the town in the story is never named, the implication can easily be that this is Western Australia. Not in the true sense an ‘original’ film, The Winds of Jarrah was adapted from a Harlequin/Mills and Boon novel (The House in Timberwoods, by Joyce Dingwell). Filming began in January 1983, with most of the action centred on a purpose-built house near Gangara. There is much picturesque scenery— timbered hillsides, creeks, lush pastures, panoramic views of mountains, and so forth. However, in spite of the apparent importance of location, there is little to suggest that the landscape has any effect on the people who live in it. Personalties exhibit the usual Mills and Boon clichés, featuring repressed sexual urges and the common panoply of ‘romantic’ longings, taking no account (as with many other Australian films and fictions) of interaction with the Australian bush, let alone the New England bush. The Winds of Jarrah does manage to include a bush fire and an Anzac Day service, combining the two for maximum melodramatic effect. The Anzac Memorial in Dorrigo’s main street was used, and locals made up the several hundred extras for the scene. Locals appeared too in a log-chopping contest scene and in a dance scene. The Anzac ceremony leads the remote, taciturn, saturnine ‘hero’ to realise and declare his love for the long-suffering ‘heroine’. There seems to be no other cause of his finally recognising and embracing both the inevitable and the heroine simultaneously. Principal photography was completed on 2 March 1983, but the film was not released until 1985, and then only in New South Wales country towns, before going to video hire. Declining interest in period, bush-located films may explain its failure to be released in city cinemas, and yet a very similar bushbased period romance (of a slightly darker tone) was shot not far away only two years later. That film was The Umbrella Woman. T he Um bre l l a Wo man Unlike most of the earlier New England films, The Umbrella Woman was original, the screenplay being written for the film and not based upon existing material, historical or fictional. The writer was Peter Kenna, well known as an author for the stage—so much so that the film’s title credit reads ‘Peter Kenna’s The Umbrella Woman’. The Umbrella Woman was shot in 1986 in and around Bowraville, which had been converted to look like a country town of 1939.12 Particular buildings—the hotel, the railway station—are singled out for narrative action and some streets, especially the main street, are viewed in passing. Again, locals make up the crowd scenes, especially in the pub, but most of the action concerns a small number of characters, played by Bryan Brown, Rachel Ward, Sam Neill and Steve Vidler. Basically, the film is a sexual melodrama concerning a young married woman’s unconsummated obsession with a womanising barman. The

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Film town itself is not identified as Bowraville and, other than some activities associated with Bowraville and the area—logging, dairy farming—once again, the area is intended to be generically Australian. And once again, much of the incidental scenery is attractive, although not spectacular. One or two sequences, a picnic scene in particular, hint at an almost idyllic existence surrounded by nature. On the other hand, the narrative suggests, albeit unconvincingly, that the neurotic behaviour of the ‘umbrella woman’ is partly a result of the boredom of country-town life.

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A Little Bi t o f So ul The black comedy, A Little Bit of Soul, was shot during January 1997 near Glen Innes, with brief scenes at the town’s railway station and courthouse, and released in 1998. Any other connection with New England is tenuous. The decision of Peter Duncan, the writer-director, to shoot the film at Nant Lodge, near the village of Furracabad, was owing to the place being owned by a friend. Duncan told the Glen Innes Examiner that the shooting would do nothing for the local economy, would take place on a closed set (so that curious locals could not even watch) and would not offer even passing employment opportunities. The production, he thought, would ‘add a vibe to the town’, but it was ‘unlikely the movie would have its world première at Glen Innes’.13 Nor did it. N E W E N G L A N D F I C T I O N , N E W E N G L A N D L O C AT I O N S

Two further films have been set partially in New England but, ironically, the locations chosen involve almost a direct transposition. That is, where the events took place fictionally was exchanged for where they were actually shot. Osca r a n d Luc i n da Peter Carey’s novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is an epic and sprawling narrative, with the last parts of the story taking place on the Bellinger River, to which the protagonist, Oscar Hopkins, has travelled overland, bringing with him a fantastic glass church. In the novel, Hopkins drags the church to a place called Boat Harbour (a real Boat Harbour is on the Clarence River, further north); in the film the barely established settlement is clearly designated as ‘Bellingen’. The novel commences with the present-day narrator (Oscar’s great-grandson) and his recollection of growing up in Gleniffer, near Bellingen. This location, and indeed the idea of moving a church, is not mere coincidence, but is drawn from Carey’s brief experience of living in the area. In 1996, when the film was produced, the Bellinger River no longer resembled the untouched wilderness of the 1860s (as imagined by Carey), and the producers decided to use the Mann River, near Jackadgery, not far from Grafton. There, an 1866 version of Bellingen was constructed. On 16 November the Grafton Daily Examiner reported the production’s interest in looking for old

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machinery for use as props. Shooting commenced a few days later. About 100 locals were employed as extras, and the Examiner later reported that the production had ‘poured’ ‘more than $700,000 into the local economy’. The final scenes, as the glass church is boated majestically up the Bellinger/Mann River, probably justify the expense. The film’s (and the novel’s) anti-climax is, of course, that during the night the church sinks, taking Oscar with it. Da nny De c kc h ai r If Oscar and Lucinda had to move from Bellingen to the Clarence valley for its conclusion, a film originally written to take place in the Clarence valley had to move to Bellingen for its cinematic location. In the judgement of the writerdirector Jeff Balsmeyer, the towns of the Clarence did not look sufficiently ‘idyllic’, and Bellingen became the location for Danny Deckchair. In the film, the town into which the hero Danny literally descends from the skies is known as ‘Clarence’, a remnant of the original fictional setting. But Bellingen/Clarence is, unlike some earlier films, not simply a generic ‘quaint’ Australian country town. Its New England setting is fairly clear. Danny is thought to be a visiting academic from ‘up north’, from the ‘Lismore University’. Although the story begins and (nearly) ends in Sydney, most of the action takes place in and around Bellingen, and the film uses the main street, the hotel, the courthouse, a ‘quaint’ local weatherboard house, and several parts of the Bellinger River, including the old Pacific Highway bridge. The result is something of a rarity in Australian cinema, as it presents a positive view of life in a small country town. It does maintain the inevitable view that rural folk are simple souls. Danny, the driver of a concrete truck, easily fools them into believing he is a university professor, and he is able, rather like a character from a Frank Capra film of the 1930s, to effect changes in nearly all their lives. None the less, Danny Deckchair is a charming comedy, and makes Bellingen seem an equally charming place. C O N C LU S I O N

Film-making in New England has been clustered mainly around Tamworth, Armidale, Uralla–Guyra and the eastern edge of the Ranges (Dorrigo, Bellingen and Bowraville), with occasional visits to the Clarence and, once, to Glen Innes. No consistent representation of the region has emerged, but then the films in question were made over a period of 80 years, in which much changed. Even so, the predominance of period narratives suggests that towns and farms lend themselves easily to period reconstruction, and that the region is a little ‘out of time’ (see Chapter 24). The period films, and even the contemporary Danny Deckchair, suggest a society that is simple, perhaps even backward, and unspoilt by modern city ways. While many of the representations are flattering, there are negative images—racism in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, sexism in most other films, and a disparaging view of bush behaviour in Little Boy Lost.

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Film Balancing these human images are visual ones, often of great beauty, showing the landscape in its various forms—mountain ranges, forests, open grasslands, rivers and streams. And yet, the absence in most instances of any reference to real places diminishes the capacity of these films to serve as ‘advertisements’ for the region. As with most Australian cinema, audiences are offered ‘typical’ and generic Australian bush and rural towns, rather than anything specifically about or from New England.

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CHAPTER 30 ❈

V is u a l A r ts Meg Vi ve r s

IMPRESSIONS

Approaching the New England Tableland from the west, along the road from Bingara, the traveller comes across magnificent natural granite formations. Here and there, half-hidden among the trees, huge boulders are precariously balanced, presenting sculptural forms that would be the envy of human artists. Occasionally, where the bush has not been cleared for cultivation and grazing, what appear to be ‘bush tucker’ trees remain, clinging to the rock formations. Tenacious to the last, their roots reach out, penetrating the slightest crack, twisting and turning in their search for nourishment, while their dark green leaves, garnished with berries, thrust upward towards the sun. Further east, where the Tableland escarpment gives way to the western slopes and the morning sun rises late, enormous granite monoliths, looking like the parents of the smaller boulders to the west, defy the forces of nature and human interference. Under their ledges, sheltered from the rain, the very first New Englanders painted impressions of their lives and customs—small figures and signs that reach out from the past (see Chapter 7). These art forms—fading, incomplete and largely unexplained—form a tenuous link between nature’s original creativity and the various artistic impressions of New England that have emerged since European settlement. On the other side of the Tableland, where the morning sun first explodes onto the eastern fall and where morning mists drift in from the ocean, fastrunning streams and waterfalls have created scenery of a very different kind. On

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❈ Natural rock formations near Bingara on the western slopes of the New England Tableland. (photo: M. Vivers)

discovering the Apsley Falls near Walcha in 1818, John Oxley, Surveyor-General for the colony of New South Wales, remarked that he and his party were ‘lost in astonishment at the sight of this wonderful natural sublimity’.1 The first European artistic impressions of these falls appeared in Joseph Lycett’s Views of Australia, published in 1824. Two falls were illustrated—Beckett’s Falls and what is now known as Apsley Falls. Later, in 1872 and 1874, Conrad Martens also painted the Apsley Falls. However, these artists altered the topographical facts to fit with the prevailing English taste for melodramatic views of pristine wilderness, in much the same way as Italian artist Salvator Rosa had done in Europe.2 This influence of European artists persisted for some time throughout Australia as artists struggled to come to terms with an unfamiliar landscape that challenged the traditional Eurocentric sense of the ideal. Approaching New England from the north is not such a dramatic experience. The traveller does not encounter a sudden rise but rather a gradual incline punctuated here and there by short, sharp ascents, like that at Bluff Rock near Tenterfield. In 1851 Conrad Martens passed through what is now Cunningham’s Gap in Queensland and the Canning Downs region of south-eastern Queensland. His journey then took him along the Tableland through the Tenterfield district, Glen Innes, on to Armidale, and further south. During his travels his artistic interpretation of the foreboding ‘pristine wilderness’ of the bushlands around Cunningham’s Gap changed in later paintings to portray a landscape where the wilderness has been partly tamed. In his paintings of Canning Downs and New England, Turneresque skies sweep low over a European settlement symbolised by fences, houses and cattle grazing peacefully.3 It was left to artists such as Tom Roberts to begin to capture some of the tension between the harshness and the beauty of the ‘real’ New England. When

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in 1885 Roberts returned to Australia after studying art in London, he had not yet developed a particular style, and his vision was still centred on Europe and a universal audience. On the other hand, he was also interested in ‘the intimate texture of life at first hand’, and he dreamed of producing work that stood ‘in beautiful isolation from all worldly distraction’.4 When Roberts was painting in New England in the last decade of the nineteenth century there was a new move to paint by way of ‘near-photographic, truthful observation’, as well as an ‘international fashion for honouring regional ways of life and work’. The latter fitted well with Roberts’ desire to work in isolation, while the concept of ‘truthful observation’ was to lead him, and other artists of the period, away from what they thought they were supposed to see to what they actually observed and experienced. Roberts’ depiction of tough Australian men working together in shearing sheds, mustering sheep and being held up by bushrangers, set in a landscape that no longer resembled the soft countryside back home in England, was to pave QUEENSLAND

Goondiwindi

Stanthorpe

Ballandean

The Pyramids Drake (Fairfield)

Texas

Tenterfield

Newstead

Glen Innes

Grafton

Stonehenge

Tilbuster

Na

Booralong

Coffs Dorrigo Harbour Ebor

mo

Armidale

i

Gara Falls

er Riv

Boggabri

Uralla

Manilla

Salisbury M a c le a y

Bendemeer Walcha Apsley Falls l

R.

GR

EA

Pe e

Werris Creek

Kempsey

T

Tamworth

r ve

Ri

Gunnedah

Liverpool Plains

cean

Guyra Barraba

Ben Lomond

Pacific O

Bundarra

DING

r

Rive

Moredun

DIVI

Bingara

ce

Furracabad

Inverell

ve r

en

Dundee

Warialda

Narrabri

ar

ir

Cl

Deepwater

Gwyd

Ri

Bolivia

Ashford Moree

R AN G E

Clifton

Nowendoc

Port Macquarie Land above 500m

Conrad Martens (1852)

Land above 1000m

Places visited by Roberts (1894-5)

0

100 Kilometres

LOCATION

❈ The route taken by Conrad Martens through New England, and some places visited by Tom Roberts. (Map drawn from information supplied by J. Ross and C. Humphreys.

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Visual Arts the way for a more ‘realistic’ interpretation of New England. His ‘Bailed Up’, painted at Newstead, near Inverell, although criticised for its rather static historical representation, has a significantly different ‘feel’ from that evoked by Martens’ landscapes (see colour plates). However, it took Roberts many years before he was satisfied with the painting, touching and re-touching it as he tried to capture what he saw as a true representation of a New England scene. Meanwhile, his ‘The Golden Fleece’, also painted at Newstead, captures some of the glaring sunshine and rough pastoral life of a sheep property in New England.5 In his representations of New England, we begin to sense that Roberts is questioning the Eurocentric perception of the ideal in relation to the real. This is reflected in his experimentation with angular shadows and shapes that evoke something quite different from the soft, sweeping misty skies and contented cattle of Martens’ works.

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❈ A drawing by Conrad Martens of the Salisbury Court homestead near Uralla. Martens’ paintings of the landscape and settlement of New England reflect a distinct European heritage with soft curving lines and Turneresque skies.

This more ‘real’ representation was gradually taken further by artists such as Elioth Gruner, who visited the Tenterfield region around 1920 and painted the Sovereign River. However, in spite of showing a better understanding of the Australian landscape, Gruner still likened the nearby Mingoola hills to the Holy Land.6 Much later, in 1999, Jeffrey Makin, visiting the Apsley Gorge and Falls, strongly delineated walls of rock at the sides of the gorge in his painting ‘The Apsley Gorge’, now in a private collection in Melbourne. In this painting, the structured sections of falling water and sloping shadows appear to build upon Roberts’ experimentation with lines and angles. However, Makin’s style cannot be said to represent the New England region in particular, as it is typical of other works of his depicting scenes throughout Australia. Another of his paintings, ‘The Apsley Falls’, is more whimsical, with its soft mists and the suggestion of a rainbow, but again, in my opinion, the colours and structure

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demonstrate a lack of understanding of, or sensibility for, the eastern falls of New England.7 Artists such as Angus Nivison and Stuart Boggs, who actually live in New England, have begun to grasp the real essence of the landscape, as though returning to new and fresh beginnings. Like the landscape of Judith Wright’s poetry that winces under winter, these later impressions tend to refer back to the archetypal or skeletal art forms of nature. Such work, I would argue, stands alone, isolated from representations dictated by a European heritance. This move away from a traditional or idealised viewpoint can be discerned in recent depictions of landscape throughout Australia, for example in the works of Fred Williams and John Olsen. However, there appears to be something specifically ‘New England’ in the paintings by Nivison and Boggs that signifies a special sense of place and belonging. The semi-abstract work of Meg Vivers, of Armidale, has a similar inspiration. Visual artists in other media have also found ways to avoid dependence upon established traditions. For example, through her textile artworks, Jenny Evelyn from Armidale has embraced a myriad of links observed within the natural world that surrounds her. A special sense of place is absorbed and expressed as imagery embedded in cloth, using dyes and pigments, batik, wax etching, dye discharge and screen printing. This project has been expanded into experimentation with digital art forms on silk (see colour plates). In northern New England, Sue Jurd of Tenterfield has created textile works, mainly on silk, depicting the four seasons and the native flora and fauna of the region. In 1988, aware of the importance of the clearly defined changing seasons and the beauty of introduced European trees, the then Armidale City Council commissioned another Armidale resident, internationally renowned textile artist Tom Moore, to create a tapestry of cotton warp, together with wool and silk weft, that depicts autumn leaves superimposed on a street plan of Armidale. The tapestry hangs in the first-floor meeting room of Armidale Dumaresq Council, beside a background of liquid amber trees, visible through the window. The creative works of ceramic artists Anna Henderson and Kiyotaka Hashimoto of Armidale are inspired by the soils, skies and natural shapes of New England. (For Henderson, see colour plates.) Henderson has lately extended her creativity to paintings, in which the texture and colours similarly mirror the landscape in which she lives. Wood carvers, such as Chris Humphreys from Tenterfield and Shane Stark from Ashford, imitate the harsh elements of the region by following the weathered grain of local timbers, thus creating art that refers back to natural formations. François Jaggi of Armidale creates wonderfully realistic local animals in bronze. Artists Anne and John Andrews, who live in the spectacular gorge country east of Walcha, have been experimenting with ways in which to represent their surroundings through photography and painting respectively. In a style slightly reminiscent of Fred Williams, John’s paintings evoke the blue-green shapes of eucalypts silhouetted against the eastern slopes and cliffs of New England, while Anne uses her camera to capture special moments, such as the mist rising off a dam on a cold New England morning (see colour plates). Some excellent gorge

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Visual Arts photography is also being produced by Simon Scott of Armidale, who knows intimately much of the area around the New England National Park. Impressions of New England are also being produced by way of public art forms. Walcha’s Stephen King has created wooden sculptures for his home town that evoke a strong sense of the surrounding bushlands. Sculptors Joan Relke and Carl Merten have gone further by bringing in some of the natural granite boulders from the western side and situating them in a park on the northern outskirts of Uralla. On the rocks, they have placed cast aluminium sculptures relating to the constellations of Carina and the Southern Cross. Ultimately, eight sculptures are planned for this project, to be constructed by various artists. Radiating from a central, twenty-metre obelisk pointing to the southern polar centre, the result will be a permanent educational and artistic installation combining nature, science, art and community that will be uniquely New England. A more traditional bronze sculpture of local legend Captain Thunderbolt, created by Dennis Adams, stands proudly in Uralla’s main street, welcoming visitors to a small town with a strong sense of its own identity, and a strong sense too of the importance of the arts and of local history. In Tenterfield and in neighbouring Wallangarra murals have become a feature, providing a way for artists of all ages to express their sense of place and to record regional history. At Wallangarra State School, Indigenous murals by Bruce McIntosh promote community adhesion and recognition of the region’s more distant past, while at St Joseph’s School in Tenterfield students, guided by Jean Braid, have created a mural that depicts European progress. The creation of other murals at Tenterfield schools and elsewhere, initiated by artists such as Barbara Johnson and Bronwyn Bancroft, have encouraged young people to create representational art that emphasises a strong sense of belonging to a particular region. The Armidale Dumaresq Council has begun what is expected to be an ongoing program of ‘Art in a Park’ along the Creeklands in Armidale. Typical of New England is Carl Merten’s installation depicting three black cockatoos, while a bronze water feature by François Jaggi adds a different dimension. Fitting in nicely with this project is Stephen King’s wooden tree-trunk sculpture, which marks the entrance to a memorial garden commemorating the poet Judith Wright. King has carved some lines from one of Judith’s poems into the wood, suggesting an intimate and yet very public involvement with the region, its people and its art. Although there has been much unique expression shown in abstract and semi-abstract art works that depict a special sense of place, many traditional and semi-traditional works are also being produced. Such works are an important part of the visual arts heritage of New England. Inspired works by watercolourists such as Anni Washington of Tenterfield, Lucy and Barry McCann and James White of Armidale, along with oil paintings by Rhonda Marsh of Glen Innes and Melvin Duffy of Armidale, are eagerly purchased, not only by local people, but also by travellers wishing to take away with them something which is, to them, more recognisably ‘New England’.

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❈ One of Gerhard Koertner’s detailed drawings of a Common Brushtail Possum.

Black and white drawings of New England’s heritage buildings by artists such as Dennis Hope, and Gerhard Koertner’s exquisite drawings and photographs of the local fauna and flora, have also provided the region with valuable historical records of both settler architecture and the natural environment. A RT S O C I E T I E S , G A L L E R I E S A N D M U S E U M S

The first European settlers approached the New England Tableland from the south, struggling up the Moonbi Range with their household belongings strapped to wagons and drays. Their first view of the foreboding ranges ahead, from about where Tamworth now stands, must have aroused a feeling of awe, and of having to overcome a distinct barrier as they passed into what, to them, seemed another world. The poet Banjo Paterson evoked a sense of New England as ‘a land apart’

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Visual Arts in his poem ‘Over the Range’. In the poem, the small girl who sees above and beyond the Moonbi Range as a separate heaven on earth, perhaps embodies the feelings of many who, over the years, have sensed a division between ‘down below’ and ‘up above’ where the New England Tableland is concerned:

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Little bush maiden, wondering-eyed, Playing alone in the creek-bed dry, In the small green flat on every side Walled in by the Moonbi ranges high; Tell us the tale of your lonely life, ’Mid the great grey forests that know no change. ‘I never have left my home,’ she said, ‘I have never been over the Moonbi Range.’ … ‘And what is this country like, my lass?’ ‘There are blossoming trees and pretty flowers, And shining creeks where the golden grass Is fresh and sweet from the summer showers. They never need work, nor want, nor weep; No troubles can come their hearts to estrange. Some summer night I shall fall asleep, And wake in the country over the range.’8 Although this idyllic view of the Tableland from down below might preclude the reality of freezing winters and hot, dry summers—conditions that can quickly wither the ‘fresh sweet grass’ and ‘pretty flowers’—similar sentiments of distinctness still exist in the minds of many New Englanders. Certainly, Armidale and Tamworth, standing above and below the range, have developed their own strong sense of individual identity, in particular where art is concerned. Both cities have taken on the care and promotion of prestigious art collections. The Tamworth City Gallery was established in 1919 by the City Council as an art salon, and moved to the premises of the Tamworth City Library in 1961. In December 2004, along with the library, it moved again, as the Tamworth Regional Gallery, to a modern building in Peel Street. The gallery’s original bequest of 100 paintings and works on paper from artist John Salvana in 1919 was augmented in 1961 by acquisition of the Burdekin Collection, a substantial gift of Australian and European paintings including works by Will Ashton, Elioth Gruner, Hans Heysen, Norman Lindsay and Sydney Long. In 1967 the Lyttleton Taylor family donated the Regan Silverware Collection, which contains some of the best-known examples of early Australian silverware. The gallery also has a valuable collection of fibre and textile works and is actively involved in organising prestigious exhibitions by visiting artists.9 Like Tamworth, Armidale has also been fortunate to receive important bequests, most of which are housed in the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM), Kentucky Street. Opened in 1983, after an appeal which

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raised $1 000 000, the museum initially housed two significant collections of Australian art—the Howard Hinton and Chandler Coventry collections. The Hinton collection consists of over 1000 paintings, drawings and prints donated to the Armidale Teachers’ College between 1929 and 1948 by a well-known patron of the arts, Howard Hinton, of Sydney. The Chandler Coventry Collection covers the period of the 1960s and 70s. It consists of over 300 works donated by the late Chandler Coventry, who spent a large part of his life in New England as a pastoralist. A third collection managed by NERAM is the Armidale City Collection of approximately 100 works, mostly by local artists, bought during 1963–79. These hang on the walls of many public premises in Armidale. NERAM also purchases works of art and receives donations from both collectors and artists (the NERAM Collection), bringing the total number of paintings, works on paper and sculptures to more than 5000—a holding conservatively valued at $35 000 000. It is one of the two or three finest regional galleries in Australia. NERAM’s early success was due, largely, to its director, Joe Eisenberg. In October 1997, following energetic fundraising, the building’s size was doubled, providing space for eight exhibition venues as well as the Museum Shop, the Café, the Packsaddle Artist Studio and the Mazda Foundation Theatre, a combined lecture theatre and conference space. A Museum of Printing was opened at NERAM in April 2001 and houses the Wimble Collection, originally owned by Mr Harry Wallace, of Sydney. This is the only public collection of presses and ancillary printing equipment open to the public in Australia.10 The complex of buildings is surrounded by terraces and gardens displaying outdoor sculpture. In 2004, NERAM’s Amanda Cachia curated an exhibition of works by ten regional artists entitled ‘New England Picture: In What They Paint I See’. This stunning display demonstrated how a variety of different styles all have the capacity to evoke a special sense of place. From Rupert Richardson’s more traditional interpretation of landscape to a skilful semi-abstract depiction of fences, buildings and dams by Nigel Gillespie, from the beautifully structured, multi-layered impressions of Fay Porter, to the more abstract and archetypal works of Angus Nivison, Rowen Matthews and Kerry Gulliver, this collection of paintings gave a strong indication of how various artists have responded to their surroundings. More importantly, all the works evoke a strong, unmistakable feel of New England. NERAM was also actively involved in the instigation of the lucrative Country Energy landscape competition, in which many local artists take part. Complementing the function of NERAM, the New England Art Society (NEAS) was formed in 1995 by a group of artists and art lovers who were keen to support regional art and to provide local artists with exhibition space and arts tuition. After establishing galleries at various successive venues in Armidale, in 2004 the society moved to premises in the Armidale Mall, where extra space allowed for workshops, seminars and exhibitions, providing an essential community service in a central position. By the end of 2005, NEAS was supported by over 170 members and the exhibition space had become ‘Armidale Art Gallery’. Since its inception, NEAS has organised annual and biennial competitive

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Visual Arts art exhibitions, which attract up to 200 entries. Since 2004 a competitive art exhibition, ‘Farmgate’, has been organised in conjunction with Wool Expo, held annually in Armidale. It is hoped that this competition will become a permanent annual event, making local art accessible to a larger cross-section of the community. Prizes are sponsored by local businesses. Inverell also has a very progressive Art Society and Gallery. The Inverell Art Society was formed in 1961, with members taking advantage of an Adult Education program organised by the University of New England. Arts tuition has since continued in various forms, and the society runs a successful gallery displaying the work of local artists. It also organises an annual art competition. In 1996 the Inverell Art Society and the Inverell Cultural Council hosted an extremely successful Tom Roberts art exhibition and festival, showing many original works. A similarly ambitious program was undertaken in 2001, when the subject of the painting ‘Bailed Up’ was enacted by local people on a site near where the original work is thought to have been created. In 2006 the Tom Roberts Festival was again a resounding success. It promises to continue as a major event for the district, and a lasting memorial to the painter and his local work. Tenterfield artists have been encouraged by the development of a major art gallery in nearby Stanthorpe, just over the border in Queensland, which now holds a growing collection of works, many by local artists. The Borderline Regional Arts Association (formed in 1994) is active in the Tenterfield region, and its members have held joint exhibitions at various galleries, including the Stanthorpe gallery and the New England Art Society’s Armidale Art Gallery. Other regional towns, including Glen Innes, Uralla, Bendemeer, Bingara, Dorrigo, Barraba and Walcha, have active arts communities, holding exhibitions and running successful galleries. Such activities demonstrate a strong interest in the art and artists of the region.

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Systematic training in the visual arts, apart from that of the Indigenous people, began in New England in the secondary schools, especially girls’ schools. However, during the colonial period and for long afterwards children were not usually encouraged to draw and paint what they saw about them. For instance, when Lilly McLeod, of the New England Ladies College, Armidale (afterwards a medallist at the Sydney Technical College), was awarded first prize for art at the school speech-day in 1893, it was for a painting, presumably watercolour, of ‘Moonlight on the Scottish Coast’.11 Such themes were typical. During the 1960s and 70s the University of New England summer schools were an important feature of art education in the region and beyond. Instigated by Bernard James, well-known artists such as Desiderius Orban, Stanislaus Rapotec, George Baldessin, Andrew Sibley, Frank Hodgkinson, Fred Cress, Irene Amos and John Olsen were brought to Armidale as painting and drawing tutors. David Rose tutored in printmaking and Les Kossatz in sculpture. Pottery tutors included Col Levy, Shiga Shigeo and Mernard Sahm. Creative embroidery

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schools were held with Patricia Langford and Cynthia Sparks, and metalwork, weaving, fabric-printing and clay and glazes workshops took place at the Technical College (the predecessor of Armidale TAFE). Exhibitions of the work of many of these tutors were held in conjunction with the schools, at either the Armidale City Art Gallery (then on the site of the present Armidale Dumaresq Council building) or at Umberumberka Gallery on the Rockvale Road. Various visual and performing arts workshops and demonstrations were an integral part of the summer schools. Some of the major Sydney galleries participated by lending works for display during the schools. One year a major John Olsen tapestry was brought to Armidale. Another participant at the weaving schools was the well-known textile artist Tom Moore (mentioned earlier). The first major calligraphy school held in Australia was conducted in Armidale in the early 1980s, with the Queen’s Scribe, Donald Jackson, as tutor and with many of Australia’s top calligraphers taking part. With such talented tutors, Armidale was seen to be at the forefront of art education in country regions. This ambitious program has not been sustained in its original form in Armidale, but NERAM and NEAS, sometimes supported by government grants, have since been running a variety of well-attended art workshops. Artists from the region also flock to major art workshops held in nearby Toowoomba and Grafton, while centres such as Tenterfield and Inverell organise their own workshop programs and tutorial sessions. C O N C LU S I O N

In this chapter I have not attempted a comprehensive listing of all the art works and artists that have contributed to New England’s sense of itself. The list would be too long, and inevitably incomplete. Instead, I have tried to identify some of the ways in which development of the visual arts has grown alongside a sense of place and regional identity. Many of the developments run parallel to national, and even international, trends. However, beyond these trends, it is possible to catch a glimpse of something that is uniquely New England. Artists who travelled through, and painted, the New England landscape during early European settlement used as reference points the familiar artistic styles and landscape impressions originating in Europe. Later on, visiting artists such as Tom Roberts and Jeffrey Makin began to see the landscape and its people a little differently. However, it is the artists who have actually lived in the region who appear to have sensed its uniqueness most thoroughly. This is reflected in various ways in their work. Textile art, pottery, woodwork, painting, sculpture, photography, all take on the ‘feel’ of the Tableland—its harsh cold winters, hot dry summers, brilliant autumns, sudden storms, deep gorges and sparkling streams. In spite of changes to the landscape brought about by European settlement, there remains a timelessness that is reflected in much of the more recent art. This sense of standing still mirrors that of the ancient rock formations and even the fragments of Indigenous art remaining beneath the rock ledges of the Tableland escarpment. All are aspects of New England’s heritage.

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EPILOGUE ❈

‘a h ig h l e a n c o u n t r y / fu ll o f o ld s to ries’ Iai n Dav i ds o n

Capturing the character of any region is never easy, but in Australia it is particularly difficult. In Europe and much of the Old World, regional cultures grew through long periods of local isolation and shared histories. In the Americas, regionalism is well marked—partly through the group immigration of communities distinguished by common interest (often religious) and common patterns of speech—but colonial societies elsewhere are not so neatly divided. If any part of Australia does have such a regional culture, it should be New England. With a certain geographical distinctness, its first European settlers were proud of being largely untainted by a continuing convict presence. Later, and more significantly, for several decades it boasted a strong movement for a new state, with a government of its own. A region’s unity depends on shared identities. How strong is the shared identity of New England? We have at our borders, or just beyond, Pallamallawa, Gulargumbone and Mummulgum. Well within lie Wollomombi, Boorolong, Wongwibinda and Dundurabin, but also Bergen-op-Zoom, Dumaresq, Saumarez and Metz; Terrible Vale, Yarrowick, Gostwyck and Mother of Ducks Lagoon. And what was Ward’s Mistake? The very heterogeneity of these names emphasises difference of origin, not commonality of purpose.1 T H E FA C E O F N E W E N G L A N D

New England is a highland.2 Much of it is higher than Britain’s highest point, Ben Nevis, in Scotland. Almost all of it is higher than any part of England.

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Armidale’s airport is higher than Snowdon, in Wales. It is girt, not by sea, but on one side by a fringe of rainforests filled with the remnants of Australia’s Gondwanan past, on the other by the ‘inback’—the black soil plains that interleave with the red sands of the outback. To the south there is the barrier of the Moonbi Range. It is not impassable, but perhaps we underestimate the extent of the mountains that surround us, because ours is neither a geography nor a history full of pretty peasant villages approached by goat- and donkey-tracks. The New England novelist Gwen Kelly speaks of roads (post-1945) that ‘were barely roads; rocks, scattered along the centre to give a surface, and dust and potholes and hazardous mist-covered mountains’.3 Sealed roads were rare until after the middle of the twentieth century. The mist-covered mountains remain, as they always have. But some things have changed. The land that John Oxley saw was Aboriginal land, but the Aboriginal hunting nets fixed between trees, noticed by William Gardner in the 1850s, have gone. It is tempting to define New England by the places said to be massacre sites that lie along its edges: Bluff Rock near Tenterfield, Darkies’ Point on the escarpment near Ebor and Myall Creek on the western margin north of Bingara.4 But to do so would be to forget that most of the people living in New England today have no kinship with the killers. Also, it would be to rely on a seeming unity among Aborigines on the Tableland, and to ignore the fact that Gamilaraay, Ngarabul, Aniwan, Dunghutti and Gumbaynggir people each proudly retain their separate identities and knowledge, as handed down by tradition. Wincing un de r w i n t e r An underlying theme of this book is New England’s weather, which reflects the most frequent comment made by outsiders. April is the cruellest month in New England, not for the lilacs, as T.S. Eliot would have it, but because its dryness brings the annual fear of drought, and because Anzac Day (25 April) is a common marker for the onset of cold nights and the slowing of pasture growth until the spring. To be sure, New England is cold in winter, but our nights of heavy frost are followed by days of shining clarity, blue skies and sunshine. In summer the temperatures never reach the old century mark, and for the most part we are free of the coastal humidity, allowing few days of discomfort. Our cooler nights are a boon rare on the coast. Once the railway link was established, New England became a refuge for people of Brisbane seeking comfort and health in summer.5 The climate was thought to be good for learning and early in Armidale’s history the seeds of tertiary education were sown. Armidale now has an Autumn Festival celebrating the change of seasons shown so spectacularly by the colourful leaves of the pistachio, poplar and claret ash planted along its streets in the 1960s, at the instigation of Alwyn Jones. But planting foreign (not just English) trees in New England began many years ago—why else are the streams of the Tableland lined with willows, their ‘maiden tresses’ cropped by cattle into unnatural bobs? The original plans for

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`a high lean country/full of old stories´ 357

❈ An English elm on the site originally planned for Booloominbah. Elms were said to sweeten the Australian soil. (photo: I. Davidson)

Booloominbah homestead, now part of the University of New England, placed it on another hill. Foreign trees planted there in the 1880s, before the decision to move to its present site, still stand—evidence of what might have been. Natu re’s a b un da n t gi ft s— c e da r, g o l d , l ives t o c k an d g r ain New England has many examples of what might have been. The escarpment’s forests once were full of the red gold of native cedar, now very scarce and preserved (just) in the Dyke River State Forest. Timber-cutters foraged everywhere, not just for cedar, and some went to extraordinary lengths to build their mills—environmentalists would be sure they were dark and satanic. At Bagot’s Mill, near Ben Lomond, the elaborate housing for the mill’s water-wheel survives, and aerial photographs show that the mill was used for both timbercutting and seed-grinding.6 But the mill is an example of vaunting ambition overreaching financial and hydraulic sense. Besides, the coming of the railway made the local milling of grain unnecessary. Scattered across the New England landscape are other relics of ambition and disappointment, such as Captain Richards’ house at Winterbourne, north of Walcha, built facing the wrong way and, ultimately, in the wrong place—too remote from transport and supply. It was abandoned by 1922 and the formerly substantial ruins are now crumbling rapidly.7 Crossing the escarpment was difficult, and various routes were tried including the Grafton to Glen Innes road through Newton Boyd, where Australia’s first road tunnel was cut at

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Dalmorton. Of the three nineteenth-century roads commonly taken by more than single horses, only that between Walcha and Port Macquarie is still much used, thanks to its successive improvements.8 So it is with mining—never sustainable in the long term, as Broken Hill can testify.9 In New England, Rocky River, Hillgrove, Tingha and Torrington barely survive as separate towns with the passing of their mining heyday. All the same, there is still a healthy tourist route—the Fossicker’s Way—on the western margin of the Tableland, where gold, sapphires and jasper can be found, and Inverell is still a large producer of sapphires. Other towns have faded too, such as Irishtown, north-west of Walcha, Falconer, north-east of Guyra, and Guy Fawkes, west of Ebor, some of them redundant since the passing of horsedrawn transport, others left behind by the vicissitudes of New England farming.

❈ One of the last remaining buildings of Irishtown— a dairy shed. (photo: I. Davidson)

Some of these adjustments were inevitable as the incoming peoples worked out what was most suitable for this new land. Where once it seemed possible that New England could be self-sufficient in foods, bitter experience showed that wheat was a poor crop, and the arrival of the railway killed off both arable farming and the milling that went with it. There were four flour mills in Armidale in the mid-1800s, including that of James McLean, but by 1891

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`a high lean country/full of old stories´ only one remained.10 More recently, the collapse of the wool market has seen sheep numbers fall and cattle increase. The New State Movement itself, from the 1920s to the 1970s, is another might-have-been, although as this book goes to press there are slight signs of its revival.

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Beau ty ri c h a n d r a re New England has its share of fine buildings. It boasts some of the finest of those designed by one of Australia’s most extraordinary architects, John Horbury Hunt.11 There are five, perhaps six, churches by Hunt, of which Armidale’s St Peter’s Cathedral is said to be the best, and another five or six secular buildings, of which Booloominbah is the most remarkable. Other examples are at Bundarra, Inverell, Ollera (west of Guyra), Walcha and, perhaps, Tingha. In each of these buildings, Hunt displayed a mastery of brickwork, including many innovative ornamental details. He showed his originality through control of spaces and avoidance of the symmetrical and the obvious. Religious and domestic buildings alike used stained glass to great effect, nowhere better than in Booloominbah, with its majestic ‘Gordon’ window and

❈ Part of the north side of St Peter’s Cathedral. (photo: I. Davidson)

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its charming vernacular pictures of native Australian animals. The domestic buildings are full of characteristic original details, signifying class differences— generously high skirting boards in the family rooms and meaner ones in the servants’ wing. Hunt bears comparison with other architects such as Spain’s Antoni Gaudí, who use in startlingly new ways a medium others use prosaically (brickwork for Hunt, concrete for Gaudí), who delight in imaginative use of detail and who set their stamp on the architectural character of a place (New England for Hunt, for Gaudí Barcelona). On ever y pa ge — a r t a n d li t e r a t ure The New England Regional Art Museum has been said to contain the two finest private collections of art in Australia—the Hinton Collection, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Coventry Collection from the second half of the twentieth—and competes for the title of the best regional gallery.12 Its impact on the region is through its presentation of art of the highest quality as an inspiration for regional artists, some of whom are now represented in its collections. A good part of the other creative work associated with New England is due to the presence of the University of New England and its precursor, the Armidale Teachers’ College, established through careful planning by David

❈ One of the many images of Australian wildlife that adorn the inside of Booloominbah— except that this is a town-dweller’s fantasy, since nothing of any such shape (something like a bilby) ever climbed trees.

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`a high lean country/full of old stories´ Drummond and others. Members of both college and university have produced creative works of all sorts, and have provoked others to do so, to the extent that Armidale is probably a candidate for the Australian town with the highest per capita productivity rate of books. Many local literary figures are not associated with the university—Judith Wright, Sophie Masson, Beverley Harper, John Heffernan and Alex Buzo, for example—and others such as Rolf Boldrewood and Dymphna Cusack—who wrote before the university existed. The presence of a university may have attracted some to the region, but others came for different reasons. The best-known songs by a New Englander are, of course, those of Peter Allen, who celebrated his home-town in ‘Tenterfield Saddler’. But his identification was not unnaturally with his nation rather than his region, for he wrote Australia’s greatest anthem, ‘I still call Australia home’. In the end, perhaps this is the difficulty in seeking to define a region’s identity. All who live in it also have loyalties to their country at large and, if they are of immigrant stock, to the home of their forebears.

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Common identity requires shared symbols. For the nation as a whole, war memorials provide some of this symbolism and, for historical reasons, many look beyond the Australia to Old England. At Dangarsleigh, outside Armidale, for example, the memorial is explicitly shaped to recognise the association between the three home countries, England, Scotland and Ireland (forgetting Wales) and the five Dominions, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and India. There is no suggestion here that the young men it commemorates came from New England, and breathed New English air. Tamworth gets close to defining an identity symbolically through its Country Music Festival. Other towns have sought to establish their own identities through festivals—the Lamb and Potato Festival in Guyra, the Orange Festival in Bingara, the Arts Festival of the 1970s and 80s in Armidale, now its Autumn Festival, the Tom Roberts Festival in Inverell and the Celtic Festival in Glen Innes. The Celtic Council of Australia created a national monument to honour Celtic pioneers in Australia by building the Australian Standing Stones at Glen Innes.13 None of these celebrations provide anything like the identification, or the income, that Tamworth has gained through its Country Music. Yet each succeeds in capturing or creating some part of the character of New England. Whether these parts make up a consistent and obvious whole is another matter. There was a time when David Drummond’s vision of the integrating force of education might have achieved greater unity for the New England region through the proselytising power of the Armidale Teachers’ College and the University of New England. And perhaps at times it has. These institutions created, for instance, the New England Theatre Company, an unmistakeably far-ranging regional body. But such successes have been dissipated, by the

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aspirations of Australia’s first regional university to perform on the world stage, and then by a relative neglect of the region, as UNE struggled to keep in step with the other universities in Australia. In its attempts to do so, the university turned its back, for instance, on the earlier deliberate provision of adult education throughout New England’s towns and villages.14 The identity and character of regions, then, is difficult to identify. New England has a shared landscape, some shared history and some outstanding cultural resources with which to forge a common identity. There have been powerful continuities among families of all kinds, towns and villages, pastoral and industrial enterprises, and other institutions. These continuities persist symbolically by telling—as we have sought to do—the old stories of which the country is full, in Judith Wright’s phrase. But a strong sense of collective identity is much more difficult now for a region such as ours, when people can travel comfortably across it in any direction within a day, and when ease of communications means that each of us can belong to our own virtual communities, whether one or many, scattered throughout the world. On the other hand, the identities of Old England— and of the Old World in general—have spread across the world too, over a much longer period, forging distinctive regional heritages, each with different strengths and drawing in varied ways on their places of origin. Some regions define themselves by their origins or histories. Others, like New England, are defined for us more loosely. The distinctiveness of all these regions, however, derives from a heritage that combines elements from the cultures of the peoples who live there. Old stories are central to those cultures, and the stories in this book in turn define our country—New England.

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E N D N OTES ADHSJ HRA HRC JRAHS NPWS SRNSW UNERA

Armidale and District Historical Society Journal Historical Records of Australia Historic Resources Centre Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society National Parks and Wildlife Service State Records of New South Wales University of New England Regional Archives

P R E LU D E 1 Folk Life Newsletter, no. 21 (2006, and concerning a conference to take place in September 2006); T. Pratchett, ‘Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories’, Folklore, vol. 111 (2000), p. 166. 2 G.S. Harman, ‘Armidale’s Bid to be Selected as the Site of Australia’s Federal Capital’, ADHSJ, no. 7 (1964), pp. 9–14. 3 ‘Report of the Royal Commission (Mr H.S. Nicholas) as to Areas Suitable to be Created New States’, New South Wales Parliamentary Papers, 1934–35, vol. 3, p. 1201. 4 New State Magazine, no. 1, vol. 1 (July 1921), p. 3. 5 New State Magazine, no. 1, vol. 1 (July 1921), pp. 11–12. 6 J.S. Ryan, Find Out What People Want—Australia’s Most Successful Community– University Dialogue: Lessons from New England, 1947–1980 (Armidale, 1999); J.S. Ryan, Robert Bowden Madgwick (1905–1979): Modest Educationalist, Compassionate Visionary, and Civilising Force for his Region and the Nation, a Man Ever Concerned to Know How Ordinary People Lived and Worked (Armidale, 2004). 7 J.S. Ryan (ed.), Writing Tenterfield: A Collection of Historical, Cultural and Other Essays (Armidale, 2002), p. vii (and the book as a whole). 8 Ryan, Writing Tenterfield, p. xiii. 9 W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955), p. 14. 10 Les Murray, ‘North of My Days’, Notes and Furphies, no. 1 (October 1978), p. 20. 11 J.S. Ryan, ‘The Pattern of Folk Belief and Folklore in New England’, in M. Clarke (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth National Folklore Conference Held at Wright College, University of New England, Armidale, November 1990 (Canberra, 1991), p. 59. 12 B. McDonald, ‘Tradition as Personal Relationship’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 110 (1997), p. 64. C H A P T E R 1 W H AT I S N E W E N G L A N D ? 1 J. Wetherspoon, ‘My Own New England Home’, in his Warblings from the Bush (Sydney, 1890), pp. 17–18.

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Endnotes—pages 11 to 23 364

2 Wetherspoon, ‘Stonehenge’ and ‘Night Musings’, in his Warblings, pp. 18–20, 30–4. 3 Charles Lyne, The Industries of New South Wales (Sydney, 1882), p. 149. 4 Lyne, Industries, p. 150. 5 Lyne, Industries, p. 17. 6 Lyne, Industries, pp. 151, 171. 7 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, p. 178. 8 Judith Wright, ‘South of My Days’. 9 Sydney Herald, 16 May 1836. 10 NSW Government Gazette, 22 May 1839, p. 605. 11 R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), pp. 175–6. 12 Walker, Old New England, pp. 155–6. 13 Australian, 12 January 1841; Archibald Boyd to Earl Grey, 27 June 1849, National Archives (UK), CO 201/424, ff. 100, 101. 14 Sydney Herald, 17 August 1841. 15 D. Thomas, ‘“Shearing the Rams”, 1888–90, “The Golden Fleece”, 1894’, in Radford (ed.), Tom Roberts (Sydney, 1996), pp. 102–4. 16 D. Aitkin, ‘“Countrymindedness”: The spread of an idea’, Australian Cultural History, no. 4 (1985). 17 J.S. Moyes, Australia: The Church and the Future (Sydney, 1942), pp. 76–7, 86–8; J.S. Moyes, The Christian Doctrine of Man in Society and Industry (Sydney, 1961), pp. 2–3, 10–11. 18 K. Richmond, ‘The New England New State Movement: Electoral Activity in 1968 and 1971’, ADHSJ, no. 23 (1980); E.R. Woolmington, A Spatial Approach to the Measurement of Support for the Separatist Movement in Northern New South Wales (Armidale, 1966), pp. 45–54. 19 ‘New England Online: Information on the Kingdom of New England’, www. newenglandonline.info/index.html [accessed 19 December 2005]. John Ryan pointed this kingdom out to me. 20 M. Jordan, A Spirit of True Learning: The Jubilee History of the University of New England (Sydney, 2004), pp. 181–3, 187, 195–6. 21 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), pp. 121–2; Jordan, A Spirit of True Learning, pp. 67–8, 102–3, 125, 192–3. 22 John Ryan contributed this point. 23 I am grateful to Jillian Oppenheimer here, and earlier. C H A P T E R 2 T H E RO C K S B E N E AT H 1 J. Oxley, Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales (London, 1820), pp. 260–320. 2 S.J. Gale and R.J. Haworth, ‘Beyond the Limits of Location: Human Environmental Disturbance Prior to Official European Contact in Early Colonial Australia’, Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 37 (2002), pp. 123–36.

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Endnotes—pages 23 to 31 3 Oxley, Journals, p. 298. 4 Oxley, Journals, pp. 293–5. 5 C.D. Ollier and C.F. Pain, ‘Equating the Basal Unconformity with the Palaeoplain: A Model for Passive Margins’, Cooperative Research for Landscape Evolution and Mineral Exploration (1996), p. 15. 6 Oxley, Journals, p. 309. 7 R.W. Galloway, ‘Late Quaternary Climates in Australia’, Journal of Geology, vol. 73 (1965), p. 610. 8 R.J. Haworth, S.J. Gale, S.A. Short and H. Heijnes, ‘Land Use and Lake Sedimentation on the New England Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia’, Australian Geographer, vol. 30 (1999), p. 62. 9 Haworth et al., ‘Land use and lake sedimentation’, p. 70. 10 C.D. Ollier, ‘Tectonics and Geomorphology of the Eastern Highlands’, in J.L. Davies and M.A.J. Williams (eds), Landform Evolution in Australasia (Canberra, 1978), p. 12. 11 Ollier, ‘Tectonics and Geomorphology of the Eastern Highlands’, p. 29. 12 S.J. Pyne, The Ice (London, 2003). 13 E. Grainger, The Remarkable Reverend Clarke (Oxford, 1982), p. 197 (quotation), pp. 199–204. 14 Grainger, The Remarkable Reverend Clarke, p. 197. 15 C. Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York, 1909), vol. 29, pp. 160–1. 16 See J. Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (New York, 1802), p. 102. 17 Ollier and Pain, ‘Equating the Basal Unconformity with the Palaeoplain’, p. 9. 18 Grainger, The Remarkable Reverend Clarke, p. 199. 19 T.W.E. David, ‘Notes on Some Points of Basalt Eruptions in New South Wales’, Transactions of the Geological Society of Australasia, vol. 1 (1886), pp. 24–30. 20 Pyne, The Ice; A. Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History, vol. 2 (Melbourne, 2004), p. 87. 21 J.S. Ryan, ‘The Shaper of New England: Some Account of the Middle Years of John James Galloway’, part 1, ADHSJ, no. 17 (1974), pp. 5–20. 22 Ryan, ‘The Shaper of New England’, part 1, p. 5. 23 Atkinson, The Europeans, vol. 2, p. 102. 24 For instance, his Sydney Scenery (1956), which went through many editions. 25 E.C. Andrews, ‘An Outline of the Tertiary History of New England’, Records of the Geological Survey of NSW, vol. 7 (1903), pp. 140–216; E.C. Andrews, ‘Geographical Unity of Eastern Australia in Late- and Post-Tertiary’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 44 (1910), pp. 420–80. 26 F.A. Craft, ‘The Coastal Tablelands and Streams of New South Wales’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, vol. 58 (1933), pp. 437–60. 27 See R. Warner, ‘The Early Tertiary Landscape in Southern New England, New South Wales: A reappraisal’, Australian Geographer, vol. 11 (1970), pp. 242–58.

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Endnotes—pages 32 to 44 366

28 L.C. King, The Morphology of the Earth: A Study and Synthesis of World Scenery (Edinburgh, 1962). 29 R.J. Haworth and C.D. Ollier, ‘Continental Rifting and Drainage Reversal: The Clarence River of Eastern Australia’, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, vol. 17 (1992), p. 390. 30 C.D. Ollier and C.F. Pain, The Origin of Mountains (London, 2000), pp. 224–5. 31 J.K. Weissel and D.E. Hayes, ‘Evolution of the Tasman Sea Re-appraised’, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol. 36 (1977), pp. 77–84. 32 Ollier and Pain, The Origin of Mountains, pp. 193–226. 33 Compare V.R. Twidale and C.R. Baker, ‘The Re-enchantment of Geomorphology’, Geomorphology, vol. 4 (1991), pp. 73–100. C H A P T E R 3 S U N S H I N E , S N OW, W I N D A N D R A I N 1 Sydney Morning Herald, 5 February 1877, p. 4. 2 A. Norton, ‘On the decadence of Australian forests’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, vol. 3 (1886), pp. 18–19; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, p. 346. 3 Thanks to Jillian Oppenheimer for advice here. 4 H.C. Russell, ‘A Cyclonic Storm or Tornado in the Gwydir District’, Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 25 (1891), pp. 58–60; and H.C. Russell, ‘Hail Storms’, Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 26 (1892), pp. 314–18. 5 B.J. Wetherell, letter, Lancet, 27 September 1873; B. Mitchell, ‘Climate, Education, Religion and Region: An 1888 Judgement’, Australia 1888 Bulletin, no. 12 (1983); I.M. Johnstone, ‘Armidale’s Climate and Weather: Some Descriptions, Statistical Facts and History’, ADHSJ, no. 41 (1998), pp. 1–25. 6 A. Sturman and N. Tapper, The Weather and Climate of Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne, 1996); R. Allan and J. Lindesay, ‘Past Climates of Australasia’, in J.E. Hobbs, J.A. Lindesay and H.A. Bridgman (eds), Climates of the Southern Continents: Present, Past and Future (Chichester, UK, 1998). 7 J. Oppenheimer, ‘Shearing “Difficulties” in New England in 1888’, ADHSJ, no. 25 (1982), p. 21; Johnstone, ‘Armidale’s Climate and Weather’, p. 12. 8 Thanks to Jillian Oppenheimer for this. 9 J. Hobbs, ‘Present Climates of Australia and New Zealand’, in Hobbs, Lindesay and Bridgman, Climates. 10 Norton, ‘On the Decadence of Australian Forests’, p. 15. 11 Johnston, ‘Armidale’s Climate and Weather ’, p. 18. 12 H. Bridgman, ‘Future Climate Scenarios for the Southern Continents’, in Hobbs, Lindesay and Bridgman, Climates. CHAPTER 4 WILDLIFE 1 William Gardner, ‘Production and Resources of the Northern and Western Districts of New South Wales (1854), UNERA MS A210.

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Endnotes—pages 45 to 47 2 Australian Naturalist, July 1906, pp. 78–9. 3 J.T. Wheeler, ‘Survey of Past and Present Wildlife of the Manilla District, NSW’, BNatRes report, UNE, 1978, pp. 65–6. 4 Wild Life Preservation Society Account Book, Mitchell Library 5715/25; I.M. Johnstone, ‘National Parks Associations of New South Wales, Branches Recently Formed in Armidale, Walcha and Tamworth’, ADHSJ, no. 18 (1974), pp. 80–1; Peter A. Wright, ‘History of the New England National Park’, ADHSJ, no. 25 (1981), pp. 1–16; J. Webb, Conserving Australia’s Wildlife: The History of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, Inc. (Sydney, 2002), pp. 13–20. 5 Wheeler, ‘Survey’, p. 65; J. Short and J.H. Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals in 1922: Collections and Field Notes of Museum Collector Charles Hoy’, Australian Zoologist, vol. 31 (2001), p. 540. 6 Charles Hoy to Garrett S. Miller, 16 October–5 November 1919, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, p. 539. 7 L.G. Dove, ‘On the Distribution, Habitat Utilization and Activity Patterns of the Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus, Shaw) in a Part of the New England Region of New South Wales’, BNatRes report, UNE, 1979. 8 Frank Falkenstein, personal communication, 2000. 9 T.R. Soderquist, ‘Spatial Organization of the Arboreal Carnivorous Marsupial phascogale tapoatafa’, Journal of Zoology (London), vol. 237 (1995). 10 A.W. Cameron, ‘Changes in the Wild Life Community of the Waterloo Valley between 1866 and 1975’, in P.J. Jarman (ed.), Agriculture, Forestry and Wildlife: Conflict or Co-existence? (Armidale, 1975), pp. 19–25. 11 Hoy to Miller, 13 January–27 February 1921, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, p. 546; C.M. Hoy, ‘The Present Status of the Australian Mammal Fauna’, Journal of Mammalogy, vol. 4 (1923), pp. 164–6 (apparently referring to the Eastern Quoll); Cameron, ‘Changes in the Wild Life Community of the Waterloo Valley’, in Jarman, Agriculture, Forestry and Wildlife, pp. 19–25. 12 Wheeler, ‘Survey’, pp. 70–1. See also Hoy to Miller, 13 January–27 February 1921, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, p. 546, for the disappearance of bandicoots from Ebor district. 13 A.S. Le Souef and H. Burrell, The Wild Animals of Australasia (London, 1926), p. 292; Wheeler, ‘Survey’, pp. 67–8. 14 Cameron, ‘Changes in the Wild Life Community of the Waterloo Valley’, in Jarman, Agriculture, Forestry and Wildlife, pp.19–25. 15 D.W. Murray, ‘Predicting the Distribution and Abundance of the Common Wombat (Vombatus ursinus Shaw, 1800) throughout Australia’, PhD thesis, UNE, 2001. Tracks were seen south of Kingston by P.J. Jarman in 1987. 16 Sir H. Wilkins, Undiscovered Australia (London, 1928), p. 107; B. McDonald, ‘Some Account of Kangaroo Hunting on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1840 to 1880, and the Evidence of Folksong’, Australian Folklore, no. 10 (1995), pp. 108–32. 17 Hoy to Miller, 13 January–27 February 1921, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, p. 546.

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Endnotes—pages 47 to 52 368

18 P.J. Jarman, Kangaroos: Two Centuries of Ecosystem Management (Armidale, 1994), p. 13; Gardner, ‘Production and resources of the Northern and Western Districts of New South Wales, 1854’. 19 McDonald, ‘Some Account of Kangaroo Hunting’, pp. 118, 120–6. 20 Hoy to Miller, 13 January–27 February 1921, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, p. 546. 21 Jarman, Kangaroos, pp. 15–16; K.A. Johnson and P.J. Jarman, ‘Records of Wildlife as Pests in the Armidale District, 1812–1975’, in Jarman, Agriculture, Forestry and Wildlife, pp. 26–32; J. Short, ‘The Extinction of Rat-kangaroos (Marsupialia: Potoroidea) in New South Wales, Australia’, Biological Conservation, vol. 86 (1998), pp. 365–77; Wheeler, ‘Survey’, pp. 46–8; Hoy to Miller, from Tamworth, 16 October–5 November 1919, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, p. 539. 22 Wheeler, ‘Survey’, pp. 42–6. 23 Wheeler, ‘Survey’, pp. 52–4; Hoy to Miller, 16 October–5 November 1919, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, pp. 539, 540. 24 Hoy to Miller, 30 August–2 October 1919, in Short and Calaby, ‘The Status of Australian Mammals’, p. 539; Dove, ‘On the Distribution, Habitat Utilization and Activity Patterns of the Platypus’. 25 Identified by J. Mahoney, reported in Wheeler, ‘Survey’, pp. 60–1. 26 Gunninah Environmental Consultants, ‘Queensland Interconnection: The Proposed Transmission Line Between New South Wales and Queensland’, in Fauna and Fauna Habitat Report (Gunninah Environmental Consultants, Crows Nest, NSW, 1998). 27 P.D. Dwyer, ‘Observations on Chalinolobus dwyeri (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) in Australia’, Journal of Mammalogy, vol. 47 (1966), pp. 716–18. 28 L. Corbett, ‘The Conservation Status of the Dingo Canis lupus dingo in Australia, with Particular Reference to New South Wales: Threats to Pure Dingoes and Potential Solutions’, in C.R. Dickman and D. Lunney (eds), A Symposium on the Dingo (Sydney, 2001). 29 P.J. Jarman and K.A. Johnson, ‘Exotic Mammals, Indigenous Mammals, and Land-use’, Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia, vol. 10 (1978), pp. 146–66; P.J. Jarman, ‘The Brown Hare: A Herbivorous Mammal in a New Ecosystem’, in R.L. Kitching (ed.), The Ecology of Exotic Animals and Plants: Some Australian Case Histories (Milton, Qld, 1986), pp. 62–76. 30 J.A. Thompson, T.J. Korn and P.J.S. Fleming, ‘1080 Usage for Fox Control in NSW’, Proceedings of the Australian Vertebrate Pest Conference, vol. 9 (1991), pp. 187–92. 31 ‘Report of the Heritage Working Party on the Horses of the Guy Fawkes River National Park to the Minister for the Environment [NSW]’, February 2002, at http://192.148.120.24/PDFs/guy_fawkes_horses.pdf [accessed March 2006]. 32 Wheeler, ‘Survey’, pp. 34–5. 33 M. Blakers, S.J.J.F. Davies and P.N. Reilly, The Atlas of Australian Birds (Melbourne, 1984); H.A. Ford and D. McFarland, ‘Faunal Survey of New England: III, Birds’, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, vol. 30 (1991), pp. 381–432.

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Endnotes—pages 52 to 54 34 M.A. Brock, R.G.B. Smith and P.J. Jarman, ‘Drain It, Dam It: Alteration of Water Regime in Shallow Wetlands on the New England Tableland of New South Wales’, Wetlands Ecology and Management, vol. 7 (1999), pp. 37–46; Gardner, ‘Production and Resources of the Northern and Western Districts of New South Wales, 1854’. 35 H.A. Ford, G.W. Barrett, D.A. Saunders and H.F. Recher, ‘Why Have Birds in the Woodlands of Southern Australia Declined?’, Biological Conservation, vol. 97 (2001), pp. 71–88. 36 S.P.W. Norton, ‘Bird Notes from Boree (New England Plateau)’, Emu, vol. 22 (1922), pp. 39–44; Ford and McFarland, ‘Faunal Survey of New England: III, Birds’. 37 M. Baldwin, ‘Birds of Inverell District, New South Wales’, Emu, vol. 75 (1975), pp. 113–20. 38 Baldwin, ‘Birds of Inverell District, New South Wales’, (Baldwin recorded them at Inverell in 1963 and 1964). 39 Norton, ‘Bird Notes from Boree (New England Plateau)’; Cameron, ‘Changes in the Wild Life Community of the Waterloo Valley’. 40 Cameron, ‘Changes in the Wild Life Community of the Waterloo Valley’. 41 R.G. Hays, ‘The Little Eagle’, Emu, vol. 20 (1920), pp. 33–4; Norton, ‘Bird notes from Boree (New England Plateau)’. 42 Ford and McFarland, ‘Faunal Survey of New England: III, Birds’. 43 H. Heatwole, J. de Bavay and P. Webber, ‘Faunal Survey of New England: V, the Lizards and Snakes’, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, vol. 49 (2003), pp. 299–325; The Australian Museum and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service records, ‘Analyses’, by Karl Vernes and Lalit Kumar, UNE, 2004. 44 Heatwole, de Bavay and Webber, ‘Faunal Survey of New England: V, the Lizards and Snakes’. 45 John Cann, Australian Freshwater Turtles (Singapore, 1998). 46 The Australian Museum and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service records, ‘Analyses’, by Karl Vernes and Lalit Kumar, UNE, 2004. 47 H. Heatwole, J. de Bavay, P. Webber and G. Webb, ‘Faunal Survey of New England: IV, the Frogs’, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, vol. 38 (1995), pp. 229–49. 48 R. Knowles, M. Mahony, J. Armstrong and S. Donnellan, ‘Systematics of Sphagnum Frogs of the Genus Philoria (Anura: Myobatrachidae) in Eastern Australia, with the Description of Two New Species’, Records of the Australian Museum, vol. 56 (2004), pp. 57–74. 49 Knowles et al., ‘Systematics of Sphagnum Frogs of the Genus Philoria’. 50 J.-M. Hero, C. Morrison, G. Gillespie, J.D. Roberts, D. Newell, E. Meyer, K. McDonald, F. Lemckert, M. Mahony, W. Osborne, H. Hines, S. Richards, C. Hoskin, J. Clarke, N. Doak and L. Shoo, ‘Overview of the Conservation Status of Australian Frogs’, Pacific Conservation Biology, in press, 2006. 51 R.M. McDowall, Freshwater Fishes of South-eastern Australia (Sydney, 1996; first published 1980). 52 S.A. Morris, D.A. Pollard, P.C. Gehrke and J.J. Pogonoski, Threatened and

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Endnotes—pages 54 to 61 370 53

54

55 56

Potentially Threatened Freshwater Fishes of Coastal New South Wales and the Murray-Darling Basin (NSW Fisheries Final Report Series, no. 33, 2001). Threatened Species Unit, NSW Fisheries, ‘Eastern (Freshwater) Cod (Maccullochella ikei): Recovery Plan’ (NSW Fisheries, Port Stephens Research Centre, 2002). Morris et al., Threatened and Potentially Threatened Freshwater Fishes of Coastal New South Wales and the Murray-Darling Basin; R. Wager and P. Jackson, The Action Plan for Australian Freshwater Fishes (Australian Conservation Agency [Environment Australia] Endangered Species Program Project Report, no. 147, Canberra, 1993). McDowall, Freshwater Fishes of South-eastern Australia. As defined by A.A. Burbidge and N.L. McKenzie (that is, ground-dwelling mammals weighing between 35 and 5500 grams), ‘Patterns in the Modern Decline of Western Australia’s Vertebrate Fauna: Causes and Conservation Implications’, Biological Conservation, vol. 50 (1989), pp. 143–98.

C H A P T E R 5 T H E V E G E TAT E D L A N D S C A P E Acknowledgements foremost, to the late John B. Williams, who contributed to this chapter by sharing his knowledge of the New England vegetation with me. Lachlan Copeland, Kirsten Knox, Ian Telford and Wal Whalley provided advice and comments on flora and vegetation. Finally, Alan Atkinson encouraged the incorporation of the human element into this chapter, which has greatly improved it. 1 National Parks and Wildlife Service, Threatened Species of the New England Tablelands and North West Slopes of New South Wales (Coffs Harbour, 2003). 2 S. McIntyre, Z. Huang and A.P. Smith, ‘Patterns of Abundance in Grassy vegetation of the New England Tablelands: Identifying Regional Rarity in a ThreatenedVegetationType’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 41 (1993), pp. 49–64; J.S. Benson and E.M. Ashby, ‘Vegetation of the Guyra 1:100 000 Map Sheet, New England Bioregion, New South Wales’, Cunninghamia, vol. 6 (2000), pp. 747–872; P.J. Clarke, ‘Composition of Grazed and Cleared Temperate Grassy Woodlands in Eastern Australia: Patterns in Space and Inferences in Time’, Journal of Vegetation Science, vol. 14 (2003), pp. 5–14. 3 W. Christie, ‘The Forest Vegetation of Central and Northern New England, in Connection with Geological Influences’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 11 (1877), p. 23; P.R. Williams and P.J. Clarke, ‘Habitat Segregation by Serotinous Shrubs in Heaths: Post-fire Emergence and Seedling Survival’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 45 (1997), pp. 31–9; J.T. Hunter and P.J. Clarke, ‘The Vegetation of Granitic Communities on the New England Batholith of Eastern Australia’, Cunninghamia, vol. 5 (1998), pp. 547–618; Benson and Ashby, ‘Vegetation of the Guyra 1:100 000 Map Sheet’. 4 See C.L. Bale and J.B. Williams, ‘Composition and Classification of Nothofagus moorei Communities in Northern New South Wales’, Australian Systematic Botany, vol. 6 (1993), pp. 429–40; P.J. Clarke, L.M. Copeland, N.E. Noble,

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Endnotes—pages 62 to 67 5

6

7 8

9

10 11 12

13

14

15

16 17

18

19 20

C.L. Bale and J.B. Williams, The Vegetation and Plant Species of New England National Park (Armidale, 2000). C.L. Bale, J.B. Williams and J.L. Charley, ‘The Impact of Aspect on Forest Structure and Floristics in Some Eastern Australian Sites’, Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 110 (1998), pp. 363–77. M.K. Henderson and D.A. Keith, ‘Correlation of Burning and Grazing Indicators with Composition of Woody Understorey Flora of Dells in a Temperate Eucalypt Forest’, Australian Ecology, vol. 27 (2002), pp. 121–31. See, for example, Benson and Ashby, ‘Vegetation of the Guyra 1:100 000 Map Sheet’. Christie, ‘The Forest Vegetation of Central and Northern New England’, pp. 21–9; A. Norton, ‘On the Decadence of Australian Forests’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, vol. 3 (1886), pp. 15–22. S. McIntyre, Z. Huang and A.P. Smith, ‘Patterns of Abundance in Grassy Vegetation of the New England Tablelands: Identifying Regional Rarity in a Threatened Vegetation Type’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 41 (1993), pp. 49–64. Hunter and Clarke, ‘The Vegetation of Granitic Communities on the New England Batholith of Eastern Australia’, pp. 547–618. Williams and Clarke, ‘Habitat Segregation by Serotinous Shrubs in Heaths’. J. Whinam and N. Chilcott, ‘Floristic Description and Environmental Relationships of Sphagnum Communities in NSW and the ACT and their Conservation Management’, Cunninghamia, vol. 7 (2002), pp. 463–500. See also R.J. Millington, ‘Sphagnum Bogs of the New England Plateau, New South Wales’, Journal of Ecology, vol. 42 (1954), pp. 328–44. D.M. Bell and P.J. Clarke, ‘Seed-bank Dynamics of Eleocharis: Can Spatial and Temporal Variability Explain Habitat Segregation?’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 52 (2004), pp. 119–31. P.J. Clarke and K.J.E. Knox, ‘Post-fire Response of Shrubs in the Tablelands of Eastern Australia: Do Existing Models Explain Habitat Differences?’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 50 (2002), pp. 53–62. K.J.E. Knox and P.J. Clarke, ‘Fire Response Syndromes of Shrubs in Grassy Woodlands in the New England Tableland Bioregion’, Cunninghamia, vol. 8 (2004), pp. 348–53. S. McIntyre and G.W. Barrett, ‘Habitat Variegation: An Alternative to Fragmentation’, Conservation Biology, vol. 10 (1992), pp. 146–7. S. McIntyre and S. Lavorel, ‘How Environmental Disturbance Factors Influence Species Composition in Temperate Australian Grasslands’, Journal of Vegetation Science, vol. 5 (1994), pp. 373–84; P.J. Clarke, ‘Composition of Grazed and Cleared Temperate Grassy Woodlands in Eastern Australia’. G.M. Lodge and R.D.B. Whalley, Native and Natural Pastures on the Northern Slopes and Tablelands of New South Wales: A Review and Annotated Bibliography, Technical Bulletin no. 35 (Sydney, 1989). McIntyre and Lavorel, ‘How Environmental Disturbance Factors Influence Species Composition’. P.J. Clarke, ‘Experiments on the Mechanism of Tree and Shrub Establishment

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Endnotes—pages 67 to 75 372 21

22 23 24 25

in Temperate Grassy Woodlands: Seedling Survival’, Australian Ecology, vol. 27 (2002), pp. 606–15. Clarke, ‘Experiments on the Mechanism of Tree and Shrub Establishment’; P.J. Clarke and E.A. Davison, ‘Emergence and Survival of Herbaceous Seedlings in Temperate Grassy Woodlands: Recruitment Limitations and Regeneration Niche’, Australian Ecology, vol. 29 (2004), pp. 320–31. D.A. Keith, A Compilation of Vegetation for New South Wales (Sydney, 2004). Hunter and Clarke, ‘The Vegetation of Granitic Communities on the New England Batholith of Eastern Australia’. Benson and Ashby, ‘Vegetation of the Guyra 1:100 000 Map Sheet’. See Keith, A Compilation of Vegetation for New South Wales; Benson and Ashby, ‘Vegetation of the Guyra 1:100 000 Map Sheet’.

CHAPTER 6 LAND AND LIVELIHOOD 1 G.M. Lodge and R.D.B. Whalley, Native and Natural Pastures on the Northern Slopes and Tablelands of New South Wales (Sydney, 1989). 2 L.P. Kahn, ‘Ewe Nutrition Boost, in Feedback’, Meat and Livestock Industry Journal, April 2004, pp. 10–11. 3 I. Reeve and K. Bock, ‘Increasing Wool Profits by Working with the Environment: Baseline Survey Results’, prepared for the Land, Water and Wool Northern Tablelands Project, Institute for Rural Futures, UNE, 2004. 4 J.C. Boray, Liver Fluke Disease in Sheep and Cattle (Sydney, 1999). 5 Australian Bureau of Statistics 2003, Integrated Regional Database, version 2.4.3, CD-ROM. 6 R. Sparkes, ‘Soldier Settlement Following World War I: A Costly Experiment’, ADHSJ, no. 40 (1997), pp. 15–24. 7 J. Ferry, ‘In the Shadow of Duval: The Newholme Story’, ADHSJ, no. 34 (1991), pp. 47–60. 8 D. Thompson, New England Timber Industry Snapshot (Armidale, 1997). 9 S.J. Gale and R.J. Haworth, ‘Beyond the Limits of Location: Human Environmental Disturbance Prior to Official European Contact in Early Colonial Australia’, Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 37 (2002), pp. 123–36. 10 M.A. Brock, R.G.B. Smith and P.J. Jarman, ‘Drain It, Dam It: Alteration of Water Regime in Shallow Wetlands on the New England Tableland of New South Wales, Australia’, Wetlands Ecology and Management, vol. 7 (1999), pp. 37–46. 11 N. Reid, A. Boulton, R. Nott and C. Chilcott, ‘Ecological Sustainability of Grazed Landscapes on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales’, in N. Klomp and I. Lunt (eds), Frontiers in Ecology: Building the Links (Oxford, 1997), pp. 117–30. 12 Andrew Boulton, personal communication (date unknown). 13 Southern New England Landcare, Case Study: Wool Production and Bodiversity Working Together for Jon and Vicki Taylor (Land, Water and Wool Northern Tablelands Project, Armidale, 2004); also for Tim and Karen Wright and

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Endnotes—pages 75 to 78

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for Rob and Annabel Dulhunty, both 2004; H.A. Lardner, B.D. Kirychuk, L. Braul, W.D. Willms and J. Yarotski, ‘The Effect of Water Quality on Cattle Performance on Pasture’, Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, vol. 56 (2005), pp. 97–104. S.G. Donaldson, Gwydir River Catchment: Report on Land Degradation and Proposals for Integrated Management (Gunnedah, 1996). Donaldson, Gwydir River Catchment; H. Brown, ‘Pioneer Settlement and Mining at Tingha’, ADHSJ, no. 36 (1993), pp. 53–61. B. Peasley, Macintyre River Catchment: Land Management Proposals for the Integrated Treatment and Prevention of Land Degradation (Inverell, 1995). Nick Reid and Lisa Lobry de Bruyn, UNE, unpublished data. S. Graham, B.R. Wilson, N. Reid and H. Jones, ‘Scattered Paddock Trees, Litter Chemistry, and Surface Soil Properties in Pastures of the New England Tablelands, New South Wales’, Australian Journal of Soil Research, vol. 42 (2004), pp. 905–12. W. Chen, G. Blair, J. Scott and R. Lefroy, ‘Nitrogen and Sulfur Dynamics of Contrasting Grazed Pastures’, Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, vol. 50 (1999), pp. 1381–92. K. Hutchinson, personal communication (date unknown). J.F. Campbell, ‘Discovery and Early Pastoral Settlement of New England’, JRAHS, vol. 8, pt 5 (1922), p. 252. Southern New England Landcare, Case Study: . . . Taylor. E. Gardiner, Terrible Vale. No Time Like the Past: History of a New England Grazing Run between 1830 and 1940 (Tamworth, 1998). P. Gregg, ‘Insect and Mite Pests of Pastures’, in J.V. Lovett and J.M. Scott (eds), Pasture Production and Management (Melbourne, 1997), pp. 231–53. H.A. Ford and H. Bell, ‘Density of Birds in Eucalypt Woodland Affected to Varying Degrees by Dieback’, Emu, vol. 81 (1982), pp. 202–8; A.J. Campbell and G.R. Brown, The Biological Control of Scarabs Causing Eucalyptus Dieback (Armidale, 1995). A. Norton, ‘On the Decadence of Australian Forests’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, vol. 3 (1886), pp. 15–22. Reid et al., ‘Ecological Sustainability of Grazed Landscapes’. A.P. Smith, D.M. Moore and S.P. Andrews, Proposed Forestry Operations in the Glen Innes Forest Management Area: Fauna Impact Statement (Armidale, 1992). World Health Organization, Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases: A Report of a Joint WHO/FAO Expert Consultation, Geneva 28 January– 1 February 2002 (Geneva, 2002). Thompson, New England Timber Industry Snapshot; D. Carr, ‘Selection of Eucalyptus Species and Provenances for Plantation and Farm Forestry on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales’, MResSc thesis, UNE, 2004. C. Binning, S. Cork, R. Perry and D. Shelton, Natural Assets: An Inventory of the Ecosystem Goods and Services in the Goulburn Broken Catchment (Canberra, 2001).

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Endnotes—pages 81 to 90 374

CHAPTER 7 SEEING RED: MUSINGS ON ROCK ART 1 I. McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory in New England (Sydney, 1974), pp. 55, 107; C.F. Williams, ‘Vacuuming Mount Yarrowyck: A Comprehensive Survey of One Stratified Zone of the New England Tablelands’, BA thesis, UNE, 1980; S. Bowdler, ‘Hunters in the Highlands: Aboriginal Adaptations in the Eastern Australian Uplands’, Archaeology in Oceania, no. 16 (1981), pp. 99–111. 2 H. de La Croix and R.G. Tansey (eds), Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (Orlando, Fla, 1986), pp. 28–32; B.S. Myers and T. Coppleston (eds), The History of Art (London, 1993), pp. 10–11; E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London, 1995), p. 44. 3 De La Croix and Tansey, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, p. 29. 4 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, p. 68. 5 W. Beck, M. Somerville, J. Duley and K. Kippen, ‘An Assessment of the Cultural Significance of Mt Yarrowyck Nature Reserve’, unpublished report to NPWS, UNE, 2003. 6 M.W. Conkey, ‘Experimenting with Style in Archaeology: Some Historical and Theoretical Issues’, in M.A. Conkey and C.A. Hastorf (eds), The Uses of Style in Archaeology (Cambridge, 1990), p. 13. 7 M.A. Smith, B. Frankhauser and M. Jercher, ‘The Changing Provenance of Red Ochre at Puritjarra Rock Shelter, Central Australia: Late Pleistocene to Present’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, vol. 64 (1998), pp. 275–92. 8 C.P. Mountford, Nomads of the Australian Desert (Adelaide, 1976), pp. 84, 295, 382; K. Sale, ‘Making the Old Brighter: Aboriginal Re-marking of Rock Pictures’, in G.K. Ward and L.A. Ward (eds), Management of Rock Imagery (Melbourne, 1995), pp. 128–40. 9 Williams, ‘Vacuuming Mount Yarrowyck’, pp. 39–46. 10 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, pp. 114, 292–8. 11 Williams, ‘Vacuuming Mount Yarrowyck’, pp. 77–80. 12 W.G. Hoddinot, ‘The Languages and Myths of the New England Area’, in I. McBryde (ed.), Records of Times Past: Ethnohistorical Essays on the Culture and Ecology of the New England Tribes (Canberra, 1978), pp. 52–64. 13 Les Smith, personal communication, 1973. 14 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, pp. 62, 100–26; A.J. Sonter, ‘Aboriginal Art on the North West Slopes of New South Wales’, MLitt thesis, UNE, 1989, pp. 28–9.

C H A P T E R 8 A B O R I G I N A L A RC H A E O L O G Y Thanks to Mike Roach (SHES, UNE) for drawing the map, and John Appleton for reading the manuscript and for the photographs. Parts of this research were funded by the Australian Research Council (Grant No. A00104082). 1 J. Wright, ‘Bora Ring’. Other lines quoted below are from the same poem. 2 L. Godwin, ‘Inside Information: Settlement and Alliance in the Late Holocene of North-eastern New South Wales’, PhD thesis, UNE, 1990, pp. 45–8.

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Endnotes—pages 90 to 95 3 I. McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory in New England (Sydney, 1974). 4 I. McBryde, ‘Australia’s Once and Future Archaeology’, Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 21 (1986), pp. 19–24. 5 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, p. 27, n. 78. 6 I. McBryde (ed.), Records of Times Past: Ethnohistorical Essays on the Culture and Ecology of the New England Tribes (Canberra, 1978), p. 4. 7 L. Godwin, ‘Little Big Men: Alliance and Schism in North-eastern NSW, During the Late Holocene’, in P. McConvell and N. Evans (eds), Archaeology and Linguistics: Global Perspectives on Ancient Australia (Melbourne, 1997), pp. 297–309. 8 C. Gamble, The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 87–92. 9 J. Belshaw, ‘Population Distribution and the Pattern of Seasonal Movement in Northern New South Wales’, in McBryde, Records of Times Past, pp. 65–81. 10 T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Environment, Dwelling and Skill (London, 2000), pp. 172–89. 11 Godwin, ‘Inside Information’, p. 313. 12 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, p. 16; D. Byrne, Cultural Resource Overview: Aboriginal Sites in the Northern Region, NSW (Sydney, 1989), p. 13. 13 J. Collins, ‘Connecting the Dots: Desktop Archaeological Review and Spatial Modelling’, unpublished report (see note 14) . 14 Data collection currently underway by M. Ridges and J. Collins as part of the Australian Research Council grant A00104082, ‘Connecting the Dots: Local and Regional Place Knowledge in Gumbaingirr Nation’, M. Somerville and W. Beck, Chief Investigators. 15 G. Connah, I. Davidson and M. Rowland, ‘Prehistoric Settlement’, in D. Lea, J. Pigram and L. Greenwood (eds), An Atlas of New England, vol. 2 (Armidale, 1977), p. 130. 16 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, p. 229. 17 Ray Yarry, cited in P. Cohen and M. Somerville, Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs (Sydney, 1990), p. 48. 18 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, p. 53. 19 Byrne, Cultural Resource Overview, n. 15. 20 S. Bowdler, ‘Hunters in the Highlands: Aboriginal Adaptations in the Eastern Australian Uplands’, Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 16 (1981), pp. 99–111. But see I. Davidson, ‘Archaeology on the New England Tableland: A Preliminary Report’, ADHSJ, no. 25 (1982), pp. 42–56. 21 Godwin, ‘Inside information’, pp. 187–90. 22 W. Beck, M. Somerville, J. Duley and K. Kippen, ‘An Assessment of the Cultural Significance of Mt Yarrowyck Nature Reserve’, unpublished report to NPWS, UNE, 2003; Godwin, ‘Inside Information’, p. 188. 23 S. Bowdler, ‘The Management of Indigenous Ceremonial (“Bora”) Sites as Components of Cultural Landscapes’, in M.M. Cotter, W.E. Boyd and J.E. Gardner (eds), Heritage Landscapes: Understanding Place and Communities (Lismore, 2001), p. 237. 24 McBryde, Aboriginal Prehistory, pp. 337, 338.

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Endnotes—pages 95 to 102 376

25 Bowdler, ‘Hunters in the Highlands’, pp. 99–111; Davidson, ‘Archaeology on the New England Tableland’, pp. 42–56. 26 R. Sahukar, C. Gallery, J. Smart and P. Mitchell, ‘New England Tableland’, in The Bioregions of NSW, Their Biodiversity, Conservation, History (Sydney, 2003), pp. 157–64. 27 Godwin, ‘Inside Information’, pp. 15, 82, 126. 28 Sahukar et al., ‘New England Tableland’. See also Chapter 3 in this book. 29 B. Gott, ‘Murnong-Microseris scapigera: A Study of a Staple Food of Victorian Aborigines’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1983, pt 2, pp. 2–18. 30 R. Jones, ‘From Kakadu to Kutikina: The Southern Continent at 18 000 Years Ago’, in C. Gamble and O. Sofer (eds), The World at 18 000BP, vol. 2 (London, 1990), pp. 265–95. 31 Godwin, ‘Little Big Men’, pp. 297–303. 32 Godwin, ‘Little Big Men’, pp. 305–9; T. Crowley, ‘Chipping Away at the Past: A Northern New South Wales Perspective’, in P. McConvell and N. Evans (eds), Archaeology and Linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in Global Perspective (Melbourne, 1997), pp. 275–95. 33 Maisie Kelly, 1995, cited in Barry McDonald, ‘Tradition as Personal Relationship’, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 110, no. 435 (1997), p. 62. C H A P T E R 9 T H E F RO N T I E R This chapter ought to have been written by John Ferry, whose wonderful account of the New England frontier in the opening chapters of Colonial Armidale (1999) is unsurpassable. My own pale reflection owes much to John’s work, and is dedicated to his memory. 1 S.J. Gale and R.J. Haworth, ‘Beyond the Limits of Location: Human Environmental Disturbance Prior to Official European Contact in Early Colonial Australia’, Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 37 (2002), pp. 123–36. 2 Thomas Tourle, quoted in R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), p. 33. 3 H.C. Sempill, evidence to the Select Committee on the Crown Lands Occupation Amendment Bill, NSW Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings, 1839, vol. 1, p. 223. 4 F. de B. Cooper, Wild Adventures in Australia and New South Wales (London, 1857), p. 113. 5 I.C. Campbell, ‘The Relations between Settlers and Aborigines in the Pastoral District of New England, 1832–1860’. BA thesis, UNE, 1969, p. 21. 6 F.C. Lamotte, 5 April 1840, quoted in R.L. Dawson, ‘Outback from the Hunter, New South Wales, to “New Caledonia” and the Severn River in 1840’, JRAHS, vol. 15 (1929), p. 45. 7 G. Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 July 1842, HRA, series 1, vol. 22, p. 172. 8 G. Bowman, evidence to the Select Committee on the Petition from Distressed Mechanics and Labourers, NSW Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings, 1843, p. 748.

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Endnotes—pages 102 to 106 9 J. Ferry, ‘In the Shadow of Duval: The Newholme Story’, ADHSJ, no. 34 (1991), p. 47. On Billy Stephenson, see R. Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838 (Melbourne, 1992), p. 91. 10 A. Harris, Settlers and Convicts (Melbourne, 1953; first published 1847), p. 111. 11 S.B. Young, ‘Reminiscences’, JRAHS, vol. 8 (1922), p. 402. 12 E.C. Sommerlad, The Land of the Beardies: Being the History of the Glen Innes District (Glen Innes, 1922), pp. 21–3. 13 Sydney Herald, 7 November 1836; Australian, 22 November 1836. 14 George Everett, quoted in Sommerlad, The Land of the Beardies, p. 23. 15 Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 230. 16 Sir George Gipps to Lord Stanley, 3 April 1844, HRA, series 1, vol. 23, p. 510. 17 Sydney Herald, 11 April 1836; William Gardner, quoted in Sommerlad, The Land of the Beardies, p. 23. 18 Sadlier to Scott, 14 January 1828, Sadlier, evidence to Select Committee on Aborigines, NSW Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings, 1838, pp. 40–1. 19 Sydney Herald, 28 January 1836; Sydney Gazette, 21 April 1838. 20 Sydney Herald, 21 June, 19 August 1839; J. Kociumbus, ‘“Mary Ann”, Joseph Fleming and “Gentleman Dick”: Aboriginal-convict Relationships in Colonial History’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 3 (2001), pp. 28–54; Young, ‘Reminiscences’, pp. 396–8. 21 P.J. Byrne, Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales, 1810–1830 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 146. 22 Sydney Gazette, 21 April 1838. 23 Milliss, Waterloo Creek, pp. 256–9. 24 B. Wilson, ‘Edward Denny Day’s Investigations at Myall Creek’, Push from the Bush, no. 20 (April 1985), pp. 35–57. 25 ‘Petition of New England Squatters’, 1839, SRNSW 4/2485 (with 36 signatures from the earliest New England squatters). 26 Gipps’ Memo, 5 October 1844, and Macdonald’s reply, 28 November 1844, SRNSW 4/2674.2. 27 Quarterly Returns of the Border Police, New England, January–March 1845, SRNSW 4/1139.1. 28 Macdonald to Thomson, 25 May 1846 and 16 June 1846, SRNSW 4/2719; J.F. Campbell, ‘Discovery and Early Pastoral Settlement of New England’, JRAHS, vol. 8 (1922), pp. 243–4. 29 Macdonald to Thomson, 1 January 1840, SRNSW 4/2485. 30 Macdonald to Thomson, 18 April 1840, SRNSW 4/2486.1. 31 Macdonald to Thomson, 18 April 1840, SRNSW 4/2486.1; Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 July 1842, HRA, series 1, vol. 22, pp. 171–3; ‘Report’, 8 January 1844, HRA, series 1, vol. 23, pp. 489–90. 32 J.B. Hartley, ‘Maps, Knowledge and Power’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 282–5. 33 D. Byrne, ‘Segregated Landscapes: The Heritage of Racial Segregation in New South Wales’, Historic Environment, vol. 17 (2003), pp. 13–17.

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Endnotes—pages 106 to 110 378

34 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 January 1845, HRA, series 1, vol. 24, p. 264; Campbell, ‘The Relations between Settlers and Aborigines’, pp. 44–5. 35 For example, E. Irby and L. Irby, Memoirs of Edward and Leonard Irby (Sydney, 1908), p. 79. 36 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 July 1842, HRA, series 1, vol. 22, p. 172; Archibald Windeyer, Station Diary, UNERA A165 (e.g., 25 February 1846); Robertson of Strachan Records, UNERA A178. 37 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 July 1842, HRA, series 1, vol. 22, p. 172. 38 Irby and Irby, Memoirs, p. 57. 39 [J.Morison], Australia as It Is (Melbourne, 1967; first published 1867), p. 61. 40 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 July 1842, HRA, series 1, vol. 22, p. 172. 41 Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 24. 42 Sydney Herald, 21 June 1838. 43 Irby and Irby, Memoirs. 44 Irby and Irby, Memoirs, p. 89; Walker, Old New England, pp. 29–30. 45 B. McDonald, ‘Evidence of Four New England Corroboree Songs Indicating Aboriginal Responses to European Invasion’, Aboriginal History, no. 20, 1996, p. 180. 46 Alfred Lardner, ‘Some of the Difficulties of Early Pioneers in the First Settlement of the Richmond and Clarence’, unpublished manuscript, n.d., Clarence River Historical Society, Grafton. 47 M. Sturma, ‘Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 16 (May 1985). 48 Irby and Irby, Memoirs, p. 80. 49 Robert Scott, quoted in R.H.W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists (Sydney, 1974), p. 30; Wilson, ‘Edward Denny Day’s Investigations at Myall Creek’, pp. 46–8. 50 Macdonald to Thomson, 18 April 1840, SRNSW 4/2486.1. 51 For example, Oakes to Thomson, June 1841, SRNSW 4/2525; Irby and Irby, Memoirs, p. 84. 52 Macdonald to Thomson, 1 January 1840, SRNSW 4/2485. 53 J. Ferry, Colonial Armidale (St Lucia, Qld, 1999), pp. 23–4. 54 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 February 1847, HRA, series 1, vol. 25, p. 565; Macdonald to Thomson, 16 June 1846, SRNSW 4/2719. On Aboriginal trackers, see also Macdonald, 21 March 1844, HRA, series 1, vol. 23, p. 490. 55 Macdonald to Thomson, 16 September 1839, SRNSW 4/2439.1. 56 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 January 1845, HRA, series 1, vol. 24, p. 264. 57 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 July 1842, HRA, series 1, vol. 22, p. 172. 58 McDonald, ‘Evidence of Four New England Corroboree Songs’, pp. 176–94. See also B. McDonald, ‘New England Corroboree Songs as Evidence of Contact Relations’, Australian Folklore, vol. 11 (1996), pp. 146–51. 59 Macdonald, ‘Report’, 1 July 1842, HRA, series 1, vol. 22, p. 172 (emphasis in original). 60 McDonald, ‘Evidence of Four New England Corroboree Songs’, p. 179.

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Endnotes—pages 111 to 119 C H A P T E R 10 A B O R I G I N A L P E O P L E A N D PA S TO R A L I S M

379

1 H. Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770−1972 (Sydney, 1996), p. 69. 2 Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 53–6, 75–87 (quotation p. 81). 3 B. Cohen, To My Delight: The Autobiography of Bill Cohen, a Grandson of the Gumbangarri (Canberra, 1987), pp. 20, 53; A. McGuigan, Aboriginal Reserves in NSW: A Land Rights Research Aid (Sydney, n.d.). 4 For more detail see R. Harrison, Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment to the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales (Sydney, 2004). 5 Robert Massie to Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands, 10 January 1852, SRNSW 4/7153. 6 P. Brock, ‘Pastoral Stations and Reserves in South and Central Australia 1950’, Labour History, no. 69 (1995), pp. 102−14. 7 H. Goodall, ‘New South Wales’, in A. McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Aboriginal Australians under the British Crown (Sydney, 1995), p. 108. 8 R. Castle and J. Hagan, ‘Settlers and the State: The Creation of an Aboriginal Workforce in Australia’, Aboriginal History, no. 22 (1998), pp. 24−35; Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, p. 62. 9 Brock, ‘Pastoral stations and reserves’, p. 104. 10 J. Beckett, ‘A Study of a Mixed-blood Minority in the Pastoral West of New South Wales’, MA thesis, Australian National University, 1958; J. Beckett, ‘Aborigines, Alcohol and Assimilation’, in M. Reay (ed.), Aborigines Now (Sydney, 1964); J. Beckett, ‘George Dutton’s country: Portrait of an Aboriginal drover’, Aboriginal History, vol. 2 (1978), pp. 2−31; J.P.M. Long, Aboriginal Settlements: A Survey of Institutional Communities in Eastern Australia (Canberra, 1970). 11 Long, Aboriginal Settlements. 12 Goodall, ‘New South Wales’, pp. 84ff. 13 Cohen, To My Delight. See, also, J. Stewart, ‘Bill Cohen’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), New England Lives (Armidale, 1999). 14 See H. Creamer, ‘Malaise and Beyond’, in P. Stanbury (ed.), The Moving Frontier: Aspects of Aboriginal–European Interaction in Australia (Sydney, 1977), pp. 147–55. 15 Cohen, To My Delight, pp. 82, 103. 16 B. Morris, Domesticating Resistance: The Dhan-Gadi Aborigines and the Australian State (Oxford, 1989). 17 B. Morris, ‘From Underemployment to Unemployment: The Changing Role of Aborigines in a Rural Economy’, Mankind, vol. 13 (1983), pp. 499−516; Morris, Domesticating Resistance. 18 Morris, Domesticating Resistance. 19 Morris, ‘From Underemployment to Unemployment’, p. 505. 20 R. Harrison, interview with Christine Kim, 20 March 2001. 21 Morris, Domesticating Resistance. 22 See C. Sullivan, ‘Report on Kunderang East Station, Upper Macleay River, NSW’, unpublished report for NPWS, 1989; H. Burke, ‘The Outbuildings of

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Endnotes—pages 119 to 124 380 23 24 25 26

Kunderang East: An Archaeological Report’, unpublished report for NPWS, 1993. Sullivan, ‘Report on Kunderang East Station’, p. 65. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), p. 89; C. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, 1999). R. Harrison, interview with Bruce Lockwood, 21 March 2001. R. Harrison, interview with Bruce Lockwood, 21 March 2001.

C H A P T E R 11 A B O R I G I N E S A N D C I T I Z E N S The vital foundation work for this chapter, especially the detail on recent developments, was done by Professor Ann-Katrin Eckermann of the Centre for Research in Aboriginal and Multicultural Studies at UNE, and by Dianne Roberts, Vera Lovelock and Elva Taylor of the Armidale Aboriginal community. 1 See A. Markus, Australian Race Relations (Sydney, 1994), pp. 151–2 and Australian Census (2001). 2 Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1940, Section 7(1) (a). 3 Personal communication, Vera Lovelock to A.-K. Eckermann, 29 January 2006. 4 B. Cohen, To My Delight: The Autobiography of Bill Cohen, A Grandson of the Gumbangarri (Canberra, 1987), pp. 5–9, 17–21. See also J. Stewart, ‘Bill Cohen (1914–1983): A Gumbangarri life’, in J.S. Ryan and B. Cady (eds), New England Lives, vol. 1 (Armidale, 1999), pp. 88–92. 5 Cohen, To My Delight, pp. 53–60, 70, 108, 116. 6 Wright in Cohen, To My Delight, p. vii. 7 J.W. Warburton, ‘The Aborigines of New England: Their Background and Their Future’, ADHSJ, no. 4 (October 1962), pp. 24–6. 8 P. Cohen and M. Somerville, Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs (Sydney, 1990), pp. 69–75, 79ff. See also M. Somerville, ‘Story and Place: Aboriginal Storytelling in the South New England Area’, in M. Clarke (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth National Folklore Conference Held at Wright College, University of New England, Armidale, November 1990 (Canberra, 1991), pp. 5–11. 9 Cohen, To My Delight, p. 146. 10 Cohen and Somerville, Ingelba, pp. 108–10. 11 M.-A. Franklin, Assimilation in Action: The Armidale Story (Armidale, 1995), p. 2. 12 Franklin, Assimilation in Action; E. McIntosh, ‘The UNE Women’s Association and Armidale’s Aborigines’, in M.-A. Franklin (ed.), The New England Experience: Inside Stories of UNE, 1938–1988 (Armidale, 1988), pp. 109–12; J. Woolmington, ‘The “Assimilation” Years in a Country Town’, Aboriginal History, vol. 15, pt. 1 (1991), pp. 25–37. 13 Franklin, Assimilation in Action, pp. 14–37. 14 Cohen and Somerville, Ingelba, pp. 98–100. 15 Cited in Franklin, Assimilation in Action, p. 16; L. Riley-Mundine (ed.), The Frank Archibald Memorial Lecture (Armidale, n.d.).

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Endnotes—pages 125 to 130 16 Woolmington, ‘The “Assimilation” Years’, p. 36. 17 Riley-Mundine, Archibald Memorial Lecture, p. 2; B. McDonald, ‘Tradition as Personal Relationship’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 110, no. 435 (Winter, 1997), pp. 56–7, 59–62. 18 Cited in Woolmington, ‘The “Assimilation” Years’, p. 37. 19 P. Cohen, ‘They Were the Only Ones that Cared’, in Franklin, Assimilation in Action, pp. 80–7; Cohen and Somerville, Ingelba, pp. 98, 101–2. 20 A.P. Elkin, ‘Historical Background to the Present Problems’, in J.W. Warburton (ed.), Proceedings of a Conference on NSW Aborigines (Armidale, 1959), pp. 20–2; A.P. Elkin, ‘The Background of Present Day Aboriginal Policies’, in J.W. Warburton (ed.), Proceedings of a Conference on Welfare Policies for Australian Aborigines (Armidale, 1960), pp. 17–18. 21 Franklin, Assimilation in Action, pp. 41, 42. 22 A. Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (Sydney, 2002), pp. 83– 170, 226. 23 Curthoys, Freedom Ride, pp. 111–13, 122–3, 143–4, 162–7. 24 Quoted in R. Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance, 1788–2001 (Sydney, 2001), p. 180. 25 Franklin, Assimilation in Action, pp. 43, 48–9. 26 M.I. Eberle, J.T. Smith and A.B. Lloyd, ‘Land Rights for Aborigines’, November 1967 (unpublished paper, Dixson Library, UNE), pp. 10, 12; Franklin, Assimilation in Action, p. 60; Armidale Express, 29 May 1967. 27 Cited in Markus, Australian Race Relations, p. 176. 28 Markus, Australian Race Relations, p. 182; Personal communication, V. Lovelock to A.-K. Eckermann, 29 January 2006. 29 E.S. Elphick, The College on the Hill: A History of Armidale Teachers’ College and Armidale College of Advanced Education, 1928–1989 (Armidale, 1989), pp. 215–16. 30 Personal communication, A.-K. Eckermann to M. Jordan, 11 May 2006. 31 Elphick, College on the Hill, pp. 268–70; L. Riley-Mundine (ed.), Oorala: ‘A Place Where People Come Together’ (Armidale, 1986), pp. 4–6; Smith’s (UNE), May 2006, pp. 8–9. 32 Cohen, ‘They Were the Only Ones that Cared’, p. 86. 33 D. Roberts, ‘Minimbah Progress Report’, 2002, Minimbah School. 34 Personal communication, V. Lovelock to A.-K. Eckermann, 29 January 2006. 35 L. Cutmore and E. Briggs, ‘Armidale Aboriginal Community Profile’, March 1984 (unpublished paper, Dixson Library, UNE), pp. 12–14. 36 Cutmore and Briggs, ‘Armidale Aboriginal Community Profile’, p. 14. 37 Ngiya Think Tank, ‘Briefing paper No. 2: Community Development Employment Projects’, 28 February 2005, pp. 4–6, University of Technology Sydney, at jumbunna.uts.edu.au/research/cdep.pdf [accessed 6 May 2006]. 38 A.-K. Eckermann, L.T. Dowd and S. Johnson, Review of the New Start and Youth Allowance Schemes in Rural and Remote Indigenous Communities (Canberra, 2000). 39 Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, Building on Success: CDEP Discussion Paper 2005 (Canberra, 2005), pp. 5–12.

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Endnotes—pages 131 to 144 382

40 Australian Council of Social Services, ‘Principles for Reform of the Community Development Employment Program’ (April 2005), at www.acoss.org. au/upload/publications/papers/111 [accessed 6 May 2006]. 41 ADSI, ‘Submission to Commonwealth Charities and Related Organisations Definition Inquiry’, 19 January 2001, at www.cdi.gov.au/submissions/310ArmidaleDistrictServicesInc.doc [accessed 6 May 2006]. 42 Dick Estens, ‘Moree’s Aboriginal Employment Strategy’, Bennelong Society Conference, September 2001, at www.bennelong.com.au/conferences/conference2001 [accessed 10 May 2006]. 43 Sydney Morning Herald, 17 October 2001. 44 Armidale Express, 28 June 1980. 45 UNE, ‘Aboriginal Diploma Breaks New Ground’, media release, 22 November 2005. 46 ADSI, ‘Submission to Commonwealth charities’. 47 See Judicial Commission of New South Wales and Aboriginal Justice Advisory Council, Circle Sentencing in New South Wales: A Review and Evaluation (Sydney, 2003), pp. 51–4. 48 Attorney-General’s Department (NSW), ‘Crime Prevention: Circle Sentencing’, Fact Sheet (November 2005). C H A P T E R 12 PA S S I N G T H RO U G H 1 J. Bedson, Sleep No More: Poems of Jack Bedson (Armidale, 1993), p. 34. 2 For Galloway on the future of Stonehenge, see J.S. Ryan, ‘The Shaper of New England: Some Account of the Middle Years of John James Galloway’, pt 2, ADHSJ, no. 19 (1976), pp. 37–9. 3 Armidale Express, 14 April 1866, quoted in R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), p. 63. 4 ‘The Taylor Family’, at www.pcug.org.au/~ptaylor/TaylorFamily.htm [accessed 14 July 2004]. 5 See also M. Auster, ‘Ruin and Decay: The Northern Railway, Glencoe, New South Wales’, Australian Folklore, no. 12 (1997), pp. 216–19. 6 J. McPherson, ‘Some Aboriginal Place Names in Northern New South Wales’, JRAHS, vol. 16 (1930), pt 2, pp. 120–31. 7 Town and Country Journal, 5 April 1879, pp. 648–9. 8 V. Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Melbourne, 1954), p. 52. 9 W. Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, plate 12, lines 35–6. 10 At www.railpage.org.au/ausrail/00june/mg01157.html [accessed 14 July 2004]. 11 Quoted in W.N. Scott, Focus on Judith Wright (St Lucia, Qld, 1967), p. 52. 12 Verse extract from G. Blomfield, Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing (Sydney, 1986), p. 46. For ‘Baal Belbora’, see J.S. Ryan, The Land of Ulitarra (Grafton, 1964). 13 W. Clarke, Man, Land and Poetry: Geography in Poetic Expression (Port Moresby, 1975), p. 24.

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Endnotes—pages 144 to 153 14 M. Auster, unpublished poem. 15 J. Wetherspoon, ‘Stonehenge’, in his Warblings from the Bush (Sydney, 1890), p. 19. 16 ‘Memoirs of Arch J. Taylor (1896–1977)’, at www.pcug.org.au/~ptaylor [accessed 14 July 2004]. 17 N. Masters, ‘Englebrecht, Lord and Johnston Family Tree’, at http://myhome. ispdr.net.au/~nigelm [accessed 15 July 2004]. 18 M. Brod (ed.), The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Harmondsworth, Vic., 1972), p. 56 (29 September 1911). 19 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Rock’ (1934), pt 1. 20 The word is taken from A. Collett, ‘Body Landguage: Linguistic Inhabitation of Land in the Poetry of Judith Wright and Oodgeroo of the Tribe Noonuccul’, Kunapipi, vol. 17 (1995), pt 3, pp. 5–14.

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C H A P T E R 13 C O L O N I A L S E T T L E M E N T 1 S.J. Gale and R.J. Haworth, ‘Beyond the Limits of Location: Human Environmental Disturbance Prior to Official European Contact in Early Colonial Australia’, Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 37 (2002), pp. 123–36. But see also J. Tibby, ‘Assessing the Impact of Early Colonial Australia on the Physical Environment: A Comment on Gale and Haworth (2002)’, Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 39 (2004), pp. 144–56. 2 R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales (Sydney, 1966), p. 10 (quoting A. Cunningham, 1828). 3 Walker, Old New England, pp. 17–18. 4 J. Oppenheimer, ‘A History of Land Use in the Walcha District’, BA thesis, UNE, 1970, pp. 29–30. 5 Sydney Herald, 16 May 1836; A. Atkinson, ‘The Creation of Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 30 (March 1987), pp. 4–5. 6 ‘1841 Census Returns’, NSW Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings, 1841, pp. 141–2. 7 ‘1851 Census’, NSW Government Gazette, 7 November 1851, tables 2 and 10. 8 R. Duncan, Armidale: Economic and Social Development 1839–1871 (Armidale, 1951), pp. 40–54; Walker, Old New England, pp. 51–9. 9 ‘1861 Census’, NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1862, vol. 3, pp. 75–89, 96–129. In Glen Innes the number of married women nearly equalled the number of houses (45 to 52). In Tenterfield the figures were 107 to 126. 10 Armidale Express, 20 December 1856. 11 E.B. Swanson, ‘Chinese Immigrants in New England’, ADHSJ, no. 11 (1968), pp. 26–35. 12 L.T. Daly, Men and a River: Richmond River District 1828–1895 (Melbourne, 1966), pp. 57, 64; S. Hearfield, ‘German Immigration to Grafton, 1849 to 1859’, MLitt thesis, UNE, 1988, p. 29. 13 E. Hartmann, Dundee: The Land and Its People (Dundee, NSW, 1979), pp. 206– 26; P.A. Pemberton, Pure Merinos and Others: The Shipping Lists of the Australian

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Endnotes—pages 154 to 159 384 14

15

16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30 31 32

Agricultural Company (Canberra, 1986), pp. 70–6; J. Ferry, Colonial Armidale (St Lucia, Qld, 1999), pp. 46–7. Namoi Valley Independent, 21 December 1976; E.L. Sommerlad, The Migrant Shepherd: Ober-Rosbach to Tenterfield (Sydney, 1986); Ferry, Colonial Armidale, pp. 46–7. H. Nancarrow, Brandscheid’s Vine: A Local History of Brandscheid’s Farm and Its Owners, Kelly’s Plains, Armidale, NSW, 1858–2001 (Armidale, 2001), pp. 3–11, 45. Nancarrow, Brandscheid’s Vine, pp. 6–7. Thanks to Bill Oates for his help in identifying Schmidt. 14.5 per cent of urban population compared with 25.8 per cent of rural population. Ferry, Colonial Armidale, p. 188. Ferry, Colonial Armidale, pp. 116–17; Armidale Family History Group, Pioneer Register of New England from First Settlement to Federation (Armidale, 2003), pp. 4–5, 87, 184–6. J. Oppenheimer, ‘A Note on “Irish Town” and Glen Morrison—Deserted Settlements in the Walcha District’, ADHSJ, no. 15 (1971), pp. 57–9; J. Oppenheimer and B. Mitchell, An Australian Clan: The Nivisons of New England (Sydney, 1989), pp. 115–16. ‘1861 Census’, pp. 157–71; Daly, Men and a River, pp. 62–4. ‘1861 Census’, pp. 157–71: Walker, Old New England, pp. 132–3; E. Wiedemann, World of Its Own: Inverell’s Early Years (Inverell, 1981), pp. 38–9. R.L. Dawson, ‘Outback from the Hunter, New South Wales, to “New Caledonia” and the Severn River in 1840’, JRAHS, vol. 15 (1930), pp. 44–6. B.L. Cameron and J.L. McLennan, ‘Scots’ Corner’: A Local History (Armidale, 1971), pp. 10–12, 143–4. W.S. Ramson, ‘Nineteenth-century Australian English’, in W.S. Ramson (ed.), English Transported: Essays on Australasian English (Canberra, 1970), p. 37. J. Wetherspoon, ‘My Own New England Home’ and ‘Woodland Dreams’, in his Warblings from the Bush (Sydney, 1890), pp. 17–18, 147–50; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, p. 450. M. Rodwell, ‘Paternalism and Assisted Immigration in Colonial Australia: The Case of Ollera and the Everetts’, PhD thesis, UNE, in process. M.C. Williams and J.R. Kime, ‘The Baptist Church in the Armidale District from 1884 to 1954’, ADHSJ, no. 18, pp. 61–6; Ferry, Colonial Armidale, pp. 46, 58, 149. R. Milliss, City on the Peel: A History of Tamworth and District 1818–1976 (Sydney, 1980), pp. 55–6, 65, 80; J. Willetts, ‘Free Settler or Felon?’, www. jenwilletts.com/inn and hotels ab.htm [accessed 25 February 2005]. Atkinson, ‘The Creation of Armidale’, p. 7. Walker, Old New England, pp. 44, 56; Wiedemann, World of Its Own, pp. 54, 254. Charles Lyne, The Industries of New South Wales (Sydney, 1882), p. 151.

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Endnotes—pages 160 to 167 C H A P T E R 14 H O M E S T E A D S

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1 R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales (Sydney, 1966, chapters 1, 2; D. Lea, J. Pigram and L. Greenwood (eds), An Atlas of New England, vol. 2 (Armidale, 1977), chapters 10–12. 2 W.S. Ramson, The Australian National Dictionary (Melbourne, 1988), pp. 312– 13. 3 G. Connah, ‘Of the hut I builded’: The Archaeology of Australia’s History (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 63–73. 4 Eliza Marsh to her sister Maria, 5 January 1845, in S. Croft, Matthew Henry and Eliza Mary Marsh, Charles William and Janetta Maria Marsh, Their Descendants and Salisbury Court (Uralla, NSW, 1990), p. 6; National Trust of Australia, Register (Sydney, 1988), p. 306. 5 L.A. Gilbert, ‘Balala, New South Wales’, in Historic Homesteads (Canberra, 1972), pp. 152–7; National Trust of Australia, Register, p. 306. 6 O. Wright, Wongwibinda (Armidale, 1985), pp. 18–22. 7 A.V. Cane, ‘Ollera 1838–1900: A Study of a Sheep Station’, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1949; L.A. Gilbert, ‘Address to Mark the Centenary of the Laying of the Foundation Stone of St Bartholomew’s Church, Ollera’, ADHSJ, no. 21 (1978), pp. 96–100; National Trust of Australia, Register, p. 216. 8 H. Burke, ‘An Archaeological Survey of Standing Structures at Irishtown, near Walcha, NSW’, unpublished report for the Walcha Historical Society, April 1996, p. 103. 9 ‘Europambela Station—A Well Known New England Property’, Dalgety’s Review, 1 August 1906, pp. 51–4; National Trust of Australia, Register, pp. 309–10. 10 National Trust of Australia, Register, p. 251. 11 J. Oppenheimer and B. Mitchell, An Australian Clan: The Nivisons of New England (Sydney, 1989); J. Oppenheimer, ’New England’s National Trust Buildings, Ohio and Salisbury Court’, ADHSJ, no. 29 (1986), pp. 41–7; National Trust of Australia, Register, p. 310. 12 National Trust of Australia, Register, p. 158. 13 J. Oppenheimer, The Gordon Girls of Strathbogie and Gragin and their Macdonald Kith and Kin (Walcha, 2003), pp. 9–44; Walker, Old New England, pp. 85–6, 132; National Trust of Australia, Register, pp. 158, 306, 310. 14 R. Milliss, City on the Peel: A History of Tamworth and District 1818–1976 (Sydney, 1980), pp. 54, 104–7, 135–7. 15 J. Oppenheimer, Munros’ Luck: From Scotland to Keera, Weebollabolla, Boombah and Ross Roy (Walcha, 1998), pp. 30–2. 16 E.C. Sommerlad and E. St Clair, The Beardies’ Heritage (Glen Innes, 1972); National Trust of Australia, Register, p. 202. 17 A. Philp, The Ladies of Saumarez: The Story of an Australian Country House and the Women who Called it Home During the Past Century (Sydney, 1988); B. Mitchell and J. Oppenheimer, Saumarez: A History of the Property and Its People (Armidale, 1995); B. Mitchell and B. McDonald, Working Saumarez: People and Places on a Sheep and Cattle Station (Armidale, 1996); National

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Endnotes—pages 168 to 176 386

18

19 20

21

22

Trust of Australia, Register, p. 150; M.A. Scott, ‘Status and the Interior of New England Domestic Architecture: A Case Study of Booloominbah and Saumarez’, BA thesis, UNE, 1994. B. Mitchell, House on the Hill: Booloominbah—Home and University, 1888— 1988 (Armidale, 1988); P. Reynolds, L. Muir and J. Hughes, John Horbury Hunt: Radical Architect, 1838–1904 (Sydney, 2002), pp. 127–9; National Trust of Australia, Register, pp. 149–50. National Trust of Australia, Register, p. 310; B. Mitchell and J. Oppenheimer, A History of the Presbyterian Church in Walcha (Walcha, 1988), pp. 15–16. ‘Gostwyck Station, Uralla, New England, New South Wales, Owners—Dangar Bros’, Dalgety’s Monthly Review, 1 May 1896, p. 25, and 28 June 1897, pp. 20– 2; ‘The Gostwyck Estate—the Property of Captain C.C. Dangar’, The Pastoral Homes of Australia (Sydney, 1914), pp. 203–14; National Trust of Australia, Register, pp. 150, 306. P. Cox and W. Stacey, The Australian Homestead (Sydney, 1986), pp. 272–9; E. Wiedemann, World of Its Own: Inverell’s Early Years (Inverell, 1981), pp. 156, 158. Oppenheimer and Mitchell, An Australian Clan, pp. 142–54.

C H A P T E R 15 S C H O O L S 1 J. Hobden, ‘The Schools’, in Tamworth: A Peep at the Past (Tamworth, 1981), pp. 15–16; R. Milliss, City on the Peel: A History of Tamworth and District, 1818–1976 (Sydney, 1980), p. 74; L. Green and W. Newman, Chronological History of Tamworth, 4 vols (Tamworth, 2004), vol. 1, pp. 74–5. 2 B. Flood, ‘St Mary’s Catholic School, Armidale, 1849–1883’, ADHSJ, no. 46 (2003). We are also grateful for help from John Farrell. 3 R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), pp. 144–5. 4 P. Hancock, ‘Your Most Obedient Servant’: A History of the First 100 Years of Public Education in Warialda (Warialda, 2001). 5 Notes and press cuttings held in Walcha Local History Centre. 6 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 1, pp. 425–6; L.A. Gilbert, ‘William Gardner, 1802–1860’, ADHSJ, no. 17 (1974), pp. 1–4. 7 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, p. 167; B. Mitchell, ‘Pioneer School Inspector, William McIntyre’, ADHSJ, no. 17 (1974), pp. 55–9. 8 D.C. Griffiths (ed.), Documents on the Establishment of Education in New South Wales, 1789–1880 (Melbourne, 1957), pp. 154–5. 9 ‘1891 Census’. We have taken ‘New England’ to be as defined in D.A.M. Lea, J.J.J. Pigram and L. Greenwood (eds), An Atlas of New England (Armidale, 1977). 10 E. Wiedemann, World of Its Own: Inverell’s Early Years (Inverell, 1981), pp. 104, 195–6. 11 E.C. Sommerlad and E. St Clair, The Beardies’ Heritage (Glen Innes, 1972), pp. 197, 324.

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Endnotes—pages 176 to 183 12 M. Madgwick, ‘The Schools of Armidale, 1880–1910, with Particular Reference to the Private Schools’, ADHSJ, no. 3 (1962), pp. 25–34. 13 B. Mitchell, ‘Mrs Spasshatt’s School in Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 24 (1981), pp. 113–17; C. Pound and A. Atkinson, The Common Task: A History of PLC, Armidale (Armidale, 1995), pp. 17–24. 14 Walker, Old New England, p. 148. 15 B. Mitchell, ‘Place and Tradition: Origins of the New England Proprietary School (TAS)’, ADHSJ, no. 26 (1983), pp. 23–44; J. Graham, A School of Their Own: A History of The Armidale School (Armidale, 1994). 16 Pound and Atkinson, The Common Task, pp. 12, 25–36. 17 K. Grose and J. Newall, So Great a Heritage (Sydney, 1989); J. Newall and M. Wright, Under the Friendly Walls, 1895–1995: A Centenary Publication (Armidale, 1995). 18 Pound and Atkinson, The Common Task. 19 Green and Newman, Chronological History of Tamworth, vol. 1, pp. 191–2, 224–5. 20 Weidemann, World of Its Own, pp. 76, 103, 237 (n. 37). 21 K. Burford, ‘Blessed Mary MacKillop and the NSW Northern Tableland’, ADHSJ, no. 39 (1996), pp. 26–36. 22 P. Kneipp, This Land of Promise: The Ursuline Order in Australia, 1882–1982 (Armidale, 1982). 23 R. Fogarty, Catholic Education in Australia, 1806–1950, 2 vols (Melbourne, 1959), vol. 2, pp. 276–7. 24 John Farrell, personal communication, 13 June 2004. 25 T. Barker, Armidale: A Cathedral City of Education and the Arts (Sydney, 1980), p. 45. 26 Green and Newman, Chronological History of Tamworth, vol. 4, p. 1830. 27 B. Mitchell, ‘Origins of the New England University College’, ADHSJ, no. 25 (1982), pp. 115–20. 28 J.Newall, ‘Home from Home’, ADHSJ, no. 39 (1996), pp. 37–52. 29 Weidemann, World of Its Own, pp. 195–6. 30 Details about this school and the Summer Vale Aboriginal School are taken from the school administrative files, SRNSW 5/17713–2, 5/17713–3. 31 J.J. Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous: A History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales (Sydney, 1989). 32 B. McHattan and L. Scott, Woolbrook School Centenary, 1880–1980 (Woolbrook, 1980). 33 Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous, pp. 141–52. 34 Age, 20 January 2004.

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C H A P T E R 16 R E L I G I O U S L I F E I am grateful to Mr Les Townsend, Miss Shirley Dawson, Mrs Jean Newall, Father John Farrell and the Reverend Christopher Pears for sharing their time and knowledge with me.

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Endnotes—pages 184 to 188 388

1 St Mark’s Anglican Church, Tilbuster, later the University Chapel, is now a preschool in Armidale. The Methodist Church in Glen Innes is now a theatre. 2 L. Gilbert and E.S. Elphick, An Armidale Album: Glimpses of Armidale’s History and Development in Word, Sketch and Photograph (Armidale, 1982), p. 32. 3 J. Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales 1850–1950 (Armidale, 2004), pp. 85–103. 4 John Everett to Charles Everett, 12 April 1844, UNERA A103, V3052/3; Gilbert and Elphick, An Armidale Album, p. 141. 5 J. Farrell, ‘“The most popular man in town”: Father Tim McCarthy in New England, 1853–1862’, ADHSJ, no. 46 (2003), p. 86. 6 J.J. Farrell, ‘Genesis of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 38 (1995), p. 29. 7 William Tyrrell to Henry Tingcombe, 13 July 1854, copy in Anglican Church Archives, Armidale. 8 Armidale Express, 7 July 1866; W.F. Wentworth-Sheilds, ‘The Bishop’s Letter’, December 1921, Armidale Diocesan News, p. 3. 9 Broughton to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 14 October 1836, in F.T. Whitington, William Grant Broughton: Bishop of Australia (Sydney, 1936), p. 124; G.P. Shaw, Patriarch and Patriot: William Grant Broughton 1788–1853, Colonial Statesman and Ecclesiastic (Melbourne, 1978), p. 187. 10 Canon Hulley, ‘The Growth of the Church in New England’, Armidale Diocesan News, March 1936, p. 15. 11 Robert Blaine, ‘A Memoir 1834–1871’, compiled by his granddaughter, Muriel Fawcett Power, November 1941, Ferguson Library, Sydney, pp. 56, 63, 64; J. Backhouse (1843), quoted in Gilbert and Elphick, An Armidale Album, p. 141; R. Therry, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales (London, 1863), pp. 13–14. 12 Farrell, ‘“The most popular man in town”’, p. 82. 13 W.G. Broughton, A Journal of Visitation by the Lord Bishop of Australia in 1845 (London, 1846), pp. 38, 41; Whitington, William Grant Broughton, p. 121. 14 John Everett to Charles Everett, 24 April 1847, UNERA A103, V3052/3; William Tyrrell to Henry Tingcombe, 25 March 1848, copy in Anglican Church Archives, Armidale. 15 Armidale Express, 5 May 1860. 16 E.J. Doody, ‘The Story of the Diocese of Armidale—New England, Australia’, p. 20, typescript, Dixson Library, UNE; J.S. Ryan, ‘The Shaper of New England: Some Account of the Middle Years of John James Galloway—Part I’, ADHSJ, no. 17 (1974), p. 13; J. Atchison, ‘Joseph Daley, a Patriarch of Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 22 (1979), pp. 113, 118; Gilbert and Elphick, An Armidale Album, p. 160; J.J. Farrell, ‘An Ornament to the Rising City of Armidale: The Roman Catholic Cathedral 1869–1912’, ADHSJ, no. 37 (1994), pp. 3–4; J.J. Farrell, ‘Revisiting Roman Catholicism in Armidale 1835–53’, ADHSJ, no. 43 (2000), pp. 25–7; J. Farrell, ‘“The most popular man in town”’, p. 85. 17 Armidale Express, 18 February 1881; J. Ferry, Colonial Armidale (St Lucia, Qld, 1999), p. 172.

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Endnotes—pages 189 to 195 18 Armidale Express, 2 May 1882. 19 B.L. Cameron and J.L. McLennan, Scots’ Corner: A Local History (Armidale, 1971), pp. 77–9; Judith W. Magnus Grieve, ‘Meeting the Needs of the Kelly’s Plains Community: The School, Churches, Hall and Sporting Fields’, ADHSJ, no. 46 (2003), pp. 100–1. 20 Atchison, ‘Joseph Daley, a Patriarch of Armidale’, p. 124. 21 T.W. Campbell, ‘Joseph O’Connor (1848–1932), Bishop and Builder’, ADHSJ, no. l47 (2004), pp. 41–4. 22 W.G. Maddox, ‘The Origins of the Methodist Church in Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 19 (1976), pp. 95–8. 23 Gilbert and Elphick, An Armidale Album, pp. 163–6. 24 A.V. Green, Memoirs, condensed in J. Newall, ‘To Fight the Good Fight: Memoirs of a Colonial Bishop’, ADHSJ, no. 38 (1995), p. 108. 25 ‘Bishop Green and the Armidale Diocese’, Archdeacon Forster’s motion at the Diocesan Synod, Armidale Diocesan News, June 1944, p. 12. 26 W.F. Wentworth-Sheilds, ‘The Bishop’s Letter’, Armidale Diocesan News, December 1921; Green, Memoirs, p. 109. 27 ‘Clergy Freed from Want and Worry’, Armidale Express, 10 February 1969 (Anglican Centenary Supplement), p. 13; Jean Newall, ‘Dominies and Divines— the Time of Their Lives: The History of St John’s College, Armidale, 1898–1924’, ADHSJ, no. 38 (1995), pp. 40–1. 28 J.M. Freeland, Architect Extraordinary: The Life and Work of John Horbury Hunt: 1838–1904 (Melbourne, 1970), pp. 42, 48. 29 J. Ferry, ‘Living and Working on Gostwyck in the Days of the Open Range’, ADHSJ, no. 39 (1996), pp. 127–31. 30 Freeland, Architect Extraordinary, p. 73. 31 Farrell, ‘“The most popular man in town”’, p. 84; Ferry, Colonial Armidale, pp. 188–90. 32 Armidale Express, 16 August 1912, 28 October 1931, p. 4; St Paul’s Church News, 15 August 1931. 33 T.W. Campbell, ‘Joseph O’Connor (1848–1932) Bishop and Builder’, ADHSJ, no. 47 (2004), p. 43; Walking with the Saints: A Gift from the People, Stained Glass Windows, St Mary and St Joseph’s Cathedral, Armidale (Armidale, 2002); R.L. Wright, Through Stained Glass: A Compendium of Donor Artefacts (Armidale, 2003). 34 Armidale Express, 12 May 1860; D.R. Beer, ‘“The holiest campus”, Its Decline and Transformation: The University of New England, 1946–79’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 21 (1997), pp. 321–2. 35 On the historic adaptability in the Methodist Church, see Maddox, ‘The Origins of the Methodist Church in Armidale’. 36 Doody, ‘The Story of the Diocese of Armidale’, p. 321; B. Flood, ‘Bishop Doody and the Aborigines’, Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 56 (1979), p. 119. 37 Blaine, ‘A memoir 1834–1871’, p. 56. 38 Green, Memoirs, in Newall, ‘To Fight the Good Fight’, p. 109. 39 Greg Stanton, expounding Ephesians 2:19–22, Anniversary Choral Evensong, Sermon, 21 August 2004. See also, Armidale Express (extra), 11 August 2004.

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Endnotes—pages 196 to 203 390

C H A P T E R 17 T W E N T I E T H  C E N T U RY I M M I G R A N T S 1 M. Jordan, A Spirit of True Learning:The Jubilee History of the University of New England (Sydney, 2004), pp. 196–7. 2 The interviews (not separately referenced here) were part of two projects: ‘Immigrants in the Bush’ (funded by the New South Wales Multicultural Education Coordinating Committee), and ‘Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales’ (all material archived in UNERA). 3 E.W. Thorpe, J.H. Holmes and P. Brownie, ‘Farm Sizes and Changing Farm Practices in Southern New England’, and N. Crew, ‘The Population of New England’, in R.F. Warner (ed.), New England Essays (Armidale, 1963), pp. 118–26, 137–44; J. Atchison, ‘The Evolution of Settlement’, and J. Giggs, L. Greenwood and D. Lea, ‘Population’, in D.A.M. Lea, J.J.J. Pigram and L. Greenwood (eds), An Atlas of New England, vol. 2 (Armidale, 1977), pp. 171–82, 183–216. 4 J. Wilton, ‘The Walls Speak, Don’t They? Heritage Places and Contested Memories: A Case Study’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal, vol. 21 (2000), pp. 16–23; J. Wilton, ‘Wing Hing Long: From Store to Museum’, Golden Threads: Stories website at http://amol.org.au/goldenthreads/stories/whl.asp. [accessed 12 July 2006]. 5 H. Andreoni, ‘Immigrant Women in an Isolated Rural Community’, in K. James (ed.), Women in Rural Australia (St Lucia, Qld, 1989) [AQ: page span for chapter, please.]; J. Wilton, ‘Immigrants in Rural Areas’, in W. Perry (ed.), Multicultural Profiles in Adult and Further Education (Sydney, 1985), pp. 101–2 6 H. Andreoni, It’s Like Building a Bridge Over a Swamp (video) (Sydney, 1980); H. Andreoni, Non-English Speaking Women in an Isolated Rural Community (Armidale, 1983). 7 See J. Wilton, The Pieper Letters: Tenterfield in the Fifties (part of the multimedia package Immigrants in the Bush (letters translated from German by Linda Hess-Liechti)) (Sydney and Armidale, 1988). 8 Wilton, The Pieper Letters, p. 22. 9 Wilton, The Pieper Letters, p. 27. 10 Wilton, The Pieper Letters, p. 50. 11 See J. Hall, ‘Private Memories, Public Perceptions: Italian Prisoners of War in Northern New South Wales’, Limina, vol. 5 (1999), pp. 40–61. 12 See E. Kunz, Displaced Persons: Calwell’s New Australians (Canberra, 1988); J. Wilton and R. Bosworth, Old Worlds and New Australia (Melbourne, 1984), chapter 1. 13 See, for example, Department of Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs, The Community Refugee Settlement Scheme: A Handbook for Support Groups (Canberra, 1989). 14 J. Wilton, interview with Joe Hanna, Armidale, 31 August 1983; J. Hanna, ‘Armidale in 1928’, ADHSJ, no. 31 (1988), pp. 1–3. 15 J. Wilton, Hawking to Haberdashery (part of the multimedia package Immigrants in the Bush) (Sydney and Armidale, 1987).

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Endnotes—pages 204 to 217 16 J. Wilton, Cafes and Cafe Owners (part of the multimedia package Immigrants in the Bush) (Sydney and Armidale, 1989), p. 28. 17 Wilton, Cafes and Cafe Owners, pp. 11–19, 29–33. 18 N. Franklin, ‘An Encounter with the Bruderhof ’, Encounter, ABC Radio National, 5 June 2005 (www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s1380704.htm) [accessed 26 May 2006].

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C H A P T E R 18 T R AV E L L I N G A N D C O M M U N I C AT I N G 1 J. Wright, ‘Bullocky’; P.A. Wright, Memories of a Bushwacker (Armidale, 1982), pp. 69–70. 2 A. Atkinson, ‘The Creation of Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 30 (1987), pp. 3–9. 3 R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), p. 103. 4 C.E.W. Bean, The ‘Dreadnought’ of the Darling (London, 1911), pp. 201–2. 5 See J. Oppenheimer, ‘Communication Routes and the Pattern of Settlement in New England to 1850’, in D.A.M. Lea, J.J.J. Pigram and L. Greenwood (eds), An Atlas of New England, vol. 2 (Armidale, 1977), pp. 153–70. 6 John Atchison, work in progress. 7 M.E. Robinson, The New South Wales Wheat Frontier 1851 to 1911 (Canberra, 1976), pp. 105–25. 8 H. Haynes, Poor Jim has Died (Orange, 2001), pp. 33, 41, 94–100. 9 Zita Denholm to John Atchison, personal communication, 1972. 10 V.C. Cremer, ‘Armidale Post Office’, ADHSJ, no. 26 (1983), pp. 1, 4. 11 T.K. Abbott, evidence before the Board of Inquiry into the Post Office Department, NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1862, vol. 2, p. 796. 12 J. Docker, ‘Annual Report’ on the Post Office Department, 16 May 1871, NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1870–71, vol. 3, pp. 4–5, 54–6. 13 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, p. 206. 14 ‘Map of the New England District of New South Wales circa 1900’, in Armidale Family History Group, Pioneer Register of New England from First Settlement to Federation (Armidale, 2003), frontispiece. 15 H. Wilson, ‘The Woodward and Purkiss Story: Buggy, Garage and Service Car Industry from 1893 to 1972’, ADHSJ, no. 32 (1989), pp. 56–7. 16 Wright, Memories of a Bushwacker, pp. 24–6. 17 W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1988), pp. 118–19. 18 E.W. Allanson, ‘Transportation’, in Lea, Pigram and Greenwood, Atlas of New England, vol. 1, pp. 241–4. 19 NSW Department of Main Roads, The Roadmakers: A History of the Main Roads in New South Wales (Sydney, 1976); Allanson, ‘Transportation’, p. 243. 20 J. Thomson, The Good Old Days of Motoring In and Around Armidale (Armidale, 2004), pp. 41–2, 75–92, 142–5. 21 R.T. Scott, ‘Evidence before Royal Commission on Postal Service’, 10 July 1908, p. 22, Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Papers, 1910, vol. 4.

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Endnotes—pages 218 to 225 392

22 A. Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (London, 1997), pp. 434–5, 454–61. 23 ‘Gunnedah’, at www.infogunnedah.com.au/tourism/town_tour.php [accessed 12 October 2004]. 24 A.J. Smith, East–West Eagles: The Story of East–West Airlines, Australia’s ‘Decentralised’ Airline (Carina, Qld, 1989), pp. 2, 17, 22. 25 J. Atchison, ‘Don Shand’, New England Lives, vol. 3 (forthcoming). 26 Walker, Old New England, pp. 175–6. 27 John Atchison, ‘Notes’ from the Murray Waters Symposium, 1971 (point made during discussion and not to be found in published proceedings). 28 Chris Cunningham to John Atchison, personal communication (date unknown). C H A P T E R 19 E N T E R P R I S E A N D I N G E N U I T Y 1 G.J.R. Linge, Industrial Awakening: A Geography of Australian Manufacturing 1788 to 1890 (Canberra, 1979), pp. 567, 573. 2 Linge, Industrial Awakening, p. 537; R.B. Walker, ‘Flour Milling in New England’, ADHSJ, no. 7 (1964), pp. 4–6. 3 E.C. Sommerlad and E. St Clair Cameron, The Beardies’ Heritage (Glen Innes, 1972), pp. 147, 301; Walker, ‘Flour Milling’, p. 107; Country Promotion League and Commonwealth Immigration Department, Immigration and Land Settlement, Glen Innes NSW (Sydney, 1922), pp. 5, 17. 4 E.C. Sommerlad, Inverell: Twixt Tableland and Plain (Sydney, 1917), pp. 23, 50; Inverell Jubilee Celebrations Souvenir 1872–1922 (Inverell, 1922); E. Wiedemann, Holding Its Own: The Inverell District Since 1919 (Inverell, 1998), p. 137. 5 T.B. Coe, The Northern District of New South Wales (Sydney, 1907); L. Green and W. Newman (eds), Chronological History of Tamworth (Tamworth, 2004), vols 1–4, copious references. 6 G. Blainey, Black Kettle and Full Moon (Melbourne, 2003), pp. 249–50; K. Farrer, To Feed a Nation: A History of Australian Food Science and Technology (Melbourne, 2005), p. 104. 7 R. Toomey, Guyra: ‘Back to Guyra’ Souvenir (Guyra, 1983), p. 11; Sommerlad and St Clair Cameron, The Beardies’ Heritage, pp. 147, 149, 300–1; A.W. Cameron, A Short History of Glen Innes (Glen Innes, 1977), p. 13; E. Wiedemann, World of Its Own: Inverell’s Early Years (Inverell, 1981), pp. 209–11; Country Promotion League and Commonwealth Immigration Department, Immigration and Land Settlement, pp. 5, 19. 8 Wiedemann, Holding Its Own, p. 234. 9 B. Cady, ‘Dairying in the Armidale District’, ADHSJ, no. 47 (2004), pp. 81–108. 10 Cady, ‘Dairying’, pp. 98–9, 100, 102. 11 Green and Newman, Chronological History, vols 3 and 4, copious references. 12 Wiedemann, World of Its Own, pp. 117–18; Green and Newman, Chronological History, vols 1 and 2, several references; B.J. Stubbs, ‘City vs Country: The

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Endnotes—pages 225 to 231 13 14 15

16 17 18

19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26

Demise of the Brewing Industry in Country New South Wales, 1898–1932’, Australian Geographer, vol. 31 (2000). ‘What Inverell Offers—1933’, The Tide of Time, vol. 11 (1984), p. 23; Coe, The Northern District; Wiedemann, Holding Its Own, pp. 20–1, 41–2. Diamond Jubilee Souvenir 1863–1923 (Armidale, 1923), p. 106. Wiedemann, Holding Its Own, pp. 20, 41–2, 196; J. Farrell, ‘Ryan’s Cordials: The Rise and Fall of an Armidale Industry’, ADHSJ, no. 48 (2005), pp. 139–46; ‘Inverell On-line’, www.inverell.nsw.gov.au/dir205/InvOnline.nsf [accessed 7 May 2006]. Wiedemann, Holding Its Own, pp. 20–1, 41–2. ‘Thomas New England Estate Wines’, at www.newenglandestatewines.com.au [accessed 15 May 2006]; information supplied by the firm. Toomey, Guyra, p. 13; Wiedemann, Holding Its Own, pp. 79, 105, 196, 268; R. Stayner, The Economic Impacts of Changes in Wool Prices on a Small Rural Town: Guyra NSW (Armidale, 1990), p. 2; Country Leader, 5 December 2005, p. 13; Bureau of Industry Economics, Job Losses in Small Country Towns: A Case Study of Adjustment to Abattoir Closures in Tenterfield, NSW (Canberra, 1983), pp. 1, 7, 9, 11. Green and Newman, Chronological History, vol. 4, various references; Department of Local Government, Report of the Inspection of the Finance and Management of the Tamworth City Council Abattoir (Sydney, 1980), pp. 2, 3, 5, 8, 11; Country Leader, 5 December 2005, pp. 12–14; ‘Country Fresh Australasia Pty Ltd’, at www.austrade.gov.au/corporate/layout [accessed 7 May 2006]; ‘CPA Australia’, at www.cpaaustralia.com.au/apps/ibisworld/company [accessed 7 May 2006]; information from Helen McNeill, of J.S.A. Jackson and Son. N. Crawford, Back to Tenterfield Souvenir (Tenterfield, 1949), p. 35; J. Harvey, ‘George Mallaby (1860–1926) Soap Manufacturer in Armidale’, in J.S. Ryan and B. Cady (eds), New England Lives II (Armidale, 2001) pp. 52–66; L. Gilbert and E.S. Elphick (compilers), An Armidale Album (Armidale, 1982), p. 95; Green and Newman, Chronological History, vols 1 and 2, several references. R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), pp. 107–8; Gilbert and Elphick, An Armidale Album, p. 88. K. Halliday, ‘Edward Reeves Whereat: A Man of True Patriotism, “Generous friend and manly foe”’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), Writing Tenterfield: A Collection of Historical, Cultural and Other Essays (Armidale, 2002), p. 80. Cameron, A Short History of Glen Innes, p. 14; Sommerlad and St Clair Cameron, The Beardies’ Heritage, pp. 154, 302. Green and Newman, Chronological History, vol. 1, pp. 266–7, 291, 412–13, vol. 2, pp. 919–20, and vol. 3, p. 1133. Back to Uralla Souvenir (Uralla, 1925) pp. 7, 9. Back to Uralla Souvenir, p. 63; Cameron, A Short History of Glen Innes, p. 13; H. Wilson, ‘The Woodward and Purkiss Story: Buggy, Garage and Service Car Industry from 1893 to 1972’, ADHSJ, no. 32 (1989); information from Arnold Goode.

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Endnotes—pages 231 to 235 394

27 Green and Newman, Chronological History, vol. 3, pp. 1252–3, 1751–2. 28 Back to Barraba: Souvenir Program (Barraba, 1946), pp. 26–7; N.L. McKellar, personal communication, April 1973; Toomey, Guyra, p. 13; Stayner, The Economic Impacts, p. 22; H. Raymond, personal communication, May 2006; Northern Rivers Echo, 9 May 2006. 29 IAC’s website is at www.iacglobal.com. 30 Thanks to Scott Williams, and to Graham East of New Horizons/EdAlive (website, www.edalive.com). C H A P T E R 20 P O L I T I C S 1 This chapter focuses on parliamentary politics in the colonial/state and federal spheres. The subject of local government warrants separate treatment and is therefore beyond its scope. 2 J.S. Ryan, ‘The Earlier Life of Wykeham Henry Freame’, ADHSJ, no. 27 (1984), pp. 57–66. 3 J.C. Caldwell, ‘New England Politics 1856–1865: An Examination of the Electorate of New England Constituencies Which Throws Some Light on New South Wales Politics During the First Decade of Responsible Government’, BA thesis, UNE, 1958, pp. 48, 49–50, 110–14, 118, 137, 138–9, 257, 258–9. 4 Caldwell, ‘New England Politics’, pp. 140–2, 253; A.W. Martin and P. Wardle, Members of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales 1856–1901: Biographical Notes (Canberra, 1959), pp. 42, 209–10; R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), pp. 160–1 (quotation); E.B. Price, ‘Samuel Henry Terry (1833–1887), MLA for New England, and Triennial Parliaments’, ADHSJ, no. 15 (1971–72), pp. 51–6; I.M. Laszlo, ‘Politics and Continuance of the Railway North beyond Tamworth’, ADHSJ, no. 20 (1977), pp. 44–5, 48. 5 Quoted in Ken Halliday, ‘Edward Reeves Whereat . . . a Man of True Patriotism’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), Writing Tenterfield: A Collection of Historical, Cultural and Other Essays (Armidale, 2002), p. 76. 6 G.S. Harman, ‘New England Politics in the Nineties’, ADHSJ, no. 3 (1962), p. 42; R. Luxton, ‘Edmund Lonsdale (1843–1913), Builder, Preacher, Politician’, in J.S. Ryan and Bruce Cady (eds), New England Lives, vol. 2 (Armidale, 2001), pp. 38–51. 7 Luxton, ‘Edmund Lonsdale’, p. 47; G.S. Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral Level—a Study in Armidale and New England, 1899–1929’, MA thesis, UNE, 1964, pp. 330, 338; D. Aitkin, The Country Party in New South Wales: A Study of Organisation and Survival (Canberra, 1972), p. 139. 8 Northern Daily Leader, 8 November 1973, p. 2; K. Richmond, ‘The New England New State Movement: Electoral Activity in 1968 and 1971’, ADHSJ, no. 23 (1980), pp. 107–10; P. Fletcher and I. Sinclair, ‘Freda Mott, OAM, BEM (1905–1998), Willing Servant of Her Community’, in Ryan and Cady, New England Lives II, p. 121.

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Endnotes—pages 236 to 240 9 Armidale Express, 4 May 1987, pp. 1–3, and 25 May 1987, p. 1; ‘Patricia Dixon ( –2001), politician’, in ‘Australian Women’s Archives Project’, at www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE0153b.htm [accessed 16 March 2005]. 10 Caldwell, ‘New England politics’, pp. 5, 27–8, 37–8, 43–4, 53, 55–6; J. Hobden, ‘Fun and Fisticuffs at Early Elections’, in J. Hobden (ed.), Tamworth: A Look at Bygone Days (Tamworth, 1978), pp. 12–15. 11 Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral Level’, pp. 483–5; D. Aitkin, The Colonel: A Political Biography of Sir Michael Bruxner (Canberra, 1969), p. 50. 12 Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral Level’, pp. 483–5, 520–1 (for Drummond, see p. 483, fn 29). 13 Caldwell, ‘New England politics’, pp. 57–63; Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral Level’, p. 124. 14 Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral Level’, chapter 5; G.S. Harman, ‘New England and Armidale Politics, 1891–1898: An Examination of the New England and Armidale Electorates to View Political Activity on the Local Level, and to Observe What Light is Thrown on NSW Politics during the 1890s’, BA Thesis, UNE, 1959, pp. 6–7; G. Harman, ‘The Provincial Press and Politics in the New England Region of New South Wales, 1856–1930’, JRAHS, vol. 61 (1975), pp. 217–35; D.J.R. Sommerlad, ‘D.H. Drummond: Parliamentarian and Pressman’, ADHSJ, no. 22 (1979), pp. 43–52. 15 The preceding section depends substantially on Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral Level’, chapters 5–7. 16 Tenterfield Star, 12 February 1920, quoted in Aitkin, The Colonel, p. 36, fn 3. 17 J.F. Atchison, ‘The Federal Electorate of New England’, ADHSJ, no. 28 (1985), p. 92. 18 D. Aitkin, ‘“Countrymindedness”: The Spread of an Idea’, Australian Cultural History, no. 4 (1985), pp. 34–41. See also Aitkin, The Country Party in New South Wales, chapter 1. 19 Aitkin, The Colonel, pp. 49–50. 20 Richmond, ‘New England New State Movement’, p. 106. 21 Aitkin, ‘“Countrymindedness”’, p. 40; Aitkin, The Country Party in New South Wales, p. 78. 22 J.J.J. Pigram, The Development and Potential of the Namoi Valley Cotton Industry (Armidale, [1968]). 23 E.J. Tapp, ‘The Colonial Origins of the New England New State Movement’, JRAHS, vol. 49 (1963), pp. 205–21. 24 The literature is large but see, besides the works cited below, E. Moore-Eyman, ‘The Causes of the Agitation, after 1901, for the Establishment of a New State in Northern New South Wales’, MA thesis, New England University College (University of Sydney), 1953; Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral level’. 25 J.J. Farrell, ‘Bones for the Growling Dog? The New State Movements in Northern New South Wales 1915–1930’, MA thesis, UNE, 1997, pp. 52, 54, 118–20, 134. 26 D.W. Cooper, ‘The Armidale Electorate 1929–1939’, MLitt thesis, UNE, 1985, pp. 31–2; E.R. Woolmington, ‘The Geographical Scope of Support for

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Endnotes—pages 240 to 248 396 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

the New State Movement in Northern NSW’, PhD thesis, UNE, 1963, pp. III/42–9. Woolmington, ‘The Geographical Scope’, II/19, 24, III/45, 48, IV/11–12, 20–2, X/23. Richmond, ‘New England New State Movement’, p. 99. Woolmington, ‘The Geographical Scope’. Australia Subdivided: The First New State [title page: Australian Subdivision: Effect on Development: The Case for Northern New South Wales] (Glen Innes, 1920), pp. 8–10. I.M. Laszlo, ‘Railway Development in the North: Some Conclusions’, ADHSJ, no. 20 (1977), pp. 80–1. Aitkin, The Country Party in New South Wales, p. 15. This interpretation has been informed by a reading of Farrell, ‘Bones’, pp. 60–1, but influenced also by J. Hirst, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne, 2000). This claim to continuity slightly simplifies the case because New South Wales had multi-member constituencies between 1920 and 1927. See Atchison, ‘Federal Electorate’. I have depended on his article for many of the basic details contained in this paragraph. Harman, ‘Politics at the Electoral Level’, pp. 267–8; Cooper, ‘The Armidale Electorate’, p. 21. Aitkin, The Country Party in New South Wales, pp. 15, 138, 187. B. Costar and J. Curtin, Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics (Sydney, 2004). Caldwell, ‘New England Politics’, p. 52.

C H A P T E R 21 WA R A N D I T S M E M O R I E S Thanks to Kevin Smith for his list of war memorials in Armidale, to be published in the ADHSJ, no. 49 (2006), and to Doug Lennox, Dave Beahan, Garry Conyers, John Farrell, Darcy Hassett and Alan Atkinson. 1 R.C. (Cleve) Potter, Not Theirs the Shame Who Fight (Canberra, 1999); Andy Fletcher, NX 20365 (Walcha, n.d.). 2 Geoff Page, Smalltown Memorials (St Lucia, Qld, 1975); Geoff Page (ed.), Shadows From the Wire: Poems and Photographs of Australians in the Great War (Harmondsworth, Vic., 1983); Geoff Page, Benton’s Conviction (Sydney, 1985). 3 D. Lennox, ‘South African War 1899–1902: Soldiers from Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 44 (2001), pp. 1–12. 4 I. Johnstone, ‘James Francis Thomas and his Many Parts’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), Writing Tenterfield (Armidale, 2002), pp. 84–100. 5 I.M. Johnstone, ‘The Men of Armidale and Hillgrove who Fell in the Great War’, ADHSJ, no. 37 (1994), pp. 105–25. 6 P.A. Wright, Memories of a Bushwhacker (Armidale, 1972), pp. 39–40. 7 R.H. Blomfield, quoted in J. Edwards, Never a Backward Step: A History of

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Endnotes—pages 248 to 255 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

the First 33rd Battalion, AIF (Grafton, 1996), p. 5. Edwards lists about 3500 profiles of those who served with the 33rd, pp. 124–334. John Goldsmith, ‘33rd Battalion AIF: An Historical note’, ADHSJ, no. 43 (2000), p. 7–8. Armidalian, March 1914; Blomfield, quoted in Edwards, Never a Backward Step, p. 7. C.E.W. Bean, The AIF in France, 1918 (Sydney, 1937), vol. 5, p. 301. Bean, The AIF in France, 1918, vol. 5, p. 301, and vol. 6 (Sydney, 1942), p. 91; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, pp. 466–7. C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac (Sydney, 1921), vol. 1, p. 599 (fn 32). J.J. Farrell, ‘Unprecedented in Australia’s Political History: The Braund Memorials’, ADHSJ, no. 45 (2002), pp. 113–30. I.M. Johnstone, ‘The 157 Men and Two Women from Armidale Lost in World War II’, ADHSJ, no. 40 (1997), pp. 37–58. See also J.S. Ryan, ‘Some Forgotten New Englanders: Australians’ Lives in RAF Bomber Command, 1942–1945’, AHDSJ, no. 40 (1997), pp. 65–7. J. Burfitt, Against All Odds: The History of the 2/18 Battalion AIF (Sydney, 1991), p. 7 (Battalion Nominal Roll at pp. 239–56). K.R. Smith, ‘New Englander Prisoners of War in Borneo 1942–1945’, ADHSJ, no. 43 (2000), pp. 1–6. Johnstone, ‘The Men of Armidale and Hillgrove’, p. 118. C. Thomas, ‘The Dangarsleigh War Memorial’, ADHSJ, no. 37 (1994), pp. 135–44.

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C H A P T E R 22 T H E A RC H A E O L O G Y O F T H E N E W P E O P L E S 1 G. Connah, ‘Wool, Water and Sediment: The Archaeological Landscape of Saumarez Station’, ADHSJ, no. 20 (1977), pp. 117–27. 2 G. Connah, M. Rowland and J. Oppenheimer, Captain Richards’ House at Winterbourne: A Study in Historical Archaeology (Armidale, 1978). 3 L. Godwin, ‘The Life and Death of a Flourmill: McCrossin’s Mill, Uralla’, Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology, vol. 1 (1983), pp. 67–77; G. Connah, ‘Bagot’s Mill: Genesis and Revelation in an Archaeological Research Project’, Australasian Historical Archaeology, vol. 12 (1994), pp. 3–55. 4 W. Pearson, ‘Water Power in a Dry Continent: The Transfer of Watermill Technology from Britain to Australia in the 19th Century’, PhD thesis, UNE, 1995; W. Pearson, ‘Water-powered Flourmilling on the New England Tablelands of New South Wales’, Australasian Historical Archaeology, vol. 16 (1998), pp. 30–44. 5 For aspects of the research, see S.McKay, ‘Demolition at Saumarez: A Study of Demolition as a Site Formation Process at Saumarez, near Armidale, NSW’, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2000; G. Connah, ‘Problem Orientation in Australian Historical Archaeology’, Historical Archaeology, vol. 37 (2003), pp. 153–6.

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Endnotes—pages 255 to 261 398

6 Pearson, ‘Water Power in a Dry Continent’; Heather Burke, ‘Investments of Meaning: An Archaeology of Style, Social Identity, Capitalism and Ideology in a Nineteenth Century Australian Town’, PhD thesis, UNE, 1996; H. Burke, Meaning and Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Style, Social Identity, and Capitalism in an Australian Town (New York, 1999). 7 E. Higginbotham, ‘Historical Archaeology of Armidale NSW: Armidale Heritage Study, vol. 3’, unpublished report for Armidale Dumaresq Council, 1991; Burke, ‘Investments of Meaning’; Burke, Meaning and Ideology in Historical Archaeology; H. Burke, ‘An Assessment of the Inadequacies of the Historical Archaeological Component of the 1991 Armidale Heritage Study: A Submission to the Armidale Dumaresq Council’, unpublished report for Armidale Dumaresq Council, 2000. 8 P. Watson, ‘Results of the Archaeological Excavations of the Armidale Coles Eastend Development Site, 2001: McLean’s Corner’, ADHSJ, no. 46 (2003), pp. 59–76. 9 S. Sutton, ‘Results of a Survey for Aboriginal Sites in the City of Armidale’, unpublished report to Armidale City Council, 1989; P. Watson, ‘Report on the Saumarez Store Archaeological Excavations, Stage 1, July 2003’, unpublished report for the National Trust of Australia (NSW), 2003; P. Watson, ‘Draft Archaeological Management Plan for Armidale’, unpublished report for NSW Heritage Office and Armidale Dumaresq Council, 2004. 10 P. Watson, ‘Report on the Rocky River Settlement Project 2004’, unpublished report, UNE, 2005. 11 Connah, Rowland and Oppenheimer, Captain Richards’ House, pp. 4, 11. 12 Connah, ‘Bagot’s Mill’; Pearson, ‘Water Power in a Dry Continent’; Pearson, ‘Water-powered Flourmilling’. 13 Godwin, ‘The Life and Death of a Flourmill’, p. 68. 14 D. Gojak, ‘Gara River: An Early Hydro-electric Scheme in Northern New South Wales’, Australian Historical Archaeology, vol. 6 (1988), pp. 3–11. 15 H. Burke, ‘An Historical Archaeological Survey of the RMT Project Area, Poverty Point, NSW’, unpublished report for Ross Mining, NL, 1997, p. 11. 16 D.M. Godden, ‘The Ottery Mine’, unpublished report for the Heritage Council of NSW, 1981. 17 H. Burke, ‘An Historical Archaeological Assessment of the Torrington State Recreation Area’, unpublished report for National Parks and Wildlife Services, 1998. 18 H. Burke, ‘An Archaeological Survey of Standing Structures at Irishtown near Walcha, NSW’, unpublished report for Walcha Historical Society, 1996; H. Burke, ‘Conservation Plan for Homeleigh, Walcha, NSW’, unpublished report for Walcha Historical Society, p.10. 19 H. Burke, ‘An Historical Archaeological Assessment of a Section of Guy Fawkes Village, near Ebor, NSW’, unpublished report for Armidale Dumaresq Council, 2000. 20 Watson, ‘Results of the Archaeological Excavations of the Armidale Coles Eastend Development Site, 2001’; Watson, ‘Draft Archaeological Management Plan for Armidale’.

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Endnotes—pages 263 to 268 C H A P T E R 23 C O L L E C T I N G A N D P R E S E N T I N G T H E PA S T

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1 T. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 9–149. 2 J.M. Bartholomew, ‘The History of Public Education in Hillgrove, 1885–1920’, 1977, pp. 19, 21, UNERA; Tonkin Personality File, HRC, UNERA. 3 L.A. Gilbert, ‘Historical Museums and the National Estate’, ADHSJ, no. 17 (1974), pp. 108–9. 4 Armidale Express, 14 September 1932, 22 May 1933. 5 Armidale Express, 18 December 1933, 29 June and 23 July 1934, 21 January 1942. 6 J.S. Ryan ‘Eric W. Dunlop (1910–1974) and the Teaching of Traditional Culture in New England’, ADHSJ, no. 42 (1999), p. 59. 7 Reports of the Australian Historical Exhibition Committee, c.1936–38, UNERA A1634, File 141; E.W. Dunlop, ‘Movement towards a museum of social history’, JRAHS, vol. 41, pt 4, (1955), p. 176. 8 L. Gilbert, ‘Eric Dunlop’, Dunlop Personality File HRC, UNERA, pp. 7–12; E.W. Dunlop, ‘The Folk Museum Movement in New England’, JRAHS, vol. 45 (1960), p. 269; E.W. Dunlop Scrapbook, UNERA A1634, file 145. 9 Dunlop Scrapbook; Dunlop, ‘The Folk Museum Movement in New England’, p. 269; Armidale Express, 24 November 1954; E.W. Dunlop, ‘Notes on 1954 Tour’, UNERA A1634, file 146. 10 Dunlop, ‘Movement towards a Museum of Social History’, pp. 176–9. 11 L.A. Gilbert, ‘A Museum and a Centenary’, ADHSJ, no. 23 (1980), p. 29. 12 Gilbert, ‘Eric Dunlop’; Dunlop Scrapbook. 13 Dunlop Scrapbook. 14 E.W. Dunlop, ‘Diary’, 1947, UNERA A1634, file 148. 15 Dunlop, ‘The Folk Museum Movement in New England’, pp. 275–6; Dunlop Scrapbook; Louise Daley to Norman Crawford, 22 June 1958, UNERA A186, V3098/20; History of New England Course, 1955, UNERA A363, file 13/7(1); Boggabri Adult Education Committee, Boggabri: The Story of our Town (Boggabri, 1957), pp. 1–2, 55. 16 ‘Regional Museums of New England’, ADHSJ, no. 14 (1971), pp. 101–5. 17 R.F. Robinson, ‘That the Future May Learn from the Past’, ADHSJ, no. 15 (1971–72), pp. 103–5. 18 ‘Historical Museum for Gunnedah’, ADHSJ, no. 16 (1973), p. 83; G. Court and J. Hobden (eds), Tamworth, the Changing Scene (Tamworth, 1977), pp. 6–9. 19 James Colman and Associates, Museums and Galleries in the Regions of New South Wales (Sydney, 1980), pp. 5, 13–18. 20 E.W. Dunlop, ‘History through Museums’, paper presented in Australian UNESCO seminar, ‘The Role of Museums in Education’, 1966, pp. 68–73, UNERA. 21 E.W. Dunlop, ‘William Gardner, Pioneer Historian of New England’, ADHSJ, no. 1 (1960), pp. 21–30.

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Endnotes—pages 268 to 274 400

22 J.S. Ryan, ‘Early University Responses to the Matter of Collecting and Using Archives in New England’, and J.S. Ryan, ‘Historical Studies in Mid-century Armidale’, ADHSJ, no. 41 (1998), pp. 27–43. 23 C. Buckley, ‘History of the University of New England Archives’, ADHSJ, no. 40 (1997), pp. 117–18. 24 Armidale Express, 12 November 1954; Buckley, ‘History’, p. 118. 25 R.J. McDonald, ‘University Archives in New England’, Australian Library Journal, March 1963, p. 26; Buckley, ‘History’, pp. 120–2. 26 A. Wilkes to A.B. McDonnell, 26 March 1964, UNERA A268. 27 M. Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria, 1834–1890 (Melbourne, 1961); G.L. Buxton, The Riverina 1861–1891: An Australian Regional Study (Melbourne, 1967). 28 Buckley, ‘History’, pp. 126–8. 29 J. Ferry, ‘Colonial Armidale: A Study of People, Place and Power in the Formation of a Country Town’, PhD thesis, UNE, 1994; J. Ferry, Colonial Armidale (St Lucia, Qld, 1999). 30 Buckley, ‘History’, pp. 130–3. 31 J.J.J. Pigram and I.N. King, ‘Tourism in New England’, in D. Lea, J. Pigram and L. Greenwood (eds), An Atlas of New England, vol. 2 (Armidale, 1977), p. 291. 32 F. McInherny and T. Schaeffer (eds), Our Grandchildren Won’t Believe It: A Local History of the Wongwibinda, Aberfoyle and Ward’s Mistake Areas (Armidale, 2004). 33 A. Ho, ‘Words and Music: Heritage Outside of the Library or Museum’, unpublished paper presented to HFRC seminar, UNE, 24 March 2005. 34 S. Macdonald, ‘What are Words Worth?’, Historic Environment, vol. 18, no. 3 (2005), p. 6. 35 M. Eastcott, ‘Local Government, Heritage and Social Identity’, unpublished paper presented to HFRC seminar, UNE, 3 November 2005. 36 ‘Festivals Australia: A Commonwealth Government Program: Grant recipients, May 2003, 16th Grant Round’, p. 2, at www.dcita.gov.au/data/assets/word_ doc/16623/round16.doc [accessed 18 April 2006]. 37 Bingara Shire Council Tourist Information Centre, Bingara: Centre of North West New South Wales (n.d.); Eastcott, ‘Local Government, Heritage and Social Identity’. 38 Eastcott, ‘Local Government, Heritage and Social Identity’. 39 Eastcott, ‘Local Government, Heritage and Social Identity’. 40 M. Bower, ‘A Co-operative of Schools, TAFE, UNE, ACE and Community within the Framework of the Cunningham Learning Region’, unpublished briefing paper, 12 November 2003; M. Goss, ‘Premier Announces $40,000 to Complete Roxy Theatre’, Arts Bulletin, no. 80 (June 2004), p. 1; S. Macdonald, ‘Year Round Comfort at the Roxy’, media release, 16 February 2006, at www.sandymacdonald.com.au/news/default.asp?action=articleandID=328 [accessed 18 April 2006]. 41 R. Florida, ‘Where It’s At: Why are Some Places More Successful than Others at

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Endnotes—pages 274 to 297 Encouraging Economic Growth?’, New Scientist, 29 October 2005, p. 43; and see R. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (Melbourne, 2003). 42 Bower, ‘A Co-operative of Schools’. 43 See their website, at www.nemas.org.au.

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C H A P T E R 24 I M A G I N I N G N E W E N G L A N D 1 G.J. Macdonald, ‘The Evening Lake’, in his On a Movement of Beethoven’s and Other Poems of 1830s (Canberra, 1978), n.p. 2 George Macdonald papers, Mitchell Library AOX816. 3 Macdonald, ‘The Fate of Poets’, in his On a Movement of Beethoven’s. 4 J. Manifold, Collected Verse (St Lucia, Qld, 1978), p. 133. 5 J. Wright, ‘For New England’, in her Collected Poems (Sydney, 1994), p. 22. 6 J. Wright, ‘South of My Days’, in her Collected Poems, p. 20. 7 F. Plunkett, ‘Michael Dransfield on the New England Highway’, in J. McDonell and M. Deeves (eds), Land and Identity (Armidale, 1998), pp. 239–42. 8 G.B. Shortis, ‘A Winter Ode to His Provincial City’, in his The Comedy Human (Armidale, 1997), p. 23. 9 G.B. Shortis, ‘A Winter Ode’, in his The Comedy Human, p. 23. 10 M. Sharkey, ‘History’, in his History: Selected Poems 1978–2000 (Wollongong, 2002), p. 79. 11 Michael Sharkey, ‘Park’, in his History, pp. 104, 106–7, 110. 12 L. Murray, ‘Toward the Imminent Days’, in his Collected Poems 1961–2002 (Sydney, 2002), p. 38. 13 Murray, ‘Granite Country’, in his Collected Poems, pp. 321–2. 14 Y. Louis, Voyagers (Wollongong, 2002). 15 Louis, Voyagers, p. 14. 16 L. Simpson, People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–83 (London, 1985), p. 158. 17 Simpson, People Live Here, pp. 149–50. 18 J. Wright, ‘At Cooloolah’, in her Half a Lifetime (Melbourne, 1999), pp. 294, 296. C H A P T E R 26 S TO R I E S A N D P RO S E Notes and Furphies, no. 1 (October 1978), p. 20. The Moving Image (1946). A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (London, 1929), pp. 93–4. W. Gardner, ‘Production and Resource of the Northern and Western Districts of New South Wales, 1854’, Mitchell Library CY 89/90; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 1, pp. 425–6. 5 J.S. Ryan, ‘The Shaper of New England: The Middle Years of John James Galloway’, in three parts, ADHSJ, nos 17 (1974), 19 (1976) and 21 (1978). 6 Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1959, p. 559. 7 I. Johnstone, ‘James Francis Thomas and his Many Parts’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), Writing Tenterfield (Armidale, 2002), pp. 84–100. 1 2 3 4

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Endnotes—pages 298 to 307 402

8 See K. Torney, ‘“Little Boy Lost”’, Australian Folklore 17 (2002), pp. 149–56; K. Torney, Babes in the Bush: The Making of an Australian Image (Perth, 2005). 9 R. Boldrewood, In Bad Company and Other Stories (London, 1901), pp. 398–406 (‘Bendemeer’ was originally published in the Australasian, 31 May–4 October 1884; the text was then issued in London by Macmillan, 1898). See also ‘The Sealskin Mantle’, Sydney Mail, February 1884–February 1885, which later became the book, The Sealskin Cloak. 10 S. Williams, A Ghost Called Thunderbolt (Canberra, 1987); B. Cummins, Thunderbolt (Moree, [1988]). 11 B. McDonald, ‘Thunderbolt, Folksong and the Legend of the “Noble Robber”’, Australian Folklore, vol. 8 (1993), pp. 40–7. 12 In its ‘Preface’, Wright indicates that it is a tale based on a story she had heard in the Uralla area as a child. 13 Cummins, Thunderbolt. For Pomeroy’s paintings, entitled ‘Death of Thunderbolt’, see K. Mayo, McCrossin’s Mill—Many Hands—and Me (Uralla, 2002), pp. 181–2. 14 Compare John O’Grady, There was a Kid (Sydney, 1977). 15 Geoff Page, Benton’s Conviction (Sydney, 1985), p. 125. 16 See also, G. Page, ‘Billyjim and Colonel Campbell’, Southerly, vol. 49 (1989), pp. 157–72; G. Page, ‘Should Non-combatants Write about War?’, Association for the Study of Australian Literature Proceedings (1994), pp. 105–7; G. Page, ‘Anzac and Why I Write’, Kunapipi, vol. 18 (1996), pp. 332–3. 17 D. Crookes, The Light Horseman’s Daughter (Sydney, 1999), pp. 17, 333. 18 D. Niland, The Shiralee (Sydney, 1955, 1956; many paperback reprints), p. 184. 19 J.S. Ryan, ‘Dymphna Cusack (1902–1981), Social Historian, Controversialist and Opponent of Social Injustice: Her New England Threshing Floor’, Australian Folklore, no. 19 (2004), pp. 109–34. 20 D. Cusack, Jungfrau (Sydney, 1936), p. 139; D. Cusack, Picnic Races (London, [1962?]), p. 78. 21 G. Kelly, Lifted from Life (Armidale, 2001), ‘Foreword’. 22 G. Kelly, There is No Refuge (London, 1961), p. 73. 23 G. Kelly, Arrows of Rain (Sydney, 1988), p. 123. 24 B. Vernon, Bellbird: The Story of a Country Town (Sydney, 1970), p. 246. 25 E.W. Dunlop, Gold Mining Around Armidale (Armidale, 1950); E.W. Dunlop, John Oxley (Melbourne, 1960); E.W. Dunlop, Gold and Australia (Melbourne, 1968); J.S. Ryan, ‘Eric W. Dunlop (1910–1974) and His Teaching of Traditional Culture in New England’, ADHSJ, no. 42 (1999), pp. 57–68. J.P. Belshaw wrote much applied and economic history of the region. 26 See also, M. Franklin (ed.), The New England Experience: Inside Stories of UNE, 1938–1988 (Armidale, 1988); K.L. Leopold, Came to Booloominbah: A Country Scholar’s Progress 1938–1942 (ed. J.S. Ryan) (Armidale, 1998). 27 Variously published, and often sold through newsagent outlets, his humorous books have acquired a considerable following; see especially, Slowly Sweat the Gun and Other Tales of an Earlier Outback Australia (1981). 28 T. Howard, The Rim of Heaven (Sydney, 1986), p. 99.

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Endnotes—pages 308 to 314 C H A P T E R 27 M U S I C

403

1 Quoted in B. McDonald, ‘“Nearly everything’s got two sides”: The Music and Community of Jim Lowe of Backwater, NSW, 1900–1930’, BA thesis, UNE, 1994, p. 71. 2 Peter McKenzie, personal communication, 30 June 2004; B. McDonald, ‘Tradition as Personal Relationship’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 110 (1997), pp. 56–7. 3 R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), pp. 36–7. 4 R. Ward, The Australian Legend (Oxford, 1966), pp. 46–7; W. Telfer jnr, The Wallabadah Manuscript: Recollections of the Early Days (ed. R. Milliss) (Sydney, 1980), p. 131. 5 McDonald, ‘“Nearly everything’s got two sides”’, p. 98. 6 McDonald, ‘“Nearly everything’s got two sides”’, pp. 77, 97–8. 7 Armidale Express, 12 February 1859. Walker, Old New England, pp. 26–7, 31; McDonald, ‘“Nearly everything’s got two sides”’, p. 95. 8 Armidale Express, 16 April 1859; Walker, Old New England, p. 91; P.A. Wright, Memories of a Bushwacker (Armidale, 1982), p. 62; Warren Newman, ‘Tamworth’s Early Musicians’, unpublished paper for the New England and Northwest Regional Conference of Historical and Affiliated Societies, Tamworth, 19–20 March 2005. 9 Armidale Express, 5 February and 9 April 1859. 10 Armidale Express, 28 May 1859 (supplement); McDonald, ‘“Nearly everything’s got two sides”’, p. 72. 11 Guyra Argus, 3 November 1904, quoted in McDonald, ‘“Nearly everything’s got two sides”’, pp. 72–3. 12 McDonald, ‘“Nearly everything’s got two sides”’, pp. 74–5. But see Wright, Memories of a Bushwacker, pp. 12ff, for an account of family members providing music. 13 C. Pound and A. Atkinson, The Common Task: A History of PLC, Armidale (Armidale, 1995), p. 47. 14 P. Kneipp, ‘The Ursuline Order in Armidale: Beginnings’, ADHSJ, no. 23 (1980), pp. 43, 44. 15 Quoted in Kneipp, ‘The Ursuline Order’, p. 44. 16 J. Graham, A School of Their Own: The History of The Armidale School (Armidale, 1994), pp. 199–200, 203, 249. 17 Newman, ‘Tamworth’s Early Musicians’. 18 Newman, ‘Tamworth’s Early Musicians’; J.S. Buchanan, A Century of Progress 1885–1985: A History of Local Government in Gunnedah and District (Gunnedah, 1985), pp. 34–43. 19 W.J. Forrest, Saturday Night: A History of Dance Bands in Country New South Wales (Tamworth, 2000); Armidale Express, In Tune magazine, 7–13 April 2005. 20 E.S. Elphick, The College on the Hill: A History of Armidale Teachers’ College and Armidale College of Advanced Education, 1928–1989 (Armidale, 1989), p. 46.

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Endnotes—pages 314 to 322 404

21 J.S. Ryan, ‘A.C.M. Howard and the Armidale Teachers’ College (1928–48)’, ADHSJ, no. 29 (1986), pp. 51–73; Armidale’s College on the Hill (Armidale, 1987), pp. 19, 27; Elphick, The College on the Hill, p. 50. 22 Armidale Express, 12 March, 12 April, 13 August 1943. 23 ‘Armidale Symphony Orchestra’, www.armsymph.org [accessed 19 December 2005]. 24 A. Horadam, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, in M.-A. Franklin (ed.), The New England Experience: Inside Stories of UNE 1938–1988 (Armidale, 1988), pp. 2–3; M. Jordan, A Spirit of True Learning: The Jubilee History of the University of New England (Sydney, 1984), pp. 111, 122. 25 University Extension Department; Music Schools 1959–1967, UNERA A315. 26 Jordan, A Spirit of True Learning, pp. 112–13. 27 Jordan, A Spirit of True Learning, pp. 112–13; New England Ensemble and New England String Quartet, UNERA A624. 28 Jane Robertson, ‘From Convent to Conservatorium’, unpublished paper for New England and Northwest Regional Conference of Historical and Affiliated Societies, Tamworth, 19–20 March 2005. 29 Corinne Arter, personal communication, 31 March 2005. 30 M. Ellis, ‘How Tamworth Became Country Music Capital’, Australian Folklore, no. 20 (2005), pp. 245–55. 31 ‘Gary Shearston’, Simply Australia, vol. 1 (2001), at http://simplyaustralia.net/ issue2/shearston.html [accessed 14 December 2005]. 32 ‘Peter Allen: Singer, Songwriter’, Who2, at www.who2.com/peterallen.html [accessed 14 December 2005]. 33 B. McDonald, ‘Some Account of Kangaroo Hunting on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1840–1880, and the Evidence of Folksong’, Australian Folklore, no. 10 (1995), pp. 108–31. 34 B. McDonald, ‘Tradition as Personal Relationship’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 110 (1997), pp. 56–7. 35 B. McDonald, ‘Where the Sun-Lights on the Dew-Drops Shine: Folk Music from the New England Tablelands of New South Wales’ (also the title of his CD), Australian Folklore, no. 13 (1998), pp. 191–2. C H A P T E R 28 T H E AT R E 1 B. Rutledge, M. Rutledge and N. Horton, It’s the Oldest Established . . . : A History of the Glen Innes Arts Council 1944–1994 (Glen Innes, 1994), p. 8. 2 J. Lamb, Never Whistle in the Dressing Room: A History of the Armidale Playhouse 1953–2003 (Armidale, 2005), p. 1. 3 Lamb, Never Whistle in the Dressing Room, pp. 51, 52. 4 Arts Festival records (uncatalogued), UNERA. 5 C. Ross-Smith, interviews with Margaret Kiehne, and Rosemary and James Mort, September–October 2004; Rutledge, Rutledge and Horton, It’s the Oldest Established . . . 6 Rutledge, Rutledge and Horton, It’s the Oldest Established . . . , p. 19.

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Endnotes—pages 322 to 334 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Rutledge, Rutledge and Horton, It’s the Oldest Established . . . , pp. 33–52. J. Lamb, interviews with Chris Newbiggin and Narelle Kennedy, September 2004. J. Lamb, interview with Narelle Kennedy, September 2004. C. Ross-Smith, interviews with Bill Bright, Andrew Sharpe, Andy Wright and David York, September 2004. J. Lamb, interview with Ruth Mathews, September 2004. Back to Uralla Souvenir (Uralla, 1925), p. 28. E.J. Petherick, ‘Centre of Community Life’, and Anon., ‘Tenterfield Arts Council of Australia’ and ‘Mr E.J. Petherick’, all in Norman Crawford, Tenterfield (Tenterfield, 1949), n.p.; K. Halliday, Call of the Highlands: The Tenterfield Story (Tenterfield, 1988), p. 117; C. Ross-Smith, interviews with Ken Halliday and Harry Bolton, September 2004. ‘Pittwater and Tenterfield Win Major LG Awards’, Local Government Focus, July 2003. Local Government Shires Association of New South Wales, ‘Media Release’, 16 June 2004. Mary Kell and Gwynneth Denner, personal communication to C. Ross-Smith, November 2004. Doug Laurie, ‘Theatre and Music in Walcha’, unpublished notes, September 2004; Frank Brazel, unpublished notes, September 2004, and personal communication. C. Ross-Smith, interviews with Jenny Sloman and Rosemary and James Mort, October 2004. C. Ross-Smith, interview with Ric Hutton, September 2004. Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May 2004. C. Ross-Smith, interview with Ric Hutton, September 2004. R. Hutton, The NWTC Company Profile (NWTC news sheet, Bingara, March 2004). J.S. Ryan (ed.), The Arts From New England (Armidale, 1998), p. 228 fn 1. C. Ross-Smith, interviews with J.S. Ryan, June–September 2004. C. Ross-Smith, ‘The Beginnings of the Department’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), The Arts from New England (Armidale, 1998), p. 210; C. Ross-Smith, interviews with J.S. Ryan, June–September 2004. Ryan, The Arts From New England, pp. 208–9. Lamb, Never Whistle in the Dressing Room, pp. 16, 56, 111, 125. Ross-Smith, ‘The Beginnings’, pp. 211–14, 220. Ross-Smith, ‘The Beginnings’, pp. 210–25. Ross-Smith, ‘The Beginnings’, pp. 220–2. C. Ross-Smith, interview with Timothy Clark, September 2004. C. Ross-Smith, interview with Margaret Kiehne, September 2004. C. Ross-Smith, ‘The Beginnings’, p. 221.

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C H A P T E R 29 F I L M 1 Following film scholarship practice, dates given for film titles are those of the first release.

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Endnotes—pages 334 to 353 406

2 See W. Fearn-Wannan [Bill Wannan], Australian Folklore: A Dictionary of Lore, Legends and Popular Allusions (Melbourne, 1970), p. 241. The Guyra Argus, April 1921, is not extant. 3 A. Pike and R. Cooper, Australian Film, 1900–1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production (Melbourne, 1978), pp. 142–3. 4 Armidale Express, 24 June 1955. 5 L. Penn, The Picture Show Man (edited by M. Long) (Melbourne, 1977) (Lye Penn, ‘Penn’s Pictures on Tour’, unpublished memoir, written before the film’s production). 6 Northern Daily Leader, 20 October 1976. 7 Northern Daily Leader, 6 October 1976. 8 Daily Examiner, 30 November 1976. 9 Armidale Express, 16 July 1977. 10 F. Clune, Jimmy Governor: The True Story (Sydney, 1959); T. Keneally, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (Sydney, 1972). 11 Armidale Express, 17 November 1978. 12 D. Stratton, The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry (Sydney, 1990), pp. 159–60. 13 Glen Innes Examiner, 9 January 1997. C H A P T E R 30 V I S U A L A RT S 1 J. Oxley, Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales (London, 1820), p. 299. 2 J. Zimmer (ed.), Australia Felix: Landscapes by Jeffrey Makin (Melbourne, 2002), p. 158. 3 J. de Falbe, My Dear Miss Macarthur: The Recollections of Emmeline Maria Macarthur (1828–1911) (Sydney, 1988), pp. 48–9. See also, J. Ross, Conrad Martens: Bush Trails and Squatter Runs (Armidale, 1986). 4 M. Eagle, ‘A Painter Making Himself ’, in R. Radford (ed.), Tom Roberts (Sydney, 1996), p. 38. 5 D. Thomas, ‘“Shearing the Rams”, 1888–90, “The Golden Fleece”, 1894’, in Radford (ed.), Tom Roberts, pp. 96–107. 6 C. Humphreys and R.J. Smith, ‘The Rise of Art in the Tenterfield Community’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), Writing Tenterfield: A Collection of Historical, Cultural and Other Essays (Armidale, 2002), p. 64. 7 Zimmer, Australia Felix, p. 158. 8 A.B. Paterson, ‘Over the Range’, in W. Stone (ed.), The Best of Banjo Paterson (Sydney, 1988), p. 267. 9 Tamworth City Gallery brochure, n.d. 10 Information supplied by Michelle Arens, NERAM. 11 C. Pound and A. Atkinson, The Common Task: A History of PLC, Armidale (Armidale, 1995), pp. 41, 42.

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Endnotes—pages 355 to 362 EPILOGUE

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1 J.S. Ryan, ‘Some Place Names in New England’, in two parts, ADHSJ, no. 5 (1963), pp. 23–9, and no. 6 (1963), pp. 31–57. 2 G.T. Walker, ‘Relief ’, in D. Lea, J. Pigram and L. Greenwood (eds), An Atlas of New England, vol. 2 (Armidale, 1977), pp. 11–16. 3 G. Kelly, The Middle-aged Maidens (Melbourne, 1976), p. 3. 4 R.B. Walker, Old New England: A History of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, 1818–1900 (Sydney, 1966), p. 29; G. Blomfield, Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing (Sydney, 1981), pp. 86–91; R. Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1938, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales (Sydney, 1994), pp. 292–300. 5 J. Ferry, Colonial Armidale (St Lucia, Qld, 1999), p. 69. 6 G.E. Connah, ‘Bagot’s Mill: Genesis and Revelation in an Archaeological Research Project’, Australasian Historical Archaeology, vol. 12 (1996), pp. 1–56. 7 G.E. Connah, M.J. Rowland and J. Oppenheimer, Captain Richards’ House at Winterbourne: A Study in Historical Archaeology (Armidale, 1978). 8 J. Oppenheimer, ‘Communication Routes and the Pattern of Settlement of New England to 1850’, in Lea, Pigram and Greenwood, An Atlas of New England, vol. 2, pp. 153–70. 9 J.P. Belshaw and L. Jackson, Gold Mining Around Armidale and Gold Mining Around Walcha (both Armidale, 1950); J. Starr, ‘The Progress of Mining in the Tenterfield Region’, in J.S. Ryan (ed.), Writing Tenterfield (Armidale, 2002), pp. 33–43. 10 R.B. Walker, ‘Flour Milling in New England’, ADHSJ, no. 9 (1966), pp. 3–8; P. Watson, ‘Results of the Archaeological Excavations of the Armidale Coles Eastend Development Site, 2001, McLean’s Corner’, ADHSJ, no. 46 (2003), pp. 59–76. 11 P. Reynolds, L. Muir and J. Hughes, John Horbury Hunt: Radical Architect 1838–1904 (Sydney, 2002). 12 Merle Goldsmith, ‘Chandler Phillip Coventry, AM (1924–1999)’, in J.S. Ryan and B. Cady (eds), New England Lives II (Armidale, 1999), pp. 138–58. 13 J.S. Tregurtha and J.S. Ryan, ‘Standing of the Array: A Celtic Tradition Re-enacted at Glen Innes, New South Wales’, Australian Folklore, vol. 7 (1992), pp. 69–76; ‘The Australian Standing Stones: The History of this Unique Array’, at www.australianstandingstones.com [accessed 9 May 2006]. 14 J.S. Ryan, ‘A One-man Open University: Arnold Eberle and Adult Education 1948–1954’, in J.J. Eddy and J.R. Nethercote (eds), From Colony to Coloniser: Studies in Administrative History (Sydney, 1987), pp. 196–206.

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In d e x Abbott, J.H.M. 299 Abbott, J.P. 239 Aboriginal archaeology 88–97 art 81–7, 344 assimilation 122–6 attachment to land 96–7, 113, 122–3 breastplates 110, 113 ceremonies 88, 92, 93–5, 97, 110, 123, 140, 308 education 128–30, 181–2 employment 112–21, 122–3, 130 hunter-gatherers 44, 92, 95 justice system 112, 133–4 music 308, 318 sport 132–3 Aboriginal Protection Board 114, 118 Ahoy family 132 Aitkin, Don 239, 306 Allen, Peter 3, 17, 320, 361 Anderson, Duncan 16 Andrews, Ann and John 348–9 Andrews, E.C. 30 Anglican Church, 184–7, 190–2, 194–5 hostels 181 ideas 17, 29 schools 171–2, 174, 175–8 Aniwan people 101, 356 anticyclones 38 Apsley River 49 Falls 345 Archibald, Frank 113, 124, 318 archives 268–70 Armidale 3, 150, 151, 154 Aboriginal community 122, 124–34 art 351–4 foundation 14, 149 importance 155, 158–9, 176 industry, 221, 224–8, 230, 231–2 national capital, 13, 294 schools 16, 175–81, 182 theatre 320–1, 331–2 Armidale College of Advanced Education 126, 128, 269–70, 275 Armidale Girls’ High School 179, 311 Armidale School, The 178, 313 Armidale Teachers College 183, 314, 320, 328

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Ashford 52 Australian Agricultural Company 98, 149, 171 Australian Railway Historical Society 141 Australian Standing Stones 270, 361 aviation and aerial fertilising 69, 76, 218, 232 Bacon, Victor 4 Bagot’s Mill 254–5, 357 Balala station 158, 164 Balancing Rock 11, 140 Bald Rock 24 National Park 47 Baldwin, Charles 45 bandicoots 46, 56 bands 308, 313–14 Baptist Church 157–8, 189–90 Barnard, Robert 301, 306 Barraba 190, 320, 323–4, 353 bats 49 Beadle, Noel 59 Beckler, Herman 58 Bedson, Jack (verse) 137 bee-keeping 46 Bellbrook 215 Aboriginal Reserve 116, 118, 131 Belshaw, J.D. 90 Belshaw, J.P. 5, 305 Ben Lomond 141, 146 Bendemeer 12, 324, 353 Berman, Ralph 127 bettongs 48, 56 Bingara 36, 153, 167, 272–4, 327–8, 345, 353 birds 13, 52–3 blacksmiths 229–30 Blaine, Rev. R. 186 Blake, Astrid 320 Boer War 248 ‘Boldrewood, Rolf’; see Browne, Thomas Boggs Stuart 348 Bora grounds 87, 94–5, 184 Braid, Jean 349 Brandscheid family 154

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Brauer, John 214 Braund, G.F. 250 Brett, Billy 251 brewing 224–5 bricks 167–9 Bright, Bill 231 Britten, C.J. 225 Broughton, Bishop W.G. 185, 186, 187 Browne, Thomas 298, 307, 361 Bruderhof community 207 Bruxner, Sir Michael 239–40, 242 Buchanan, James 187 Bundarra 103, 112, 190, 194 ‘Pundarra’ plains 44 Bundjalung people 101 Burgess family 158 Burke, Heather 119, 255 Burnt Ridge Reserve 117 bushrangers 14, 102–3, 279, 298–9, 309, 333–5, 337–8 butchering 226–7 butter-making 223–4 Calala house 167 Campbell, J.F. 6, 75 Captain Thunderbolt (film) 334–5 Carey, Warren 32 Catholic Church 124, 154, 184–8, 189 mission 193 schools 172, 174, 175–6, 179–80, 183 cattle 71–2 mustering and branding 11, 15, 112–13, 115–17, 121 see also dairying Chaffey family 242 Chaffey, J.F. 223, 230 Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The (film) 298, 334, 337–8 Chinese immigrants 152, 185, 197–8 Chiswick Research Station 75 Christian Brothers 179 Clarence River 30, 341–2 Clarke, George 149 Clarke, Rev. W.B. 27 Cohen, Bill 115–19, 122–3 Cohen, Patsy 123, 124, 129 Connah, Graham 254–5, 257–9 convicts 101–2, 105, 148–9 Cooper, Theophilus 234, 244 Cordial-making 225–6 Cosgrove, John 334 Country Party 5, 18, 233, 237, 238–43 Country Women’s Association 236 countrymindedness 17, 18, 239

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Craft, Frank 31 Craig, Richard 149 Crocker, Bill 329 Croft family 3 Crookes, David 301 Cumpston, Mary 268 Cunningham, Allan 29, 57, 99, 148 dairying 77, 117, 223–4, 240 Danish immigrants 200 Dangar, C.C. 169, 193, 252 Dangar family 3, 153 Dangar, Henry 29, 157 Dangar, N.N. 169 Dangar’s Lagoon 52 Danny Deckchair (film) 342 Darkies’ Point 26, 356 David, Thomas Edgeworth 29 De La Salle Brothers 179 decentralisation 3, 7, 17, 220 Deepwater 2, 153, 327 deer 51 Delungra 323 dieback 63, 74, 76–7, 290 dingoes 47, 49, 50, 56, 72 Dixon, Pat 131–2, 133, 235–6 domestic servants 112, 152 Dominican Sisters 179 Doody, Bishop E.J. 193 Dorrigo 326, 342, 353 Dougherty, Sir Ivan 251 Douglas, Millie 128 drought 3, 43, 168 Drummond, D.H. 5, 182, 237–8, 265, 361 Dumaresq, Henry 14, 149, 297, Dumaresq, William 102, 149, 187 Dundee 172 Dunghutti people 101, 118, 121, 356 Dunkins family 154 Dunlop, Eric 265–6, 267, 305 Dutch immigrants 206–7 Duval, John 102 Dyaberin station 117 East, Graham and Barbara 232 East Kunderang station 115–17, 118–21, 258 Eastcott, Max 272 Eisenberg, Joe 352 Elkin, A.P. 125 Ellis, Catherine 317–8 Ellis, Ulrich 1, 4 engineering 230–1

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Index Englebrecht family 146 English immigrants 150, 157–8 Estens, Dick 131 Europambela station 165 Everett brothers 102, 157, 164, 185–6 Faint, Cliff 120 Faint, Tom 229 family and local history 271 farming 56, 57, 67, 69–73, 77–8, 14, 151 Farrer Memorial Agricultural High School 181 feral animals 51–2, 67 Ferry, John 154, 269, 376 festivals 272, 321, 323–4, 361 Fielder, George 222 fire 37, 53, 66–7, 77 fishes 54–5 Fletcher, Neville 316 flour-milling 222, 259–60, 358–9 Foggon, Gwen 320 foxes 50, 51, 53, 56 Franklin, Margaret-Ann 124, 127 frogs 53–4, 56 frost 38, 40, 43 Galloway, J.J. 29, 138, 187, 297 Gamilaraay people 101, 149, 356 Gardner, William 44, 52, 106, 172, 268, 297, 356 Garvey, Keith 305 German immigrants 146, 152–4, 155, 156, 198–200, 293, 312–13, 318 Gibraltar Range National Park 59, 60 Gilbert, Lionel 266, 269 Gipps, Sir George 103 Glen Innes 13, 40, 50, 151, 158, 353 industry 223–4, 228–9, 230 museum 266, 267 schools 176, 180, 187 theatre 321–2 Glencoe 10, 137–9, 141, 145–6, 156, 209 global warming 43, 54, 77 Goddard, H.S. and T.B. 230, 231 Godwin, Luke 89–90, 94, 96 gold 27, 112 mining 150–2, 157, 260, 358 Goodall, Heather 114 Gordon, Gen. Charles 15, 18 Gordon Window 15, 359 Gorman, Owen 154 Gostwyck station 14, 102, 153, 169, 174, 193, 252

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Governor, Jimmy and Joe 297–8, 337–8 Grafton 35, 150, 153, 155, 158 grasses 58, 60, 63–4, 66, 67, 70, 72–3 improvement 72, 76 Great North Road 210 Greek immigrants 203, 204–5, 272 Green, Bishop A.V. 178, 190 Green, Florence 178 Greenhalgh, A.J. 268 Grills family 158 grinding grooves 92 Gruner, Elioth 347 Gumbaynngir people 93, 101, 118, 121, 356 Gunnedah 154, 158 Guy Fawkes 261, 358 Guy Fawkes River National Park 51 Guyra 40, 131, 148 Guyra Ghost Mystery, The (film) 334 Gwydir River 12, 53, 149

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hailstorms 42 Haning house 166 Harper, William 229 Harrison, Rodney 257–8 Hartmann, Hermann and Louisa 153 heath 60, 64–5 Helmrich, Dorothy 319, 321 Herbert, Bob 329, 331 Heritage Council, NSW 255 Heritage Office, NSW 255 Hill, Cecil 316 Hillgrove 159, 313, 358 museum 263–4 historical societies 266–7, 270–1 Ho, Andrea 271 Hodges, N.A. 231 Hope, Dennis 350 horses, wild 51 horticulture 70, 73, 74, 152 Hoskins, W.G. 7, 215 Howard, A.C.M. 314–5, 328 Hoy, Charles 45, 46 Humphries, Chris 346, 348 Hunt, J. Horbury 168, 190, 305, 359 Hunter River 27 valley 13, 17, 103, 149, 160, 161 hydroelectricity 4, 260 IAC Group 232 information technology 220, 231–2 Innes, A.C. 158, 210, 213, 255 insects 57

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Inverell 2, 35, 52, 54, 155–6, 158, 190 art 353 industry 222, 224–5 theatre 322–3 transport 212, 214, 217, 219 Irby brothers 105, 108 Ireland, David 144 Irish immigrants 150, 154–5, 156, 179 Irishtown 154, 261, 358 Italian immigrants 198–9, 201 Jackson, J.S.A. 226–7 James, Bernard 353 Jarman, Peter 48 Jenkins, Richard and Charles 225 Johnstone, Rev. Dr Thomas 188, 192 Jordan, Matthew 19, 196 kangaroos 47–8, 56, 318 Kelly, Esther 116 Kelly, Gwen, 284, 303–4, 356 Kelly, Maisie 97 Kelly’s Plains 154 Kemp, Jeff 231 Kempsey 124, 126, 134, 150 Keneally, Thomas 298, 306, 329 Kesteven, Lois 314 Kiernander, Adrian 331 Kilcoy 156 King, Lester 32 King, Stephen 349 Kingdom of New England 17–18 King’s Plains station 169, 216 Kirchner, Wilhelm 153 koalas 46–7 Koertner, Gerhard 350 lakes and wetlands 25, 52, 54, 61, 65–6, 67, 72, 74 Little Llangothlin Lagoon 52, 65, 148, 159 Lamb, Judith (Morsley) 320 Lamb, Paul 328 Lang, Rev. Dr J.D. 2, 155 Langford house 168 language and speech 143–4, 147 Aboriginal 96 Chinese 152 Gaelic 2, 155–6 German 154, 155 pidgin 101 Lawrence 158 Lebanese immigrants 203–4 Leitch, David and Rosemary 236

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Leopold, Keith 306 Lismore 158 Little Boy Lost (film) 298, 338–9 Liverpool Plains 23, 40, 49, 149, 150 Llangothlin lakes 25 Lonergan, John 212 Long, Desmond 268 Lonsdale, Edmund 235 Louis, Yve 287–8 Lovelock, Vera 122, 130, 380 Lowe, J.J. 187–8 Lyne, Charles 12–13, 158–9 McBryde, Isobel 89–96 McCarthy, Bill and Thelma 236 McCarthy Catholic College 180 McDonald, Barry 317–8 Macdonald, George 105, 184, 279–80, 297, 308 McDonald, Ray 269 Macintyre, Peter 156 McIntyre, William 173 McKie, Rev. E. Norman 58 Mackin, Jeffrey 347–8 Maclean (town) 155 McLean, James 255, 256 Macleay River 109, 110, 117 Madgwick, Sir Robert 5, 265–6, 268, 292–3 Maiden, J.H. 6, 58 mail, carriage of 146, 214–15, 219 Maitland 13, 152 Manifold, John 280–1 Manilla 45 Manilla River 49 Mann River 341 Markham, George 234 Markham, Thomas 154 Marooan station 108 Marsh, Eliza 163–4 Marsh, Janetta 186 Marsh, M.H. 163 Martens, Conrad 29, 138, 345–7 massacres 103, 356 Bluff Rock 108 Myall Creek 103–4, 105, 272–3, 356 Massie, Robert 112 Mayo, Kent 324 memorials 15, 138–9, 143, 145, 192, 272–3, 349 war 192, 193, 245–52 Merten, Carl 349 Methodism 189, 193 mice 52

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Index Miller, James 125 Minimbah school 129, 134 mining 29, 112, 151–2, 159, 230, 242 archaeology 260–1 see also gold Minson, John 317 Mirani house 169, 170 Mitchell, Jean 236 Moonbi Range 24, 98, 209, 351, 356 Moore, Tom 348, 354 Moorsehead, Sir Leslie 248–50 Moran family 132 Moree 12, 181, 219 Aboriginal community 126–7, 131 bore 74 homesteads 165 Mormon Church 193 Morris, Barry 117 Mother-of-Ducks Lagoon 52 Moses, Barnet 227, 228 Moses, Ingrid 293 motor-cars 215–17, 237 Mt Duval 8, 24 Mt Yarrowyck 81–7 Moyes, Bishop John S. 8, 17, 192 Munro, Grace 236 Munro, Les 230–1 Munro, Lyle jr 127 Munro, Lyle sr 131, 272 Murray, Les 8, 285–7, 296 museums, local 265–8 Muslims 185, 193 Namoi River 45, 49, 53 Nandewar bioregion 91, 95 Narrabri 35 Narwan Eels 132 national parks 45, 57–8, 73 National Parks and Wildlife Service 55, 57, 72 National Party 18, 233, 237, 243–4 New England Art Society 352–3 New England Bioregion 5 New England Conservatorium 317 New England Girls School 178, 314 New England Ladies College 178–9, 353 New England Medieval Arts Society 275 New England National Park 3, 45 New England Proprietary School 177–8 New England Regional Art Museum 29, 351–2, 360

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New England Theatre Company 331 361 New England University College 5, 183, 292, 315 New State Movement 3, 4, 7, 8, 16, 233, 359 referendum 4, 127 Newcastle 3, 17, 212, 221, 240 newspapers 215, 237–8 Newstead station 16 Ngarabul people 356 Nicholas, H.S. 3 Royal Commission 5 Niland, D’Arcy 301 Nivison, Abraham 154, 166 Nivison, Angus 348 Nivison family 170, 212 North Coast bioregion 91, 95 Northern Tablelands Aboriginal Elders Sovereign Authority 133 Norton, Albert 35, 39, 63 Nowendoc 153 Nundle 150, 151 Nunn, Major J.W. 103

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O’Connor, Bishop Patrick 189 Ogilvie, Edward 153 Ogilvie family 3 O’Grady, Frank 299 Ohio station 154, 166, 212 Ollera station 157, 164, 173, 185, 190 Ollier, Cliff 28, 32 Olsen, John 353–4 O’Mahony, Bishop Timothy 186 Orban, Desiderius 353 orchards 73, 153, 74 orchestras 314–16 Oscar and Lucinda (film) 341–2 Oxley, John 23, 25, 31, 34, 45, 57, 99, 160, 345, 356 Page, Geoff 246, 299–300 Page, Sir Earle 3 Pain, Colin 33 Palmer, Vance 140 Palmerston station 169 Parkes, Sir Henry 234–5 pastoralism 69–78, 98–110, 112–21, 149–50, 153, 158–9 archaeology 253, 257–9 houses 160–70, 254 see also sheep, cattle Pastures Protection boards 47 Pat Dixon Clinic 133

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Paterson, A.B. 350–1 Pavel, Charles 227 Peel River 45 valley 149 Pender, J.H. 167 Perkins, Charles 126 Picture Show Man, The (film) 335–7 Pike, Alfred 264–5 Piper, James 227 place-names 99, 153, 156, 355 platypus 45 Polding, Archbishop J.B. 185, 186 police 103, 105, 133 Pomeroy, Phillip 299 population numbers 43, 122, 149–52, 153, 185 Port Macquarie 148, 149, 150 possums 47, 350 Pratt, Mavis 198 Presbyterian Church 155–6, 179, 185–7, 188–9, 192 Presbyterian Ladies College 179 Purkis, Gerry 270 Purkiss, Ezra 215, 230 Purves, Rev. William 185 Quirindi 18 quolls 46 rabbits 50, 53, 56 poison 46, 48, 50, 51 railways 72, 137–47, 165, 211–13, 220 politics 234, 237 241, rainfall 39–43 Ranger’s Valley 153, 169 rats, native 49, 52 introduced 52 Relke, Joan 349 reptiles 53 reserves 52, 56, 58 Aboriginal 111–12, 116–18, 123 Richardson, Rupert 231, 352 Richmond River 54 Riley-Mundine, Lynette 128 Rixon, Annie 299 roads 209–11, 215–17 Roberts, Dianne 129, 380 Roberts, Tom 16, 345–7, 353 Robertson Land Acts, 1861 72, 76, 111, 156, 162 Robinson, R.F. 266 Rocky River 12, 150, 153, 185, 309 Rogers, Frank 269 Ross, Colin 158

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Ross, June 346 Rudd, E.H. 231 Rudolph Steiner Waldorf School 182 Rusden, G.W. 172 Russell, H.C. 35, 36, 37, 42 Ryan, J.S. 328 Ryan, T.O. 225 St John’s Theological College 125 Salisbury Court station 163–4, 166, 347 Salvation Army 190 Saumarez Ponds 157 Saumarez station 14, 149, 167, 254 archaeology 257–8 Schepisi, Fred 298 sclerophyll forest 61, 62–3 Scotland 10, 150, 156, 355 Scots’ Corner 156, 159, 189 Scottish immigrants 155–7 Sempill, H.C. 101, 149 Sharpe, Andrew 324 sheep 15, 37, 47, 69–72, 77, 161 shearing 71, 152 shepherding 107, 112, 152 Shortis, Gregory 282–4 Silver family 229–30 Simpson, Louis 288 Sinclair, I.M. 242 Smith, W.J. 228 snow 36, 39–40 soap-making 227–8 soldier settlement 114, 169 Sommerlad, J.H. 153 Spasshatt, Angela 176 stockmen 13, 107–9, 112–14, 115–21, 163 Stonehenge 137, 138, 139, 167 Strathbogie station 167 Stuart, Charles 58 Summer Vale 181 Tamworth 35, 40, 150, 158, 171, 215, 218 industry 221–31 schools 179–81 transport 214, 216, 219 Tamworth City Gallery 351 Tamworth Conservatorium of Music 316 Tamworth Country Music Festival 361 Tamworth Regional Music Centre 316 tanning 227 Taylor, Archie 145–6 Taylor family (Glencoe) 138

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Index Taylor family (Terrible Vale) 76 Taylor, Thomas Griffith 30 telegraph 214 telephones 217 Telfer, William 309 Tenterfield 35, 150, 151, 153–4, 158, 188, 199–200 industry 226, 227 theatre 325–6 Terrible Vale station 76 Terry, S.H. 234, 244 Thomas family 225–6 Thomas, Major James 297 Thompson, Victor 237–9 ‘Thunderbolt’; see Ward, Frederick thunderstorms 38, 42 Tibbs, Peter and George 157 Tilbuster station 187 Timbarra goldfield 150 timber and forests 46, 56, 73–4, 78 building 162–5 Tincombe, Rev. Henry 186, 187 Tingha 131, 152, 190, 196–7, 358 tobacco-growing 198 Toomelah 131 Torregiani Bishop Elzear 312 Torrington 260, 358 State Conservation Area 60 tourism 198, 207, 217, 275 Turner, Bishop James 190–1 Umbrella Woman, The (film) 340–1 University of New England 3, 19, 183, 192–3, 196, 291–5, 360–2 Adult Education 8, 362 Agricultural Business Research Institute 231–2 colleges 130, 293, 329 Heritage Futures Research Centre 6, 255–7 music 315, 317–18 Oorala Centre 128, 133 summer schools 353–4 theatre 328–30 Uralla 5, 29, 131, 151, 205, 206, 251 Aboriginal reserve 112 art 349 election 233, 236–7, 244 industry 230–1 theatre 324–5 Vaughan, Archbishop R.B. 175, 183 vegetables 70 Vernon, Barbara 304–5

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Vietnamese immigrants 202–3 vineyards 73 Vivers, Allan 169 Vivers, Jack 216 Vivers, Meg 348 Voisey, Alan 31 von Mueller, Ferdinand 58 Walcha 40, 131, 149, 158, 159, 172, 353 Aboriginal Reserve 112, 117, 181 schools 172, 182 theatre 326–7 transport 215, 217 Walgett 126, 134 Aboriginal Education Conferences 128 Walker, R.B. 14, 17, 269 wallabies 48, 56 Wallamumbi station 2, 45, 168, 215 Falls 41 Wallangarra 226, 349 Wallangra George 100 war service 113, 123, 192, 193, 245–52, 272, 297, 299–301 Warburton, James 123, 125, 380 Ward, Frederick (‘Thunderbolt’) 298–9, 333, 334–5 Ward, R.B. 317–8 Warialda 148, 172 Warner, Robin 31 Watson, Pamela 255 Waterloo station 169 Wee Waa 150 Wellingrove 150, 155 Wellington Vale station 169 Wetherspoon, John 10–11, 19, 145, 156 Wheeler, John 45 Whereat, E.J. 228 White family 3 White, F.J. 167, 311 White, F.R. 15, 16, 168 White, H.F. 250, 305 White, James 349 Whyte, J.J. 228–9 Wilkes, Alan 269 Williams, John 58 Williams, Vern 125 Williamson, H.D. 305 Wilson, Edwin 306–7 Wilson, Graham 270 Winds of Jarrah, The (film) 339–40 Windsor, Tony 243–4 Winterbourne house 254, 258, 357 Wollomombi 156

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wombats 47 Wongwabinda station 115, 164 Woolbrook school 182 Woolmington, Eric 241 Wright, Albert 164 Wright, Andy 324 Wright, Cecil 116 Wright family 3 Wright, Judith 2, 8, 13–14, 45, 123, 143, 290, 349, 361

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prose 297, 299 verse 13, 88, 93, 96, 140–1, 209–10, 281–2 Wright, Peter A. 305 Wright, Phillip A. 5, 45, 215, 248, 305 Wyndham family 3 Yarry, Ray 93 Young, Leslie 230 Yugambul people 101

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