PASSING DOWN THEIR ACRES: The Good Farmers of Gowrie: As Told by the Current Crop

By Evelyn Keane and Tony Orr

Gowrie was well-placed to become a stopping-off station for travellers heading to the emerging inland town of Tamworth. Certainly, there was a vision, with land set aside for a school, teacher's accommodation and two churches at the southern end and a church, cemetery, and store o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicious Book Publishing
• Release date: Mar 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9780645120110

Book preview

PROLOGUE

As early as the 1820s the penal colony of New South Wales was being hailed ‘a land of opportunity for settlers’. Britain, looking to empty its overcrowded cities, was promoting the colony to potential emigrants. Hundreds of maps and pamphlets were being distributed, full of stories of successful settlers, methods for farming, and land selection in the new country. The prospect of owning land of their own, outweighing the despair of leaving their home and loved ones behind, they set out on the unknown journey to Australia.

Prior to Ireland’s potato famine which began in 1845, shipping lists recorded mainly single males working as agricultural labourers. Most were tenant farmers, highly skilled and knowledgeable, having laboured on the land alongside their fathers. Wages were low and rewards few; a small plot of land to work, barely able to support a crop of potatoes and a rented cottage. For that, they needed to be courteous to the squire and attentive to the parson! During the famine and in the aftermath, entire families set sail.

The new land not only offered shepherds and agricultural labourers as much as £25 annually, with rations and lodging, but if you sailed with your wife and she would work as a domestic servant, she could expect £12-18, often with rations. For those wanting to establish their own piece of land, it wouldn’t take long to save enough to take up one of the small arable farms on offer, by purchase or rental, either in a natural state or partially cleared and cultivated. As well, the business of a sheep farmer or wool grower in the colony was a happier prospect; animals were healthier and the weather kinder; with the whole process going on naturally under the blessed canopy of heaven!

And here we are! ….nearly two-hundred years on, recording the stories of farming families, many fifth and sixth generation, whose ancestors settled in the Peel Valley.

The settlers of this small hamlet of Gowrie, financed and erected their own places of worship; one Methodist, one Catholic and built a public school with teacher’s residence, ahead of most rural settlements of the time. From the earliest settlers to the present day, Gowrie locals have worked to build and support their community.

When Australia was ‘riding on the sheep’s back’ farmers from Gowrie and surrounding districts were making their own contributions to Australian pastoralism; experimenting with sheep breeds and sending wool and meat to markets. They were establishing crops and trialling new wheat varieties and designing and manufacturing their own farming equipment.

So many Australians today choose to live far removed from the bush and still the images of the man on the land in RM Williams boots and Akubra hats; stockmen, shearers and drovers stir in us a national identity, far more than a flying kangaroo! Farming is hard work; it can be a stressful and dangerous occupation. But these men and women love their farming life, they love their animals and have proven themselves to be worthy custodians of the land. It’s taken them a long time to learn what they know, and their stories are worth recording. In ecological terms, the impact on the land has been profound and water is a serious issue, but these good farmers have ensured Gowrie retains its claim to some of the finest country in the state. We hope you enjoy their stories!

INTRODUCTION

Gowrie lies at the southern end of the Peel Valley extending eastward from the Melville Range across the Goonoo Goonoo Creek to the New England Highway, and north to an imaginary line running east from the peak of Mt Belgamba, toward the ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ station and southward past Mount Sugarloaf, to where the ranges intersect the New England Highway.

Several waterways rise within the district including Currabubula and Timbumburi Creeks in the west, Spring and Swamp Creeks in the East and Boiling Down Creek (previously Old Goonoo Goonoo Creek) passing through the middle. Spring Creek merges into Swamp Creek which flows eastward into Goonoo Goonoo Creek eventually joining the Peel River in Tamworth. Boiling Down Creek likewise flows east joining Goonoo Goonoo Creek to the north of the Swamp Creek junction. Currabubula flows westward joining with Werris Creek before it flows into the Mooki River on the Liverpool Plains. Timbumburi Creek flows almost due north picking up other tributaries before joining the Wallamore Anabranch arm of the Peel River north-west of Tamworth. Tamworth-Gowrie Road more or less follows the Timbumburi Creek but avoids crossing it.

The official postal delivery area and census district also includes a small valley to the south of Mt Belgamba which is not normally considered part of the Gowrie community, however the official district excludes several properties on the northern boundary that locals have always included in our Gowrie community.

The broader region includes the valley of the Peel River and its major tributaries; the Cockburn River, Dungowan Creek and Goonoo Goonoo Creek. To the west is the Currabubula Valley. The Peel River is in turn a tributary of the Namoi River to the north-west. To the south is the Liverpool Range. The deep alluvial soils of the floodplains of these rivers support rich grasslands, ideal for grazing sheep and cattle.

This remaining undisturbed bushland on Heath Road, Gowrie shows the landscape as it would have been before settlement

Part I

BECOMING A COLONY

First Peoples

The diverse landscape of mountains, valleys, plains, and rivers that surround the Peel Valley region is the traditional country of the Kamilaroi people; also referred to as Gamilaraay (the language group), Kamilroi, Gamilaroi or Goomilaroi. The boundaries of the Kamilaroi have been described as extending from Murrurundi north along the Great Dividing Range, through the foothills of the Moonbis and across to Manilla. More recently it has been suggested that the boundaries extended into Queensland and a narrow corridor stretched into the Hunter Valley. There may be differing descriptions of traditional boundaries, however it is widely acknowledged, the Kamilaroi nation covered a large area.

In common with Aboriginal societies elsewhere in the world, the Kamilaroi had a complex social system of moieties, sections, and totemic clans. Responsibilities for caring for the land and the ongoing survival and increase of plant and animal resources were inherited through this system. As the Kamilaroi were a matrilineal society, children inherited their moiety and their totemic affiliation through their mother.

The Kamilaroi utilised natural resources to manufacture tools and artefacts: grasses and reeds for making baskets and nets for trapping; stone for manufacturing axes, spearheads, and grindstones; wood and resins for manufacturing digging sticks, spears, boomerangs, and other weapons. They lived in small family groups; their movements determined by the seasonal availability of resources. Each group occupied defined hunting grounds within the tribal territory, the boundaries marked by watercourses, trees, and other recognised landmarks. The men hunted kangaroos and emus as well as smaller mammals. The women and children gathered grass seeds and other plant foods such as tubers, yams, berries, and fruit, and collected bird and reptile eggs. Grass seeds were a vital part of their existence.

Aboriginal people have a profound spiritual connection to land. Aboriginal law and spirituality are intertwined with the land, the people and creation, forming their culture and sovereignty. The health of land and water is central to their culture and they have the responsibility to care for it. The Kamilaroi had strict rules and protocols for entering or crossing the territory of a neighbouring group, and there could be severe consequences if these were not adhered to. Then uninvited onto their land, white men arrived; from where they did not know, with laws from a government of which they had no concept, not seeking permission to trespass and not following the established rules so that all could live in harmony.

We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavour to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. (Tom Dystra, Aboriginal Elder)

European Impact

The first European explorers to cross the territory of the Kamilaroi had limited contact with the traditional owners of the country. Relationships were uncertain from the beginning but beneficial and necessary for the new arrivals. Aboriginal people were indispensable guides to Europeans, showing them the location of water and game and acting as interpreters and negotiators with local Aboriginals. In turn the Kamilaroi came to value European axes and knives, tobacco and tea. However, the Kamilaroi resented the intrusion of white men into their country, the disrespect of their sacred sites and traditional laws and appropriation of their women. There was conflict and Aborigines were killed, but far more died from diseases that the colonists brought with them, including measles and tuberculosis. A smallpox pandemic between 1830-32 would decimate the indigenous population of NSW.

Squatters with their sheep and cattle rapidly followed in the wake of the early explorers, taking over the prime river flats, forcing the Kamilaroi from their camp sites near watercourses and depriving them of their best hunting grounds. A short period of peaceful co-existence was soon broken by feuds over European access to Aboriginal women and the spearing of stock by Aboriginal hunters as game became scarce. It is difficult to estimate the prevalence of violence on the early grazing runs in the region as clashes often went unreported.

The reasonably harmonious relationship between Aborigines and settlers in the Peel Valley was possibly due to some extent by the influence of the Australian Agricultural Company’s original agent, Robert Dawson, who had witnessed the fatal impact on Aboriginal society by settlers ruthlessly dispossessing them of their hunting grounds and destroying their sacred sites. Dawson saw that the customs and culture of the Aborigines were so little known, even amongst governing officials, that the most absurd stories were sometimes circulated and believed. Dawson was determined to do his utmost to better relations between the two groups.

….the aboriginals on the Peel River were a quiet race not hostile to the white man the reason; they were humanely treated by the Company’s managers and other squatters on that river. I never heard of a white man having been killed by the Peel blacks. (Wallabadah Manuscript)

For the Aboriginals, loss of their hunting grounds and the destruction of their communities eventually forced the Kamilaroi to give up hunting and gathering as their main source of subsistence. In the space of one generation they were reduced to living in humpies and came to rely upon the more easily earned wages and handouts of squatters, shepherds, and stockmen. Not all Aboriginal people gave up their traditional ways, but history suggests, by the late 1840s beef, mutton, sugar, flour, and tea were already a more important part of their diet than traditional seed cakes, possums and fish in much of the central north of NSW.

By the late 1820s it was estimated Aboriginals numbered between ten and twelve thousand in the northwest, from the Peel River to the Barwon. In 1842, Edward Mayne, the first Commissioner of Crown Lands and Protector of Aborigines for the Liverpool Plains, put the number at about four thousand Kamilaroi living between the Peel, Namoi, and Gwydir Rivers.

During the 1850s and early 1860s the rush of Europeans to the goldfields created a labour shortage on pastoral stations throughout northwest NSW and Aborigines became an indispensable source of casual labour.

By the 1880s the Kamilaroi were wanderers in their own country, reduced to working for white landowners or living on the fringes of white townships, dependent on handouts of food, clothing, and blankets. As their numbers decreased, their rich ceremonial and cultural life broke down. The Association for the Protection of Aborigines, was formed ‘for the purpose of bettering the conditions of the remnants of the Aborigine tribes of the colony.’ The following year a Protector of Aborigines was appointed with the power to create reserves and to force Aboriginal people to live on them. Two years later a new Protection Board was created, its objectives being ‘to provide asylum for the aged and sick and to train and teach the young, to fit them to take their places amongst the rest of the community’.

The Board established supervised estates or Aboriginal’ stations. In 1895, 150 acres was ‘reserved from sale for the use of Aborigines’ at Walhallow (Caroona Mission), near Quirindi. Their first recommendation was an ‘annual blanket handout’. The Aborigines thought that these were not as good as possum skins, but possums were getting scarce. It was also suggested that some welfare compensation should be given to Aborigines for being displaced from their land and that they should receive some Christian education, so that they could better understand Europeans and fît in with them.

A report on the reserve dated 3rd July 1900 stated: 116 Aborigines, all very comfortable. The men get work on ‘Walhallow’ station at good wages, the children attend the public school about a mile distant. The reserve is fenced around, excepting for a small part which will be completed shortly.

People on these ‘missions’ came under the control of government officials who managed all aspects of their daily lives. Other groups camped on numerous old and new reserves which were small portions of land set aside for Aborigines on the fringes of white settlements. The Kamilaroi living on reserves were free of supervision except for the ‘irregular control exercised by police and any employers of casual labour’. In the Peel River area, most of the surviving Aborigines were living in a ‘blacks’ camp’ at ‘Calala by the late nineteenth century. These reserves of the 1930s to the 1960s will long be remembered as places of unrelenting segregation, repression, and assault on Aboriginal culture by agents of the Government. We must never forget that the progress and prosperity of Australia began with dispossessing Aboriginal people of their lands and denying them basic human rights.

….The destruction of Aboriginal society was not the consequence of European development in Australia, but its price, which is a very different thing. (William Edward Hanley Stanner)

European Exploration of the Peel Valley

The first documented Europeans in the Peel Valley were the members of John Oxley’s exploration party. In 1817, Oxley, a former naval officer, having been appointed Surveyor General by Governor Macquarie, crossed the Blue Mountains to follow the Lachlan River surveying and mapping its course. When his way was eventually blocked by swamps, he turned north and struck the Macquarie River which, on following it upstream, took him back to where he started! Oxley concluded that, ‘the interior of this vast country is a marsh and uninhabitable’. He wasn’t to know that he had been within a few days trek of the Murrumbidgee River, which would have led him to large areas of exceptional land.

The following year, Oxley was instructed to return to trace the course of the Macquarie River, but again was impeded by marshes. Instead, he led his party north-east and discovered the Castlereagh River and the fertile Liverpool Plains. He then continued, discovering, and naming the Peel River, crossed the southern New England Range and followed the Hastings River to the coast. Despite Oxley’s glowing account of the Peel Valley, the difficulty in accessing this region by navigating the Liverpool Range, was less appealing.

In 1824 Governor Brisbane commissioned Alan Cunningham to find an easier route over the range. Cunningham headed north from Bathurst up the Cudgegong River to the headwaters of the Goulburn and across to what would become the Cassilis/Coolah Road. Turning back, he came across a valley which he followed until it led to a natural break in the mountain chain, about thirty kilometres west of where the Warrumbungles joined the Liverpool Range. From a peak on the eastern side Cunningham had an extensive view of the Liverpool Plains. He named the gap, ‘Pandoras Pass’, it being their ‘last hope’. Today it is known as Brennan’s Gap.

By the time Cunningham had crossed the range, his men and their provisions were nearly exhausted. They turned back, but not before planting an east-west row of peach stones at both the north and south ends of the pass ‘in every good hope that their produce will one day or other afford some refreshment to the weary farmer on his route’. The pass however would prove to be too far west.

Later that year Henry Dangar, Oxley’s Assistant Government Surveyor, while exploring the Upper Hunter Valley, discovered the joining of the Goulburn and Hunter rivers, and then, following Dart Brook to its source, crossed the Liverpool Range onto the Plains beyond. He turned back when attacked by the Geawegalclan of the Wanaruah people where the town of Murrurundi now stands. On his second excursion onto the Plains, Dangar crossed the Liverpool Range near the route of the present New England Highway. On this trip he proclaimed that the Peel Valley was ‘beyond all doubt, the most extensive and fertile tract yet travelled in the colony’. Unfortunately, he left no trace of his passage and drew no maps of the way he had come, keeping the knowledge to himself. In May 1825, Dangar was commissioned to select land for several settlers in the area. He subsequently allocated to himself and his brother William some land to which another man believed he had prior claim. A board of enquiry found Dangar guilty of using his public position for private gain. It didn’t pass the pub test! Dangar was dismissed from office in 1827, dispossessed of the land and he returned to England to lodge an unsuccessful appeal.

Only the hardiest of pioneers confident in their abilities and willing to face the risks presented by the remoteness of the Peel Valley found their way onto the plains! One such man was nineteen-year-old William Nowland, who essentially followed Dangar’s unrecorded route; the track would become known as ‘Nowlands Gap’.

In April 1827 I formed a station on the borders of the Liverpool Plains on a creek named Warrah, in the northern district beyond the main range of the colony. There were two stations before mine; one owned by Messrs Singleton and Baldwin at ‘Yarramunbar’ and the other by Messrs Onus and Williams on a creek called Onus’s. Singleton’s track over the main range was at the head of Dart Brook and nearly impassable for man and beast; it being so difficult to cross, that drovers have been so exhausted by endeavouring to drive their cattle up the mountains that they have had to rest themselves by holding a tree while they caught their breath. Many people went out to find a better road to cross the mountains with their stock but failed to do so. I was determined to find a better road if possible and started from Liverpool Plains with my stockman, taking with me a packhorse and rations we travelled the mountains endangering our lives with the Blacks for a space of three months, and found at last the gap in the main range between Doughboy Hollow and the town now called Murrurundi….We not only found a better road for cattle but one that a team could take two tons over the whole range. I then loaded a dray at Patrick Plains and took the first dray that ever went over the new road to the Liverpool Plains. It being wet, the ground was soft, and we left a plain dray track behind us. When we arrived at the west side of the range we stopped and camped at a small creek which I named Doughboy Hollow. I then proceeded to my station at Warrah. Immediately after, the squatters travelled over the track I had made across the ranges and commenced forming stations on all parts of the Liverpool Plains; and in a short time they travelled hundreds of miles to the north and north-west, all travelling by degrees over the new road I had discovered which was used for twenty years without any expense to the Government. (Nowland’s recount of his early discovery, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 January 1861)

[Squatter Nowland took up land on Warrah Creek, from which he was later removed by the Australian Agricultural Company when it claimed possession of its exchange grants on the Liverpool Plains. He later took up a run on the Mooki, further north, part of a larger property, 87,000 acres, known as ‘Wallhalla’, established by Walter and John Rotton. He also helped his brother Edward, set up the Hawkesbury Benevolent Society’s station at Phillip’s Creek, and when Edward died in 1843, William succeeded his brother as superintendent on its ‘Mooki’ run, adjoining his own ‘Walhallow’.]

Further exploration in 1831 saw Thomas Mitchell, who had replaced Oxley as Surveyor General, passing through the valley in search of a river that reportedly flowed to the north-west. On his way he camped at a deep waterhole named ‘Carrabobila’.

The water where we were encamped, was hot and muddy, but the Blacks knew well how to obtain a cool and clean draught, by first scratching a hole in the soft sand beside the pool, thus making a filter, in which the water rose cool but muddy. They next threw into this some tufts of long grass, through which they sucked the cooler water thus purified also from the sand or gravel. I was glad to follow the example, and I found the sweet fragrance of the grass an agreeable addition to the pleasure of drinking. (Thomas Mitchell, diary entry 9 December 1831)

Two days later Mitchell reached the Peel River, having been shown the way by his Aboriginal guide, Jemmy, to the station of Joseph Brown, one of the first squatters in the valley. Mitchell’s instruction to early settlers and surveyors was they should be particular in noting the native names; the natives can furnish you with the name of every flat and every hill, and settlers should select their grants by these names.

Even while the Liverpool Plains was officially ‘off limits’, white settlement was underway. During the first few years of settlement in the Hunter Valley, there was any amount of country stretching behind the lands taken up by early settlers for all the stock grazing in the valley. But as settlement increased, additional pastural land needed to be found, especially during dry seasons. Stockmen began to push over the dividing range above Murrurundi, squatting first on the Liverpool Plains and afterwards in the New England and Gwydir districts.

The early squatter and pioneer had some hard times travelling with their families, having two or three possum rugs strapped on behind their gigs with their quarts and pint pots, also some damper and salt meat. Sometimes they got a pot of tea at a carrier’s camp. The bullock drivers those days were a hospitable lot of men. No one went hungry away from their camps. They would not accept any payment for their kindness telling the squatter, I will call on you one of these days when I run short of provisions. The dress those men wore were scotch twill shirts, moleskin trousers, blucher boots, cabbage-tree hats with two long streamers of black ribbon hanging over the leaf of the hat, also a blue smock shirt instead of a coat for all weather, wet or dry. (The Wallabadah Manuscript)

The Australian Agricultural Company

Meanwhile, back in England, an 1824 British Act of Parliament established the Australian Agricultural Company (the Company or AA Company) which would have a long-term impact on settlement of the Peel Valley.

Part of the momentum for the Company can be attributed to the findings of Commissioner John Thomas Bigge who, in 1819, conducted a detailed investigation into conditions in the colony on behalf of the Colonial Office. He recommended that joint stock ventures be established to develop ‘fine wool’ growing and that colonists be given economic incentives to settle new areas, moving the colony out of its convict phase. Bigge’s strategy was to establish a huge pastoral and agricultural enterprise, rivalling the famous East India Company and the successful Hudson Bay Company in Canada. It was estimated the Company would run five-hundred thousand sheep and employ fifteen hundred convicts and one hundred overseers.

…Nevertheless, I do not mean to imply that this colony or its dependencies, present at this moment any very flattering prospects for the mere agriculturist. That the skilful farmer would be enabled to obtain an independent and comfortable subsistence is, however, indubitable; and the larger his family, provided they were of sufficient age to afford him an effectual co-operation, the greater would be his chance of a successful establishment. The advantages, however, which the colony offers to this class of emigrants, great as they undoubtedly are, when considered in an isolated point of view, are absolutely of no weight when placed in the balance of comparison against those which it offers to the capitalist, who has the means to embark largely in the breeding of fine woolled sheep. It may be safely asserted that of all the various openings which the world at this moment affords for the profitable investment of money, there is not one equally inviting as this single channel of enterprise offered by the colony. (William Charles Wentworth 1819)

The Company was formed with ten thousand shares of £100 each, payable in instalments and the right to take up a million acres of pastureland in the colony with the prime purpose of ‘producing wool for British mills and subordinate to the object, cultivating the vine, olive, flax and other productions now imported from the shores of the Mediterranean’. The founding members included thirty members of the British Parliament, as well as eminent bankers and merchants of England, thus ensuring the Company’s influence to get what it wanted.

Governor Brisbane agreed that the Company could take coastal landholdings extending from Port Stephens, including the Karuah River Valley to the Gloucester Flats and to the Manning River, and most of the northern shore of Port Stephens. The Company initially agreed to this option but on closer examination, most of the land would be deemed unsuitable for sheep grazing.

The first of the Company’s employees arrived at the end of 1825 on the ‘York’ accompanied by the Company’s Superintendent, Robert Dawson; twenty-five men, thirteen women and forty children. They brought with them twelve Anglo-Merino ewes, fifteen rams, four lambs and three hundred and thirteen Merino ewes from Southern France. On the second ship, the ‘Brothers’, were two hundred and four French ewes, one hundred and sixty-seven Anglo-Merino ewes and fifteen French rams, as well as new breeds of cattle and horse. By the time Dawson arrived he was well-acquainted with Australian animal husbandry, having spent time in Sydney with John Macarthur, Australia’s wool pioneer.

In 1831 the substantial settlement at Port Stephens was faltering. Macarthur and other stockholders had been selling their inferior livestock to the Company at inflated prices, which was having a disastrous effect on the Company’s breeding efforts, and Dawson was being replaced by Sir William Parry.

Henry Dangar, who had returned to Australia, his earlier offence being no disadvantage to him, was commissioned by Parry to explore the vast country over the Great Divide. During this expedition Dangar examined some two million acres between the Liverpool Ranges and Wentworth Mounds along the Peel River. Dangar recommended to Parry that approximately 750,000 acres was suitable for pasturing sheep, which included a large portion north of the Peel Ranges. On Dangar’s recommendation, the Company sought to take up the fertile centre of the Peel Valley, about 313,000 acres, which included some of the land that eventually would become part of the district of Gowrie, leaving only hillier and less watered areas to the west and east.

By 1832, the Company was suffering from the effects of a terrible drought and in June, Parry met with the new Governor, Richard Bourke, to formally request exchanging land north of Port Stephens, for the areas identified on the Liverpool Plains and the Peel Valley. Bourke acknowledged the substance of the request but suggested that the Company’s needs would be met by taking all of the Peel Valley between the ranges, east and west of the river. This would provide a more satisfactory boundary than the zigzag western line proposed in the submission. Parry replied that such a natural boundary would normally be preferable, but in this case, it would include an immense proportion of very inferior land without permanent water. Dangar was summoned and he pointed out that such a disproportionate quantity of bad and unwatered land would cause a repetition of the original mistake in the Port Stephens area. Surveyor General Mitchell agreed with Bourke, stressing the hardship of turning out the poor people. These ‘poorpeople’ were the wealthy squattocracy who held stations on and around Liverpool Plains. Bourke would have been aware that some of the best sheep land in the colony lay in the Liverpool Plains and it is reasonable to surmise he saw development by individual pastoralists preferable to granting this large tract of land to one enterprise, who up until this time had a poor track record!

The short conference ended with Parry agreeing that the Company would work with the Government Surveyor to examine the areas of land that the Governor wanted them to take up. Mitchell agreed the land east of the Peel River was not suited to the purposes of the Company and Dangar rejected a further area to the northwest. However, two areas to the south which were considered as being two-thirds wasteland, were accepted by Dangar in order to break the continuing deadlock. These areas included all of Gowrie and the neighbouring Ranges Valley; some of which would also become part of Gowrie, being two triangles formed on two sides by the zigzag boundary surveyed by Dangar and the Peel Range on the third side.

In the meantime, Parry had written to his London principals, hoping that they would exert their influence. The new Secretary of State, Lord Goderich was approached with Parry’s request for the preferred grants. Goderich sent a despatch to the government specifying that the Company was to receive the land as originally surveyed. If it had not been for this directive from London, Gowrie would not exist! Had the area been absorbed into the Company’s holdings, the early families that were the foundation of our community, would have settled elsewhere.

Dangar’s map of the proposed exchange grant for the Australian Agricultural Company. The land situated on the north-west side of the Dividing Range and on the south-west side of Peels River. Bounded on its south and west sides commencing at a remarkable Cone-Top Hill called Durii, by lines north to Peels River and again from Durii east ten miles to the corner (G), south thirteen miles to the corner (H), east four and a half miles to the corner (I), south five miles to the corner (K), east to Peels River and on the east and north sides by that river. The extent of this portion of land being about 469 square miles or 300,160 acres.

In 1833, Parry handed command of the AA Company to Henry Dumaresq, who’s initial task was to grow grain on the inland grass of the Peel Valley and Liverpool Plains and reduce the Company’s dependence for wheat and maize supplies from Stroud and Maitland. However, labour shortages, and drought conditions in 1835-1836 and again in 1838, made this task almost impossible.

Within eighteen months of occupation of the valley, the Company had established three stations; ‘Killala’ (‘Calala’) its head station, an outpost known as ‘Robinsons’, and a third at Cann’s Plains. ‘Robinsons’ was later renamed ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ and became the headquarters for the Company’s operations in the Peel Valley. Other stations were added almost continuously as the Company began to utilise more and more of its vast holdings. Eventually the Company’s Peel Valley land was divided into thirty-four sheep grazing stations.

In mid-1833, William Telfer, one of the original employees of the Company, and a team of shepherds moved six thousand breeding ewes from Port Stephens up the Hunter Valley and over the Liverpool Range to ‘Warrah’ station. However all did not go well. Neighbouring sheep were infested with a disease known as ‘scab’, so to prevent the Warrah sheep from contracting this complaint, Dumaresq ordered that all sheep be moved to the ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ estate. Later, a breeding stud would be established on the Peel River grant; in part to meet an extensive demand for rams by squatters.

[By 1836, Telfer had mapped out an excellent line of road from Port Stephens, known as the Peel Line, which followed closely the modern-day Gloucester-Nowendoc-Tamworth roads but branched off at what is now the Port Stephens cutting, to descend into the Dungowan Valley, along the creek, and overland to the Company’s headquarters on the Peel.]

Labour shortages brought many and varied nationalities to the colony including, Chilean muleteers, utilized by Telfer, who were invaluable for moving stock across the mountain passes. Large numbers of Chinese indentured labourers arrived during the 1840s to work as shepherds but proved to be experts in irrigation and were engaged in excavating dams.

Between 1825 and 1862 the Company brought over seven-hundred men to work on their extensive pastoral estates and their colliery in Newcastle, many were accompanied by their wives and children. A great number of shepherds failed to fulfil their contracts, due to the dangers and isolation of their work. Initially these were Irish and Welsh immigrants, but the Company soon moved to recruiting men from various European countries. Many Gowrie families can trace their ancestors to German shepherds who arrived on Company ships to work on ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ station. These people were often not recorded in government shipping records, however in PA Pemberton’s book, ‘Pure Merinos and Others, The Shipping Lists of the Australian Agricultural Company’, we located the family names of settlers in our district: Bielefeld, Heyman, Poetschka and Studte.

The early 1840s were a difficult time for the colony and the Company, with severe drought and an economic depression. Sheep were being boiled down for tallow, prices for fat cattle collapsed, the demand for coal fell away and there were difficulties with the miners at Newcastle. The Company sought to settle the matter of the freehold title to its extensive lands, with a view to selling some part of them. Under the original arrangements the Company was to receive its title deeds when it had relieved the Colonial Treasury of £100,000, the equivalent of its quit rent, by maintaining convicts and making improvements to its Estate. In 1844 the Company estimated that it had spent £131,000 on convicts and £80,000 on improvements. By an Act of Parliament in 1846, the form of the title deeds was agreed, and a Royal Warrant was issued empowering the Governor of NSW to authorise the conveyance of all the Company’s land. In 1851 convict, John Barnes who had received his ticket of leave and free settler and businessman, William Settatree, were buying small blocks of land Company side in Tamworth, later purchasing in Gowrie.

By the end of the 1840s the Court of Directors had begun to look hard at the nature of their operations in NSW. Wool prices in London were still low, the unsuitability of the Port Stephens grant for sheep was becoming increasingly obvious, distance made the Peel Estate difficult to manage, Warrah was dry and most of it leased, and the labour situation was not improving.

In 1852, gold was discovered on the banks of the Peel River and the Company wanted to expand its interests into mining, however its constitution only covered agricultural and coal mining activities. Consequently, in 1853 by an Act of Parliament in London, the Peel River Estate was purchased by the Peel River Land and Mineral Company (the Peel Company). Gold mining was short-lived, and the Peel estate soon returned to concentrating on sheep and cattle.

On ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ in 1881, one hundred and thirty thousand sheep were shorn. The shearing shed and wool room on top of a rise overlooking the ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ township was said to have been among the most complete of its kind in the colony. Forty-seven shearers were accommodated, capable of shearing three thousand sheep a day.

By 1884 ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ had fenced the perimeter boundaries and fifty enclosed paddocks, consequently shepherding was coming to its end. The number of sheep raised on ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ continued to increase until the end of the century. From that time, the sale of portions of the estate reduced the area of pastureland which resulted in diminished production by the Company.

Squatting & Land Control

In the early years of the colony Governor Arthur Phillip (1788-1792) and later Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1810-1821) were authorised to make land grants not exceeding 100 acres to encourage settlement. All land in the colony was Crown Land and any sale or lease of that land was referred to as Alienation of Land. The selling of land to free settlers had already been introduced under Governor Thomas Brisbane (1821-1825). Governor Ralph Darling (1825-1831) introduced legislation to control unauthorised ‘alienation of land’. He created by Government Order in 1826 an area known as the ‘limits of location’. The area of approved settlement was increased in 1829 by a further order. The division of the eastern, more accessible land, into counties, hundreds and parishes had been completed, creating ‘nineteen counties’ covering about 34,505 square miles and valuing the lands with a view to fixing a fair price for future sales.

In theory occupation of the land beyond the ‘nineteen counties’ was prohibited. But in effect, with surveyed land becoming scarce, it was impossible to stop squatters taking up runs beyond these limits, even though they had no legal right or surety of tenure. Because of the influence of some of the men involved in these operations and the importance of the pastoral industry to the developing economy of the colony, little attempt was made by the Government to enforce the boundaries.

The Government orders were the first of a series of restrictions introduced in an effort to curtail settlement beyond the ‘limits of location’ and did nothing for the honest man trying to secure a plot of land.

The years 1826 to 1836 saw the illegal occupation of Crown Lands on the Liverpool Plains and in the Peel Valley. By May 1827, The Australian newspaper reported that 10,000 cattle had gone by various routes to the northern interior and onto the Plains to escape a drought which was harshly affecting the Upper Hunter. Within a few months, several Hunter Valley cattlemen were establishing squatting runs along the Peel River. A run being ‘land claimed by the Squatter as sheepwalks, open, as nature left them, without any improvement from the Squatter. (Reminiscences of Australia)

When the long drought broke in 1831, there was a turnaround in the colony’s fortunes. Favourable seasons and a revival in the English wool trade, combined with an inflow of settlers with capital, would send men beyond the ‘limits of location’ in search of pastoral land. Those choosing to settle on unoccupied land outside the jurisdiction of the Nineteen Counties, were classed as ‘squatters’.

Australian Squattocracy

The word ‘squatter’ was first used in Van Diemen’s Land where in the twenties there emerged a class of what might be termed frontiersmen, bushrangers or ex-convicts, shingle splitters or small cultivators who gathered flocks both by legal and illegal means. Their holdings were called ‘runs’; a most convenient depot for stolen sheep… (History of Australian Land Settlement, S.H. Roberts)

Successful squatters, having no legal title to the land beyond being the first European to settle on it, were fast becoming among the wealthiest class of people in the colony and came to be perceived as ‘persons of high social prestige’. Vast areas were privately explored and squatted upon long before government became fully aware of such activity.

These squatters understood they could be removed from their run without notice or compensation. Squatters were often ‘legal landholders’ within the nineteen counties and ‘unauthorised occupiers’ of Crown Lands beyond the ‘limits of location’. Men such as Joseph Brown of ‘Darlington’ and William Dangar of ‘Neotsfield’ on the ‘Wallamoul’ run and William Warland of "Blandford’ and Edward Cory of ‘Bickham’ on the ‘Waldoo’ run, were raising cattle on land that was in the area granted to the AA Company. In 1833 they lost their stations, and many other squatters were forced to move their cattle northward to the New England. In total, twenty-three squatters were displaced by the Warrah and Peel River exchange grants of the AA Company.

William Dangar had established an outstation in the Gowrie area and was probably the first to have done so. He abandoned this run soon after the AA Company took possession of ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ station. This is likely the Gowri Hut referred to in the following proclamation: The Government Gazette proclaimed on 22 December 1865 the following land to be ‘reserved from sale for the preservation of water supply, No. 57 at the Springs, Old Goonoo Goonoo Gully, Currabubula Station, No. 24, County of Parry, the Crown Lands within the following boundaries: Commencing at the Springs, about a ¼ of a mile southerly from Gowri Hut; and bounded on the south by a line easterly about 2 miles; and on the north by a line 1 mile from and parallel to the south boundary line, westerly to the gully’.

In 1833 Bourke, possibly unhappy with having been forced to allow the AA Company to take up large grants beyond the settled areas, appointed commissioners with the authority to warn off all trespassers beyond the ‘limits of location’. However, as one observer reported, ‘not a hundred thousand soldiers scattered throughout the bush could drive back our herds within the limits of the nineteen counties’.

I would observe that it is not beyond the southern boundary alone that flocks and herds of the colonists have wandered for suitable pastures…. they have crossed the mountain range into Liverpool Plains. Here indeed, and still more northly on the banks of the Peels river, 500,000 thousand acres of land have been granted to the AA Company. In every direction, the desire of procuring good pastures for sheep has led the colonists far beyond the limits of location…." (Governor Bourke, in his despatch 4 July 1834)

Land Control

Within three years the existence of squatters had been officially recognised and from here their position would continue to improve although rules became more complicated, and fees increased.

-1836 under the new Squatting Act, a grazier could hold a run for an annual licence fee of £10 effectively repealing the restrictions imposed by the ‘limits of location’.

-1837 the area beyond the nineteen counties was divided into seven districts (Peel Valley falling into district six). Later two additional districts were added which divided the old district six into New England, district two, and Liverpool Plains district three.

-1839 stock returns were made compulsory and levied on annual assessment of a halfpenny per sheep, a penny per head of cattle and threepence per horse

-1847 Orders in Council ‘right of first refusal over any section offered for sale’ granted to squatters and lease periods extended -Liverpool Plains and Peel Valley (intermediate zone) providing leases of up to eight years. The size of the lease had to be large enough to support at least four thousand sheep or the equivalent number of cattle. There was no provision for the small landholder.

The pastoralist now had surety of tenure and was paying as little as one-sixth of a penny per acre annual rent. Should he choose to purchase, the portion would be more than 160 acres, rectangular in shape, unless a boundary was a waterway, and not including both banks of a creek or other waterway. The pastoralist was encouraged to make improvements on his land and head stations with substantial dwellings, outbuildings, and stockyards were established. The station store often provided meals and accommodation for travellers; towns and villages such as Quirindi, Currabubula and Wallabadah, were established at or near a head-station.

Map showing the extent of squatter holdings in the Peel Valley and on the Liverpool Plains following the Orders in Council of 1847. A. Attunga, B. Bective (Bubbagullion), C. Breeza, D. Carroll, E. Colley Creek, F. Cuerindie South, G. Dungowan, H. Durham Court (Diniwarindi), I. Hanging Rock, J. Keepit, K. Klori, L. Menedebri, M. Mooki Springs, N. Moonbi, O. Goonoo Goonoo, P. Pialloway, Q. Quirindi Creek, R. Ranger’s Valley, S. Swamp Oak, T. Summer Hill, U. Walhallow, V. Wallahadah, W. Warrah, X. Woolomin, Y. Woolomol, Z. Wombramurra.

The 1850s was a time of great prosperity. The NSW Legislative Council, which had been established eight years earlier, was expanded to fifty-four members of whom thirty-six were to be elected by the people. At home, the gold rush helped keep the price of meat high, while wool prices in England were again on the rise. However, most of the local land was still held in large tracts owned and occupied by a small number of pastoralist families. The Census of 1861 indicates, of the Liverpool Plains district’s four million acres, there were only one-hundred and seven pastoral holdings and less than 1,000 acres under cultivation.

Across the colony, agitation against unrepresentative government was growing and large pastoral estates were under increasing political scrutiny. Many colonists were hostile to the growth of large estates. And a specific political campaign had developed against the two hundred families regarded as dominating rural settlement with their vast pastoral runs held on lease from the Crown. In our area the dominant landholder was John Eales.

Land reform was central to the 1860 election for Tamworth voters as part of the electorate of the Liverpool Plains. The choice was between two candidates, both Sydney men. Alexander Dick favoured land reform and was strongly supported by townspeople, whilst Charles Kemp favoured the status quo and was supported by the pastoralists. Dick won by an overwhelming vote of six to one, and a similar trend occurred statewide.

With the reformists dominating the Legislative Council, they were able to pass the changes that had been proposed by the Lands Minister, John Robertson. Hence the Crown Lands Alienation Act and the Crown Lands Occupation Act, became known as the Robertson Land Acts. The most important feature of the Alienation Act was that new farms were to be created, where necessary, at the expense of pastoralists who occupied large areas of land under inexpensive lease from the Crown. Government grants were excluded from these Acts, such as the AA Company’s ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ and ‘Warrah’ stations which were held as freehold.

Sadly, these reforms resulted in further marginalisation of Aboriginal people by the enablement of closer settlement of pastoral lands on which Aboriginals had previously been allowed to remain to live and hunt.

The reform movement resulted in legislation that would open up country beyond the ‘limits of location’ to settlers who now only needed to select their bit of country and proceed to the local land office and put down a 25% deposit based on the land value of £1 per acre to secure their Conditional Purchase (CP), without survey. The land available for selection included that currently occupied by a pastoralist and could be selected once