The Far West of New South Wales is not a particularly well-defined area but to reach it, mostly, you need to be “west of the Darling” or at least somewhere along that very long watercourse… However, there are parts of the country east of the Darling that are also regarded as being in the Far West. Regardless, the Far West is a long way from big cities. It was even more isolated when the sites that appear on the next set of web pages were bustling with activity. Some still have an ebb and flow of humanity, but the majority are just shadows of the past.
The pages start with Wilcannia, mainly because what went on there directly influenced everything else. Wilcannia, a river-port located conveniently on the river that more or less formed the eastern boundary of the Far West, was the gateway to the whole. Wilcannia also marked the limits of Darling River navigation most years. Sometimes there was enough water to allow navigation further upstream, but there were also years when the paddle-steamers could not even reach Wilcannia.
The last-mentioned difficulty has been invaluable in a way, because when a paddle-steamer got stuck on account of shallow water, the captain would often try to reduce the boat’s draught by selling or otherwise off-loading as much of his cargo as practical. On at least two occasions the Wilcannia Times published a comprehensive list of foodstuffs that were available for sale. On other occasions new stock that had been landed at Wilcannia were advertised by the local merchants. These lists included quite a lot of canned food (…how about canned lobster…) , and at the time when the research that underlies these pages was completed, the Far West was littered with tin cans of various shapes and sizes. The labels were mostly gone, but it would be interesting to know if any fragmentary remnants of the original contents had been trapped in the seams of those cans – and if so, could those remnants be extracted and subjected to DNA analysis? After 100-plus years in the sun? The results might enable a match of can shapes to their contents and allow identification of the source and ultimate destination of the foodstuffs that came up the Darling River in the 1880s and 1890s.
Wilcannia
Image: The Post & Telegraph Office, Wilcannia – 1987
In the mid-1980s Wilcannia retained many buildings that demonstrated just how much of a hub this river port was until bypassed and made less relevant by the construction of railways. As already said above, Wilcannia was the gateway – where the paddle-steamer gave way to the coaches of Morrison Brothers, where a group of Chinese men had market gardens, and rumours of gold set off quite a scramble in 1880.
Click here for Wilcannia
Mount Browne
Image: The Mount Browne Prospecting Gold Mining Company’s Site – 1985
Mount Browne was the site of the second gold discovery in the far west. (The first discovery was on the slopes of Mount Poole, and just to confuse matters, Mount Poole became part of the Mount Browne Goldfield, which in turn was a division of the Albert Goldfield…). As a gold field Mount Browne was was quite compact, but in the 1980s and 1990s plenty was left of the diggings… Great open holes in the ground each accompanied by its matching pile of off-white dirt. Other evidence remained – left behind by the diggers – in the form of discarded hole-in-the-cap cans, tobacco and wax Vesta tins, broken billy cans. broken and worn-out spades, pickaxes, components of other equipment.
Click here for Mount Browne
Milparinka
Image: Inspecting the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney’s premises – 1985
Ahhh! Milparinka – the town where life was just too hard and the things that hold people were missing. The town that was the centre of administration, where pigs wandered the street, dynamite stores exploded, people’s favourite horses stopped a bullet, and children found bottles of strychnine… But Milparinka had Thomas Wakefield Chambers, who left us with the most incredible word picture of the town he took under his wing. He is so important (IMO) that he gets a page all to himself – see below.
Click here for Milparinka
Thomas Wakefield Chambers – editor extraordinaire
Image: Thomas Wakefield Chambers’ grave, Milparinka Cemetery 1985.
Tom Chambers, publisher of the Sturt Recorder Tibooburra and Mount Browne Advertiser. A man with a very clear idea as to how things should be and very little time for those who disagreed. But in other ways he was far more liberal in his thinking than most…Without his fabulous word-picture we would know very little about the town he adopted. Milparinka and Australia in general owes him far more than a lonely grave in a town that has all but disappeared.
” Pig! Pig!! Pig !!! PIGTOWN !!!! “
Click here for Thomas Wakefield Chambers
The Warratta Battery and Albert Town
Image: “The Battery”, 1985
“The Battery” is the remains of very complicated piece of goldfields machinery. Designed and manufactured in Victoria in 1889, it went to South Australia on the steamship Lubra where it was transhipped to the paddle steamer Golconda and its’ barge Leviathan for a trip up the Murray and Darling rivers to Wilcannia. From Wilcannia it was hauled 450 km to Mount Browne by bullock and camel power, and subsequently to Warratta where it sits today. In 1985 it was minus its steam engine and a large number of other parts. Who knows what is left today…
Albert Town, a community of gold diggers not far from the Battery was so named for Albert, Prince Consort to Queen Victoria. Prince Albert had died ten years before gold was found here, but people in the Far West during the 1880s and 1890s were Empire loyalists. And so we have Albert Town, the Albert Hall at Tibooburra, and, especially, the Albert Hotel at Milparinka. But we do not, it seems, have an Albert Street.
