Today the tiny Central Tablelands village of Hargraves – population, about 30 – will swell three- or four-fold as locals and others with Hargraves connections foregather for the annual Anzac Day commemoration service.
Like many rural centres that might have been considered townships a century ago, but have since shrunk into villages or mere “localities”, Hargraves is seeing a revival in interest and awareness of its role in Australia’s past conflicts.
Army cadets from nearby Mudgee will lead a march to the village war memorial, where a service will be conducted, pupils from the local public school will lay poppies in remembrance of war veterans, the Last Post and Reveille will be sounded, and breakfast will be served in the local hall.
It’s a routine that will be played out, with local variations, in dozens of small rural communities on Anzac Day, a day that has taken on heightened relevance in the past two years as we mark the centenary of the First World War and its grim battles.
Hargraves was a township of 75 registered households in 1914 and a population of several hundred, most of the men engaged in pastoral work on the surrounding stations, seasonal work or mining.
The village itself had only come into being following the discovery of the famous “Kerr’s Hundredweight” nugget” in 1851 by an Aboriginal shepherd on nearby Wallerwaugh Station, sparking a rush to what became the Louisa Goldfield.
By the time of the First World War the “rush” was long gone and most of the alluvial gold with it, but the Big Nugget Goldmine, long defunct but refloated in 1911 by H.E. Pratten, was back in underground operation, employing some 20 men.
The township itself boasted several stores, two pubs, a school, police station and courthouse and three churches. Most of the land around was held in the big stations of Wallerwaugh, Triamble, Weeroona, Dun Dun, Gundowda and Waudong.
Today the village of Hargraves has just one store, the public school and a scattering of residences, while the original big stations have long since been broken up, replaced by modest-scale family farms and smaller “lifestyle” blocks.
Precisely how many men enlisted from Hargraves following the outbreak of war in 1914 is hard to determine, owing to the mobile nature of rural work at that time, but a handsome WWI honour roll now housed at the school lists 50 names.
It’s not difficult to imagine the impact on labour availability that a withdrawal of 50 able-bodied men would have had on a district then (as now) largely reliant on sheep, and at that time also ravaged by drought and marauding rabbits.
Of those 50 men who enlisted from Hargraves, eight were either killed in action or died soon after from wounds – a casualty rate slightly higher than the national average of 14 per cent.
In addition to those, local research has identified another casualty, and also another eight names of Hargraves-originating servicemen not listed on the plaque.
A number of names listed on the plaque are still represented in the district, among them the Gjessing family, originally of Norwegian seafaring origin, who sent two of their four sons to the war, only to lose both of them.
Cecil, who was listed as a grocer working at Wongarbon when he enlisted, sailed for Egypt in June 1915 and saw service on Gallipoli before transferring to the Western Front, where he was killed by shellfire during the Ypres offensive in September 1917, aged 25.
His four-years-younger brother Albert enlisted in March 1917 and embarked in May. He survived on the Western Front right up until August 23, 1918 only to die then at Strazeele from a shrapnel wound, just six weeks before the armistice.
Their great-nephew, Grant Gjessing, who owns a crane business in Mudgee, has spent the past five years hunting down details of his forebears, in the course of which he has visited both the Menin Gate in Belgium where Cecil’s name is inscribed, and the Daours Communal Cemetery in France, to see Albert’s grave.
In 1920, as the nation began the painful recovery from the war and the repatriation process, Hargraves was offered – and accepted – a captured German machine gun from the NSW State Trophies Committee to be the centrepiece of a war memorial.
The gun was mounted on a pedestal in front of the court house, where it formed a backdrop for the village’s annual Anzac Day service until 1939, when it was seen to be coming loose and was removed for safety reasons, only to subsequently disappear.
By then, however, the nation was locked into another global conflict – this time, one that threatened our own shores – and people had more pressing issues to deal with than the refurbishment of a WWI memorial.
It’s only been in recent years, with the upsurge of interest by younger generations in our Anzac heritage, that it was felt Hargraves should once again honour its war heroes in a permanent monument and an annual service.
A government grant in 2011 enabled a new war memorial to be erected on the base of the old, the original machine gun replaced by a convincing replica made by local handyman, Peter Holman, and the whole structure enclosed by a handsome drystone wall flanked by rosemary bushes.
Anzac Day commemoration services were restarted in 2012 and in recent years have been conducted by David Nelson, a Vietnam veteran and (at the time) Mudgee RSL sub-branch secretary, with strong family connections to Hargraves.
When next week’s Anzac Day service takes place, Mr Nelson will be in Belgium – closer to the centenary action – and the Hargraves service will be taken by his successor as sub-branch secretary, Royce Flynn, who served in Afghanistan.
Mr Nelson says while the ranks of world war “Diggers” are rapidly thinning, the Anzac spirit is being bolstered by a reinvigorated corps of Vietnam veterans (like himself) and participants from the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By 1939, when the Second World War broke out, Hargraves had shrunk in both size and status to a village outpost of Mudgee, and although men and women from the Hargraves district enlisted and served, their names are inscribed elsewhere.
But since the restoration of the memorial at Hargraves and the resumption of Anzac Day activities there, a number of locals whose forebears served in that war now attend the Hargraves service on Anzac Day, to keep the community flame alive.
Among those marching next Monday will be Jim Colley and Neville Mattick, both from long-established local grazing families, and both of whose parents (now deceased) all saw active service in the Second World War.
John Colley’s father, Tom, was one of three brothers raised on the family’s Dun Dun Station. He enlisted in 1941 aged 25, trained as a truck driver and served with the 2/101st General Transport Company where he saw action at El Alamein and later in Palestine and New Guinea.
It was after the unit was recalled to Queensland in May 1944 that Tom came into contact with Una Cover, an army nurse then based at Charters Towers. The couple were married in Townsville while both were still serving in 1945.
After the war when “Dun Dun” was divided between the brothers, Tom took a block he named “Maroombah”, where Jim continues to farm today.
Jim’s wife, Marg (whose own father, Tom Menchin, served with the RAAF during the war), cherishes an old exercise book into which Una had transcribed many poems composed by war-shattered men in her care at Charters Towers.
Neville Mattick, for his part, will be marching in memory of his late parents, both of whom saw military service during WWII. (He also has links, as a great-nephew, to a local WWI veteran, W.B.M. Suttor from a prominent Hargraves pioneering family.)
His father, Terry, was the first of six children born to Walter and Marie Mattick of “Wanda Vale” at Hargraves, and when the war broke out he was dividing his time between farm work on “Wanda Vale” and on his uncle’s “Gundowda” property.
He enlisted in February 1942 at the age of 22, while Singapore was under siege to the Japanese, and saw service with the Royal Australian Engineers in New Guinea and Borneo (where he narrowly escaped death from a sniper’s bullet).
One of his enduring memories of his time in New Guinea was having his tonsils removed in a field hospital, with only a dash of local anaesthetic for comfort.
His future wife, Lois Dunn, who grew up in Mudgee, joined the WAAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force) a few months later and served at Wagga Wagga, Tocumwal and Pearce (WA), before being discharged in 1947.
She and Terry were married in 1949 and made their home on “Hill Top”, a run-down property of 1000 hectares on the Triamble Road which Terry set about improving and in due course, expanding, while they raised their family of three sons.
Today “Hill Top” is a property of some 1440ha, owned and operated by Terry’s eldest son, Neville, and his wife Leonie.
