TODAY, the Namoi River-fronting Gunnedah property known as “Burburgate” is a modest 295 hectare (728ac) residential and cattle-fattening block, but the name has a long and distinguished lineage.
“Burburgate” was one of several runs taken up by the colonial explorer-politician William Charles Wentworth in the 1840s. In 1853 it was taken over by his former manager, John Lloyd, who was joined later by his brothers, Edward and Charles.
Trading from 1858 as Lloyd Brothers, they built a string of stations centred on “Burburgate” straddling the Namoi River from present-day Manilla to Wee Waa – a fertile tract of more than 500,000 hectares, according to historian/author Eric Rolls.
Fast-forward to the present, and the property now for sale as “Burburgate” is the original homestead portion of this former pastoral juggernaut, complete with its 1850s homestead, which has long since been incorporated into a larger structure.
It is owned by well-known agency identity Dick Cameron – a founding partner in 1983 of the northern NSW stock and station agency group Davidson Cameron – and his wife Polly, who are selling to relocate to a smaller holding near Willow Tree.
The marketing of “Burburgate” has been entrusted – not surprisingly – to Ruralco Property Davidson Cameron, and the property will go to auction in Gunnedah on November 10 with price expectations approaching $2.5 million.
Situated 15 kilometres north-west of Gunnedah where it fronts the Namoi River for 2.4km, “Burburgate” is a property of rich alluvial soils well suited to year-round cropping and cattle enterprise (as it is today).
About 500 steers on average are typically backgrounded and finished each year on improved pastures and crops, making Burburgate” a viable commercial farm as well as an attractive residential proposition.
It wasn’t as a cattle fattening block but as a sheep run that the original “Burburgate” made its name, shearing 140,000 and more sheep in the 1870s and ‘80s.
The property was also noteworthy as being one of the first in northern NSW, under Charles Lloyd’s management, to erect wire fences.
By 1870 ownership of “Burburgate” had passed to its mortgagee, the Sydney-based industrialist Ebenezer Vickery, and thereafter lost much of its area to free selection, before being absorbed into the Namoi Pastoral Company’s property empire.
Seeing the obvious potential for subdividing the vast grazing run into living areas for cropping and dairying, a Tamworth syndicate bought “Burburgate” – by then reduced to about 18,800ha - in 1905 and submitted it to auction in 58 blocks.
All of them sold, for a total sum of 152,000 pounds ($304,000, or about $42m in present-day values), with the homestead portion being bought by Walcha interests, who soon afterwards resold to a partnership of Thomson and Melrose.
The Thomson ownership thread endured through succeeding generations until the sale of the present homestead block to the Camerons in 1988.
