Soldier settlement schemes in NSW have a chequered history, but among the failures were some notable successes. One of the most successful, and biggest was at Edgeroi in northern NSW. In this two-part series, PETER AUSTIN traces the history of Edgeroi from its pastoral foundations.
MOTORISTS heading north from Narrabri along the busy Newell Highway soon come to a tiny settlement called Edgeroi, where there are wheat silos, a store, a community hall and not much else. It has the appearance, and shares the seasonal life cycle, of countless other whistle-stop silo townships across the wheat belt: a frenzy of activity at harvest time and an air of languor the rest of the year. One could easily assume that Edgeroi was simply an arbitrary name given to one of the dozens of rail sidings that became wheat delivery points during the mid-1900s expansion of graingrowing.
Little would you realise (unless you stopped to read an information plaque in the roadside park) that long before Edgeroi gave its name to a silo town, it was an illustrious pastoral station. When it was resumed for soldier settlement in 1947, it was a property sprawling over some 123,000 acres (49,000 hectares), shearing up to 100,000 sheep and trucking 1000 fats to market every week.
Earlier still, in the late 1800s, “Edgeroi” was part of a huge aggregation straddling the Namoi River from Manilla almost to Wee Waa – today, some of the choicest farmland in northern NSW. Much of what became “Edgeroi” was taken up in the 1840s by the explorer/statesman W.C. Wentworth as “Galathera”. An adjoining run called “Gundermaine” was taken up by Campbell and Ryan. All of this country by 1860 had become part of the pastoral empire of John, Charles and Edward Lloyd, trading as Lloyd Brothers, whose head station was “Burburgate”, between Gunnedah and Narrabri. Like so many empires built on “grass castles”, however, that of the Lloyd Brothers began to unravel in the 1860s, as losses mounted from successive disasters: drought, floods and scab disease in the sheep.
By the end of the 1870s all of the Lloyds’ holdings were under the control of their mortgagee, a hard-nosed coal baron named Ebenezer Vickery. And it was this parcel of properties – by this time a vast aggregation of nearly 150,000ha – that was sold in a 1881 mega-deal to an investment syndicate trading as Namoi Pastoral Company. Namoi was an offshoot of the Australian Mortgage and Agency Company, a UK-based finance and woolbroking company which ran into headwinds in the early 1900s. In 1901 it offered the 53,000ha “Burburgate” for sale at auction, without result (it was eventually sold and broken up in 1905), and next it started sounding out potential buyers for “Edgeroi”, which had been registered in that name as a pastoral holding in 1885.
The timing was fortuitous, because another UK-based investor, the New Zealand and Australian Land Company (“the Land Company”) was just then cashed up from sales of its NZ properties and looking to expand its Australian holdings. As the Land Company’s then general manager and driving force, William Soltau Davidson, tells the story in his memoir, he began discussions with the Namoi Pastoral management during a visit to Australia in 1903, and a sale was concluded the following year.
Thus, he wrote, “The Land Company came into possession of one of the best fattening estates in New South Wales...”. The price paid for the 60,000ha property was just over 240,000 pounds ($480,000), or around $36 million in present-day money, but Davidson thought it worth every penny. As he wrote: “‘Edgeroi’ is an estate which can be worked to the very best advantage by the Land Company, as they can quickly supply a very large number of sheep in a good season from their other estates, and also by purchase, so as to stock the place up to the hilt while the rush of good feed lasts and then, by selling the fat sheep at a proper time, reduce the flock to quite a small number during the summer.”
With its acquisition of “Edgeroi”, the Land Company also inherited the station’s manager, Robert Shields, who had replaced the previous manager, W.A. Gordon, upon the latter’s retirement in 1901. Shields, who later became a pillar of the Narrabri community, had left England for “colonial experience” in NSW in the early 1880s aged just 13, and found work on “Edgeroi” as a yard hand. He left, a few years later, to try his luck on the Western Australian goldfields, but returned to “Edgeroi”, broke, as a boundary rider, only to enjoy a meteoric rise to the position of manager when barely 30. Shields remained as manager of “Edgeroi” for the Land Company until 1934, when he died after collapsing at the Narrabri Show where he had been judging the sheep shearing competition.
He was succeeded by Ken Hudson, previously manager of the company’s “Wingadee” at Coonamble, who remained at the helm until “Edgeroi” was resumed for soldier settlement in 1947. As the manager of “Edgeroi”, Hudson (and Shields before him) commanded a veritable army of station staff – even during the war years, when labour was tight. In 1941, for instance, company records show “Edgeroi” having a workforce of 28, from the manager, two overseers and book-keeper down the pecking order to boundary riders, musterers, stockmen, fencers, gardeners, cooks and housemaids. During its years of Land Company ownership, “Edgeroi” achieved a statewide reputation as a source of prime stock, particularly sheep and lambs.
As well as maintaining a breeding flock of some 60,000 Merino ewes, the property was regularly used to fatten for market sheep bred on other, less geographically favoured, company stations. In 1908, for instance, we find 23,000 wethers being on the road to “Edgeroi” from Wellshot Station in western Queensland, while on the other side of the ledger, we see 20,000 fat wethers being sold in one line off “Edgeroi” in 1929 to an Adelaide processor.
Nor was “Edgeroi” just a source of prime mutton; it was renowned for its big lines of station-bred first-cross lambs, such as the entire drop from 28,000 ewes that was purchased one year by the late “Gundy” Webster when pastoral inspector for Pitt Son and Badgery, for his Riverina dealer client Andrew Glenn of “North Yathong”, Jerliderie. Most of the sale sheep from “Edgeroi”, however, ended up in the fat markets of Homebush or Maitland, where the property’s reputation for well-finished stock ensured a premium price from regular buyers.
All of this came to an end after the Second World War, when large stations found themselves in the government’s cross-hairs as fitting targets for soldier settlement. Negotiations with the Land Company for the resumption of “Edgeroi” were finalised early in 1947, and a two-day disposal sale held in June of that year saw the station’s remaining 26,000 sheep sold in just under one hour for an average price of 47 shillings ($4.70).
It was the fourth NSW station surrendered reluctantly by the Land Company for the War Service Land Settlement program, following the earlier resumptions of “Gragin”, “Orandumbie” and “Bobundara”. Together, these post-war property acquisitions for soldier settlement meant the loss of more than 120,000ha of the company’s best freehold country, carrying 250,000 sheep and 5000 head of cattle. But helped by the 1950s wool boom, the company was able to rebuild some of its lost capacity during the next decade with the purchases of some 15 new properties, only to see them all swallowed up by Dalgety-New Zealand Loan in a 1969 takeover, and subsequently sold off.
