There are surely few pastoral properties in NSW that can match Oxley Station at Warren for its colourful history of successive build-up and break-up, and its rich pedigree of illustrious owners.
Oxley Station today (and not to be confused with its namesake in the Riverina) is a 35,168 hectare (86,864ac) holding located 75 kilometres north of Warren on the Lower Macquarie River. It is owned by Paraway Pastoral Company, which bought it in 2011 as part of Clyde Agriculture’s pastoral wash-up, along with the same vendor’s “Merrimba” at Warren and “Pier Pier” at Coonamble.
Prized by successive owners as a low-cost, large-scale cattle breeding property, “Oxley” benefits from its exquisite location at the point where the river begins to fan out into the sprawling natural wetland known as the Macquarie Marshes.
It was those marshes, with their vast reedbeds, that defeated the colonial explorer/surveyor John Oxley and his party when they tried to trace the course of the Macquarie River in the wet year of 1818.
But once the region was explored, and better understood, it came to be appreciated by squatters for its grazing potential, particularly in time of drought when the marshes remained green.
The property now known as “Oxley” began life as “Ringorah”, which in 1876 became part of the huge Buttabone Pastoral Company aggregation of the Hill family, part owners of the woolbroking firm Hill, Clark and Co. By 1924 the Buttabone aggregation had become the largest freehold in the Macquarie Valley, encompassing some 240,000 acres, but in that year it all went up for auction in subdivision.
That was when the Millear Brothers bought the portion of Buttabone that became “Buttabone Stud Park”, while the Body family of “Bundemar” bought the Buttabone homestead block.
The “Ringorah” portion, amounting to about 100,000ac, was not sold at auction, but shortly afterwards it was sold privately to an ill-fated UK-based investment company called Australian Sheep Farms.
Closely allied to (and financed by) the pastoral house AML & F, with whom it shared directors, Australian Sheep Farms was floated in 1924 to purchase the three former McCaughey stations - Toorale, Dunlop and Nocoleche – on the Darling. “Ringorah”, then a property of some 120,000 acres, much of it subject to annual inundation, was purchased specifically to provide “relief country” for the drought-exposed Darling stations.
Already by 1927 the property was being loaded up with sheep for which feed had run out on the western stations, but the drought was spreading and by year’s end “Ringorah” itself had been forced to buy-in 300 tons of fodder to keep its 18,000 sheep alive.
By 1937 the mounting losses on the western stations had forced the company into voluntary liquidation, and “Ringorah” (by then reduced to 84,000ac) was subdivided and sold.
The biggest portion – the 47,000 acres with river frontage - was bought, with cattle, by the Sydney-based pastoralist and wheeler-dealer John Jeremiah (‘JJ’) Leahy, who (at the suggestion of his son Keith) renamed it “Oxley”.
A further 27,000 acres which retained the “Ringorah” name and incorporating the homestead and shearing shed was bought by John Fisher, a member of a prominent local pastoral dynasty.
This left about 10,000 acres which became “Ringorah South” and was bought by the Healey family, who later sold to the Body family of “Bundemar” (and also, by then, “Buttabone”). In his book, Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Two Generations, Leahy’s youngest and only surviving son Gerard describes his father’s foray into the Lower Macquarie.
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He tells how Leahy and his eldest son Paul drove to “Oxley” in 1937 to take delivery, camping in tents while working with a team of hired stockmen to sort out the 4000 head of cattle on the property.
Drought was raging at the time (contributing to the previous owner’s demise) and the river had shrunk to a few waterholes, the steep banks of which often trapped the weakened cattle.
Paul had the unsavoury daily task of hauling carcases of stranded beasts out of the waterholes with his Chev ute, and many older cattle were lost before the drought broke.
The property when purchased consisted of just two huge paddocks and no improvements. One of Leahy’s first tasks was to build a bridge across the river, to give access to the main road to Warren.
He engaged Gordon Edgell, a well-regarded engineer and chairman of the eponymous canning company, to design the bridge, ironwork for which was forged in the property’s newly-erected blacksmith’s shop.
Also erected at this time, beside the river, were a homestead, men’s quarters and cattle yards, plus a bigger set of yards on higher ground in the middle of the property, fences, windmills and water troughs.
Soon after “Oxley” was purchased and bedded down, Paul Leahy moved to his father’s “Manna Park” fattening property at Condobolin, leaving the management of “Oxley” to his younger brother Keith.
