For more than a century, the Ramornie Handicap has been a feature race of the Clarence River Jockey Club's July racing carnival at Grafton, currently carrying a total purse of $200,000.
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If nothing else, this prestigious annual horserace helps keep alive the rich history of the Clarence Valley pastoral property from which it takes its name - a history dating back to early colonial times.
It was in June, 1840 that Ramornie was taken up by former naval surgeon Dr John Dobie, who the year before had led the first seaborne expedition of prospective settlers to enter the then unnamed Clarence River.
He named his run after the village in Fifeshire, Scotland, where he was born, before going on to take up Stratheden in the Richmond Valley in 1842.
Six other owners have held Ramornie since that time, leaving a rich tapestry of Northern Rivers history behind them.
Originally a vast spread of some 36,000 hectares, Ramornie today is a holding of about 4800ha fronting the Clarence River near Copmanhurst and owned by the local Holmes family.
It is home to Bernard Holmes, who runs a beef cattle breeding operation based on Braford and Angus bloodlines, augmented by timber harvesting and cropping.
For more than a century of its long history, though, Ramornie was held by successive generations of the Tindal family, during whose tenure the property became an international brand-name thanks to the ground-breaking meatworks to which it gave birth.
The family's Australian patriarch was Charles Grant Tindal, who arrived in Sydney from his native England in 1842 aged 18 and wasted no time sizing up opportunities.
After gaining pastoral experience with the Ogilvies of Yulgilbar (Tindal's father and Edward Ogilvie's father were naval colleagues in England), Tindal struck out on his own.
Hoping to pick up a suitable station, he was narrowly beaten to Tabulam Station in 1848, and likewise Koreelah at the head of the Clarence, although he did obtain the rent of the latter for three years, stocking it with 1000 head of cattle. But already he had his eye on Ramornie, which by 1845 Dobie had sold to take up Gordon Brook further up the Clarence. Its new owners were shipowner Edye Manning and his brother Arthur.
By 1850 the Mannings were ready to move on, but before Tindal was in a position to buy Ramornie it was snapped up by the nobly-born Frenchman Count Gabriel de Milhau and his two partners who had just fled France in the wake of the 1848 republican revolution. They paid about 1300 pounds ($650) for the property, with its 1800 head of cattle, and undertook substantial improvements. They also established a boiling-down works to render the near-worthless cattle into saleable tallow.
But the timing of their foray into pastoralism could hardly have been worse. Following the discovery of gold in NSW in 1851, their workers decamped for the diggings, and they decided to sell. The year before, Tindal had written prophetically to his father: 'Mannings' station has been sold some time since, but from what I hear, it will be in the market again before long. If it does, I will take care to look at it'.
Ramornie was duly listed for auction in Sydney in September 1852, billed as 'a splendid fattening station with 2200 well fed cattle', extensive improvements and potential to run 4000 head.
Tindal was ready this time, and secured the property for the princely sum of 21 shillings and sixpence ($2.15) per head for the 2138 grown cattle, with the land and 200 calves given in. Even before he won Ramornie, Tindal had been mulling the idea of establishing some sort of meat preserving plant, to extract more value from a beast than mere hides and tallow, but when the price of tallow soared in 1854 to levels that returned four pounds a head from every rendered animal, all thoughts of meat preserving were put on hold.
The 1850s was a decade of mixed fortunes for Tindal. High points were his marriage in 1856 to Ann Travers followed by the construction of the elegant sandstone homestead still in use today.
But offsetting these joys were the successive losses of all three of Tindal's brothers in separate drowning accidents, one of them in the notorious 1857 wreck of the Dunbar on Sydney's South Head.
It wasn't until the 1860s that market conditions prompted Tindal to revisit his meat preserving ideas, helped by the advent of a new meat canning process developed by German scientist Justus von Liebig.
Returning to England with his family in 1862, he boned up on the Liebig process and seeing its potential as facilitating a new market outlet for Australian beef, lost no time in grasping the nettle.
Helped by his father, who was now a banker, and with other founding UK shareholders keen to back his ideas, he launched the Australian Meat Company with start-up capital of 100,000 pounds.
The following year he was back in Australia and overseeing the conversion of the former modest boiling-down plant at Ramornie into a full-scale processing and canning works - Australia's first.
Carrying the Ramornie brand, Tindal's canned meat extract was soon being exported around the world, although mostly to England, where customers included the British army and navy. Tindal returned to England once the works was up and running, to look after the company's London warehouse, and in 1879 he bought out the company's other shareholders to become sole owner.
Although he made frequent visits back to Australia, Tindal remained domiciled in England until his death at 91 in 1914. His son Charles F. Tindal took over management of Ramornie in 1885. While the meatworks was his absorbing obsession, Tindal maintained his interest in pastoral affairs, acquiring in 1885 the Queensland border stations Gunyan/Bonshaw, and later, the adjoining Trigamon.
He also shared his fellow squatters' passion for horseflesh, importing the famous mare Cassandra and later Sir Hercules, which together produced Yattendon, one of Australia's top racing sires (mentioned in 'Banjo' Paterson's poem, Old Pardon, the son of Reprieve).
Following his death, and the sale three years later of the meatworks, Ramornie Station was held by three more generations of Tindal owners, who at different times conducted Devon, Hereford and Guernsey studs as well as dairying, conducted by share-farmers. But the First World War had taken a heavy toll of the Tindal menfolk. Two sons of Charles F. Tindal were killed in action and two others suffered impaired health.
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One of the latter - the eldest son, Charles H. Tindal - took over Ramornie after the war but died in 1926 aged just 39. Earlier that year he had formed a partnership with William Hughes of Newbold Station and the partnership endured under Hughes' management until 1952, with the Perpetual Trustee Company representing the Tindal family.
Following Hughes' sudden death in 1953, Ramornie was managed by Peter Tindal - one of C.H. Tindal's three sons - on behalf of a family company trading as Ramornie Pty Ltd. This endured until about 1970, when the company - and the property with it - was acquired by an offshore investment company, which subdivided and sold off some 2000ha from Ramornie. This left an area of 4270ha which in 1972 was snapped up for $350,000 by the then little-known (in Australia) steel baron, John D. Kahlbetzer, ushering in the next phase of Ramornie.
It was the Argentina-based Kahlbetzer's first real foray into Australian pastoralism, and the launching pad of what would become one of the country's biggest agricultural players, Twynam Pastoral Company. By the early 2000s, Twynam had built an empire of 19 properties covering 443,275ha with a full gamut of irrigated and dryland enterprises.
Twynam operated Ramornie as a breeding factory, running some 2000 mostly Braford females with progeny either sold at the annual Grafton autumn weaner sales, or - as the pastoral empire expanded - shifted to inland properties to grow and fatten. Kahlbetzer's son Johnny, now CEO of a much-slimmed-down Twynam, was just a boy at the time his father bought Ramornie, but remembers the place with affection. "We spent my May school holidays there up until I was probably ten or eleven, so it was my (first) major exposure to agriculture, cattle and horses," he recalls.
He said during Twynam's 22-year tenure of Ramornie, the main homestead had been redecorated (under the direction of his mother) and a new wing added.
The stone stables (originally built as barracks for staff) had also been extended and yards added, to accommodate the Kahlbetzers' passion for Quarter Horse breeding and competition.
As time went on and Twynam's focus became more oriented towards intensive farming and irrigation, Ramornie (along with the company's Hanging Rock property, Cangai) became surplus to requirements, and in 1994 it was offered for sale by tender.
The buyers this time, for $4.4 million (including cattle), were Kevin and Beverley Holmes, for whom Ramornie represented a major step up the pastoral ladder from their nearby home property, the 600ha Eatonsville.
Kevin, a successful businessman from a long-established local family, died last year aged 84 leaving Beverley holding the reins, and one of their two sons, Bernard, now calls Ramornie home.
The existing Twynam Braford herd was acquired to provide the basis of a breeding program that has involved crossbreeding with Angus bulls, now breeding up towards pure Angus.
Retained heifers are grown out on Eatonsville while steer weaners, feeder steers and surplus heifers are mostly sold through Grafton saleyards, along with some steers fattened on the river flats.
Corn is grown in season to provide feedgrain and silage, and soybeans as a cash crop to improve the soils.
The other major enterprise is timber harvesting from Ramornie's 1200ha eucalypt plantation, thinnings from which are sent to Brisbane for woodchipping and export, while timber from bushfire-damaged trees is sent to a local sugar mill as a carbon-neutral fuel.
