Heritage of the Upper North Region: Background History Peter Bell The Region
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- The Railways
- The Smelters
The Wheat Towns When the Strangways Act was being debated in Parliament in 1868, the only towns in the Upper North region were Melrose, and the small coastal settlements beside the anchorages at Port Pirie and Port Germein. That changed dramatically in the following ten years, as the demands of closer settlement established a large number of towns throughout the ranges. The farm blocks were surveyed in land units called Hundreds (the equivalent of Parishes in other colonies), areas which were to be as nearly as possible ten miles square, and would thus ideally contain exactly one hundred 640 acre farms. Goyder established a policy of surveying an agricultural town in the centre of every hundred, so that in theory there was to be a town spaced every ten miles (16km) apart along both east-west and north-south lines. Events were to show that this spacing was over-optimistic, but no-one at the time seems to have questioned whether any other agricultural land in Australia was supporting towns only ten miles apart. In practice, the geometry was never as neat as this; the size and shape of the Hundreds naturally varied with local topography, and towns could only be positioned where water supply and convenience of road access permitted. However, even given these constraints, the road map of the Upper North still clearly shows the orderliness of the 1870s surveys. The pace with which these towns were established was astonishing. In 1869, within months of the Strangways Act, Georgetown and Redhill were drawn up, then in the following decade, nearly every town in the Upper North region was surveyed: 1870 Hallett and Yacka, 1871 Caltowie, Jamestown, Laura, Narridy and Port Pirie, 1872 Appila, Baroota and Gladstone, 1874 Gulnare, Nelshaby, Pekina, Stone Hut, Yarcowie, Wirrabarra and Yatina, 1875 Crystal Brook, Lake View, Koolunga and Tarcowie, 1876 Orroroo, Spalding, Wilmington and Yongala, 1877 Huddleston, Lancelot, Mannanarie, Morchard and Warnertown, 1878 Booleroo, Hornsdale, Port Germein, Terowie and Willowie, 1879 Amyton and Hammond, 1880 Franklyn, Merriton and Petersburg. (Manning 1990) In some cases, the determinants of geography put the new towns alongside the homesteads established thirty years earlier, simply because the place chosen to build a homestead in the 1840s was also likely to be the best place to locate a town in the 1870s. Thus Orroroo was established not far north of Pekina in 1876, the town of Wirrabara near the homestead of the same name in 1874, and the new town of Gladstone was surveyed beside Booyoolee homestead in 1875. The old road network also played a part; the existing track up the valleys from Clare to Melrose, passing half a dozen homesteads, influenced the locations of Yacka, Gulnare, Georgetown, Gladstone, Laura, Stone Hut, Wirrabara and Murray Town along its route. Not all of the new towns were laid out by the government; Samuel Robinson had Mannanarie surveyed as a private speculation in 1877. The government town of Booleroo, laid out in 1878, was virtually ignored by settlers, who preferred the private town of Booleroo Centre, surveyed five miles (8km) to the southwest in 1882. (Manning 1990, p. 41) Thus Melrose, Solomontown, Mannanarie and Booleroo Centre began with land sales by private investors, whereas residents in most towns in the region bought their land from the Crown. The rawness and excitement of the new towns reminded one Victorian visitor of the goldfields: At all these townships the scene reminds one of a rush to a new diggings, only instead of gold the rush here is for Land. In each township there are prominent the stripper and plough factories, some having as many as three. A flour mill at work is to be found in most, and the hotels and stores, which are of a more superior class than might be expected in such new places, are driving a brisk business. The number of houses in each township, including hotels, stores, banks, mills, implement factories, schools, and churches, vary from about fifteen to fifty, and rapidly growing. (Dow 1874, p. 30) One fundamental difference between a gold rush and a land rush was the gender balance of the population. Unlike the goldfields with their thousands of young restless male diggers, a large proportion of the Strangways Act pioneers tended to arrive in the district as family units, or at least as married couples. Large numbers of children were present from the outset. A sprinkling of the new arrivals were experienced middle-aged farming families who had moved 100km north from the farmlands between Gawler and Clare to try their luck on a bigger farm in the Areas. Many of the business people in the new wheat towns were also from similar towns further south, moving their trade to the new frontier. The names of shopkeepers and hoteliers from older towns like Clare, Auburn, Gawler and Kapunda are conspicuous among the early people taking up town allotments in the Areas. Under Goyder's directions, the standard form of these town surveys was a miniature version of Colonel Light's plan for Adelaide, a square of town allotments centred within a square of parkland, centred within a square of farmland: Light's plan for Adelaide had some effect on these early towns, private and government. Goyder drew a sketch plan of an imaginary hundred including a town centre, park lands and surrounding suburban land. This became the model for surveyors for the rest of the 19th century and little copies of Adelaide were strewn all over the agricultural areas. (Love 1986, p. 8) The surveyors of the 1870s had to peg out about two million acres of farmland and select about forty town sites very quickly, and not surprisingly their judgement was not always perfect. The town of Yongala is notorious for having the coldest winter temperatures of any town in the State, and Jamestown straddling Belalie Creek suffers from infrequent but serious flooding. The editor of the Jamestown Review pointed out some of these defects at the time; he did not share Goyder's passion for geometrical symmetry, and wrote his own acerbic instructions for the government surveyors: Avoid all sites that are naturally high and dry and possess natural facilities for easy drainage. If there be a gentle slope, sheltered by friendly upland, avoid that also; eschew any elements of the picturesque, and select rather the flattest, most uninteresting site possible; if a flat with a creek running through it and subject to overflow, by all means get on the lower bank of the creek and peg away. If a running creek be not available get in the way of a storm channel. (Quoted in Cooper 1978, p. 3) Beside their commercial roles, the new wheat towns became centres for government administration, with police stations, court houses, post offices and telegraph stations erected on government reserves. The Education Act of 1875 encouraged the construction of public schools early in the life of the new towns. In Gladstone the government commenced building a large gaol of a radically new design in 1879, signalling that the frontier of law and order had moved on from Redruth at Burra, which had been the northernmost gaol since the 1850s. The new farmers arriving in the region tended to be predominantly of English descent, and they brought with them their traditional religious faiths, the Anglican church and the various Methodist denominations. There was not the fervent Wesleyan evangelism that had accompanied the spread of farming in the Lower North twenty years earlier; chapels set among the wheatfields are rare in the Upper North. In the 1880s the Salvation Army arrived, but found that the hard-working farmers of the Upper North provided them with only a small amount of sin to fight. A large proportion of the Anglican churches in the Upper North towns were designed by William Mallyon of Port Pirie, who produced some fine designs despite being entirely untrained in architecture; somewhat improbably he had a full-time job as a bank manager. (Fenton 1971) However, there was some cultural diversity in the new population. There were Catholic churches everywhere in the region, and around Pekina there was a particular concentration of Irish families who had moved north from Armagh and Clare, so many that for a time under Bishop Maher the little town became the seat of the Port Augusta diocese, and the district was known by outsiders as 'Vatican Valley'. Bishop Norton of Petersburg designed some of the Catholic churches of the region; unlike Mallyon he had trained as an architect. (Press 1993) There was a sprinkling of other protestant denominations. Unusually for South Australian farmland, Lutheran churches were rare, but there were small groups of German settlers who moved north from the Barossa and established Petersburg and nearby Gottlieb's Well (later Terowie), and a few German families settled in the Booleroo and Appila districts. The old towns also had a new lease of life. In 1871 a new government town was surveyed along the Port Pirie river; in conforming to the plan of the wharves along the riverbank, it became one of the very few South Australian towns to have curved streets. The new excitement gave hope to the moribund private survey of 1848 nearby, and in 1873 it was renamed Solomontown to distinguish it from the government subdivision. The muddy estuary at Port Pirie was improved by harbour works. In 1876 the Queens Wharf was constructed along the river on steel piles driven into the river bed, and the channel was dredged to allow ocean-going ships to tie up alongside. By 1880, over 300,000 tons of silt had been dredged from the channel and pumped ashore for landfill. (Robinson 1976, pp. 151-161) In 1878 Port Germein was also surveyed as a government town. Although it was a sheltered anchorage, its main drawback was the extreme shallowness of the seabed in the upper Gulf, so to upgrade Port Germein for the wheat trade, a long jetty was built in 1881. It was extended to 5,459 feet (1,664m) in length in 1883, stretching over a mile out to sea, making it by far the longest jetty in South Australian waters. Even at that length, it drew only nine feet (2.7m) of water at the outer end. As the wheat harvest of the Upper North grew year after year, so Port Germein, Port Pirie and Port Augusta entered a new era as booming wheat ports in the 1870s. During the harvest each year the ports came to life as bagged wheat arrived on wagons and was built into rectangular mountains along the foreshore. Then the ocean-going wheat ships arrived, usually four-masted barques, many of them owned by Scandinavian trading firms and crewed by Swedish and Finnish sailors. In the deep river channels of Port Pirie and Port Augusta they could tie up to the wharves and be loaded up gangways. At Port Germein they sat at anchor in the roadstead while the 'mosquito fleet' of local ketches worked for weeks lightering wheat out to them from the jetty; typically each ship held about 4,000 tonnes of cargo, which was about 50,000 wheat bags. (Sundberg 1998) When the big ships were deep in the water they sailed for the markets of Europe, their holds full of bagged wheat grown by the farmers of Redhill and Jamestown and Orroroo. The Railways The economic gains of the wheat farming boom were consolidated by the construction of railway lines from the ports into the farming districts. In the process, the selection of railway routes was to reorganise the chequerboard of more or less evenly-spaced wheat settlements into a hierarchy of economic significance, as the new railways conferred prosperity on the fortunate towns along their route. Railways had been built outward from Adelaide since 1856, the northernmost line reaching the mining town of Burra in 1870. The first line in the Upper North region was independent of the Adelaide network, constructed east from Port Pirie through the Crystal Brook gap, commencing in 1875 and extended in stages, reaching as far inland as Petersburg within six years. The first section was open to Crystal Brook in 1875, then it was built onward to Gladstone in 1876, extended to Caltowie in January 1878, and to Jamestown the following July. It reached Yongala in 1880 and Petersburg in January 1881. The Port Pirie to Petersburg railway was to form the principal east-west transport axis of the Upper North region, bringing prosperity to all the towns along its route for many decades, and, although both its principal freight and its route have changed, it still makes an important contribution to the region's economy today. The full impact of this line on South Australia would only be felt after 1887 when it was extended to the New South Wales border to link with the Silverton Tramway to Broken Hill. While the Petersburg line was under construction, another line was built north from Burra to Hallett in 1878. It reached Terowie in 1880, and in May 1881 the link between Terowie and Petersburg was completed, connecting the Port Pirie hinterland with Adelaide by way of Burra. The farmers of the Orroroo district repeatedly lobbied for their own railway from the coast at Port Germein, along a route that would have taken it up through the Germein Gorge past Bangor to Murray Town, then through Booleroo and Pekina to Orroroo. They pursued their campaign so persistently that three parliamentary enquiries considered the question over twenty years in 1881, 1891 and 1902, but their expensive line was never found viable. Instead, in November 1881 a branch line was opened from Petersburg north to Orroroo, and then the following year this was pushed north through Eurelia to Quorn, linking with the Great Northern railway which was open from Port Augusta to Farina. This link was to take on new significance in 1917, when the Transcontinental railway was opened across the Nullarbor to Perth. Railway traffic from Adelaide to Perth travelled north via Burra through Terowie and Petersburg, thence through Quorn and Port Augusta to the west. Although no-one had planned it that way, these developments made Petersburg the railway hub of the Australian continent. In the 1920s and 30s, all long-distance passengers and freight from Sydney to Perth, from Adelaide to Brisbane, or from Melbourne to Alice Springs, had to pass through the Petersburg railway yards. Surprisingly, it was not until 1937 that a direct line was built between Port Pirie and Port Augusta, allowing trains bound for Perth or Alice Springs to travel north up the shore of Spencer Gulf. (Donovan 1992) The railways brought economic benefits to the region for many years, not only because they reduced the costs of goods coming inward and hastened the carriage of wheat to the ports for export, but also because the railways themselves were an important industry. Because of the complicated politics of Australian public transport, there were three different rail gauges in the region, so there were break-of-gauge facilities and goods sheds at Port Pirie, Terowie and Gladstone. Because of the delays to passengers at the break-of-gauge stops, they all had large stations with refreshment rooms. Petersburg became the busiest railway junction in South Australia; a large maintenance workshop was built there, and the tracks in its yard were fitted with four rails to take rolling stock of all three gauges. Stations at such strategic points on the railway network employed large workforces for many years. Over the next few decades, more branch lines filled in many of the blank spaces on the railway map. In the south-west of the region, a horse tramway was built from Port Broughton to Barrunga Range (Mundoora) in 1876, and later converted to steam operation. A branch line was built from Gladstone to Laura in 1884, then on to Booleroo Centre in 1910, and extended north to Wilmington in 1915. The region was linked more closely to the southern railway network by a series of lines that came north up the valleys, connecting Blyth to Gladstone in 1894, Clare to Spalding in 1922, and Snowtown to Redhill in 1935. The 1930s saw the peak of the Upper North region's railway era. The first railway closure in the region came soon afterward as a result of wartime rationalisation, when the short line from Port Broughton to Mundoora closed in 1942. This was an early precursor of what was to happen after 1975, when all railway lines in the Upper North region were taken over by Australian National Railways. The Forests From early setttlement it had been realised that South Australia was less plentifully endowed with trees than any other Australian colony, with the result that nearly all timber for any purpose had to be imported, so it was not surprising that nineteenth century governments were eager to create forest plantations. The ranges of the Upper North were chosen as the most promising land for afforestation. In 1875 the Forest Board Act provided the legislative basis for government involvement in forestry, and within months, in February 1876, the first seedlings were growing at Bundaleer, south of Jamestown. Over 132,000 seedlings were planted out as the beginning of a commercial forest later that year. From the outset, there was great diversity in the plantations. There were native red gums and sugar gums, introduced Tasmanian blue gums and Western Australian jarrah, as well as acclimatisation experiments with European oaks, elms, ashes, poplars, walnuts, sycamores and willows. Golden wattle was grown to harvest the bark, used in tanning leather. (Lewis 1975, pp. 15-16) Among the early plantings were stands of radiata pine, later to become the staple of the Australian softwood timber industry. Goyder, seemingly expert on almost every subject, personally recommended that Pinus radiata be tested. (Kelly 1963) Bundaleer North Forest Reserve was the first State forest in South Australia, and the first forest planting by any government in Australia. A second eucalypt plantation at Wirrabara Forest was commenced in 1877. (Malone 1971; Cole 1972) No-one had ever attempted forestry on this scale in Australia, and there was a lot to learn about the climate, soils and seasons of the Upper North region. Not all the plantings were a success, and drought, frosts and fires also took their toll. But the foresters persevered, and learned to mix their tree plantings with wheat growing and sheep grazing. The Conservator of Forests, John Ednie Brown, held a view fashionable at the time, that planting forests would cause the rainfall to increase, and proposed establishing huge plantations across the arid northern lands. In his Practical Treatise on Tree Culture he expounded his plausible-sounding but mistaken theory that tree plantings could modify the climate. Brown entitled a chapter of the book "The Benefits which would accrue to the Soil and Climate of the Colony from a general System of Tree Planting", prominent among which was: "More Rain would Fall." (Brown 1881, p. 7) To Goyder, chairman of the Forest Board, this was unscientific nonsense, and he insisted that commercial timber production remain the chief aim of the State forests. Goyder was painfully aware that Brown’s views were only a variation of the 'rain follows the plough' beliefs which had prompted the excesses of the later Strangways land reforms. It was in part concern over Brown's misguided enthusiasm which prompted the government to disband the Forest Board in 1882 and replace it with the more practically-minded Department of Woods and Forests. (Williams 1978 p. 17; Jones 1999) In the early decades the harvested logs were the chief product of the forests, and they were sold commercially for milling. The hardwoods found a ready market for underground mine timber at Broken Hill. Then in 1910 the Verran government, with its program of State enterprise, built a sawmill at Bundaleer so that sawn timber could be marketed. In 1935 the Butler government expanded the mill, installing seasoning kilns, and more sophisticated sawing and planing plant. The forests which formed the basis of State forestry in the 1870s have been continuously cultivated to the present, and still contribute significant economic activity to the Upper North. The Smelters An event which was to have a profound impact on the development of the Upper North region was the discovery of silver-lead-zinc ore at Broken Hill in far western New South Wales in 1883. It was apparent within only a few years that the ore deposit in the Barrier Ranges was among the great mineral discoveries of the world. The initial attraction of the field was the value of its silver, but even after this crashed in value in the early 1890s, the mines of the Barrier went on to produce millions of tons of lead and zinc, becoming by far the most productive and profitable base metal mining field in Australia. South Australia effectively stole the economic benefits of Australia's greatest mining field from New South Wales. This was done very simply by extending the Port Pirie-Petersburg railway to Cockburn on the New South Wales border in 1887, creating a rail link with the privately-built Silverton Tramway from that point to the mines of Broken Hill. The new line was a gamble, and political support for it was the result of effective representation by the local member for the Northern Areas, Dr John Cockburn, long-term mayor of Jamestown and Minister for Education in the Downer government. His bronze bust in the main street of Jamestown expresses the region’s gratitude for his foresight. Once the Cockburn rail link was opened, all fuel and other supplies going into Broken Hill, and all mineral products coming out, had to pass through Port Pirie, bringing greatly increased shipping and railway activity to the economic benefit of the Upper North region. Along the railway, Petersburg, Yongala, Jamestown, Gladstone and Crystal Brook all shared some of Broken Hill’s prosperity. Then in 1889, one of the mining companies, British Broken Hill Proprietary Coy Ltd, took the process a step further by building a smelter at Port Pirie. The major company, Broken Hill Proprietary Coy Ltd (BHP), built its own lead refinery at Port Pirie the same year, and also took over the British company's smelter in 1892. (Green 1977) Siting the smelter at the coast saved the cost of railing fuel to Broken Hill, but added the cost of railing ore to Port Pirie. This only made economic sense when more efficient treatment processes enabled the waste rock to be discarded and metallic ore to be concentrated, so that a relatively small amount of rich concentrate was railed to the smelter. (Blainey 1968, p. 64) Some companies continued to smelt on the field, but Port Pirie benefited in any case, as it railed them their fuel. There was a third option; some of the Broken Hill companies did not smelt at all, but sold their concentrate to smelters in Europe - mostly in Germany - for treatment there. This practice ended abruptly when the First World War broke out in 1914, because Germany and the other Central Powers were inaccessible, and all commercial shipping worldwide was disrupted. Unsaleable concentrate began to accumulate in large stockpiles at Port Pirie; paradoxically, this was happening just as wartime demand was driving the price of metals up to unprecedented levels. In the face of this emergency, the Broken Hill companies acted in co-operation for the first time. In May 1915 five of the largest companies combined to form Broken Hill Associated Smelters (BHAS), which took over BHP’s Port Pirie smelter and enlarged it into a joint venture. Port Pirie had progressed through five roles, each rising in economic importance: first a sleepy wool port, second a bustling grain port, third a regional railway terminus, it then became the port for Australia’s most important base metal mines. With the arrival of BHAS it entered its fifth phase: by 1918, Port Pirie was the second-largest city in South Australia, and its smelters were the largest in the world. (Blainey 1968, p. 79) BHP sold the Port Pirie smelters because it was moving out of Broken Hill into the iron and steel industry at Newcastle and Port Kembla, and later Whyalla. Under BHAS, the smelters have operated to the present, with several major changes in their operating technology. In 1925 a Royal Commission investigated the incidence of lead poisoning or plumbism among the workforce, and lead toxicity from smelter waste is still of concern to the Port Pirie community today. During the uranium boom of the 1950s, the smelters diversified, installing a plant to extract uranium oxide from ores mined at Radium Hill. In recent decades, production at the Broken Hill mines has been steadily dropping, with obvious implications for the future of Port Pirie. Directory: 175 -> bm.doc 175 -> Automobiles, or cars. 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