| BACK HOME A UNIQUE CORNER A signpost on the Broken Hill street corner says "Tibooburra, 380km. Semi trailers enter the city loaded with sheep or giant wool packs and head back to the bush with drums of petrol, tyres, cement, pipes, wire gates, wire netting, wire (the bushman's universal aid), and so many other valuable goods which present prosperity keeps circulating. Many of these transports, we know, head for Tibooburra and the surrounding districts, but that's all a lot of us do know of the distant North West "corner" of NSW. This region has a very history of its own. DISCOVERY The corner region was explored by Captain Charles Sturt during the early months of 1845, when he was pinned down with his companions at "Depot Glen", 16kms from where Milparinka was later to be established. "Red Hill" now Mount Poole, lay beside it and "Black Hill", later Mount Brown, lay 16kms to the SSW of Mount Poole. Sturt wrote very gloomily indeed about the region. His eyesight was failing; he felt the dreaded scurvy attacking him: he had the lives of 16 of his fellow men in his keeping and he was stranded at Depot Glenn by drought, unable to go forward and almost afraid to go back. He was lonely and depressed, and no doubt he exaggerated when he said "the mean temperature for December, January and February was 101, 104 and 101F. Under its effects, every screw in our boxes had been drawn, and the horn handles of our instruments, as well as our combs, were split into fine Laminae. The lead dropped out of our pencils, our signal rockets were entirely spoiled. Our hair, as well as the wool on sheep, ceased to grow, and our nails had become as brittle as glass." Hard and discouraging words indeed! But, they did not prevent hardy pioneers from venturing out into "The Corner". THE PASTORALISTS The graziers followed close on Sturt's footsteps; they were at Menindee in 1846, and by the early 1850s covered the whole region. If the wool ceased to grow for Sturt, it has been growing vigorously on the sheep since, and bringing wealth to Australia. Merino breeds flourish in the dry, scantily vegetated region with its average annual rainfall of 6-8 inches. In good years, the desert blooms, stocks increase and tanks are replenished. Drought years forced stock to other areas and wiped out many sheep but always the area comes back. Stations are large, from 65,000 acres upwards. Flocks vary about the 6,000 mark depending on the season. In the early days, Sir Sidney Kidman owned many of the stations of this region, but today all have been leased to individuals by the Western Lands Commission. None of the stations are freehold, all are Crown leases. GOLD MINING IN "THE CORNER" Tibooburra is an aboriginal word which means "the place of the granites". The title is apt, for in the words of George Farwell "Entirely surrounding the town is a massive granite outcrop, a wall of weather - worn boulders that might have been piled up on top of the other by a race of giants". At some remote point in time an igneous blow had flung these jurassic boulders up through the earth's crust. In the early mining reports of this region, it was often called "The Granites" instead of its present name, Tibooburra. As early as 1867 gold was discovered in the Milparinka area, but nothing much came of this early discovery except that prospecting continued more eagerly. However, in the early 1870s several claims were pegged, and for the next 30-odd years this area was established as a mining field, but one whose fortunes often fluctuated. One of the two reefs found in this period were at a depth of up to 50 feet, for example at Wangaratta, but most of the gold found was from alluvial workings. In general the surface patches containing gold were not very rich although from time to time a lucky miner would find a small nugget which would encourage all the other miners to renewed efforts. As each patch of alluvia gold was worked out, prospectors found new ones. The total gold recovered in 3 years was very large. CONTINUE NEXT PAGE |