Wastelands of the Crown

… the British nation may be an example to the whole world for their wisdom, care, and justice in planting colonies; their caution in stocking the provinces with people of sober lives and conversations from this mother kingdom … —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

I was born in Adelaide in 1932 and when I was four they removed my tonsils and circumcised me for good measure, the latter without telling me. Arriving at the age of twelve, hyperactive, redheaded, I was invited to join the managing director of the Mutooroo Pastoral Company on his monthly inspection of the runs, three properties covering 3000 square miles of the north-east of South Australia, from Yunta to Broken Hill up on the NSW border and west to Lake Frome—or thereabouts. I went up by train, changing at Terowie to the Silverton narrow gauge, swaying and rattling through the night to arrive at Cockburn in the early hours, having hung over the rails of the observation platform of the last carriage for an hour, counting kangaroos and observing stations and sidings: Paratoo, Yunta, Manna Hill, Mingary and at last Cockburn. Mr Findlay was there to meet us in his large American car and take us to breakfast at the outstation Lake Dismal, with its overseer whose nerves were shredded by responsibility and a wife who kept back the tide of dust blowing in from moving stock. This was my introduction to the organisation of which I was to be managing director twenty-five years later. Everyone has two grandfathers, no more no less, not necessarily alive and kicking, but somewhere in the background. What is unusual about mine is that they not only knew each other as children, but also lived next door to each other and, despite a difference in temperament like a ditch if not a chasm between them, were best mates. Grandfathers are one thing, great-grandfathers another—we each have four of them and must think hard to be able to name them all.

Two of my great-grandfathers come readily to mind: William Morgan and Peter Waite. The former was a wholesale grocer and for a while premier of South Australia, the latter was possibly Australia’s outstanding sheep farmer of the nineteenth century. Both were immigrants from Britain. One came from Bedfordshire, one from Fife and both young men grew up breathing in the fumes of industrial revolution and religious dissent and recieved enough education to hold their own in the public arena. Both came to have houses that were dignified by rooms described as libraries. According to my father, ‘William Morgan throughout was an avid reader and a buyer of books’, whereas ‘Peter Waite seldom used the library, nor did anyone else’, though these contrasting judgements may possess some bias by descent. Aged twelve, for a week, I sat in the back of Mr Findlay’s Pontiac, ready to leap out and open the gates, mainly so-called ‘Waite’ gates, an clever variation with an adjustable latch of the basic cockies’ wire gate. In 1944 the runs were in the grip of drought and the bush looked black. The inspection took a week, two nights at each homestead: Mulyungarie, Mutooroo and Lilydale, each house more or less seventy miles from the next with many stops in between at boundary riders’ huts. In those days the huts were all inhabited, even during the Second World War; sometimes by one man, usually past his prime or in the grip of alcoholism; sometimes by two, a younger and an older, whose days would be spent maintaining waters, inspecting stock and fencing, and fetching wood and water for their own survival. The buildings were spaced every hour or so of driving, and ranged from solid stone buildings with slate floors to one room of corrugated iron with an earth floor, tricked out with wooden shelves lined with pages pinked from the Womens’ Weekly. There would be johnnie cakes or jam tart baked in anticipation of the visit, the word of our arrival having gone out over the station telephone line, an improvement carried out in 1910 by the same W.S. Findlay soon after he joined the company, despite fears that ready communication would tempt employees to talk rather than do their job.

The sheep farmer had several daughters, two of whom were known to us children as ‘the Aunts’ though in fact they were great-aunts. Though both born in South Australia, they kept a Scottish way of speaking about ‘gals’ and the game of ‘goff’. They ate ‘cheecken’ in the ‘keetchen’ and declared certain things ‘eeveel’: pies and pasties, tomato sauce, bananas, for instance. Both were well read and could dominate a meeting in which they were the only women with a natural authority, not just bullying; neither married, though there were opportunities, so it is said. They had much to do with our family in my childhood, especially with my father whom they had given £500 a decade before my birth to go to England and marry my mother who was languishing there, her mother disapproving of penniless colonials. Throughout my childhood, there was a daily telephone conversation with my father, who, on coming home from his chambers, would sit at the crouching black instrument of the time at the foot of the stairs beneath the rise of the upper flight, somewhat dark, but in a way private, although his resounding Morgan voice could be heard upwards and abroad from this point that was almost central to the large house’s being. I can’t quite remember who rang whom; I think it depended somewhat on which party had something to communicate, considered urgent. In these overheard conversations concerning the events of the day, large and small, there would be long silences at my father’s end interspersed by his habitual uttering of a drawn-out ‘Yersss’ and bursts of laughter.

My grandfather, James Waite, the sheep farmer’s elder son, worked all his life in England as a consulting engineer and only came back to South Australia on his wife’s death, travelling by merchant ship in a convoy towards the close of the war, so that I knew him but never knew my other grandfather, Ranembe Morgan, or either of their fathers, the two great-grandfathers in question. Ranembe was a cheerful teller of tales to all and sundry, and much of what I know about William Morgan comes from him, including the story of how his father, the young immigrant, was saved from a certain death at the hands of the warlike Murray Bend mob, who were inclined to deal with overlanding colonials in a summary fashion, by another Aborigine named Ranembe who swam him across the Murray on his back. So that my grandfather, the first of five subsequent generations, was named after him and was always known as ‘Ran’. A Tasmanian literary lady, Cassandra Pybus, to whom I told the story at a Freud conference in the seaside town of Lorne, said it was an unforgivable piece of appropriation.

The passage of time and the whims of family are strangely selective when it comes to deciding what shall be recorded and remembered from generation to generation. ‘Both families appear to have been destroyers,’ my father writes in the foreword to his family history, describing how my grandfather Ranembe Morgan, William Morgan’s son, was ‘assigned the task of sorting and disposing of his father’s papers’. Thus portraits of the two men, friends and neighbours, depend almost entirely on formal accounts of their careers that give little flavour and lack the detail that can light up a life for posterity.

At first, all went well for William Morgan: a trip to the Victorian goldfields with some success, then purchase with the proceeds plus a small inheritance of the business of wholesale grocer in Hindley Street, which never ceased to thrive. He married and had children and became engaged with the community in a way that Peter Waite never was: Waite’s engagement was with sheep and the saltbush plains. In contrast Morgan had the life of the city: family, business and public. He seemed to have all that was required to be not only the ‘coming man’ as his wife once described him, but also the man of the hour. In 1867 he was persuaded to stand for the Legislative Council and a committee of thirty-one supporters was formed to secure his return, including four members of the upper house, five of the lower, eight justices of the peace and one doctor. On 20 July 1867 the Weekly Mail published a formal request by a round dozen gentlemen that William Morgan Esq. JP would allow himself to be nominated ‘feeling assured that, from your long experience and knowledge of what tends to our best interests, you would ably represent the Colony’, pledging themselves to use their best exertions to secure his return, this modest backing compared with that of a hundred supporters listed for Emanuel Solomon in the very next column of the same newspaper. In his published acceptance, Morgan pleads that, given the lengthened period of ten-year terms in the Legislative Council, general character means more than expression of opinion on topics of the day, confining his remarks to support for borrowing reasonable amounts of English capital for ‘reproductive’ works and those calculated to open up the resources of the province, his regret for the temporary distress among the working classes, his support for unfettered trade with the Riverina district, and his opposition to ‘any impost or restriction calculated to fetter or embarrass the development of the resources of our pastoral, mineral or agricultural interests’—in other words free trade.

A couple of days later, a meeting was held at the new Town Hall for the purpose of considering who were the most fit and proper persons to represent the province in the Legislative Council. Question and answer was the order of the evening rather than formal speeches. It seems the meeting had been called by those in favour of increased protection and candidates gave their views on that subject and that of the preferential treatment of squatters. By the time William Morgan spoke, the audience was inclined to uproar and the report in the Weekly Mail later referred to ‘drunken behaviour of lawyers’ clerks’.

Morgan opened his remarks using the classic mode of self-deprecation, saying that he was ‘not much up to that kind of thing’ and that he hoped they would hear him out patiently. He went on to say: that ‘want of work’ was the most important issue; that immigration should be discontinued for a year and Sutherland’s Act repealed; that protection in its existing form was unfair and only supported by men who derived personal profit from it; that northern squatters in dry country should hold land at a peppercorn rent rather than leave it unoccupied (Peter Waite would have approved of this sentiment); that prospectors should have mining leases for nothing, providing they worked them—‘that principle had been found to act well in Chili [sic].’ Questions and answers followed in which candidate Skelton, a man with some antipathy towards Morgan, played a leading part. He asked whether someone establishing a ‘manufactory’ should be granted a bonus, to which Morgan replied that great care should be taken. Candidate Raphael then asked whether Morgan was a squatter. Morgan told Raphael he had no more right to ask this question than he had to ask Raphael if he lent money at 25 per cent. A Dr Spicer moved that Mr Morgan ‘should not be heard until he answers the question whether or not he is a squatter’. Morgan refused to answer, saying it was his private business. A Mr Bean took the chair, asking Morgan to answer the question, but there came a chorus of ‘He’s gone, he’s not here.’ At this point the gaslights almost went out. The meeting ended with a farcical wrangle about the gas being turned down when the mayor had left the building, over whether this was deliberate or a coincidental fault.

It was not a promising start to a political career. But William Morgan’s candidature must subsequently have been approved for he stood and was elected second in the poll, well behind Crozier but ahead of Solomon, all three taking up their seats later that year in the Legislative Council.

At first all went well. In 1865 William Morgan was one of the eleven founders of the Bank of Adelaide and in 1867, at the age of thirty-eight, he was elected to the Adelaide Club in his rise from Bedfordshire farm boy to colonial gentleman. He became a partner in wheat broking firm Morgan Connor & Glyde and was a local director of the AMP Society. But it was probably about this time that he met the man who was to be his nemesis, John Higginson, and became involved in the supply of flour to the French penal colony New Caledonia. New Caledonia looms large in his life from about 1870 onwards. On the one hand there was his continued prosperity as merchant, a calling that was never to fail him. Would that he had stuck to this business, which from 1870 became exclusively wholesale and operated from a building in Currie Street on a block of freehold land he had bought some time earlier, a site later occupied by the Adelaide Steamship Company.

Compared with South Australia, New Caledonia with its Melanesian population leavened with a dash of Polynesian, a French possession since 1853, must have seemed to the Bedfordshire man quite exotic and a suitable conduit for the entrepreneurial side of his character. Nevertheless, it is hard to reconcile a man in his prime, his mid-forties, a member of the legislative council of a thriving new political entity, popular, successful in his local business of merchant and shipping agent, a family man with a fine house pullulating with business associates and distinguished visitors should go to another house in another community, even more fledgling and quite foreign. Having come to South Australia aged nineteen, his success there was not enough, he looked for another challenge, somewhere more exotic —South Australia despite its natural and even man-made charms was hardly that, unlike the Grand Terre of New Caledonia with its contrasting mix of sub-tropical east coast and largely Kanak population and the bleaker west coast of gum trees and cattle country worked by Caldoches - settlers of European descent.

Once in New Caledonia William Morgan was treated as a person of some importance by the governor and allotted three assignés—convicts released on good behaviour to work outside the penitentiary—one was his valet, one his cook and the role of the third I have forgotten if I ever knew it. Their stories have been passed down by Ranembe, a vivid raconteur: the valet who shaved William each morning had cut the throat of a customer who displeased him back in France; the cook, worse still, had surprised his wife and her lover in the act, killed the man, cut out his heart, cooked it and made the wife eat it.

Morgan and John Higginson built a sugar refinery with a great castellated brick chimney that still stands lonely in a field, some distance from the town. There was another partner, a New Zealander whom Morgan did not like, but in the end relationships did not affect the outcome, as grasshoppers demolished the young shoots. There were other expeditions further afield to the north of Grande Terre, by ship along the Diahot River, deep and navigable, by whose side lay the Fern Hill gold mine and not so far away the diggings for copper at Balade. To the end of his life William Morgan remained obsessed by copper, like some sickness of the mind that valued above all that which could be dug out of the ground. At home in Adelaide he continued to thrive in business and politics. He became premier and provided a period of stability when all the institutions as we know them on North Terrace—library, museum, art gallery, university—came into being. A town was named after him on the bend of the Murray. He retired from office on the grounds of pressure of business affairs, went back to England for the first time in an attempt to resuscitate his finances and died there of pernicious anaemia, leaving his widow and children unexpectedly penniless. The estate of Netherby, where the Morgans had lived next door to Urrbrae, the home of Peter Waite, my other South Australian great-grandfather, was sold up.

Meanwhile Waite prospered and continued to inspect and manage 11,500 square miles of northern South Australia with his entrepreneurial partner, Thomas Elder, in two separate ventures but moved, after fifteen years, from the bush to town. The nature of this challenge, an area almost half that of Scotland, perhaps needs some explanation.

Pastoralism takes place mainly in marginal areas where cultivation, usually through lack of rainfall, is not possible. Indigenous people live off the land in a direct manner, hunting and foraging. But colonists can only make the land work through the intermediary of a grazing domestic animal that produces either meat or wool for sale.

They enclosed land with walls or fences and introduced machinery and water reticulation, which enabled vast areas of waste land to be stocked with little permanent labour. They worked out that cattle were bulky to transport, slow to breed up, expensive to fence in and liable to go bush. But above all, cattle’s only product was meat, possessing a limited shelf life. Sheep, on the other hand, enabled those with capital and ingenuity to make huge areas of waste land productive. Wool could be cut from the sheep’s back, scoured and pressed in bales for transport to the markets of Europe, even years later.

What happened to the indigenous people on Thomas Elder and Peter Waite’s outback runs? On Mutooroo it was said that there was no permanent surface water until the company put it there, so it was only in a good season that Aborigines came across from the Menindee Lakes. That may be true as they do not play much part in the legends of the company. Not so in the Beltana Pastoral Company in the lee of the Flinders Ranges, its watercourse country in the far north. The offical history of the Beltana Pastoral Company Limited tells how there was always a camp near the homestead from which the indigenous people went about their traditional activities, their maintenance subsidised to some extent by government rations; how Cordillo employed male and female Aborigines as shepherds and women worked on the famous wool scour with white stockmen until the chiacking got quite out of hand. There was a succession of legendary indigenous stockmen throughout the Beltana’s history down to my day as a director in the late 1960s: Murtee Johnnie, Bunny Treloar and many more.

How was it that my great-grandfather, a young man in his mid-twenties, could so rapidly and with such sure touch conceive and implement the infrastructure of extended sheep farming in the arid zone within the space of a few years with no previous experience? He had grown up on farm in Fife of 320 acres. It was not the biggest in the district parish of Auchterderran, but a viable size. A mild climate allowed the cultivation of three-quarters of its acreage. Breeding herds or flocks were rare and in 1875 the number of sheep run in the whole of Fife was 70,000, compared with 260,000 on the Paratoo runs in the same year. Waite was the facilitator, the man who made the grandiose schemes viable. Elder was the visionary, importing camels from India complete with attendant ‘Afghans’ as early as 1862. From the beginning Elder fostered his interests and those of his ‘sheep farmers’ by his election to the Legislative Council. But drought struck in the mid 1860s with huge losses, reputed to be 100 000, on his northern runs. That was when Waite had made an impressive appearance before a parliamentary committee on the drought and in 1869, when Elder visited Europe, he made Waite ‘Superintendent of his Northern Runs’, which included Beltana, Umberatana and Lake Hope.

Waite was not the first man to build a fence but he was the first to do so to manage stock successfully on thousands of square miles. Until he arrived on the pastoral scene, flocks were shepherded and yarded overnight to prevent them wandering and falling prey to wild dogs. Waters were mainly small holes scooped out in creek beds or where a local catchment lent itself to their creation.

His much-quoted dictum was ‘big dams and small paddocks’. But there was a chasm between a phrase thrown off and its execution—to take a thousand square miles and cut it up with fences in a rational manner to produce more than a hundred paddocks, each paddock with water, either with access to a trough fed by a tank or by direct access to a dam, could not have happened overnight. At first, waters had to be developed where there was some possibility of supply, where there was a well or one could be dug. To some extent the government led the way, sinking a chain of such wells in the mid 1860s from Burra through the original north-eastern runs to provide a stock route for teamsters and drovers from the country on the Darling to Adelaide purveyors and markets until such time as the Adelaide–Broken Hill railway line was completed in 1887 under the aegis of Waite’s next-door neighbour, Premier William Morgan. This chain of wells was known as the Peg Line; the wells were equipped with a steam pump or horse works to pump water into the great square tanks made of stone with lime mortar, walls feet thick, capacity perhaps 25,000 gallons. Four-inch cast iron outlets ran water into giant troughs one hundred yards long for travelling stock. Those at the Gorge and Duffields still exist on the Mutooroo runs and are not to be forgotten by anyone who has cleaned them out.

All this needed great organisation where means of communication were sparse or non-existent, men, capital and foresight. Fortunately workers had flooded into South Australia as the boom in copper boosted employment. From 1870 the overland telegraph established an instant connection between Adelaide and townships such as Burra and Beltana. From the outset Waite realised that tenure unsupported by capital was useless, that placement of stock depended on feed and water and that methods of control were dependent on labour. Waite began developing the runs with careful planning and baffling speed. Early in the piece, not long after his appearance before the parliamentary inquiry following the drought, Waite purchased a shipload—265 tons—of wire from England, and fencing contractors were engaged to erect minimal but effective fences for sheep. There is some doubt whether the wire was black soft eight-gauge wire or the wire that still hangs about Mutooroo and Lilydale, sometimes known as Waite wire, a steely wire that being plaited cannot be tied with an ordinary fencing knot but must be spliced.

One of the first tasks would have been to build a fence enclosing an area about an existing water so that no part of the enclosed area was further than five miles from the watering point, as that was as far as lambing ewes could be expected to walk out and back to drink at least once a day. If it were a boundary fence, netting would have been used against dogs (and rabbits after 1880), a so-called vermin-proof fence, 3’8” high with netting, one plain wire and two barbs, according to Peter Waite—somewhat low by modern standards.

Waite lived on for twenty-five years after his partner, Thomas Elder, died, throughout that period remaining chairman of Elder Smith & Co Ltd, managing director of the Beltana Pastoral Company Ltd and a director of the Mutooroo Pastoral Company Ltd.

In 1913 his second son David, who had taken on the title of Inspector of Runs, disappeared at sea, perhaps mentally affected by a fall from a horse; the daughters having been consulted, Peter Waite wrote to the premier of South Australia, the Hon. A.H. Peake, regarding his intention to make over to the University of Adelaide his house, Urrbrae, and more than 200 acres to be used for agricultural and kindred studies. Later he bought and transferred another 163 acres to the university along with £60,000. On his death in 1922 the endowment became a reality and the Waite Institute instrumental in changing the face of huge areas of Australia through its research and development of trace elements and wheat varieties.