Aboriginal History of Wilcannia:
Wilcannia is located on the Darling River, about halfway between Bourke and Wentworth. The river is known as Barka by the local Aboriginal people or Barkandji, literally people belonging to the Barka, and it is surrounded on all sides by Barkandji speaking people. The people from along the Barka and varying distances either side from near Bourke down to Wentworth all recognised the Barkandji language as their primary language, but they were divided into subgroups with different dialects of this one language. The Barkandji language is very different from all the neighbouring languages including the adjoining Ngiyampaa/Ngemba to the east, the Kulin, and Murray River languages to the south, and the Yardli and Thura-Yura language groups to the west and north.
Barkandji have a unique culture and depended heavily on the grinding or pounding of seeds on large grinding dishes or mortars and pestles, such as grass, portulaca, and acacia seeds. In the riverine areas, there is a strong emphasis on aquatic plant food tubers and corms, and fish, yabbies, turtles, mussels, and shrimps as well as water birds and their eggs. Insect foods were also important, such as parti or witchetty grubs along the rivers and creeks, and termite larvae in the Mallee country. Large and small canoes were cut out, necessitating ground edge axes, and string manufacture for fish nets, hunting nets, bags, and belts was an important part of the culture. The Wilcannia area still shows tangible evidence of traditional life in the form of canoe trees, coolamon trees, middens, heat retainer ovens, ashy deposits, stone tool quarries and artefacts.
Thomas Mitchell led the first exploring party to reach Wilcannia and gave the Barkandji their first unpleasant taste of what was to come. Mitchell travelled via the Bogan to the Darling River near Bourke and then down the river to Wilcannia then Menindee, reaching it in July 1835. Mitchell was harassed by Barkandji as he did not understand that he had to properly negotiate permission for use of water, grass, land to camp on etc., and in addition his men were abusing women behind his back and breaking all the rules. He gave them names such as the Fire Eaters and the Spitting Tribe as they tried to warn him off. His comments show that the Barkandji groups he met occupied "different portions of the river", and that they owned the resources in their territories including the water in the river. The exclusive possession enjoyed by the Barkandji and the need to obtain permission before using any of their resources is demonstrated by the following comment about the "Spitting Tribe" from the river near Wilcannia:
"The Spitting Tribe desired our men to pour out the water from their buckets, as if it had belonged to them; digging, at the same time a hole in the ground to receive it when poured out; and I have more than once seen a river chief, on receiving a tomahawk, point to the stream and signify that we were then at liberty to take water from it, so strongly were they possessed with the notion that the water was their own"
A hill 15 kilometres north of Wilcannia was named Mount Murchison by Mitchell and this became the name of the very large original station that included the location that was to become Wilcannia township.
In 1862 the area northwest of Mount Murchison Station was still frontier country with continual conflict. Frederic Bonney was based at Mount Murchison homestead and then nearby Momba homestead from 1865 to 1881 and he bluntly states in his notebooks that in this period "natives killed by settlers - shot like dogs"
Bonney recorded extensive detail about the lives, language, culture, and personalities of the Aboriginal people at Mount Murchison/Momba and left us with extremely significant series of photos of Aboriginal people taken in this period. He does not elaborate about the way the station was set up except for his comment above. Frederic Bonney not only respected and looked after the local people but he sympathised with them, worked with them, and respected them. The Bonney papers and photographs are a treasure of information about the Aboriginal people living there between 1865 and 1881. Bonney published a paper in 1884 but long after he had returned to England to live he campaigned for the better treatment of the Aboriginal people, and he tried to educate the public about the complexity of Aboriginal culture.
Bonney names about 44 individual Aboriginal people living at Momba in this period, and one group photo from the same period shows a total of 38 people. Descendants of some of the people Bonney describes still live in Wilcannia and surrounding areas today.
Aboriginal people worked on Moomba and Mount Murchison Station, and from very early times fringe camps grew up around Wilcannia. The land straight across the River from the Wilcannia post office was gazetted as an Aboriginal Reserve, and this became the nucleus of a very large fringe camp that grew into a substantial settlement spaced out along the river bank in the 1930s to the 1970s. By 1953 the Aboriginal Welfare Board had built a series of 14 barrack-like and inappropriately designed houses in an enlarged reserve, now an attractive tree lined settlement known as the Mission (although never a mission it was beside a Catholic School and clinic, thus the name). Today Aboriginal people are the majority of the population of the vibrant, creative, and culturally active town of Wilcannia, and the main users of the post office facilities.
Wilcannia History:
The first secure pastoralists at Mount Murchison were the brothers Hugh and Bushby Jamieson of Mildura Station on the Murray, who in 1856 took up Tallandra and Moorabin blocks, later extended with other blocks and named Mount Murchison Station. Captain Cadell's paddlesteamer Albury was the first to travel up the Darling, landing flour and other stores for the Jamiesons at Mount Murchison in February 1859. The Albury then loaded 100 bales of wool from their woolshed and brought it down to Adelaide. At this time there were no other stations on the Darling between Mt Murchison and Fort Bourke. A little later:
"An enterprising attempt has just been made by Mr. Hugh Jamieson, of Mount Murchison, to bring fat sheep speedily to Adelaide. Mr. Jamieson having chartered Captain Cadell's steamer, Albury, that vessel was prepared, and received on board at Mildura 550 fine fat sheep. These were landed at Moorundee last Tuesday, after a rapid passage of two days, all the sheep being in splendid condition when put ashore"
Jamiesons sold in 1864 to Robert Barr Smith and Ross Reid from Adelaide. The brothers Edward and Frederic Bonney were leasing some adjacent blocks and possibly worked at Mount Murchison for these owners. In 1875 they bought the Mount Murchison/Momba complex, one of the largest stations in New South Wale. In 1865 it was known as Mount Murchison, in 1881 it was all known as Momba, later splitting into smaller stations. The original Mount Murchison Station homestead block was also known as Head Station or Karannia, the Barkandji name for the area just north of the town near where the Paroo River comes into the Barka. The original Mount Murchison woolshed was located on what is now Baker Park, Wilcannia, which is adjacent to the current Post Office.
The site of Wilcannia was selected on Mount Murchison Station in 1864 by John Chadwick Woore, who was appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands of the Albert District in 1863 and was based at Wilcannia. The town was proclaimed in 1866 and in the 1870s it became a coaching centre for prospectors exploiting the region's gold, copper, silver, and opal resources, and the administrative, service, and shipping centre for the pastoral industry. Wilcannia was incorporated as a municipality in 1881, and around this time it became New South Wales biggest inland port and Australia's third largest inland port (after Echuca Victoria and Morgan South Australia). 'The Queen of the River' or 'Queen City of the West'. At the height of its prosperity around 1880, the town boasted a population of 3,000. According to the Register of the National Estate, during 1887 alone, 222 steamers took on 26,550 tonnes of wool and other goods at Wilcannia wharves. The value of goods coming down the Darling River in 1884 was 1,359,786 pounds, and included over 30,000 bales of wool. The customs house, another Wilcannia stone building now demolished, located immediately between the Post office and the river bank and wharfs, took 17,544 pounds in customs duties in 1889. Paddlesteamers gradually declined, particularly after the 1920s, although a few continued to trade up and down the river into the 1940's, still remembered by elderly Wilcannia residents.
Wilcannia in the 1870s and into the 1900s was the centre of the pastoral and mining boom of the far west of New South Wales, and it was the centre of the paddlesteamer river trade from the Upper Darling to the Murray River and outlets such as Adelaide and Melbourne. The frequent dry seasons and lack of water in the river led to other methods of transporting goods being used, such as camel trains, but when the water came down the river trade always returned. The river trade built Wilcannia's fine buildings, but it was also its undoing, as the New South Wales government intervened to reduce the river trade because goods were moving to and from Adelaide and Melbourne, not Sydney.
Plans to improve navigation on the river were suggested in 1859 after Captain Cadell's first successful voyage up the Darling that was followed by other paddlesteamers. Cadell gave evidence at a New South Wales Select Committee that the Darling would be become reliable for boats if a system of locks were built at very reasonable cost that would hold back water during the drier seasons. The plans to build locks along the Darling River to make navigation more consistent were investigated again and again, but were not realised because the New South Wales government believed trade would benefit Victoria and South Australia.
After the opening of the Sydney to Bourke railway line in 1885, Wilcannia lost its status as the major commercial centre of the Darling River. The trade from the far North West New South Wales then tended to go to the railhead at Bourke and straight to Sydney. There were plans in the 1880s for the railway to be run from Cobar to Wilcannia, however this plan was continuously put off. Plans for a railway to Wilcannia continued to be made throughout the 1890's and early 1900's, and including a proposal from Cobar to Broken Hill then linking to South Australia as the Great Western Railway. In 1907 "a large petition was forwarded to Sydney from Wilcannia for presentation to the Premier urging immediate construction of the Cobar-Wilcannia Railway, and subsequent extension to Broken Hill".
The New South Wales government attempt to stop trade leaking out of the state resulted in their refusal to build a railway to Wilcannia (as goods tended to go to Wilcannia and down the river), or to extend the railway to South Australia for the same reasons. The bend in the river on the north side of town celebrates this government intransigence by its name "Iron Pole Bend", the iron pole said to have been placed at the surveyed location of the proposed railway bridge. New South Wales eventually built a railway through the low population Ivanhoe route to the south of Wilcannia reaching Broken Hill in 1927, and even then it stopped at Broken Hill and did not join the South Australian line until 1970. The link between Broken Hill and the South Australian railway was provided from 1884 to 1970 by the narrow gauge private railway 'the Silverton Tramway', which also took trade from Wilcannia.
The combination of missing out on the railway and locking of the river, the severe drought on 1900 - 1901, and the damage to the pastoral economy by drought, rabbits, and over grazing, led to a down turn in Wilcannia's prospects, leaving the fine stone buildings such as the post office languishing as tangible reminders of a time when Wilcannia was known as the "Queen City of the West" and was the largest inland port in New South Wales and the third largest inland port in Australia.
Source: New South Wales Heritage Register
