Along with Owen Springs and Mount Burrell, Undoolya is generally regarded as one of the first stations in the Territory. While some stations were stocked from 1866, they were abandoned by 1869, making Undoolya the oldest continuously running station. The station was stocked in 1873 with cattle owned by E.M. Bagot. He spent £30,000 on Undoolya, but was forced to sell at a heavy loss to Love and Tennant in 1876. The Love/Tennant partnership suffered huge losses too and was sold to the Barrow Creek Pastoral Company in 1890. In 1891 the company sold to Willowie Land and Pastoral Association, who sold it to the Hayes family in 1907. The Hayes family have retained the station since this time.
Reference: Peter Forrest, ‘Undoolya', 'Centralian Advocate, 4/5/1984, p 7
Owen Springs cattle station was named after the large waterhole located near the High River, which was discovered by John McDouall Stuart, William Kekwick and Benjamin Head on 11 April 1860. Along with Mount Burrell and Undoolya, Owen Springs is now remembered as one of the first stations to be stocked in Central Australia. As local historian Peter Forrest reports in his mini station histories, the station was first stocked in 1873 by William Gilbert. By 1874 there were 3200 cattle stationed at both Owen Springs and Undoolya, and it was around this time that Gilbert built the Owen Springs homestead. Gilbert died in 1884 and the station closed. In 1886 Sir Thomas Elder re-stocked the station with horses and cattle, and ran it as an out-station of Mt Burrell. He sold the stations in 1893 in debt, having lost £40,000 in eight years. In 1894 Charles Gall, A.D Breaden and Sidney Kidman took over Owen Springs. The partnership was later sold to the Hayes family, who then re-sold to Kidman in 1930. It became run-down and the Hayes family re-acquired it (Forrest, p 7). The station was eventually acquired by the Northern Territory Government in 2000 and was opened in 2003 as a nature reserve.
Reference Peter Forrest, ‘Owen Springs’, Centralian Advocate, 11 May, 1984, p 7
While there is relatively scant information available on outback station histories, there is a large body of material available on the history of pastoralism in Central Australia. It is replete with stories of luck, misfortune, and murder.
Perhaps one of the best accounts of the history of pastoralism on the Finke, and the Centre more broadly, is local historian Peter Forrest's unpublished account, which is held in the Alice Springs Local Library.
As Forrest maintains, many pastoralists were lured to the Centre following a report from A.C Gregory and other builders and explorers on the Overland Telegraph project. In 1856 Gregory was one of several contracters who announced the availability of good grasslands in the Victoria River district. In his unpublished MS Forrest writes, '[a]nxious South Australian pastoralists were then looking to the far north for new country – they had discovered that there were very definite limits to the good land in their own colony. How to reach the grass found by Gregory was their dilemma.’ (Forrest, 4)·
In 1858 or 1860 (the date varies according to sources - Forrest dates it at 1858) John McDougall Stuart was hired to find an overland route through the centre from south to north. Stuart reached the end of the country in July 1862 and confirmed what the South Australians sought to hear – good grass in the north and an accessible route to the northern coast (Forrest, 4).
The South Australian Government took immediate action and petitioned the British Government to annex the land to their north which was, until then, an unwanted part of NSW. Within the year (July 1863), the Northern Territory of South Australia was created (Forrest, 5)·
In 1871 and 1872 Telegraph stations were constructed at Charlotte Waters, Alice Springs and Barrow Creek. However, it wasn't long before the colonialists discovered that the surrounding countryside was generally too poor to support pastoral settlement. Rather than deterring pastoral efforts, the discovery sparked a rush for the remaining good grasslands with many of the pastoralists still chasing dreams of developing the great cattle empire.
By 1873 the first stations had been established. Owen Springs and Undoolya, the latter of which remains the oldest continuous station in the Territory), were founded by SA entrepreneurs Ned Bagot and Joseph Gilbert. The pair set the stations up through a joint overlanding venture and by October 1874 they had a combined herd of 3200 cattle (Forrest, 10). Glen Helen and other stations soon followed. And yet problems were looming. While the Finke and Hugh Creek were flowing well, this wealth of water was not destined to last. Indeed, as Bonny Green writes in her historical account of pastoralism in Central Australia, many pastoralists had mistaken water springs for soakaages and were caught out when the dry weather struck.
'[T]the springs were not springs,' she writes, 'they were soakages from the result of heavy rain, and the settlers did not realise that after a few years stocking, the springs would dry up and the reeds would disappear. The waterhole known as Stuart’s Owen Springs waterhole is today silted up, the result of incessant treading of hoofs of drier times. This was one of the sad lessons that had to be taught to the pioneers who could not understand that the new country was not as bountiful as their southern lands' (Green, 16).
Yet, as Green goes on to explain, the lesson was not learnt quickly. Her article relays the following story about a Finke River settler some ten years later who left 1000 cattle near what was, at the time, a flowing creek. She writes:
‘Thinking they would be alright, he did not inspect them again for a few weeks, a custom inherited from southern regions where one has no need to worry about natural water drying up quickly.
‘He then went to the Alice Springs Christmas races and was in no hurry to return.
‘When he did return it was another week before he inspected the cattle.
‘On inspection, the distressing sound of bellowing greeted him and the scene before him wasn’t too encouraging, either.
‘Scores of beasts were dead about the creek, which had dried up and left a murky puddle of salt.
‘The remainder stood weakly around the puddles, hollow-eyed and perishing.
‘Dozens of calves had to be killed on the spot...‘ (Green, 16).
Other problems the settlers faced included an overrun stock routes and over-supply of stock and altercations with Aboriginal people whose land they had taken.
The historian Dick Kimber takes up the story of frontier conflict between the pastoralists and Aboriginal people in a number of his books and essays. One essay in particular, ‘The end of the bad old days: European settlement in Central Australia, 1871-1894’, looks at this history in detail.
The essay argues that it took some time before tensions in the outback built to the point of conflict and it mainly started in the most remote of areas. Kimber writes:
‘The developments towards conflict seem to have occurred first on the fringes of settlement, where the white men involved were few in number, remote from communication with the telegraph and police stations, and where the ranges provided protection for the Aborigines... the further ‘out’, the more likely for hard men to deal with situations in a way not necessarily as the prevailing laws of the land suggested' (Kimber, 8)
One of the examples that Kimber draws on is Allan Breaden and the establishment of Glen Helen Station. According to Kimber, Breaden and his fellow stockmen became involved in escalating conflicts over cattle and the theft of goods (Kimber, 8).
While those on the southern and northern ends of the Finke experienced problems with cattle-killing, those on the central parts of the Finke were immune to their neighbours problems and like Strehlow, Kimber puts this down to the 1875 Irbmangkara massacres. As both Strehlow and Kimber argue, despite their resentment of the intrusion on the land, Aboriginal people were tired of conflict and killing and, therefore, tolerated the settler's trespassing unlike other tribes (TGH 36-45, Kimber, p 9).
By the 1890s, as many of the individual station histories suggest, many of the pastoralists feel into bad times and a number of stations changed hands or simply feel into dis-use. The depression, inconsistencies in weather and conditions, cattle-killing and disease had beome major problems. By 1894 things had hit rock bottom. They would not improve in any real terms until 1929 when the railway line was extended to Alice Springs in 1929 (Kimber, 19).
References
Peter Forrest, unpublished MS, ‘The Pastoral Industries of the Centre’, 33 pages, 1986, Alice Springs Public Library, ‘NT History – Exploration and Pastoral Activities’ Folder
Bonny Green, ‘Unsung Heroes of the Centre’, Centralian Advocate, 2 October, 1987, p 16
Dick Kimber, ‘The end of the bad old days: European settlement in Central Australia, 1871-1894’, Occasional Papers no 25, The Fifth Eric Johnston Lecture, pub by the State Library of the NT, Darwin, 1991
Also see S.L. Davis and J.R.V. Prescott, Aboriginal Frontiers and Boundaries in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1992, pp 86-95
The first Glen Helen homestead was situated on the Ormiston about two miles north of the current homestead/chalet. According to Bryan Bowman, the homestead was built in the middle to late 1880s and was managed by Allan Breaden.
Reference
Bowman, B (1985) The Glen Helen Story. Dapa Productions, Alice Springs
The Black Bull Hotel was located on Hindley Street in Adelaide and was a popular drinking house. For more information on the early history of the Black Bull see the Manning Index of South Australian History published on the State Library of South Australia website. The website includes bibliographic lists and references a 1910 edition of the Register which reported that early proprietors of the hotel famously set up a sign tha read:
'The bull is tame, so fear him not, So long as you can pay your shot. When money's gone and credit's bad, That's what makes the bull go mad.'
Reference: 'Adelaide Hotels and Lodging Houses', The Manning Index of South Australian History, http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/manning/adelaide/hotels/hotels.htm
