Wentworth’s First Historian

Mrs Nell Grace —Wentworth Historian

Mrs Nell Grace, a remarkable woman who should be recognised as Wentworth’s first historian.  It had been known that Mrs Grace had written a history of Wentworth, but it was thought to be lost—until a surprise rediscovery early this year.  We include here Maud Crang’s biography of Mrs Grace, a description of her collection of photographs of historic figures—yet to be located—and extracts from some of her published articles. 

By Maud Crang

Ellen (Nell) Grace nee Haines, who became one of the Wentworth District’s earliest historians, publishing as N. Grace, was born at Werris Creek in 1875. Nell was educated at Wilcannia Convent.  She travelled to Mildura in the early 1890s and remembered seeing the Wentworth bridge being built.  She lived with her parents in Mildura until her marriage to WS (Bill) Grace on 3 December 1893.  Nell had another early Wentworth memory as the wedding took place at St Francis Xavier Church at Wentworth. 

Mrs Grace’s husband was born in 1866, perhaps in South Australia, as it is known that his parents were married at Kapunda on the 24 April 1865.  His father, John Joseph Grace, came to New South Wales in 1880, and took up Bengallow, (a sheep station later owned by D Wickett) and in the same year his brother James Grace took up an adjoining property, Culpra, (a sheep station later owner by JK Buxton).  These were some 24 miles from Gol Gol.

There are documents dated in the early 1900s, when Mr Grace was a consistent applicant for any land becoming available in the Wentworth District.  He described himself as ‘drover’ and his postal address c/- Euston Station.  The Town & Country Journal in 1872, whose special correspondent did a Murrumbidgee – Balranald to Wentworth tour in that year, describes the extent of Euston Station:  “there are six runs in connection with this station, embracing an area of 1800 square miles. 700 miles are enclosed by fences.  Euston has a frontage of twenty-six miles to the Murray River”. Whether or not the Grace family properties of Bengallow and Culpra had been part of this station has not been researched, but it seems that this is the locality where Bill and Nell lived after their marriage.   Bill and Nell had a family of ten children and it is known that some of the children had their early education at the Gol Gol Public School.

In 1912 Mr Grace was granted one of the ‘Anabranch blocks’ which he named Tara Downs.  There is no doubt this event would have been the cause of great jubilation for Mr and Mrs Grace and their family of  nine children, four sons and five daughters, aged between one and seventeen years.  These properties of 10,000 acres were, at that time, considered to be a ‘living area’, but bringing them to their full capacity proved to be a great struggle with droughts, rabbits and wool prices at various levels.   During the 1930s Land Courts were held to grant extensions of areas.  Later it was an accepted fact that 40,000 acres was a truer ‘living area’, and after the Second World War, properties of this size were granted to returned men.  

Life must not have been all that easy for Mrs Grace, with a large family of children to feed and clothe. A new baby son died at birth and then, in 1918 at Wentworth, another son, Arthur, was born.  Mrs Grace had received a good education herself, as is proven by her writings, and she must have been concerned about education for her children.  Somehow this was achieved as three of her daughters became nurses (one serving in the combat area during the Second World War), and other daughters included a school teacher and a secretary.  At least three sons were in business, in managerial positions, and two others on the land.

It would seem that Mrs Grace’s interest in history commenced at an early age because she had gathered such a lot of information. She was soon writing this down.  Articles, under the name N Grace, appeared in city papers, also local Sunraysia Daily.  In 1926 one of N Grace’s Articles was read before the Victorian Historical Society.  Within the Wentworth community hope was often expressed that a book might be written.  Sadly, this did not eventuate during Mrs Grace’s lifetime.  After the death of her husband in 1935, Tara Downs was sold and Mrs Grace went to live in Mildura with her daughter Marion.  Mrs Grace died on 8 February 1960.

Mrs Grace’s History

When I first joined the Wentworth Historical Society, in the 1990s, I heard mentions of ‘Mrs Grace’s History’. Unlike Tulloch’s well-known and often reprinted ‘History of Wentworth’,  Mrs Grace’s History was a mystery—there was a mention of it in the Adelaide Register in 1927 (see Mrs Grace’s Photographs), but no-one seemed to know what had become of it.  Now, more than 80 years later, Mrs Grace’s History has been found, in remarkable circumstances.

An old white-anted shed on Milara Station, still owned by the Grace family, was under demolition, when a small tin trunk, the bottom rusting through, was found. Inside was the missing typed manuscript of Nell Grace’s history of Wentworth.  This was the second edited version, after the first had been rejected by publishers as ‘too long’.  It was saved just in time, minutes before the remains of the shed were burnt. 

Nell Grace was clearly frustrated that her History was never published, as this extract from a Letter to the Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald (Monday 18/12/1933) shows.  Perhaps now it can be!

“Mr. Chatto further remarks, ‘It seems a pity that the history o' these old towns cannot be recorded before all the old hands pass away’. Well, I have spent 12 years and a lot of money in gathering material for such a record, not only of Wentworth, but of the great mid-Murray and Darling districts from their beginning. And, having compiled and checked this work without bias or contentious matter (adding many early portraits and maps), I find Sydney publishers unwilling to publish this ‘fine piece of work’ - to quote - except at my expense, on the plea that ‘pioneer history does not sell’. My effort, therefore, has proved merely a waste of years and material.”

Mrs Grace’s Photographs

In 1927 the Adelaide Register published a  series of articles by Murracurra  ‘THE MAN ON THE LAND. ALONG BUSH TRACKS. On the Murray-Darling.’

Murracurra travelled to Wentworth for the annual show: ‘The Wentworth Pastoral, Agricultural, and Industrial Society conducted a two days' fixture on July 13 and 14, and its outstanding features were its sheep display and field trials.’  On display at the Show was a remarkable exhibit: 50 photographs of  Murray-Darling Pioneers collected by Mrs Grace. 

Murray-Darling Pioneers

Another interesting exhibit at the Wentworth show was a framed collection of more than 50 portraits of Murray Darling pioneers from 1846 to 1806. This was placed on view by Mrs. W. S. Grace, of Tara Downs, Anabranch, via Wentworth, who as a result of five years' effort, has about 400 portraits and photographs of places.  Mrs. Grace is a sort of unofficial historian of this district, and has in her possession a good many diaries,  from which she is engaged in writing up a useful record of the settlement on the rivers from 1846.

Included in the portraits exhibited at the show were the following:—

E. M. Bagot, George Melrose and John Moody (Rufus Country), Dr. McKinley (Waukaringa, and a brother of J. McKinley, the explorer), Peter and Mrs. McFarlane (Mallee Cliffs, the latter was the first white woman to settle on the Darling), D. R. McLeod (Merno), James Scott (Para), E. B. Scott (Moorna - the early spelling o£ which was Moorinna - and Mootherie), D. McKenzie, and J. McDiarmid (Tapalin), William Paterson (for many years manager of Para),

W. Holden (assistant at the Yelta Mission Station), D. McRae (Culpaulin), E. B. L. Dickens (son of the famous Charles Dickens), W. D. Hatton (a noted horse man of Yanda), John Pile (Cuthro), Capt. Cadell, G. H. Birt (father of ex-Inspector Birt), G. Rayner (mail coach driver from Wentworth), Philip Gel (Lake Victoria Station), H. B. Richardson (Garnpang),

W. Crozier (Moorna), T. Hamilton (Narrung), Rev. W. Ross (Presbyterian minister at Wentworth), W. Goodwin (superintendent of Yelta Mission), Charlie (a mission boy), T. Pain (hotelkeeper at Menindie), Archibald Gibbs (Swan Hill), A. and John McDonald (hotelkeepers at Euston), Joseph Hoare (contractor, who now resides in Mildura). C. N. Lockhart (Lands Commissioner), D. McHenry (customs officer, Wentworth), Lyle Richard son (Police Magistrate at Wentworth), Sgt. Carter (who died last year at the age of 97 years), F. D. Kerridge, J. T. Smith, J. Price, J. S. Upton, Henry Williams, and John Davie (storekeepers, of Wentworth}, Peter Perring (blacksmith, Wentworth), W. Gunn (who built the Crown Hotel at Wentworth), E. Felgate (Royal Hotel, Wentworth), Harry Pegler (Wentworth), T. Tunkin (Windamingle), John Coombs (hotelkeeper at Ral Ral). G. Lush (Anabranch), A. Rutherford (Marathon), John Gormley (River Darling), Peter Birt (station manager), Rev. W. Cox (St. John's Church, Wentworth), and M. Aron (storekeeper, at Euston).     The Register, Adelaide, Wednesday 3 August 1927

A call to Local Detectives: What happened to Mrs Grace’s photographs?  Do you have or have you seen any photos of people in the list above?

WENTWORTH.  ‘A Suburb of Mildura’

By N. Grace

Although a certain legal light once jestingly explained to a nonplussed client the locale of this long-established town, at the confluence of the Darling and Murray, as ‘a suburb of Mildura,’ there may be people who, if they think about it at all, imagine that this Wentworth (named after the W C Wentworth buried at Vaucluse, Sydney) is a village somewhere in the uttermost wilds of Western New South Wales. Doubtless it was that, too, in the time before Victoria's northern settlement crept right to its front fence, the Murray border, but it is not so to-day. For, regardless of that surveyed line, ‘the border,’ Wentworth has automatically become the near neighbour of a large, stable city and environs - Mildura, within Victoria. That city, lately declared, is in a position to grant and convey electric power through the intervening 17 miles, filled with fruit blocks, across the Murray and Darling bridges into the municipality of Wentworth in New South Wales which it has just done, June 13, thus making good the Victorian jest.

For the installation £3000 has been borrowed from the Superannuation Board at 4½ per cent, repayable over 25 years. Besides light, the town pumps will be driven by power instead of steam, as now, and a fuller water service ensured. It is even predicted that Wentworth (having banned the once ubiquitous goat) will again become a town of gardens as aforetime. The municipality of Wentworth was proclaimed 55 years ago, when its citizens, not dreaming of any rival, hoped great things from its strategic site: good roads, bridges, locks and weirs, a railway, water service, local industries, and even light. Yet most of these things were not to be until Victorian enterprise had pushed their very doors in.

Many were the concerted causes for this delay of reasonable hopes. There was ever the distance from the seat of government, a disability still, Then droughts and rabbits in turn reduced inland commerce to a trickle - the rabbits first downed the squatters, and then upset the Treasury. Amid this welter of related events the Chaffey brothers appeared like a ray in the general gloom, formed their new industry by irrigation, and drew practically the whole population of Wentworth and its pastoral districts into their orbit. After the financial crash in 1893 there was a further exodus to where was ‘something green’, and a chance of work. And there the people have stayed for a couple of generations, growing into valued ‘Victorians’, and leaving Wentworth to recover by the aid of its ‘remnant’ and some newer blood - which it seems to be doing very well.

But, having in the past missed its aim of becoming a Western Division agricultural, grazing and industrial metropolis, in contradistinction to the mining city of Broken Hill, also in the division, Wentworth agrees to join hands across the bolder while biding its time to recapture, and perhaps surpass, its former status.

Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 30 June 1934

Wilcannia Memories

By N. Grace

Wilcannia, perhaps more than other far western towns of New South Wales, seems to have been a fostering place for literary folk from the beginning. One may begin with the names of E.B.L. Dickens and A. Trollope, but only because they happen to have been the sons of two novelists, Charles Dickens and A. Trollope respectively. Mr Trollope, jnr., was a Lands officer in Wilcannia in the ‘seventies or ‘eighties, and Mr Dickens, after managing a neighbouring station. Mount Murchison, also went into the Lands Department – with an interval in which he sat in Parliament for a short time. It was while he was fighting Mr Willis for the seat that Mr Dickens made his amusing riposte. ‘My late father, he said, ‘wrote that Barkis was willin’; I have to say that Willis is barkin’!’

Tarella Quinn, whose charming stories are so well  known, was brought up on Tarella Station, then owned by Quinn, Currie, and Co., - and later by Quinn alone – near to the White Cliffs opal fields; and it was while on this station as governess that Miss Katherine Susannah Pritchard (now Mrs Throssell) found that she, too, could write. Her first attempt was a delightful account of her journey from Melbourne to Wilcanna and Tarella Station, and of her experiences while there. This was printed in the ‘New Idea’.

Notes: This is a short extract from an article republished in ‘Wilcannia Volume 1’, Papers of the Wilcannia & District Historical Society, 1980. It is attributed to ‘The Australian’, 16.9.1930. However no newspaper of that name seems to have been  published in 1930; perhaps it was ‘The Australian something’.

Tarella Quin (1877-1945)  also wrote under her married name, Daskein, and was one of Australia's most successful writers of fairy-stories for children; several were illustrated by Ida Outhwaite. They include Gum Tree Brownie (1907), later renamed Freckles (1910), Before the Lamps are Lit (1911), The Other Side of Nowhere (1934) and Chimney Town (1934). She also wrote the novels for adults, A Desert Rose (1912), Kerno (1914) and Paying Guests (1917).