More Aerials

I recently posted about the library acquiring copies of aerial photographs from the collection of Peter and Marie Thomson formerly of St Andrews farm. Peter was an amateur pilot and during the 1960s and early 1970s would take Marie with him to shoot aerial photographs from his plane.

Aerial photographs are excellent for comparing the landscape of a location over periods of time. I thought I would show two more aerial photographs from Peter and Marie's collection. For more aerials of the area or any other historical images from Campbelltown's past, go to our Our Past in Pictures at http://pictures.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/OPIP/scripts/home.asp

The above shot is of St Andrews farm. In the background is Campbelltown Road intersecting with St Andrews Road. The house in the background belonged to sculptor Tom Bass who died in 2010. Aberdeen Road now runs through where the outbuildings are behind the house on St Andrews farm. The photo was taken in 1960.

 

 

This image is of Mt St Joseph in today's suburb of Eagle Vale. This building is now Odyssey House in Moonstone Place. The main building is all that's left from the original farm and then monastery that can be seen in the photo. The buildings were demolished after the land was subdivided in the 1980s. The small unusual building in the foreground was a lacrosse court according to the Thomsons. The aerial shot was taken in April 1970. (Remember to click on images for a larger version).

Written by Andrew Allen

The Campbelltown Convicts

Our local studies section recently acquired a copy of Peter Hind's fantastic new book The Campbelltown Convicts. It's a must read for those with an interest in Australian history and in particularly our convict past.

On 19 March 1818, a young man called John Champley was committed to the House of Correction in Beverley, Yorkshire, England, for two years’ hard labour. He had been convicted of being a party to the theft of eighty pounds of butt leather in Pocklington on 13 December 1817.

Four months later, after an attempted escape from the House of Correction, he was sentenced to transportation to one of His Majesty’s ‘Plantations or Colonies abroad’.

Champley arrived in the penal colony of Sydney Cove on Thursday 7 October 1819 and was assigned to a shoemaker at Parramatta. After receiving his freedom in May 1826, Champley left Parramatta – with the shoemaker’s wife.

Early in 1829, Champley and his family left Sydney to live at Bong Bong. In February 1830, following a robbery at the nearby Oldbury estate, Champley and his two alleged accomplices, John Yates and Joseph Shelvey, were sentenced to death at Campbelltown. They were saved from the gallows upon appeal by their barrister and their death penalties commuted to ‘life and hard labour in irons’. Champley and Shelvey were sent to Norfolk Island, and Yates to Moreton Bay.

About a year later, two captured bushrangers from Jack Donohoe’s gang made confessions concerning the robbery and Champley, Shelvey and Yates were brought home and pardoned. However, the trial and incarceration had by now reduced their lives from one of hope to one of despair.

~~~

Many Australians now take great pride in tracing their convict heritage, but this has not always been the case. Historically governments destroyed convict records and families kept their offspring in the dark about their convict ancestry which has made it difficult to establish the true stories of these convicts.

The backdrop to this story is the slavery of the convict system in New South Wales with the terror of the penal settlements of Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay.

Under this evil system excessive floggings were handed out by the magistrates. The floggings and starvation drove many convicts to abscond and take to the bush to become bushrangers. Even when the convicts were emancipated they were still treated as second class citizens.

This book serves to record as many facts and details as possible of one story from this tragic period in our country’s history. It is a timely reminder that compassion and authority do not always go hand in hand.

Written by Andrew Allen

A Distinguished Geologist

Few people from Campbelltown have made as much impact on the world as geologist Sam Carey. Carey was influential in the world of geology as an early advocate of continental drift and later plate tectonics. He became founding Professor of Geology at the University of Tasmania for 30 years from 1946 to 1976 and continued his vigorous belief in Earth expansion as an explanation for what he observed in his studies of continental drift.

Samuel Warren Carey was born was born on 1 November 1911 at Campbelltown to Tasman George and Hannah Elspeth Carey. He was born at home with his father and a neighbour in attendance, several days after his mother was thrown from a sulky when the horse bolted. The family had built a small stone cottage on a 4 ha farm on the Georges River. His name was chosen by his father to honour his own father. He was the third of six surviving children in a family of nine. As primary school students at Campbelltown, he and his siblings had to walk the five kilometres to school whatever the weather or their state of health. When he was six or seven years of age, the family moved to Campbelltown where his father had a job as typesetter for a local newspaper.

Sam later attended high school at Canterbury where he was strongly influenced by his teachers. After completing high school he enrolled at the University of Sydney.

The people of Campbelltown took a keen interest in his academic development. An article in the Campbelltown Ingleburn News in 1933 talks about the 'success of a Campbelltown native' and how he received 6 scholarships in 5 years. It proudly went on to list all Carey's achievements up to that time.

Professor Sam Carey received a DSc from the University of Sydney in 1939 for his work on the tectonic evolution of New Guinea and Melanesia. He worked in the petroleum industry in New Guinea and then served with the Australian Infantry Forces from 1942-44.

Carey supported the theory of continental drift, explaining the movement of the continents through a model in which oceanic crust was formed at mid-ocean ridges and old oceanic crust underwent subduction at deep ocean trenches. The University of Tasmania became a leading university in tectonics and in 1957 he organised the Continental Drift Symposium, which influenced many scientists about the importance of continental drift.

Following his retirement from the University of Tasmania in 1976 Sam Carey was awarded the Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to the field of geology. He continued to support and investigate expanding earth models up until his death in 2002 aged 90.

 

 

Written by Andrew Allen

Sources:

Campbelltown Ingleburn News 23rd June 1933

Australian Academy of Science website at http://www.sciencearchive.org.au/scientists/interviews/c/sc.html

Armed Apes

I was reading about the new movie 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' and how a scene of an ape firing a gun has shocked fans. The controversial scene depicts an ape who pretends to befriend two armed humans before stealing one of their guns and shooting them both. This scene reminded me of a similar incident in Campbelltown's history which caused similar horror from a movie audience involving an ape.

During the 1930s the owner of the old Macquarie Cinema often staged bizarre Vaudeville acts as an added attraction. One such act involved a live ape shooting at a piece of fruit suspended on stage. The act went haywire when the ape bit the owner and began pointing the rifle at the audience. After eventually taking a rather wild shot at its target, the bullet was eventually fired harmlessly into a nearby wall. This left a bullet hole which remained until the building's demolition in 1979! I'm assured this is a true story and in fact old timers still recall the remarkable event.

The Macquarie Cinema was on the corner of Queen and Browne Streets in Campbelltown.

An undated photograph of an audience at the Macquarie Cinema watching a Saturday matinee

Written by Andrew Allen

Sources:

Daley, John 1982
"Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage: The Macquarie Cinema, Campbelltown, 1920s-1979
In Grist Mills, Vol. 1 No. 1

McGill, Jeff 1993
Campbelltown Clippings
Campbelltown: Campbelltown City Council

A Sad Ending

Today marks the 28th anniversary of the demolition of the old Royal Hotel at the corner of Railway and Hurley Streets. The hotel was demolished in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning July 6, 1986. Newspaper reports described how at 5.30am council workmen first set up safety barriers around the hotel. By 6am a massive Hitachi caterpillar-tracked back hoe commenced clawing the building down and by evening most of the remains had been removed from the site.

There was much controversy about the demolition of the hotel in the weeks and months leading up to the demolition. On one side there were those that were strongly opposed to the destruction of such a much loved historical building. On the other side however was Campbelltown Council who had exhausted all its options. Council needed to widen Hurley Street and unfortunately the Royal Hotel was in the way of this.

The Royal Hotel was originally known as the Cumberland Hotel in the 1880s and became the Royal Hotel in the 1890s. It dates back to the first half of the 19th century.

Interestingly, sandstone from the foundations was used on buildings such as the Campbelltown Library and the Bicentennial Art Gallery.

I thought I would show photographs from the library's collection of the hotel over time. They begin with the earliest known photograph when it was "Hodge's Royal Hotel" right up to its demolition in 1986.

4 unidentified men outside "Hodge's Royal Hotel"

A procession outside the Royal Hotel in 1958

The Royal in 1977

The Royal in 1986- the year it was demolished

Gone!

Written by Andrew Allen

Mt Gilead Windmill

 

 

 

An article in the local newspaper last week on the historic windmill at Mt Gilead prompted me to recall an interesting fact concerning its history. The article in the Macarthur Advertiser discussed the latest attempts to have the windmill listed on the State Register. The construction built from convict labour is rapidly falling into disrepair.

The windmill at the Mt Gilead property on Appin Road was built by Thomas Rose in 1836. The mill tower, which is built from sandstone quarried on the property, is 60 feet in height, comprises four stories, and is reputed to have contained the finest millstones in the colony. No metal was used in its construction and all the moving parts were fashioned from ironbark grown on the property. The tapering stone tower was topped by a moveable cap made of wood (as the sails had to be always facing into the wind, the moveable cap carried the sails and driving shaft). A stone wall surrounded the windmill, to protect animals from touching the rotating sails.

The interesting fact I thought I would raise was that on the night of August 20, 1857 the mill was struck by lightning and received minimal damage. Coincidentally this was the same storm that caused the Dunbar to be famously wrecked at South Head killing 121 souls.

Mount Gilead is the last remaining tower mill in New South Wales. It has been and still is a favourite study for artists and photographers. Lets hope it can be listed on the State Register and survive for centuries to come.

Written by Andrew Allen

Update: I recently finished reading Larry Writer's excellent book "The Shipwreck" which tells the story of the Dunbar. In it he describes the storm that night. The winds were from the south east and there is no mention of lightning in Larry's book or the original newspaper reports. Lightning to my knowledge is not usually associated with an east coast low such as the one that struck that night. 

Sources:

Morris, John F.
Mount Gilead Estate and Windmill, Campbelltown
In Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings
Vol. 27 (5), pp 359-66, 1941

Fowler, Verlie
Mount Gilead
In Grist Mills
Vol. 7 (4), 66-87, July 1994