Cuthbert Albany Fetherstonhaugh (1837 – 1925)

Part 2: Clergyman, Pastoralist and Entrepreneur

Following on from Part 1 it is now 1866 and Cuthbert, who is 29 years old, has been retained as manager of Brookong Station in the Riverina, on the traditional lands of the Wiradjuri People. After leaving Queensland and spending only two weeks in Melbourne, he set out for Brookong.

Brookong Station

“When I took charge of Brookong it contained 315,000 acres, of which 70,000 acres were plains, some 50,000 acres open forest, and the balance heavily timbered box and pine country, and more or less scrubby … There must have been 1,500 wild horses and 400 wild cattle and 46,000 shepherded sheep (which) seemed to occupy the whole area… these took some fifty hands to look after them in ordinary times, and about ninety at lambing time”.

Of the 46,000 sheep:  “25,000 were shepherded ewes, lambing, as we termed it, “by hand,” on scanty feed, and with dirty wet yards, (which) meant much anxiety and work. In addition, we had 21,000 dry sheep, scattered over the immense area, some of them twenty five miles away from the head station on scrubby country. The shepherds were constantly losing sheep, and had got so used to it that it was looked on as a matter of course, and they had become very careless. Dingoes were numerous, and made sad havoc among lost sheep”.^1,p.309

Cuthbert explains the work he and his overseer, Mr Dill, undertook:

The work was extremely heavy, and we both of us were, I think, foolish in undertaking as much as we did. We both of us rode on an average 12,000 miles a year. Take my own work. Here was an area of 315,000 acres, of which two-thirds was scrub, and for the first two years I had the shepherds to look after as well as the fencing to erect. To count the shepherds’ flocks, either Mr. Dill or I had to ride from ten to twenty-six miles there and back in the early morning or late in the evening. We seldom got home till after dark, and breakfast was in the winter at half-past six o’clock, and in summer any time after daylight. We had no back station — all the work was done from the head station — no tracks. I had no bookkeeper, only a ration carrier. ^{1, p.320}

 Despite the deprivations of his work, a weatherboard homestead that had just been completed prior to Cuthbert having taken over Brookong, was able to provide some comforts. Also, due to his now strong religious beliefs, Cuthbert held a service at the home station every Sunday evening and avoided work on Sunday as much as he could.

In 1868, two years into his position at Brookong, Cuthbert became well known for his encounter with the bushranger Bluecap and his gang, which also featured in a famous retelling by a young poet Barcroft Boake. Although gifted, Boake was like his idol, Adam Gordon Lindsay, prone to severe depressive episodes, and took his own life at the age of 26. In his coat pocket at the time of his death was the poem ‘Featherstonhaugh’ (often misspelt in articles written about Cuthbert) together with a note in pencil that directed the reader to hand the verses to Mr. Archibald, of the Bulletin, where they later appeared. The poem was then included in an anthology of Boake’s works, “Where the Dead Men Lie and other poems”.² 

The poem ‘Fetherstonhaugh’ runs to 15 verses, of which the first three are:

Brookong station lay half-asleep
Dozed in the waning western glare
(‘Twas before the run had stocked with sheep
And only cattle depastured there)
As the Bluecap mob reined up at the door
And loudly saluted Fetherstonhaugh.

“My saintly preacher,” the leader cried,
“I stand no nonsense, as you’re aware,
I’ve a word for you if you’ll step outside,
just drop that pistol and have a care;
I’ll trouble you, too, for the key of the store,
For we’re short of tucker, friend Fetherstonhaugh.”

The muscular Christian showed no fear,
Though he handed the key with but small delay.
He never answered the ruffian’s jeer
Except by a look which seemed to say –
“Beware, my friend, and think twice before
You raise the devil in Fetherstonhaugh.”

Cuthbert acknowledges the poem romanticised his encounter with the bushrangers and told the Australian poet, folk singer and shearer Duke Tritton, that: ‘Boake made me a hero, over a simple affair‘.^3,p.28 Cuthbert’s own version of the encounter is outlined in his memoir,¹ and also in Tritton’s book,³ and in the article below in Smith’s Weekly, complete with illustration of Cuthbert pursuing BluCap.

The pioneering days were a dangerous time and Cuthbert describes having known four murderers as well as the bushranger Frank Gardiner. The first of these was a fellow farmer, Mr Waines, to whom Cuthbert had often lent draft fillies for the farmer to do his ploughing. Cuthbert thought well of Waines and his wife and was surprised when it was found Waines had killed a married couple to regain the purchase price of some land the couple had sold back to Waines. The second was an assistant groom at Muntham, Martin Rice, who went missing after stealing a horse to go to Melbourne. A few months later he murdered a veterinary surgeon. The third was a horse dealer at Rockhampton with whom Cuthbert had had dealings. He shot and robbed an old man in the dark, as the man was known to be carrying a large sum of money. The fourth was Mr Griffin, whom Cuthbert had known when Griffin was the Commissioner of Goldfields at Clermont in 1865. Griffin shot two troopers after trying to poison them when they found Griffin had committed a fraud. All four were found guilty and hanged. Frank Gardiner the bushranger was apprehended while Cuthbert was at Apis Creek and Cuthbert formed part of the party who escorted Gardiner to Rockhampton and onto Sydney for judgement. Cuthbert’s story of the apprehension of Frank Gardiner is a 15 page rollicking tale. ^1,p.242-258

In 1871 Cuthbert’s mother died, which affected him deeply:

“I might have doubted that the world was round, but I never doubted my Mother’s love, and she never doubted mine … Every week for many years my Mother wrote me a long letter telling me all the family news and tendering me loving advice, and full of her own thoughts of God… I have never thought of my Mother as dead or as any further from me as when she was in the flesh, but for all that, her death left a great void and I greatly missed my weekly letter“.^4,p.5

It is therefore no surprise that in the year following her passing, Cuthbert left Brookong to follow the faith he held, that his mother had been so integral in nourishing.

Cuthbert left Bookong in 1872 after six years; he was 35. Cuthbert felt he had achieved his hopes of becoming a successful station manager. He had ring fenced the entire 315,000 acres, an endeavour that took two years; and Cuthbert remains famous as the man credited with being the first station manager in Australia to introduce wire fencing for sheep paddocks⁵. His woolshed had stands for 36 hand shearers and under his management the price and quality of Brookong’s wool clip increased. After Cuthbert left Brookong it was bought by William Halliday and by the 1880s Brookong had a wool shed with 97 stands and a shearing team of 250 who handled 10,000 sheep a day.^1,p.399. At this time Brookong became famous for the shearing strike of 1888, which is reported in an article “The Shearing Riots at Brookong“, in the Illustrated Sydney News. By 1890 Brookong was arguably the biggest sheep station in Australia.

Cuthbert’s religious experience

On leaving Brookong Cuthbert received several lucrative offers to manage other large properties, however:

“Knowing that if I accepted the offer I would be, as the saying goes, a made man as far as financial position went, and that I would be in a position to ask the girl whom I had loved for some five years to join her lot with mine, I was sorely tempted to accept. But my heart was set on entering the ministry, and in trying to do some really good work in a world in which — at that time — I thought the great majority were going straight to hell…”.^{1, p.413}

So it was that Cuthbert studied for the Anglican Ministry, first becoming a lay-reader near Melbourne, which included Templestowe (forenoon sermon), Doncaster (afternoon) and Anderson’s Creek (evening). He received a stipend of £90 and lived with his widowed cousin Travers Adamson, who was now a crown prosecutor: “I was terribly in earnest and that helped me with my people and with the Dean, they could see I thoroughly believed in what I preached. Everyone was more than good to me, my sole ambition, the one aim and object of my life was to win souls to God. I worked hard morning, noon and part of the night – I was truly happy“.^4,p.20

During this time, Cuthbert became an insatiable reader and soon found perceived inconsistencies between Christian dogma and his own beliefs. The first of his doubts dealt with the concept of Eternal Punishment, and despite his confession to the Bishop that he felt he had to discard this doctrine, he was ordained as an Anglican priest at Wagga Wagga in 1873, something the Dean came to oppose. Cuthbert then took charge of the Brookong-Jerilderie parish, a place dear to his heart, and received a stipend of £300 a year. This enabled Cuthbert to buy books to add to a very good library of valuable theological and philosophical books his friends had donated to him to help him through his work and life. So Cuthbert found himself reading Max Müller, William Benjamin Carpenter, Charles Lyell (Antiquity of Man), John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, F.D. Maurice, James Robertson and Charles Kingsley. “I read in every spare moment I had. I read when driving along a good road in my buggy and when riding … one day I was riding and I became so engrossed in my book, that I did not notice that the horse had left the road and I pulled up not knowing where I had got to“.^3,p.35

As his reading increased and his knowledge expanded: “Very soon I became convinced that neither of the two contradictory stories of creation in the book of Genesis could be true and the dogmas of the Fall of Man, Original Sin and the infallibility of the Bible had to follow the dogma of everlasting punishment ‘into the limbo of exploded belief’s’ … Very soon the truth of evolution forced itself on me. I eagerly embraced it; I did not seem to have to argue about it, it was as obviously as true as the sun and the stars and the law of gravitation”.^{3, p.37}

Parallel to these academic pursuits Cuthbert worked hard in his parish. His general Sunday work included three services and forty miles to ride or drive, sometimes in winter over very heavy roads. Cuthbert also attended 22 stations and two townships at which he held service as often as he could. By 1874 he was predominantly providing services, readings and lectures to bushman at both their ‘men’s huts’ and at their ‘station house’ on properties where they worked. Readings might include topics such as heroism and co-operation, and he read books to them such as The Outcasts of Poker Flat, The Loss of the Birkenhead, Burke and Wills; all to which he would add in a ‘little non doctrinal religion’.

Cuthbert found the men rolled up well to these lectures and all denominations attended. He also had a magic lantern and a large number of interesting slides, as well as illustrated stories for the children, which gave pleasure to many of his audiences. His main work however lay with bushmen, whom he described as “a wandering nondescript workman, now here, now there, shearing, reaping, fencing, road making, dam-making, lamb marking and tramping… living the most monotonous lives…”.^3,p.39

Around this time Cuthbert became aware of the Bushman’s Club in Adelaide, which inspired him to want to undertake a similar endeavour to support the bushmen in his own parish. Cuthbert took three months leave with the aim of raising the money to build the club through a “one pound subscription” for membership. He rode over 3000 miles and lectured 70 times but instead of the 5000 members (and the required £5000) he had aimed for, he could only recruit 468 subscribers, nowhere near enough to support his lofty aim. This was a significant blow for Cuthbert and he reluctantly gave up his goal of a Bushman’s Club and returned the money he had collected. His failure to raise enough money for a local Bushman’s Club was a significant personal blow.

On one of his visits to Melbourne in 1874 Cuthbert called on a friend and fellow clergyman Mr Wollerton, who asked Cuthbert to take one of his services in East Melbourne. With a full church, including family of his mentor, the Dean, Cuthbert “put his heart and soul into his sermon“.^4,p.43 It did not take long for Cuthbert’s liberal ideas and deviation from theological orthodoxy to reach the ears of the Dean, who immediately wrote to Cuthbert stating he “did not realise Cuthbert’s infidelity had gone so far“. The Dean then ordered him not to preach again any Church of England Building in Victoria. Cuthbert reflected: “While there was nothing in the sermon to offend any true follower of Jesus Christ, there was without doubt enough in it to bring down on me the anathesis of narrow minded, orthodox evangelicals“.^4,p.47 As a result of the Dean’s census Cuthbert’s friends encouraged him to publish his sermon, and to write a new preface:

“I believe that all the pain and sorrow and suffering we see around us are not, as is popularly believed, the fruits of ‘Adams sin’, and the death throes of a fallen and doomed Humanity, but that all sin and suffering are the consequences of our yet imperfect state, and not death throes, but birth pangs, the travail which ever accompanies a new birth. It is a birth that in being accomplished therefore “doth the whole creation groan and travail in pain together until now”.^6,p.2

The publication of this sermon was followed by widespread support for Cuthbert in the form of editorials and letters to the editors of newspapers in Victoria and even the ‘Melbourne Punch’ “had a cartoon with a capital likeness of the Dean, not at all a caricature, – trying to sweep back the incoming tide with a broom“.^3,p.36 Some editorials and letters were so critical of the Dean that Cuthbert found himself also writing a letter to the editor of the Argus in defense of the Dean.

In early 1875 Cuthbert’s older brother Alfred, with whom he had first set out to Queensland with, died aged 42 at Yanko station from an ‘effusion of the brain’ (a brain haemorrhage of undetermined cause). Cuthbert officiated at Alfred’s funeral. By May 1875 Cuthbert had resigned his ministry, “simply as a matter of conscience and not on account of any pressure brought to bear on me“,^4,p.51 but he continued on as an unsectarian minister in Urana due to the support of his parishioners. However, he found his health beginning to suffer greatly, “no doubt, chiefly mental and I got into a very low state of nervous debility“.^4,p.54 Cuthbert remarked:

“During my whole life since 1862, I have ‘that tired feeling’. After Queensland for years and years I suffered from chronic indigestion, dyspepsia, and nervous prostration. The bad fall I got at Brookong … when I sustained five fractures and … dislocations and was never laid up for even a day, left me very run down and I was far from having recovered when I entered on what proved to be the heaviest strain, physically and mentally, that I have ever gone through, in my four years of life in connection to the ministry“.^4,p.1

So it was that Cuthbert finally also resigned from his lay ministry in April 1876, but not before publishing a final sermon entitled “Truth & Freedom”.⁷

Above: Cuthbert’s public resignation from his position as the unsectarian minister of Urana, Family clipping, source unknown.

Cuthbert’s time as a clergyman was inspiration for the character, the Rev. Egbert Heatherstone in Rolf Boldrewoods “The Colonial Reformer”, an historical novel that explores the social and political issues of the time, including the struggle for democracy and the fight against injustice.  Rolf Boldrewood is best known for his 1882 bushranging novel ‘Robbery Under Arms’.

Right: Cover from Vol. 1 of “A Colonial Reformer” with the clergyman character based on Cuthbert seen far left.

Cuthbert also wrote a foreward to Rolf Boldrewood’s unpublished reminiscences, which were discovered by his daughter after Boldrewood’s death.

Marriage to Flora Agnes Murchison

After resigning his ministry Cuthbert became manager of Canally Station, for Messrs Macguire and Cohen. Canally was a property of 400,000 acres near Balranald in south west NSW. However the property was sold a short time after in 1876. Ten years had now passed since Cuthbert had first set his heart on marrying Flora (Florrie) Murchison. At last, Cuthbert felt he was finally in a position to ask for Flora’s hand and they were married on November 16th, 1876 in Holy Saints Church in Kew, Victoria. Cuthbert was now 39 and Flora 32. Flora was the youngest daughter of pioneers John and Mary Ann Murchison who were among the first settlers to come to Australia in 1833. Flora was considered “one of the belles of Melbourne … and she drove her own lively chestnuts four-in-hand (buggy or carriage with four horses) and she matched her husband with the reins“.^15,p.179 For Flora’s bridal present, Cuthbert had commissioned from London an ornate silver and gilt tea and coffee set, engraved with the Fetherstonhaugh family crest, and made by silversmiths Martin, Hall & Co. The bride and groom were described below in what was presumably the groomsman’s speech (source: family clipping):

After his marriage to Flora, Cuthbert then went into partnership in 1877 with a number of friends and bought Goorianawa Station in the Castlereagh District of NSW.⁸

Eric C Rolls⁹ spoke to Cuthbert and Flora’s daughter Dorothy, shortly before her death in 1974, and she remembered that:

“when her mother first went to Goorianawa as a bride there was no proper home. On wet mornings Flora took macintosh and umbrella to breakfast in a detached kitchen. But her father soon built a fine house on sloping ground. It had big verandahs all round, and wide hollow wooden walls filled with sawdust as insulation. There was a central room they called the lobby that the other rooms opened into, a cool place in the summer. Dorothy remembered a canvas boat her mother made for keeping food. It hung in the breeze on the verandah (and can be seen in the above photo). A wooden tray beneath it filled with water kept the canvas damp by capillary action. Compartments held butter, milk, cream and meat. Water was piped as far as the garden from two big willow fringed dams higher up the slope but it was not reticulated within the garden. Every evening a Chinese gardener took buckets on a pole balanced around his neck and brought water to the vegetables.“

Visitors came from all around the district to see the roses. They grew over a huge trellis that sheltered beehives. Flora had grafted three roses together on briar stock: little yellow banksias, vigorous climbing Cloth of Gold and yellow Merechal Niel; they bloomed at different times and for months there was a succession of flowers”.^9,p.200

Flora was throughout her time at Goorianawa an active community member, and was invited to lay the Foundation Stone of the Coonabarabran Hospital in 1891, with the Mallet and Trowel displayed today in a specifically designed case at the hospital.

Goorianawa

In the mid ninteenth century Goorianawa Station was a large squatter’s run situated in the valley on the northern side of the Warrumbungle Ranges, the traditional lands of the Gomeri People. Goorianawa is pronounced Gooree – ana – wah. By the late 1800s Goorianawa had become a ‘Pastoral Holding’.

Mrs Mary Cain, a famous and revered Gomeroi woman elder, recorded the meaning of Goorianawa as “enemy coming”.¹⁰ Oral history handed down through her mother, Jinnie Griffin, told of the local Aboriginal people who would often camp in the large caves that were to be found in the Warrabungles. These caves provided an important vantage point to identify potential raiders from neighbouring groups that would come into the Goorianawa valley below. There was often warfare between goups in order to continually assert the rights to the land’s resources by one group over another.¹¹ These conflicts were then followed in the early to mid 1800s by decades of guerrilla warfare that had raged as the Gomeroi people resisted colonial pastoral invasion.¹²

When purchased by Cuthbert and his partners from Sir Patrick Jennings and Martin Shanahan in 1877, Goorianawa comprised 148,300 acres and took in Curianawa, Baradean and Coonabarabran. At that time Squatters’ Runs in NSW had been divided into two equal areas: the Resumed Area and the Leasehold Area, which for Goorianawa was 78,100 and 70,000 acres respectively. Resumed areas were available for ‘land selection’, which was the act of choosing and acquiring a plot of crown land for farming purposes. Selection was enabled by the “Robertson Land Acts” of 1861, which allowed individuals, known as ‘selectors’, to purchase small parcels of land from the government to settle on and farm, effectively breaking up large squatting runs and enabling wider land ownership among working-class people. Leasehold areas could be leased from the Crown by a squatter and were exempt from conditional purchase (or selection).¹³ As a result Cuthbert purchased portions in the “resumed area” with a number of partners to meet this criteria.

In his memoir Cuthbert describes how at the time of his purchase of Goorianawa he had been sitting next to Sir John Robertson at the Reform Club when Sir John put his hand on Cuthbert’s arm and said “Look here, young man, sell your blooming shirt and buy the land,” and he repeated his advice^{1, p394}.

Cuthbert then went on to write in his memoir about how the Robertson Land Acts had allowed European settlers to legally buy crown lands that had not been improved upon by the squatters occupying them, and what impact this had:

“Jack Robertson’s Act set the men who wanted land and the men occupying the land at each other’s throats. In one day the value of a squatter’s tenure fell by one half. Any Thursday any man could select anywhere on the squatter’s holding that was not protected by improvements. Unscrupulous men tried to blackmail (squatters) by cutting a man off from his homestead, wool shed and sheep wash or frontage. On a cattle run cattle camps would be selected. I have known the owner of a fairly small run ruined on one Thursday. Sixteen selections were taken up on him by one family. That means 40,000 acres at one swoop” ^{1, p394} .

Records are not clear as to who Cuthbert’s partners were in purchasing Goorianawa. In her later years, Cuthbert’s daughter Dorothy named John (Jack) Campbell as Cuthbert’s partner. However, Messrs. Macguire, Cornish and Francis are those named alongside Cuthbert on a 1964 Parish Map of Goorianawa, which appears to have been copied from a much earlier map. James Maguire, had been part owner of Canally when Cuthbert was manager there, but information on the partners Cornish and Francis was not found. Jack Campbell went on to be a significant landholder in the district⁸.

From 1885 the Goorianawa Run was registered as Goorianawa Pastoral Holdings and was reputed to have an area of up to 240,000 acres with outstations that included Baraean, Quinema and Terridgerie (later know as Horseshoe Bend)⁸. Some of the difficulties Cuthbert encountered as a station owner were similar to his previous experiences, particularly when it came to clearing land:

” I did a lot of scrub driving while at Brookong, and still more while at Goorianawa. I could take a buggy and four horses through scrub no one could have got through with a pair, for you want strength to pull through scrub. You have to pull a lot of it down with the horses and buggy. In pine scrub I have often had the hind wheels lifted right off the ground by the recoil of a big pine sapling, and have had to cut the saplings before I could get on“^{1, p335}.

Other hardships Cuthbert experienced, such as drought and the shearer’s strike, are known today through song. “The Squatter’s Life is Not a Happy One” (clipping below left)¹⁴ was written by Cuthbert during the 1884 drought and sung as entertainment at Goorianawa to the air of ‘A Policemen’s Life is not a Happy One’. The last two verses were added after the drought broke. Music obviously still played an important part in family life as it had done when Cuthbert was a child, and he and Flora would have entertained many visitors from throughout the district and beyond.

The song “Goorianawa” (An Old Bush Song, below right)¹⁵ told of the ‘Big Shearer’s Strike’ of 1891. It was written by a shearer named ‘Whalebone’, who according to the ‘Old Bush Song’ preamble below, was an outsider who, despite Cuthbert agreeing to pay the new rate, began ‘some insolent backchat’ and was asked to leave by the other shearers. Another version of events based on a story told by a ‘picker-up’ (roustabout) who worked in the Goorianawa shearing shed in 1891 is related by B Walker in the magazine “Shearing“¹⁶:

“The Australian folk song ‘Goorianawa’ tells of a shearer, known as ‘Whalebone’, who had shorn in many of the tough sheds of New South Wales during the 1880s and ‘90s and never been faulted. But he was sacked (speared) at ‘Goorianawa’ before he’d ‘barbered three’. As a result of the song, ‘Goorianawa’ became a famous shed on the northern slopes of the Warrumbungle Ranges in Central New South Wales. ‘Whalebone’ was sacked by the owner at the time, Cuthbert Fetherstonhaugh, who had a reputation as being very hard on the shearers, hence the reference to ‘knuckle down’ in the chorus of the song. ‘Knuckle down’ in this context meant to keep one’s knuckles close to the sheep to shear it cleanly. But his hostile attitude to the shearers is understandable when some facts are known. Shearing was taking place on the station when the big strike of 1891 was called, and it is recorded that news of the strike reached the shed halfway through the second run. The shearers walked off the board leaving partly shorn sheep to run away (often with their fleeces still attached). It was reported that Fetherstonhaugh offered to pay them the new rate they were striking for, plus the same new rate for the sheep already shorn, if they would finish the shed. But they refused and he never forgave them for it“^{16, p4}.

One shearer even shore a sheep from the hindquarters to the shoulders, and let him go looking ‘like a judge with a wig on‘. After the experience of 1891 Cuthbert developed a reputation for being ‘severe on shearers‘.³ Although the reality appeared to be quite different. Cuthbert’s quick agreement to pay the rate the Shearer’s Union requested indicated empathy with their cause and was at odds with what was happening elsewhere. For instance, in Barcaldine in Queensland, the centre of the strike, troopers were brought in by train and a Military Camp was set up in opposition to the Strikers Camp and union leaders were arrested. Around 1300 shearers marched on foot and on horseback with Ureka flags to protest against their poor working conditions and low wages. The strike lasted 6 months but the shearers were unable to hold out and the strike was broken. The Shearers Strike of 1891 is credited as being one of the factors leading to the formation of the Australian Labour Party.

The song Goorianawa (An Old Bush Song) was published in Banjo Patterson’s 1932 anthology of Old Bush Songs¹⁷ and several recent renditions are available to view on YouTube.

During his time at Goorianawa, Cuthbert was very active in advocating for pastoral issues. In 1881 he was appointed as Magistrate in the County of Baradine, and in the same year was instructed by the Minister for Lands to investigate and write a report on rabbit and dog proof fencing in South Australia. “Cuthbert, who had witnessed the ravages caused by rabbits in Victoria, was one of the first to raise his voice in warning of their certain invasion of the district, but was called an alarmist“.^18,p127

In 1884, Cuthbert was one of the prime movers, along with Frederick Wolsley and Alexander Wilson, in founding the Warrigal Club, which “promoted social intercourse amongst gentleman engaged in pastoral pursuits in NSW and the adjacent colonies“. The Warrigal Club was noted both in Australia and overseas for its comfort, homeliness and comradeship. In 1886 Cuthbert helped to form the Commercial and Pastoral Association of NSW and in 1890, the Pastoralist’s Union, and was a member of the Union Club in Sydney. Cuthbert also served on the Board of the Coonabarabran Hospital and the Show Committee. He also held a race meeting on the property for the entertainment of shearers and residents of the district. The program consisted of nine races, seven of which were for horses entered by shearers, and a donkey race also provided much amusement.¹⁹

In 1894 Cuthbert began to advocate for inland freezing works and a meat export company. In journals and newspapers, and in lectures he gave all over the colony, he sought support for his venture and initially raised 71,000 shares and £40,100 in debentures. In 1895 he visited Chicago and the UK to engage experts in canning.²⁰ He then decided to sell Goorianawa to pursue this enterprise further.

Flora and Cuthbert had lived at Goorianawa Station for 17 years, where they had their three children: Cuthbert (b1879), Albany (b1882) and Dorothy (b1886). Cuthbert sold his share of Goorianawa to his partner John Campbell and a Mr Tom Stirton (or Sturton) in 1894. When they left the district Cuthbert and Flora were presented with an engraved silver tea service and an Illuminated Address of Appreciation. Upon leaving Goorianawa Cuthbert was then 57 years old and Flora 52.

Dear Sir, 

On the departure of yourself and family from Goorianawa, after a residence of 17 years, your friends here desire to convey to you the expression of their appreciation of your high character and of the varied services you have rendered to the district. Your gifts to the hospital and hearty interest in that institution of which you have been president since its inception and your willing aid to other public associations have contributed materially to their success.

In Mrs Fetherstonhaugh, who has always shown a lively interest  in the welfare of the district and an active sympathy with all in distress, you have an energetic fellow worker in every good sense.

We sincerely hope that in the new venture in which you have entered you may be successful, and so realise your idea to secure thereby, lasting benefit to the whole country

We desire Mrs Fetherstonhaugh's acceptance of the accompanying tea service, as a small token of esteem in which she is held, and wishing you all God Speed.

We remain, very sincerely yours, On behalf of the residents of Coonabaraban and District, March, 1896.

The sale of Goorianawa enabled Cuthbert to commit £200,000 of his own money to the Graziers’ (Stockowner’s) Meat Export Company; convinced as he was that chilling and canning were the future of meat export. However, by 1898 there had been a significant downturn in the number of stock available and prices of the carriage of stock became unreasonably high²¹. So the company was wound up with significant losses to shareholders and directors alike.

Following the failure of the Meat Export Company Cuthbert explored a new mining venture in the Gulf Country. He went north by boat to Burketown and then 140 miles inland where he found country rich in minerals, particularly silver and lead. But Cuthbert eventually found rail connection and the carriage of the ore to be problematic²². Cuthbert then worked as a government land valuer, valuing over 20 million acres for land taxation purposes, whilst also writing about the properties he valued for the journal, The Pastoralists’ Review.

In the years following the sale of Goorianawa Cuthbert’s family lived at Darling Point, where the older children attended private schools; Ascham for Dorothy (Dorrie) and Shore for Cuthbert jnr. It was likely during this time the Fetherstonhaughs became good friends with the MacKellars, who lived nearby at Piper Point. Dorrie in particular developed a close relationship with writer and poet, Dorothea MacKellar OBE, and author of ‘I Love a Sunburnt Country. Dorothea MacKellar was Godmother to her namesake, Dorothy’s daughter, Dorothea, or ‘Peachy’ as she was known to family and friends.

Mungery (Mungerie) Station

In 1910, after Cuthbert’s return from the Gulf country, he bought a smaller property, Mungerie (15,000 acres), on the traditional lands of the Wailwan People, approximately 30km west of Goorianawa. On Flora’s first visit to the property it was drought affected, unfenced and overrun with rabbits, which had been in plague proportions in the district since the early 1900s. The plague was so great that 92 million rabbits alone were destroyed at a nearby Station, Wingadee, in 1905, and 14 million had been frozen and exported from Australia in 1904.¹⁸ Flora is reported by her great nephew Jamie Hedger to have said to Cuthbert “Oh Bony, what have you done?!” Bony was the nickname Flora had always used for her husband, likely due to his slim and wiry build when younger. However, Cuthbert worked hard as always and fenced the property and got the rabbits under control, making it into going concern. Later he also purchased Ulundri, about 20km from Mungery, which pastured 2000 sheep³.

Duke Tritton, the shearer, poet and folksinger, worked for Cuthbert for nearly two years at Mungerie. Duke held him in high regard, and even wrote a manuscript entitled ‘Working for Fetherstonhaugh‘³. Duke said Cuthbert had a reputation for having been, not only an accomplished horseman, but also a pretty good boxer in his time:

“He would be well into his seventies then, but was still an active man, though he admitted somewhat sadly that he could no longer ride a rough horse. In his day he had been a noted buck jump rider and all-round horseman. He still was a mighty man in a buggy and pair. In fact I have never seen his equal. He drove through timbered country just as fast as did in the open. And though his horses appeared to be half broken, he always had them under control. After one trip, few people would ride with him if they could avoid it. I am not a nervous type, but he often had me hanging onto the side of the buggy and wishing I was on foot” ^3,p26.

Duke first met Cuthbert when Cuthbert was looking for contractors to dig out the rabbit burrows at Mungery, and Duke tells many entertaining tales about his years spent working there. Duke described Cuthbert as easy to get on with, and on contract jobs he never argued over the price, and on day work always paid him when Duke asked. Duke said Cuthbert had been a keen collector of curios that had been dug up from the rabbit holes on his property, mainly Aboriginal weapons and utensils of various kinds, which covered the walls of his office. On giving one such find to Cuthbert, he insisted on the young Duke having a whiskey with him.

Some of the tales Duke told highlight how incredibly tough farming was in pioneer times. It was not only the clearing and the rabbit plague, but Duke tells of drought, and the time his toddler daughter, Dorrie, accidentally ingested a small amount of strychnine powder from a jar stored in the men’s tent. Dorrie was subsequently cared for at the homestead for two weeks by the Fetherstonhaugh children’s nanny, who was also a nurse. Luckily little Dorrie did recover. Duke also told a very funny story of his having to collect a large python on Cuthbert’s orders to put in the hay store to control the mice; and the terrible day in 1912 when the ‘hoppers’ came. With some good rains in March the grass was sprouting and everyone was cheerful with the prospect of a good winter, then news came that the grasshoppers were swarming to the west. When the ‘hoppers’ arrived Duke described it as:

“like a light shower coming over the plain, gradually increasing until it was impossible to face them. The noise of their wings rasping together was indescribable, and the drumming on the galvanised iron roofs of the staion was like a heavy hailstorm… The orchard, vegetable and flower gardens, the pride of young Miss Fetherstonhaugh (Dorothy), was a seething mass of hoppers. The fruit trees were loaded with them till they bowed down to the ground, many of the branches breaking off. English shade trees were stripped while we watched. Of the native trees, only the kurrajongs were eaten, the coolabahs, wilgas and others, though the hoppers covered them and hung in clusters and festoons, were not eaten… The ground was a crawling mass of insects… I found it hard to believe that people on a strip of country a hundred miles wide were going through the same experience … herbage and grass had been taken to the roots and tanks and dams had been left with the scum of grasshoppers inches deep …a million grasshoppers can smell very high, to say the least” ^3,p32.

Cuthbert placed the blame for the grasshopper plagues at the door of the poison carts that laid miles of poisoned pollard (milled bran) a day to control the rabbits, but in doing so, had upset nature’s balance by wiping out flocks of Ibis that lived on the plains and consumed large amounts of grasshoppers.³.

Bracklyn at Blackheath

Cuthbert’s older brother Theobald died in 1909 and with that, Cuthbert inherited his father’s home, Correagh, in Victoria. Upon the sale of Correagh, Cuthbert purchased a new home at Blackheath in the Upper Blue Mountains, over 400km from Mungerie Station. He named it Bracklyn after the home of his Irish ancestors. This left Cuthbert’s older son, Cuthbert jnr, to manage Mungerie, and Albany the younger son also worked there for a time.

In 1917, urged on by Flora and many of his friends, Cuthbert wrote ‘After Many Days’, a book of reminiscences of his first 35 years. To today’s readers the book can be demanding, as Cuthbert’s writing style is often a free flow of memories, dense with personal adventures and descriptions of events that have made up not only his own life, but also the myriad of personalities he came in contact with. The book is an incredibly rich description of colonial days and forms an important record of white settlement in Australia.

In his latter years he continued to travel from Blackheath to stay at Mungery for short periods. It must have been hard to let go of a lifetime on the land. Although, he still also continued on with his community work and took great interest in the development of kindergartens, being one of the founders of the Golden Fleece branch of kindergartens in Sydney. He also continued with his memoirs, writing ‘My Religious Experiences’, of which the unpublished manuscript is held in the Mitchell Library.⁴ A more readily available transcription of the manuscript can also be found in Ian Itter’s ‘After Many Years’, along with Cuthbert’s sermons and other snippets that represent his life.¹⁹

To the disappointment of many, particularly those in the Coonamble District, Cuthbert never made it to write the final leg of his memoir covering his life at Goorianawa and his family years. That has been left to those who knew him. Cuthbert died en route from Blackheath to Mungerie Station in 1925. He was 88. Flora died six years later.

Below I have provided exerpts from a poem by Adam Lindsay Gordon and one of the many obituaries written in Cuthbert’s memory; as well as an inscription Cuthbert addressed to his oldest son ‘Cuthie’ in a Sunday School book Cuthbert gave him when he was aged 8. I think these remembrances best sum up the man Cuthbert was and the impact he had on those around him. While Cuthbert was very much a product of his time, and it can’t be said he was always successful in his many ventures, he was in many ways, an exceptional person. He was a resourceful, optimistically courageous, inquisitive, kind, compassionate, thinking man who held beliefs and ideas that were far ahead of those held by many others in colonial Australia.

The below quote from the poet Cuthbert so admired, Adam Lindsay Gordon, and the inscription in his little son’s book, seem to sum up Cuthbert’s approach to life:

Two things stand together like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.

My Dear Cuthie, from His Father:

Be kind and loving, considerate and thoughtful, obedient and trustful. You will then be on God’s side and his loving prescence will never leave you. CF 1887.

And finally an exerpt from an obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald.

CUTHBERT FETHERSTONHAUGH

One outstanding attribute possessed by him was the fascination that young men seemed to have for him. Perhaps his remarkable feats of horsemanship, his reputation for daredevil escapades, may have had something to do with it, but I think that the chief reason why young men delighted in his company was because, with all his years and snowy hair, he was just like one of them, a boy talking to a boy, a youth to a youth. Loving humanity, he often seemed surprised that they loved him, but the fact is that he simply carried his own welcome with him. People were glad to see him, and to welcome him, and press him to stay just another week, or, failing that, just another day. (He was) a man of happy expediant in minor difficulties ... and of resourceful determination and purpose in bigger obstacles that so often confronted him during his long life. A wild Irishman, many would call him: none could fail to add, a courteous, chivalrous gentleman, a thouroughbred every inch of him. 

Vivid and picturesque as was his life and personality was, he cared nothing for the limelight ... yet if brilliant courage, unflagging energy, and faithful work: simple directness of purpose and inherent goodness; a heart that could dare; a personality full of love and true camaraderie, a brain that could think and a long life of doing to the utmost and in the best way possible to him, the work that came to hand, are things worth writing about (then I make no apology). His life in this world was full to the brim with happy interest. To life in 'the world to come' he looked forward quite simply and seriously, with the same happy interest, sure that all was well. It is good to have known him.

by Walter C Henderson. The Sydney Morning Herald 15 Jul, 1925.

Cuthbert’s optimistic outlook on life past and the love he shared with Flora still ongoing in the life yet to come, are inscribed on their headstone

After Many Days
Cuthbert Fetherstonhaugh
Mungerie Coonable
Passed on 10th June 1925
Aged 88 years

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward
Never doubted clouds would break
Never dreamed tho right were worsted
Wrong would triumph

and his wife Flora Agnes
Daughter of Captain John Murchison
5th November 1931, aged 87

Love is the joining of two souls on their way to God

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to descendents of Cuthbert: Jamie Hedger and Mandy Sheilds and to Wes Rogers (owner of Correagh) for their valuable family knowledge and assistance with research.

References

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