Bundarra

The surrounding country, originally home to the Anaiwan tribe of Aborigines, was first occupied by Europeans when Edward Clerk and John Rankin took up a large parcel of land on the Gwydir River several kilometres south of the present township of Bundarra. Clerk and Rankin, who had recently purchased the squattage of Carlyle’s Gully, near Walcha, from William Carlyle, arrived there with their flock in 1836 to find the ground covered in snow. With their sheep and cattle starving, they decided to seek greener and less exposed pastures further west. They packed their belongings onto two bullock drays and by the spring of 1836 had found what they were seeking on the banks of the Gwydir River. Clerk and Rankin formed their head station on a pretty little tributary which they named Clerk’s Creek. Two rudimentary huts were built by splitting slabs for the walls and stripping large sheets of stringybark from nearby trees for the roof. Clerk and Rankin called their new home ‘Bundarrah’, from the Aboriginal name for the kangaroos which grazed in large numbers under the tall trees of the Gwydir.

The area of the run was vast. It extended from the Big River, as that part of the Gwydir was then known, to the Macintyre River, covering roughly 179,000 acres of land. Rankin built a homestead on the northern part of the run, which he named Newstead, while Clerk retained the southern portion known as ‘Bundarrah’. By the early-1840s, Rankin had sold Newstead; Clerk, however, had resolved to make Bundarrah his permanent home and in 1841 built a homestead for he and his young wife, Mary. He called the station ‘Clerkness’, and in time the name Bundarrah was dropped in favour of this more personal nomenclature.

Clerkness was a very successful run; by 1848, it consisted of 66,000 acres and carried more than 16,000 sheep. The homestead itself was situated on the Great Northern Road, and as Inverell was opened up to European settlement, Clerkness became a main stopping point for the ever-increasing number of travellers heading north. This severely taxed the resources of the homestead, which only received supplies once a year when wool was taken south to be shipped to England. Not one to miss an opportunity, Clerk responded by building an inn next to his homestead in 1846. Later he also opened a store, for which Mary was largely responsible. These, along with the blacksmith’s shop which Clerk had established for his own needs, formed the nucleus of the Bundarra township.

In 1849, the Assistant Surveyor, John James Galloway, drew up plans for Bundarra showing a house and an inn on Clerkness Station; several years later, a post office was opened. Further surveys were carried out in 1855, this time on the southern side of the Gwydir directly opposite Clerk’s homestead and inn. Like so much of Bundarra’s early development, the Clerks played a vital role in bringing the Church of England to the village in 1857. In that year, a small slab building was erected to provide a place of worship for Bundarra’s mostly Anglican population; the Clerks donated its furniture and a surplice and caddock for the priest. They also provided clergymen with accommodation until a vigarage was built on land donated by Edward Clerk. A Catholic church was built in 1862, but it would be another nineteen years before Bundarra received a resident priest. By this time, there was even a race course in the town and, according to one local, the first race meeting in 1857 was held with ‘great whoop-ee’. In 1869, the Bundarra Public School was opened with an enrolment of about 30 students.

Bundarra’s natural position as a stopover on the Great Northern Road was reflected in its concentration on the service industry; by 1875, there were three ‘apparently thriving inns’ with another on the way, four ‘large’ stores and ‘a very respectable’ courthouse. The telegraph line, opened in 1874, was said to be ‘a very great convenience to the neigbourhood’, and for several years now the Cobb and Company coach service had been making twice-weekly stops at Bundarra on its run between Bendemeer and Inverell. ‘The great want now’, according to the Town and Country Journal, ‘is a bridge over the Gwydir’. The river frequently flooded, and as a result ‘mails have been delayed for days and weeks, boats have been lost and lives too’. In 1879, the New South Wales government responded by constructing a 210-metre long bridge across the Gwydir. It was opened two years later by Mary Clerk, whose husband had died in 1876.

Bundarra experienced the same difficulties as other country towns during the depression and drought of the 1890s, and throughout these years many pastoral properties in the upper Gwydir changed hands. There was some relief with intermitent mining activity in the surrounding regions, and although Bundarrra was by the beginning of the twentieth century largely self-supporting with it own flour mill, bakers’ shops and butcher, Bundarra itself never fully recovered form the crisis. The situation was made worse by the arrival of the motor car, which, by diminishing the limitations of distance, effectively destroyed Bundarra’s prime function as a stopover point for weary travellers on the Great Northern Road.

Today Bundarra, with a population of about 300 people, remains a small service centre for the surrounding district, although many of its residents now commute to the larger nearby cities, especially Armidale and Inverell. Its annual show, established during the town’s heydey in the 1870s, is still held in January each year.

Related Bodies:
Clerkness Station

Related People:

References:
Town and Country Journal (20 November 1875); Inverell Times (20 April 1951); Golden Horizens: Supplement to the Inverell Times (28 February 1972); Claire Schofield, Bundarra: Stepping Stone of the Gwydir (Inverell: Regional Printers, 1979).