Bourke
Court house
Is a town and Local Government Area (see Bourke Shire) in the north of New South Wales, Australia. The town is located approximately 800 km northwest of Sydney, on the south bank of the Darling River. At the 2006 census, Bourke had a population of 2,145 and 815 or 33% of whom identified as Indigenous Australians.
History
The location of the current township of Bourke on a bend in the Darling River is the traditional country of the Ngemba people. The first white explorer to encounter the river was Charles Sturt in 1828 who named it after NSW Governor Ralph Darling. Having struck the region during an intense drought and a low river, Sturt dismissed the area as largely uninhabitable and short of any features necessary for establishing renewable industry on the land. It was not until the mid-1800s following a visit by colonial surveyor and explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell in 1835 that settlement of the area began. Following tensions with the local people Mitchell built a small stockade to protect his men and named it Fort Bourke after then Governor Richard Bourke. This first crude structure became the foundation for a fledgling community with a small number of agricultural and livestock farms established in the region shortly afterwards. The area truly started to flourish when its location on the Darling River had it recognised as a key trade centre, linking the nearby outback agricultural industries with the east coast trade routes via the Darling River. Bourke was surveyed for a town in 1869 and soon established itself as the outback trade hub of New South Wales with several transportation industries setting up branches in the town. By the 1880s Bourke would host a Cobb & Co. Coach Terminus,
A Camel caravan in Bourke circa 1900
several paddle boat companies running the Darling and a bridge crossing the river which would allow for road transportation into the town and by 1885 Bourke would be accessible by rail, confirming its position as a major inland transport hub. Like many outback Australian Townships, Bourke would come to rely on camels for overland transport, and the area supported a large Afghan community who had been imported to drive the teams of camels. A small Afghan mosque which dates back to the 1900s can still be found within Bourke cemetery today.
As trade moved away from river transport routes, Bourke’s hold on the inland trade industry began to relax. Whilst no longer considered a trade centre, Bourke serves instead as a key service centre for the states north western regions. In this semi-arid outback landscape, sheep farming along with some small irrigated cotton crops comprise the primary industry in the area today. Bourke’s traditional owners endured a similar fate to indigenous people across Australia. Dispossessed of their traditional country and in occasional conflict with white settlers, they battled a loss of land and culture and were hit hard by European disease. While the population of the local Ngemba and Barkindji people around the town of Bourke had dwindled by the late 19th century, many continued to live a traditional lifestyle in the region. Others found employment on local stations working with stock and found their skill as trackers in high demand. A large influx of displaced Aboriginal people from other areas in the 1940s saw Bourke’s indigenous community grow and led to the establishment of a reserve by the Aborigines Protection Board in 1946. The majority of indigenous settlers were Wangkumara people from the Tibooburra region. n 1962 local high jumper Percy Hobson became the first Aboriginal athlete to win a Commonwealth Games gold medal for Australia in Perth. The 5 ft. 10 in. tall Hobson jumped 13 inches above his height to win the event with a leap of 6 ft. 11 inches. While Hobson was urged by athletics administrators ‘not to broadcast
The unsealed Bourke-Wilcannia highway links the two towns.
his ancestry’, he was celebrated on his return to Bourke and greeted by a brass band playing “Hail the Conquering Hero”. Cathy Freeman was the next Aboriginal athlete to claim a Commonwealth Gold in Auckland in 1990. In Bourke today there are 21 different recognized indigenous language groups including Ngemba, Barkindji, Wangkumara and Murrawari.
Transportation
Bourke can be reached by the Mitchell Highway, with additional sealed roads from town to the north (Cunnamulla), east (towards Brewarrina, Moree and Goondiwindi) and south (Cobar). The town is also served by Bourke Airport and has Countrylink bus service to other regional centres, like Dubbo. It was also formerly the largest inland port in the world for exporting wool on the Darling River. The countryside around Bourke is used mainly for sheep farming with some irrigated fruit and cotton crops near the river. Bourke is the original end of the Main Western railway line, before the last section from Dubbo was closed to passengers. The station opened in 1885, and is currently in use as a tourist information office.
Cultural significance
Bourke is considered to represent the edge of the settled agricultural districts and the gateway to the Outback which lies north and west of Bourke. This is reflected in a traditional east coast Australian expression “back o’ Bourke”, referring to the Outback. In 1892 young writer Henry Lawson was sent to Bourke by Bulletin editor J.F. Archibald to get a taste of outback life and to try and curb his heavy drinking. In Lawson’s own words “I got £5 and a railway ticket from the Bulletin and went to Bourke. Painted, picked up in a shearing shed and swagged it
Telegraph Hotel established 1875, now Riverside Motel
for six months”. The experience was to have a profound effect on the 25 year old and his encounter with the harsh realities of bush life inspired much of his subsequent work. Lawson would later write “if you know Bourke you know Australia”. In 1992 eight poems, written under a pseudonym and published in the Western Herald, were discovered in the Bourke library archives and confirmed to be Lawson’s work.
Bush poets Harry Morant (the Breaker) and Will Ogilvie also spent time in the Bourke region and based much of their work on the experience. Bourke was mentioned in the trial of Bradley John Murdoch on November 24, 2005, as the place where murder victim Peter Falconio was allegedly seen, 8 days after his disappearance from near Barrow Creek, Northern Territory. Fred Hollows, the famous eye surgeon, was buried in Bourke after his death in 1993. Fred Hollows had worked in Bourke in the early 1970s and had asked to be buried there. The Telegraph Hotel, established in 1888 beside the Darling River, has been restored and now operates as the Riverside Motel. In 2008, persistently high levels of crime in Bourke led to bans on the sale of alcohol.
Media
The town is served by 7 FM and 2 AM stations, and 5 TV stations. The two local commercial radio stations are Rebel FM and The Breeze. Rebel FM broadcasts on 104.9 FM (MHz) with a new & classic rock music format. The Breeze broadcasts on 107.3 FM (MHz) with an easy adult contemporary & classics hits music format. Both stations are part of the Rebel Media group. There are two regional community radio stations based in Bourke. 2WEB broadcasts on 585 AM. 2CUZ FM is the regional Indigenous radio station in Bourke. It broadcasts locally on 106.5 FM. Both station broadcast to a myriad of communities in the region. The local paper, The Western Herald, is also published on a weekly basis (every Thursday) year-round, except during a short break at Christmas.
Back O Bourke Exhibition Centre
The Darling River from Bourke Wharf
The Back O’Bourke Exhibition Centre is nestled in a spectacular natural setting amongst the river red gums on the banks of the Darling River. The centre allows you to experience a journey through life in the back country; rediscovering the stories of Australia through modern eyes, taking you from the rich cultural history of the past through to the future of the Australian Outback. This world-class centre employs a series of interactive installations and stunning visual screen displays to immerse visitors with stories of the Australian Outback, bringing them to life and actively engaging visitors with the area’s rich history.
Engage and uncover stories of early exploration, the poets, local bushrangers, the grazing industry, Outback legends and conflicts. A modern gift shop and the Nardoo Café are part of the experience, enjoy a coffee overlooking the Darling floodplain and ponder your journey.
Seven days a week from 9am – 5pm. Great for Children. Ramp access available.
Substantial township on the Darling River in far western New South Wales.
Located 789 km north-west of Sydney, Bourke is situated on the Darling River 110 m above sea level. It is, by any measure, a thriving country town with a population around 3500 and a sense of prosperity which is the result of its geographic importance as the centre of a large wool, cotton and citrus area. The prosperity of the town belies the assessments of the first Europeans who travelled through the area. When Charles Sturt passed through the district in 1828 he thought that the whole area was ‘unlikely to become the haunt of civilised man’. Sturt, accompanied by Hamilton Hume, reached the Darling River (Sturt named the river after Sir Ralph Darling, Governor of NSW at the time) about 30 km north of the present town site and they followed the river downstream for about 100 km. They had arrived in the area during a period of drought and, although Sturt was to refer to the Darling as that ‘noble river’ he was to stop travelling down it because, at the time, it was saline and very low. He returned to Sydney with less that glowing reports of the area. Certainly he did nothing to encourage settlement.
Mosque in Bourke cemetery. 19th C Bourke was home to many Afghan camel keepers
It wasn’t until 1835 that Sir Thomas Mitchell returned to the area and constructed a fort about 13 km south of the town site. Mitchell had bad relations with the local Aborigines and he felt a fort was suitable protection against their attacks. It was named Fort Bourke after the governor of NSW, Sir Richard Bourke (1777-1855). Eventually the district and later the town came to be known by this name. Fort Bourke was short-lived but it did establish the possibility of settlement in the area and over the next decade pastoralists (some of them speculators) moved into the area. It was marginal land and few prospered. However the history of the district changed dramatically when, in 1859, Captain W. R. Randall sailed the Gemini up the Darling from South Australia. Suddenly Bourke and Brewarrina and other centres along the river became vital transport nodes. For decades Bourke was the transport centre for the whole of south west Queensland and western NSW. Its port was the only efficient way to transport wool to the coastal markets and at its height in the late 1800s over 40 000 bales of wool were being shipped down the Darling annually. The river transport continued until the last commercial riverboat in 1931.
In 1862 the township was surveyed and the first businesses – ‘Bourke Store’ and ‘Bourke’ Hotel – were established. That same year, the town’s first court case – a bushranging charge – was conducted in the open air. This was a boom time for the town with large landholdings being taken up by optimistic graziers. The unreliability of the rainfall – it averages 340 mm but is likely to vary from 150 mm one year to 800 mm the next – forced many of the optimists out of the area.
Things to see:
Historic Buildings
Sunday morning at the Bourke Bowls Club
There is so much to see of historical interest in Bourke. The town’s history is genuinely interesting and the places of historical importance have been well preserved. The common sense first stop should be at the Tourist Information Office in the 2WEB building in Oxley Street east of the Police Station. The Tourist Information Office provides an excellent brochure, complete with a detailed map, which highlights the town’s most interesting and important buildings. The most interesting buildings in Bourke include the ‘Lands Building’, now Government Offices, which was built between 1863-1865 as the town’s first Court House. It served the town for only a decade before the second court house was built in 1875. Today the first Court House has been beautifully restored and is one of the most attractive buildings in the town. It is located in Mitchell Street one block west of Richard Street.
One of the town’s most impressive buildings, and certainly one of the most photographed, is the Court House at 51 Oxley Street which was built in 1899 – a true Federation building. The Court itself, which is open for inspection, is beautifully preserved and has an appropriate air of solemnity. This Court House must be one of the first ‘project’ court houses in the country as it is almost identical to the Wagga Court House which the architect, Walter Vernon, designed at the same time. A little further down Oxley Street (the main street of town) is the Post Office which was built in 1879 with the upper floor being added some years later. It survived the 1890 flood (the town’s worst flood when the river broke its banks and the levees which had been built) by building its own levee bank. Much is made of the Carriers Arms Hotel (on the Mitchell Highway two blocks from Richard Street) in which Henry Lawson reputedly wrote some stories and which was a popular Cobb & Co stopoff point. Built in 1879, the building is now singularly unimpressive. When compared to the large number of old and interesting buildings in town it is a great disappointment.
Afghan Mosque/Bourke Cemetery
Bourke Cemetery has the graves of several Afghan camel drivers, as well as the corrugated-iron shack they used as a mosque. The local camel drivers once stationed over 2000 camels at a site just south of the town’s present showgrounds.
The Bourke Weir
The Back O Bourke Exhibition Centre
The Bourke Weir (it can be reached by driving west along Anson Street and following the signs) was opened in 1897 and was designed to maintain a reasonable level of water in the river near the town. The lock was nearly 60 metres long and 11 metres wide and was the only one built on the Darling. It was concreted and converted into a weir in 1941.
Mud Map Tours
The Mud Map Tours, a brochure which is freely available around the town, offers a number of suggested tours around the area. Of all these the short journey out to Fort Bourke Stockade is probably the most interesting. On the way out to the stockade stop at the cemetery (the section closest to town is the oldest) where there are a number of graves of Afghan camel drivers. They are easy to identify because, unlike the Christian graves, they are all pointing towards Mecca. About 50 metres further across is the grave of John McCabe, a local policeman who was shot by bushranger Captain Starlight in 1868. The highwayman was captured nearly three months later and held in Bourke where he was charged before being tried in Bathurst (see Enngonia for further details).
Fort Bourke Stockade
Ironically the trip out to Fort Bourke Stockade is actually more interesting than the reconstructed Stockade. About 15 km out of town the road passes around a wildlife refuge which is extraordinarily beautiful. The actual fort itself is nothing more than a few logs in the middle of nowhere. The argument, which is true, is that there is no accurate information about what Mitchell’s stockade looked like but it is reasonable to assume that it looked nothing like this re-creation which would barely hold a single man for half an hour and certainly wouldn’t have deterred the ‘hostile natives’ that Mitchell was so afraid of. There are seven mud maps in the brochure with trips around the town which range from fishing to wildflowers and a trip out through the cotton growing areas. The map relating to Midnight’s Grave is inaccurate (see Enngonia).
Wanaaring
Red Tailed Black Cockatoo
Located on the banks of the Paroo River,195 km north-west of Bourke, Wanaaring was established in the 1880s as a service centre to the surrounding stations, which it remains today. Yellowbelly and yabbies can be caught in the river and it is possible to visit a local bee farm. There is also a modest local golf course, along with a hotel/motel, a general store and a campsite.
Cobb & Co Heritage Trail
The historic inland coaching company, Cobb & Co, celebrates the 150th anniversary of its first journey in 2004 (and the 80th anniversary of its last, owing to the emergence of motorised transport). The trailblazing company’s contribution to Australia’s development is celebrated with the establishment of a heritage trail which explores the terrain covered on one of its old routes: between Bathurst and Bourke. Cobb & Co’s origins lay in the growing human traffic prompted by the goldrushes of the early 1850s. As the Heritage Trail website states: ‘The company was enormously successful and had branches or franchises throughout much of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Japan. At its peak, Cobb & Co operated along a network of tracks that extended further than those of any other coach system in the world its coaches travelled 28,000 miles (44,800km) per week and 6000 (out of their 30,000) horses were harnessed every day. Cobb & Co created a web of tracks from Normanton on the Gulf of Carpentaria and Port Douglas on the Coral Sea down to the furthest reaches of Victoria and South Australia in all, a continuous line of 2000 miles (3200km) of track over eastern Australia from south to north, with a total of 7000 miles (11,200km) of regular routes’ (see http://www.cobbandco.net.au).
Darling River at Bourke
As a major terminus on the coach line, Bourke has many Cobb & Co sites. These include the blacksmith’s workshop and residence in Oxley St, which are largely unchanged. The workshop still bears the soot of its working days and a 19th-century grapevine can be seen by the house. The Carriers Arms Hotel (1879) was once a booking office for the coach service to Hungerford and Queensland and the old company foreman’s residence can still be found in Hope St. Other extant buildings thought to be connected to Cobb & Co are the Fitzgerald Hotel (1888) in Oxley St, the post office (1879), the Telegraph Hotel (now the Riverside Motel) and Bourke Cemetery. Other Cobb & Co related buildings have disappeared, such as Richardson & Bennett’s wagon and coach factory, which became the Cobb & Co stables, Sam Doughty’s livery stable, the City Coach & Buggy Works, and the Steam Coach and Wagon Factory. Furrther afield are such sites as the remains of the Dry Lake Hotel, the Warrego Pub (built on the site of the Salmon Ford Pub, which was once a Cobb & Co change station), Mount Oxley, where there was once a changing station (and where it is now possible to camp with a key and permit from the Bourke Information Centre), the North Bourke Billabong, where distinguished coach driver, Billy Armstrong, died after overturning his coach, the North Bourke Bridge (the second lift bridge in NSW), the ruins of the old changing station at Curraweena, the former site of the Pink Hills Pub, Wanaaring (which once received a Cobb & Co coach each week), Wangamanna Station, where Cobb & Co once obtained camels to pull their coaches during a drought, and Yantabulla changing station.
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