Wrightville
Wrightville was a mining village in the Orana region of New South Wales, Australia. Once it was a significant settlement, with its own municipal government, public school, convent school, post office, police station, four hotels, and railway connection. At its peak, around 1907, its population probably reached 2,000 people. Its site and that of the adjacent former village of Dapville are now an uninhabited part of Cobar.
Location
Wrightville was located on the road to Hillston, about four kilometers south-east of Cobar. This road is now known as Kidman Way. The northernmost part of the village straddled the main road to Hillston, but the bulk of Wrightville lay to the south and west of that main road. The branch railway, after it turned south from the road to Hillston, ran just outside the eastern edge of the village.On the eastern edge of the village, toward its southern end, was the Occidental Gold Mine, and to the village's north-east, the Chesney Mine. Less well known mines in the area were the Gladstone Mine, in the north-west of the village, Mount Pleasant Mine, just east of the village, and the Young Australian Mine, also just east of the village but a little further south. The irregular shape of the village's ground plan was defined, in a large part, by the presence of these five mine sites, which constrained where the village could be located.
The area of the neighbouring village of Dapville lay to Wrightville's north, on both sides of the Hillston road. Dapville was bounded, in the north and north-west by mining lands of the Great Cobar mine, and to the east by Fort Bourke Hill and the Cobar Gold Mine, continuing south towards the Chesney Mine. At its southern end, Dapville adjoined Wrightville, and the Hillston road passed through both villages.
History
Aboriginal occupation
The area that later became Wrightville lies within the traditional lands of Wangaaypuwan dialect speakers of Ngiyampaa people, referred to in their own language as Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan. The local people collected pigments from mineral outcrops on Fort Bourke Hill, near the future site of Dapville, the adjacent village to Wrightville.Mining village
The Cobar area is most commonly associated with copper mining, but a line of mines, which were primarily for gold, stretch way from the town to its south, from Fort Bourke Hill to as far as just beyond a landform known as 'The Peak'. Although it would later become a copper mine, the first of these gold mines was the Chesney Mine, opened in 1887. The Occidental Mine was working by mid-1889. These gold mines gave rise to Wrightville and its neighbouring village Dapville, which seems to have been largely a suburb of Wrightville.In the days before motorised road transport, miners had to live close to their work, and it is likely that some form of informal settlement began to take shape close to the mines. By 1892, the Occidental Mine was described as the "leading mine on the field," and it was clear that it was going to have a relatively long and productive life.
The Village of Wrightville was proclaimed on 27 November 1895, and allotments in the village were on sale by December 1897. The new village began life at a time when Cobar, a mere 4 km away, was in decline following the slowdown of copper mining there. Initially, the new village grew quickly; its population was around 800, in 1898, reached 1,242 by 1901, and around 1,500 by 1903.
One reported explanation of the village's name is that Wrightville was named after Jabez Wright. He was a carpenter, undertaker, trade union official and Labor alderman of Broken Hill, later its mayor and, from 1913, a colourful and somewhat eccentric Labor member of the NSW Legislative Assembly. However, Jabez Wright did not have much to do with the Cobar district, until he became a parliamentarian and represented the area, and that was many years after the village had been named. A more likely explanation is that the village was named after another 'J. Wright', Joseph Wright, proprietor of Wright's Cobar Hotel and a mining entrepreneur. Joseph Wright was one of three men who had pegged a claim, in 1876, over the area that became the Occidental Mine. He was a director of the Chesney Mine and took out mining leases over what became the Albion Mine, later the north portion of the area combined into the Occidental Mine. The Albion struck a rich lode early in 1895. Wrightville was virtually a company town for the surrounding mines, the two largest being the Occidental and the Chesney, so naming the village after Joseph Wright seems more probable.
The population probably peaked, possibly reaching around 2000, in 1907. However, by mid 1909, it was reported that the population was "decreasing, and instead of being as a few years ago a thriving and busy centre, we are now simply a struggling village, with little or no hope of a future return to prosperity. Then how are we, a mere handful of rate-payers, going to maintain a costly sanitary system?" This was in regard to epidemics of infectious disease, which were a part of life in mining towns at the time.In 1911, the village had a population of 1,568. It had four hotels Tattersall's Hotel, destroyed by fire in 1903 but rebuilt, the Family Hotel, the Young Australia Hotel, and the Chesney Hotel.
The village had a public school, specified to be erected "on a site midway between Wrightville and The Peak", from May 1897; it was expanded in 1899. There was also a Catholic convent school, St. Columba's School, run by the Sisters of Mercy, from February 1905. The sisters lived in Cobar and rode to and from the convent school each day by horse bus.
Wrightville had Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist churches. In 1912, Presbyterian church services were held in a hall that was also used for other purposes, including boxing matches. It had a St John's Ambulance brigade, with a bicycle ambulance in 1904. From late 1913, the village had the 'Wrightville Picture Company' showing motion pictures. There was also a town band. In late 1909, a soda fountain was open for business.
The village had its own branch of the Amalgamated Miners' Association, a trade union representing mine workers, which had a 'Benefits Section' to financially aid families of members who had been injured or killed at work. Mining was a dangerous occupation; the accident rate for Cobar district miners, in 1912, was 109.3 accidents per 1,000 workers. There were fatal accidents at the Occidental Mine in 1896, 1901, 1904, and 1913, resulting in a total of at least five deaths at the mine; all those fatal accidents involved blasting work in the open cut section of the mine. The Chesney mine had fatalities in 1898, 1906, 1908, and 1916, resulting in a total of at least five deaths at the mine. Accident victims who survived were sometimes left with life-altering injuries.
In keeping with the then widely-prevailing racism within the labour movement and the 'White Australia policy', the union branch rules specifically excluded from its membership,"Asiatics and other coloured aliens" but, in a somewhat more progressive stance, added a qualification that, "This shall not apply to Aborigines, Maoris, American Negroes, or children of mixed marriages born in ''Australasia''".
The main road through the village, Hunt Street, was a wide thoroughfare. Other streets of the village were Albion, Dan, Chesney, Kenane, Meryula, Peak, Ryan, William, Cobar, Occidental, Pleasant, and Young streets, and West and East parades.
The miners' houses in the village, typically, were simple structures constructed of inexpensive and readily-available materials. The village had a police station. The police presence in Wrightville in 1912 was only one constable, in 1912. It had a post office, from 1897.
Building fires were a part of life in the village; once lit there was little that could be done to extinguish such a fire. A fire preceded the spectacular explosion of the explosives magazine at the Great Cobar Mine, on 25 January 1908. A fire at the post office, in 1901, was alleged to have been a deliberate attempt to cover embezzlement by the postmaster. Some boys of the village were involved in dangerous behaviour and vandalism.
From October 1901 to September 1931, Wrightville had a railway connection, The Peak branch railway line, which despite its name—officially Cobar to Peak railway—and the original plan, never extended to The Peak. It ran from a junction on the Cobar railway line, just east of Cobar, to a siding at the Occidental Mine. On its way toward Wrightville, the line had two separate sidings, for the Great Cobar and Chesney mines. The railway ran down the main road of the village, Hunt Street, before curving away to the south, then forming the eastern edge of the village, to reach the mine. There was a freight loading location and goods shed near the Mount Pleasant mine site—sometimes called 'Mount Pleasant' and sometimes 'Wrightville'—not far from where the line left the main road; it was used by Wrightville, as well as mines and further along the main road, such as at The Peak and Illewong. There was some talk of an extension of the railway from Wrightville to Nymagee, via Illewong and Shuttleton, but it would never be built.
The village had no passenger rail service—Wrightville residents' hopes for a railway station in the centre of the village were never realised—but it did have a horse bus service to Cobar. People, on occasion, did hitch a ride on freight trains. Operation of the railway through the village's main street was hazardous. On 8 April 1913, as a horse bus crossed the railway line, a train emerged from a cutting that led to the Chesney Mine and struck the horses, killing them and the bus driver. The passengers on the horse bus all survived.
The water supply for the village, in a semi-arid area, was an important issue, from the earliest days of the village. In 1914, the village had a population of 1,400, and water was fed to a stand pipe in the village, in limited quantity, from Cobar; the village could not bear the cost of installing a reticulated water supply connected to the larger Cobar water supply network. The water supply remained a constant issue, with the village's householders primarily reliant upon their own rainwater tanks, and Wrightville's communal 'tank', a small dam which captured rainwater.
Especially in times of drought, the precarious water supply and inadequate sanitation led to serious outbreaks of typhoid fever. Droughts also affected operation of the mines, which consumed large amounts of water, leading to serious unemployment in the area, during the Federation Drought.
Paradoxically, there was a continuously flowing watercourse through the village. Its source was the mine water pumps of the Chesney Mine. A footbridge was built across it, in 1912, at the eastern end of Occidental Street, so that children going to the public school did not need to wade through it or walk along the railway to cross it. In 1907, mine water, from the dewatering of the Mount Pleasant and Young Australia mines, had flowed over the village's cricket oval and the part of the village near to the Occidental mine. Unfortunately, mine water was unsuitable for human consumption, but the dam, or 'tank', of the Chesney mine did serve as the venue of a swimming carnival in 1921.
On 25 April 1916, the village celebrated 'Anzac Night', a first commemoration of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli a year earlier. At least thirteen men from the village had gone to war, by mid 1916, and more recruits were sought. Soon after the war's end, in July-August 1919, the village was struck by the Spanish influenza pandemic, during the second and more lethal wave of the pandemic in Australia. It may have experienced a relatively mild strain of the disease. For whatever reason, Wrightville seems not to have been badly impacted, which was in stark contrast to another mining settlement in the region, Canbelego, where the outcome was devastating.
A prominent early resident of Wrightville was reformed bushranger, Patrick Daley. He was a cousin of the bushranger, John O'Meally, and one of the few survivors of the Gardiner-Hall gang. Most of the others, including O'Meally, met violent deaths, or were hanged, by the end of 1865. Daly had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison, with hard labour, for his crimes, in 1863. He received a remission of his sentence and was released early, in 1873. In 1882, he married Mary Kelly, and subsequently came to the Cobar district, where her family were landholders. After Wrightville was established, he settled there. He worked as a mail contractor, he owned the Family Hotel, and, in 1904, was elected as an alderman of the municipality. Upon his death, in 1914, he left an estate valued at around £6,000, consisting of hotels, mining shares and cottages.