Mr Thomson’s selection

One of the odd byways of my of squatting landscapes in the Canberra region is the case of the selection of William Ferguson Thomson.

On the 13th October 1862 Leopold De Fane Salis leasee of the Cuppacumbalong squatting run (situated on the west bank of the Murrumbidgee river near the current village of Tharwa)  wrote to the Chief Commissioner of Crown lands complaining of that a William Thomson had selected land on his run right where one of the lots de Salis had applied for as part of his pre-emptive right was located. 

Thompson was a married man who had worked for de Salis in 1861. Indeed de Salis was summoned to Court by Thompson’s previous employer Pemberton C. Palmer under the Masters and Servants Act for allegedly inducing Thompson to breach his employment contract with Palmer.  From the account of the court case in the  Queanbeyan Age and General Advertiser  (27 Jun 1861: 2) it seems Thomson was trying to improve his circumstances by raising stock (on a system of half share with Palmer) as well as cultivating land. A dispute with Palmer about pigs seems to have resulted in Thompson leaving.

Thomson’s application was made on 4th September 1862 and his address was gardener at Cuppacumbalong. This address immediately raises the prospect that Thomson was “dummying” for de Salis. except for de Salis’s outrage and that the de Salis family did not begin extensive dummy selections until the 1870s.

There appears to have been some confusion in the Lands Department concerning whether Thompson had selected some of de Salis’s pre-emptive purchase. A note on the folio comments that “by the application”... and the maps we have” that the application is for land beyond de Salis’s land (18th October 1862). A second note mentions “Since writing the above Mr de Salis has called and says that it is within the above section”. In a second letter dated 18th October 1862, de Salis claims that despite Thompson’s description in his application of land “more than a mile distant”, Thompson had in fact occupied the pre-emptive land.

The advice to the Surveyor General from the Lands Office was that they agreed with de Salis and that the Surveyor be authorised to withdraw Thomson’s conditional purchase and the Police Inspectorate was authorised to move him however the Surveyor General requested the District Surveyor to measure the land and proceed from there.

Licenced Surveyor Thompson was urgently directed to survey the land on the 27th November 1862 but didn't get around to it. William Thomson wrote to the Lands Department requested that the description of the land be amended so that it didn't intrude on de Salis’s land. This seems to have been done as can be seen on the plan of Portion 22 which was surveyed in September 1864 by which time it seems Thomson  had abandoned the selection.

The land remained a portion until 1883 when Licenced Survey Lester accidently included it in Portion 115 and the portion had to be obliterated at Lester's cost.

I have georeferenced the original plan and overain modern drainage and contours.

You can see that both Thomson and De Salis were occupying flats adjacent to the river with steeper ground behind.

Apart from a mention in a court case in 1869 nothing more is known of Thomson.

Sunny Corner plan

Following on from my earlier post here is a plan of the Sunny Corner site.

Digitising Naas

Over the last two weeks I have returned again to the work I originally did for my thesis on squatting landscapes. I was always unhappy with how my analysis of the landscape worked out feeling that with Geographical Information Systems I should have been able to do more. in the end my GIS analysis was pretty pathetic.

However twelve years on (is it that long???) I am up and digitising Parish maps again and trying to make the Parish maps fit the topography of the area. This time instead of digitising paper maps with a special machine in a room at Uni  I am sitting in the office digitising scanned images of the Parish Plans using ArcGIS on my computer. I also have digital data for the ACT landscape in the form of contours and watersheds …etc. If things need to be clarified most Crown Lands can be ordered on line and delivered in about 5 min (I did this on Saturday night).

Things are progressing I have now got the Parishes of Tharwa and Naas done so I am about 1/3 the way through.  

(above is a section of the Parish of Naas)

One of the other things I can do now is search some of the selectors in the Australian Newspapers so once I finished Naas I searched some of the selectors like James Patrick Tong. He turns out to be Irish and to have has several court cases which are fully reported in the Queanbeyan papers giving colour to the people whose properties I have digitised.

Sunny despite the rain

Well after several days solid work (spread out over 6 months) I have finished the search of the Digitised Australian Newspapers for information regarding the Sunny Corner Silver mine. I have clipped the information into a MS Word document which is 111 pages and has 63,959 words! Supporting this is another smaller document on Mitchell’s Creek (the name Sunny Corner had prior to silver being discovered) plus two largish files of Mines Department Records. Downloaded from DIGS.

There was an earlier history of Sunny Corner by Vicki Powys published in 1989 (Powys 1989). It is an excellent historical study. However since Powys research, the on-line revolution has arrived. So much hitherto hidden or difficult to research information has become available on-line.

When I did my first research in late 2008 I had access to Powys book and the Mines Department Records (via DIGS). The digital Australian Newspapers project was only just beginning meaning that I got some accounts of Sunny Corners that were reprinted in the Courier Mail. Last year, when I started this current research, I decided to search the digitised Australian Newspapers systematically and comprehensively as hundreds of papers had been added. Notable among these were the Sydney Morning Herald, the Town and Country Journal and the Bathurst Free Press which covered Sunny Corner.

Newspapers have been available for historians for many years but the difficulty has always been the immense task of systematically searching the newspapers for items of interest to a particular topic. The searchable Australian Newspapers allows a detailed searching of available newspapers so that general topics such as “silver smelting” can be searched as well as “Sunny Corner” or more specifically individuals like “John LaMonte”. This tool has transformed historical research by allowing a more systematic search across a number of publications in seconds.

Supporting such research is also the invaluable Google and the less known Internet Archive which contains numerous on-line copies of old manuals on arcane topics but which tell much about the process of silver smelting and other methods of processing silver-lead and zinc ore prior to the invention of froth floatation.

The Challenge

The challenge now is to turn these words into some form of understanding of Sunny Corner and the mining that occurred there in a reasonable number of words without getting bogged down in the detail.

Experimenting with location

I am experimenting with adding the location of a post to this page.

Here is a picture of a slightly belligerent seagull at Cockatoo Island.(taken November 2007)

This is a good approach although it is difficult to pin point exactly where the seagull was.

The Bing Map is at its max zoom in and it is really difficult to insert the pushpin.

As I edit the posts using Windows Live it will only accept MS’s silly Bing maps (have you ever heard of a sillier name?). Anyway the experiments continue.

The Cannon that isn't the one at Yeppoon

Following on from the previous posts showing a 6” Breach loading Armstrong gun on a hydro-pneumatic carriage, I thought I’d tell a bit of the story of the cannon that features in the Yellow Pages add. The add shows a cannon inspector inspecting a large gun and commenting that “one of these went off at Yeppoon a few years back”.

The gun being measured is one of two 1867 Armstrong RML guns on the foreshore at Williamstown (there are two more at Fore Gellibrand). RML stands for rifled muzzle loader and therein lies the story.

Newcastle (UK) industrialist and inventor William Armstrong was inspired by reports from the Crimean War to develop improvements to British artillery. There are three major improvements attributed to Armstrong; the use of rifling, breach loading and the “build up” method of construction using wrought iron hoops. These produced a lighter more accurate artillery piece and Armstrong’s weapons were tested and adopted in the period 1855-58. 

The original weapons were smaller pieces such as 40 pounders but despite some misgivings about the forces involved Armstrong was persuaded to make 110 pounders for the Royal Navy without trials.    

During the bombardment of these fortifications at Kagoshima in 1862 some of the Royal Navy’s Armstrong guns suffered from the breach mechanism failing.

By this time some improvements were made in shells which facilitated the muzzle loading of rifled guns and Palliser developed a method for inserting wrought iron rifled barrels into old cast iron cannon converting them into rifled muzzle loaders so the Armstrong breach loader was discontinued and Armstrong produced RML weapons from his factory at Elserwick. He produced some very large weapons indeed probably reaching the limits of what was practical using gunpowder and wrought iron.

Here is one of the Williamstown guns in all its glory.

But lacking any real context.

It is easy for the “Battlefield Archaeologist” when the manufacturer puts so much information on the weapon.

The Armstrong guns mounted on the H-P mountings were a generation on from the RML’s they had a new improved breach mechanism and were made from steel.

Steel? Well in the 1850’s steel making on a large scale only had just been developed with the development of the Bessemer converter but a decade or more was needed to develop a steel that would take the stresses in artillery tubes so the original Armstrong guns were wrought iron.   

More Taiaroa Head

The breach of the Disappearing Gun was working so I borrowed Janes camera and took some video of the guide (and I think Neville Ritchie) operating the breech.

Closing the breech

Locking

The development of a successful breech mechanism was the key to development of modern artillery. Armstrong’s original breech-loaders exploded at the Battle of Kagoshima in 1862 (part of my Japanese work) setting back development several decades. I thought showing the breech on a later gun might be of interest.