Beardy Street looking east: Armidale was still a small place when Drummond arrived in 1907, a city because of its two bishoprics.This is the thirteenth in a series on the history of the media and especially the newspaper press in New England, the sixth column on the emergence of the NSW Country Party
When seventeen year old David Drummond arrived in Armidale on that cold day in 1907, he had no idea that he would spend the rest of his life in the North, that twelve years later he would become involved in the formation of two political movements and would enter Parliament.
Armidale had been established in 1839 as the administrative capital of a pastoral district that stretched from the end of the Hunter Valley up into what would become Queensland. While its period as capital of this vast territory was brief, the city had developed into an important administrative, religious and education centre.
Despite its regional importance, Armidale was still a small place, classified as a city because of its two bishoprics, not because of its size. At the 1911 census, its population was just 4,738.
The lad’s first job was to run a small mixed farm on the outskirts of Armidale. The year had been dry, the farm overstocked, there was no feed on the place, and fodder was scarce and expensive:
“When I fed the stock well enough to keep them strong the owner - who appeared at weekends – growled when they had their ration reduced with resultant weakness he growled even more. It was the beginning of my education in the twin evils of drought and over-stocking.”
By the time Drummond
left the place the following autumn, he had the satisfaction of seeing the
sheds full of hay and maize, while the surviving stock were sleek and strong.
The next three years were spent on farms around Armidale and partly on a sheep station at Kingstown, south of Uralla. His working hours were always long and not without risk because of the inevitable accidents associated with farm work.
At one stage the lad was almost crippled when the draught horse he was unharnessing bolted, jamming him between the cart wheel and the shed post. The old horse temporarily obeyed an order to stop, allowing Drummond to slip free; "Verily a cat has nine lives but a Scotchman ten”, he wrote to his step mother Martha.
Drummond enjoyed the work and fitted in well with the Tablelands' small farming communities. He shared their Christian beliefs and absorbed their simple, cooperative outlook.
The Tablelands then produced considerable quantities of wheat and especially oats used as horse feed. Both crops were harvested by cooperative effort.
After being cut with a binder, they were stooked in the fields to dry and then built into round stacks. A contractor with teams of up to sixteen bullocks would bring a portable steam engine and large threshing machine onto the farms and thresh the grain.
The farmers in the area would then combine to supply a team of twenty to twenty-four men to carry out the threshing and later the chaff-cutting. The women from the farms would combine to cook and serve food.
Throughout his life, Drummond would support the idea of cooperatives and collective effort.
Note to readers: This post was prepared as a column for the on-line edition of the Armidale Express. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here 2017, here 2018, here 2019, here 2020
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