From Africa's Great Lakes to Mingoola's Field of Dreams

For those who do not know the series, Australian Story is a weekly ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) TV production that for many years has showcased a different aspect of Australian life. The stories are personal and often inspirational. A Field of Dreams (7 November 2016) was one of the best.

The story reminds us that at times when problems seem so big, so insoluble, individual action can help at least some.

Mingoola lies 57 km  (35.4 miles) west from Tenterfield along the Bruxner Highway very near the Queensland border. This is  farming country, pretty country, some of Northern New England's best.

The Glenlyon Dam with its water sports and a tourist park lies 16km from Mingoola across the Queensland border. The Sundown National Park with spectacular sharp ridges and steep-sided gorges is 12km from Mingoola. Here the Severn River and its tributaries, woodland birds and the remains of pastoral and mining heritage can be discovered via maintained walking tracks or challenging remote walks.

Despite these attractions, Mingoola had a problem. The community was dying.

CHRISTINE DENIS, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Mingoola for lots of years has been an ageing community so we’ve got lots of older people but we don’t have many younger people and the community is poorer without them.
JULIA HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Maybe it's a bit of a sense of history, you don't wish to see a community die. And there’s a lot of rural communities dying. And the life of any community is largely tied to children. There’s not much joy in a place with no children

Population loss in New England's rural communities has been a problem for many years. In Mingoola's case, the problem was compounded by the closure of the tobacco growing industry that had stretched from Ashford to the border. You can still see signs of the industry today in the drying sheds, painted letter boxes and (I think that it still survives) a bocce court next to the Mingoola Hall.

CHRISTINE DENIS, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Lots of migrants came for seasonal work. Some of them found it very difficult to fit in. And some of the locals found it very difficult to understand why these people had come. But eventually .... an harmonious community came out of it. Everybody seemed to be prospering well. But the industry died.

Tobacco brought many Italians as workers and sharefarmers. Their children attended the Mingoola School. There were some integration problems, but things worked out. With the ending of the tobacco industry, many left although some like the Zappa family stayed, acquiring land and moving into new industries such as wine. As people left, it became harder and harder to maintain community activities, to find the seasonal labour for the farms.

BOB SOUTH, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Fifty years ago there was a dance in the hall here once a month and there was one in a wool shed up the road once a month, you know, there was a great social life. That social life has changed.  

Three years ago, the Mingoola Progress Association decided to try to turn things around. Drawing from the region's immigration past, they decided to look for refugees willing to move to the area.

JULIA HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: The Mingoola community felt very strongly that we'd welcomed people before, historically. And most people were really happy at the idea of welcoming people again.

They struck brick walls.

JULIA HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Then we started thinking we might be able to find some refugees who'd be happy to come and live in the valley. But every time I contacted any kind of refugee service they all said, oh no, you know, these people need to stay in the city.
CHRISTINE DENIS, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: They need lots of counselling, lots of language support, they needed more than we had. So we had to find families that had been in Australia for long enough to be feeling OK about perhaps moving

This business of need for adequate support services for refugees has become a major difficulty that actively impedes families moving to country areas . The need to provide adequate (ie modern) housing and support services can actually place refugees in situations where they have good housing and support services but are isolated from the surrounding community without access to work. This can be an especial problem for those from farming communities without experience of urban living.

At the end of 2015, the Mingoola position went critical. The small local school had gone into recess and would close permanently if the minimum number of students could not be found by April 2016. 

THOMAS GEORGE, LOCAL MP: The community was shattered because that’s the hub of Mingoola, the hall and their school. It really affected Julia but she wasn’t taking it lying down and she was going to lead the community in trying to have that school re-opened. I thought, ‘Well, good on you Julia’, but I didn’t know how she was going to do it.

Unknown to the Mingoola team, Sydney refugee advocate Emmanuel Musoni had a problem. He and his organisation, the Great Lakes Agency for Peace and Development International (GLAPD), were grappling with problems in the community from Central Africa displaced from Rwanda and neighbouring countries during years of bitter civil war. The majority had rural backgrounds.   

"If you ask them, 'What was your dream when you applied to come to Australia and boarded the plane,' they say, 'We hoped we were going to be put in the countryside, to connect ourselves with agricultural life and have a garden'," Mr Musoni said. 

Instead they were resettled in cities where employment prospects were few, the environment was intimidating and many became depressed and isolated.

In 2014, Musoni and his colleagues had a discussion with Minister Concetta Fravanti-Wells, then assistant minister for multicultural affairs, about improvement of settlement services for their communities. People wanted to move to regional cities and towns because their background was mostly in agriculture and farming.  The group was asked if their people "could actually live and work on farm by doing farming jobs and the answer was yes."  They were asked to prepare a policy paper which they submitted in 2015.

There matters rested for the moment. However, one of Minister Concetta Fravanti-Wells' advisers, Isobel Brown, was struck by the conversation. When Julia Harpham contacted the office of Member for New England Barnaby Joyce,  they knew of Isobel Brown's interest in resettlement and asked her if she could help the residents of Mingoola. Isobel then put Julia in contact with Emmanuel Musoni.

On 26 January 2016,  a team of six selected from various Great Lakes communities visited Mingoola. There they met community members, the Mayor of Tenterfield Shire and local Lismore MP Thomas George. GAPD was invited to present to a meeting of Tenterfield Shire Council on 24 February. The presentation was a considerable success.

Meanwhile, time was of the essence if the school was to be saved. Agreement was reached between Mr Musoni and the Mingoola Progress Association on a timetable for settling three families by the end of April 2016. There were some reservations.

On housing:

CHRISTINE DENIS, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Around the district there were lots of small cottages that hadn’t been lived in for a long time and were crying out for somebody to do something to them.

JULIA HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: We went to look at the houses and I was totally embarrassed because the houses were in great need of repainting. There was quite a lot of work that needed to be done in the kitchens. But, they were totally unfazed by that.

Julia: We’re thinking if we put a verandah on, on the side as well. But as you can see.

Emmanuel: How about an outside kitchen?

Julia: Yeah, well they really wanted an outside kitchen.

Emmanuel: That’s an African thing, yeah. 

Julia: They love the outside kitchen

On jobs:

BOB SOUTH, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Philip and Julia went ahead and pushed this quite quickly and, you know, they’re compassionate people going at it from the heart. But a lot of people in the area were concerned about the lack of employment. I think the biggest fear we had was we would be introducing the people into a poverty trap. I know one of my neighbours has said that bringing these people in has the potential, if it falls apart, to set neighbour against neighbour and have people who’ve been friends for years opposed to each other and we don’t want that to happen.

On not going back:

THOMAS GEORGE, LOCAL MP: I was brought up in a household that didn’t speak English. I did say, look, coming from the migrant background that I’d come from, I wanna raise a few realities to you. First of all, if you don’t like it here you just can’t walk down the road and catch a bus and get away from here. You know, you’re in a remote area. They said ‘We are African. We know.’

A call was put out seeking families who might be willing to make the move; while the community began renovating the vacant cottages. Within a week, there were 50 families on the waiting list.

JULIA HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: I don’t think we ever really in our wildest dreams expected these people would really want to come so much and want to come so quickly, to get out of the city. Emmanuel came back with the first two families who put their names down. They arrived the day before Anzac Day. One family was staying with us because their house wasn’t ready. I did note that there were a lot of children in these families. I thought well there’s a good thing.

The first families who came had troubled stories:

JULIA HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Renata and Isaac had nine kids. Fainess and Jonathan have seven. 

PHILIP HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: I think that a lot of these people had a very difficult past, because of the trauma they’ve seen. So we don’t ask them. We just don’t ask. 

ISAAC ICIMPAYE: My name is Isaac, I come from Burundi.

ISAAC ICIMPAYE (SUBTITLED): My dad and my mum passed away and my brother passed away when I was already in the refugee camp. They killed him and threw him in the forest.

RENATA NTIHABOSE (SUBTITLED): Yes, that’s what happened to me too. I lost my two brothers. Yes, they got killed.

FAINESS KABURA: When they come to kill people we just hide there. If you’re hiding together with your family they can kill all the family. I was with my brother. When we are hearing people scream something. And my mother died. So yeah.

JONATHAN KANANI: Yeah, freedom. Yeah. And the peace. That’s why I think I’m excited to come and live here, yeah. 

Three families have now settled at Mingoola. They have found seasonal work in woolsheds and picking pumpkins previously done by backpackers.

PAUL MAGNER, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: We’d been using backpackers but in the last few months, we’ve been employing the couple of African refugee families with picking pumpkins and a little bit of time in the wool shed work. They’re doing a good job

THOMAS GEORGE, LOCAL MP: So there may not be long-term full-time employment, however there’s long-term seasonal employment. 

PHILIP HARHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: And these people do enjoy working. And they're very keen to see their children succeed.

And they have gardens, really close to their own small farms:

NADINE SHEMA, COMMUNITY ADVOCATE: For the families who have moved having a garden helped them to heal from their depression and all the trauma that they had. It was like, going back to their roots, I think.

EMMANUEL MUSONI, COMMUNITY ADVOCATE: Renata said that it had been more than 16 years since she had a garden.

JULIA HARPHAM, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: Renata and Fainess have probably hoed up more than a hectare, maybe two. You know, like, it's just incredible how much garden they've managed to produce in three months.

And the school has reopened, now featuring its new pupils.

Things are never perfect. Mingoola can take just four families and there are now 150 Great Lakes families on the waitlist. Mingoola has worked because there was a local need and local commitment.

CHRISTINE DENIS, MINGOOLA RESIDENT: We were feeling a bit of pressure, a bit of responsibility that if these people were going to make their lives up here we had to make the whole project work.  

Like their predecessors, most of the new children at Mingoola School will need to leave for further study and work. But they will do so knowing that they are part of a community in a new country. That's no small thing.

Meantime, the hard graft of maintaining the Mingoola community continues.

This photo is Mingoola Hall on election day in the 1920s. Now from the Mingoola Community Facebook Page:

Vote at Mingoola on Election Day!! We have the Polling Booth back but will lose it again if it's not supported......

A little later:

74 people voted at Mingoola - good work guys!!

And so the work goes on!

Sources:

In addition to the links given above, majour sources are:

• Great Lakes Agency for peace and Development website
• 2 March 2016, ABC Newcastle,  Congolese refugee calls for overhaul of re-settlement services in Australia
• 7 November 2016, Greg Hassall, ABC News, African refugees reinvigorating rural Mingoola in social experiment to boost ageing community
• 7 November 2016, Australian Story website.You will find the transcript of the program here.  
• Donna Ward, Tenterfield Star, 10 November 2016, Australian Story episode on Mingoola refugees strikes a chord
• For those interested in the Italian background, the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England has a significant resource section on the Italian influence. 

I can't give you a link to the full ABC piece accessible to people outside Australia, but this YouTube news video provides a little more:

This is another YouTube video connected with this story



And a third



And yet another. I like this one because it shows the broader community.

My New England 2 - Autumn colours

The Tablelands, Australia's largest tablelands, form the heart of New England. Rivers flowing to the north, west, east and south. Colours change across New England from west to east, north to south, something I described in The colours of New England.

On the Tablelands, autumn is a time of colour because of the introduced trees. This photo from the Armidale Express Facebook page will give you a feel for the beauty.

It's cold in them, thair, hills

I was struck by this photo from Gordon Smith. Gordon's caption reads:

The view, looking north from the track leading to our house, one fine frosty morning. This year’s lowest overnight temperature saw the thermometer dip to -11.2 degC (11.8 degF) in Armidale.

That's cold, although if my memory serves me correctly, it's not Armidale's coldest temperature. The figure 9 degF sticks in my minds. Still, 11.8 is cold enough.

Judith Wright's South of My Days remains by far the best description of a Tablelands' winter, capturing the very essence of the Tablelands itself.  

Searching for the Diggers Graveyard mine

All of us who live or have lived in New England have our own perspectives of the place based on where we lived and our experiences. I have written on this quite a bit in one way or another, attempting to bring different perspectives alive.

The gorge country that forms the eastern edge is a unique world in its own right. This was once flat country with rivers flowing to the west from distant eastern mountains. Then came continental drift and uplift. Western flowing rivers were forced to flow east, creating great gorges and a sometimes crazy river pattern.

Gordon Smith often explores this country in his lookANDsee photo blog.

Just at present, Gordon is searching for the Diggers Graveyard mine. This photo shows the valley view before descent. Gordon's caption reads:

  If I’ve got my bearings correct, this is looking upstream (north) as we descend into the valley with the Macleay River just visible behind the trees in the foreground (left of centre). At this point we’re about 13 km (8 miles) south of Hillgrove.

It's beautiful if very rugged country. Perhaps it's time for another geography post!     

L J Hill's Pretty Bird Tree

I have mentioned New England singer-song-writer L J Hill before. I have found several of his songs on You Tube videoed by an amateur during L J Hill's performance at the Basement in Sydney on 29 March 2009.

Part Australian Aboriginal, part Cherokee Indian and part Irish, L J Hill now lives in the Armidale area. His songs focus on the New England Tablelands and Western Slopes. One song follows - Pretty Bird Tree. You can find all the clips here.

According to the Armidale Express, L J Hill is in the process is in the process of making a fully professional video to show on You Tube.

You can order L J Hill's Namoi Mud album here. 

New England Granite

For those who do not know Australia's New England, the term is used in two ways.

"The New England" refers to the New England Tablelands, Australia's largest tablelands area stretching from the edge of the Hunter Valley into what is now southern Queensland.

New England without the the - also known as the North, Northern Districts or Northern Provinces - refers to the broader area covering the Tablelands and the river catchments extending from the Tablelands.

Each area has its own unique character, something that I tried to capture a little of in The colours of New England.

In a comment on UNE passings - death of Margaret Mackie (1914-2009),  Kerith Power included the lyrics of a song he had written to celebrate Margaret Mackie. I quote the chorus:

I find my touchstone in the New England granite, feel the bare bone under the skin
Walk on bedrock, feet fairly planted, see the end of all my meanings and where I begin.

New England granite! Those from The New England know the granite. Its outcrops, boulders and soil are central.

Poet Judith Wright's South of My Days is almost the national poem of those from The New England. I reviewed this poem in The Poetry of Judith Wright - South of My Days.  I won't repeat either the poem or the whole post, just one part. 

rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue leaved and olive, outcropping granite -

All those from the Tablelands will immediately understand these words. The picture will come to them at once.

As Keith says, granite is the bedrock of New England. This is, indeed, the end of all my meanings and where I begin.    

Round the New England blogging traps 11 - Tablelands and coast

Congratulations to Bronwyn Parry on signing a contract for two new books. Well deserved. I complained in A fit of depression about my own slow progress in writing. Bronwyn has the good fortune now to work full time as a writer. That remains my dream.

While not a New England blogger, Kanani Fong had an interesting post on writing, Writing The Path.

With partner Gordon of lookANDsee fame, Bronwyn recorded a recent excursion into the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park in Top Creek & Macleay River trip.

For those who do not know the Park, it is one of those dotting the New England Tableland's eastern escarpment.

It appears that once Bronwyn has finished the current Dungirri series - this is set in New England's Western Plains - her new book is likely to feature this country.

After a long posting delay, Peter Firminger's Wollombi Valley has posted again with A Fair Go for the Hunter Community Coalition.  The post begins:

A Fair Go for the Hunter Community Coalition consists of community groups whose objective is to halt the wave of bad planning by this NSW Government in order to get the best results for the Hunter community.

The new group will be launched on 8 October 2009 at the Newcastle Leagues Club. You can find the details in the post. I wish the new group well.

We have far too few locality blogs. I have argued for a long time that blogging is one way for individual areas to promote themselves. For that reason I was very glad to see a new post from Peter.

Sticking to locality or area blogs, North Coast Voices continues its mix of local and political. I tend to turn off the political commentary, I get enough of that anyway. However, to those of a different political persuasion from NCV, the blog is really worth while reading for its local content. K Roo's post, Calf confusion or why the little bull loves fence posts, is really very funny. I won't give the story away. just read it.

On the purely political, Clarence Girl's post Shame Rudd Shame: government gets a fail on pension increase was just so wrong on public policy grounds that it deserves a full reply. I know where she is coming from, I understand her motivations, but while I am in complete sympathy I think that we need to look objectively at the issues raised by the decision she refers to.

This post is a blog review: I will respond in another post that focuses just on the public policy issues.

Staying with NCV and indeed with Clarence Girl, Lowdown on the Joint Regional Planning Committee for the NSW North Coast deals with a very important issue, the Sydney Government's approach to planning and to the approval of developments. Two joint planning committees affect New England; one covers the Hunter, a second the rest of the North.

I am not close enough to the politics and public policy issues on this one to have a view beyond the common suspicion that pretty much everybody has about just about anything coming out of Macquarie Street at the present time. It's something that I really need to look at because CG, rightly, highlights its importance.

Staying on the North Coast, LYNNE SANDERS-BRAITHWAITE turns sixty this month and is planning a public party for Friday night 16 October at the South Grafton Emporium. Lynne wrote:

Call  02 6643 3524 to book a table if you would like to join us. Izzy and friends will provide the music , Peter Freeman the food and Annie Dodd, the Lady of the Emporium, has created a community atmosphere that is hard to resist. In fact – Don’t Resist it.

Happy birthday Lynne. I would love to go to actually meet you both; after this time, I feel that I know you both quite well!

Lynne's post MONDAY IN SEPTEMBER is all about Festivals. This photo shows Izzi with Mereki and Robyn.  Robyn owns Shellbound, one of the four indigenous businesses involved in this year's Wide River's Festival.

Lynne notes that Robin Bryant's JTD Merchandise is providing an umbrella for the four businesses involved. Looking at Robin's web site, I see that 5% of all merchandise sold goes to support the Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-Operative. 

As it happens, I have been meaning for a while to write a little bit about Muurrbray as part of the story of the Aboriginal Language Revival Movement in New England.

The Clarence River marks the dividing line between two very large Aboriginal language groups.

To the north, the Bundjalung language with its various dialects was spoken in a huge sweep of territory north along the coast into what is now Southern Queensland and west onto the Tablelands. To the south, Gumbaynggirr was spoken down to and including the Nambucca Valley. It, too, extended onto the Tablelands essentially following the headwaters of the Nymboida. Like Bundjalung, Gumbaynggir had a number of dialects, including Baanbay on the Tablelands around Guyra.

Yaygirr, the language spoken at the mouth of the Clarence, was a Gumbaynggirric language, but sufficiently different to be classified as a language in its own right.               

    The Language Revival Movement began in the 1980s as a way of recovering languages that had either died or were in danger of extinction. Muurrbay played a key role on the coast, while there was a similar movement in the west concerned with the revival of Kamilaroi.

I really got side-tracked on this post digging around for supporting material. There are so many other things that I meant to write about, but these will have to wait until my next meander around the New England blogging traps.

Harry Pidgeon's Naturally Touched Cooks Hill Gallery

My thanks to Paul Barratt for bringing to my attention the latest exhibition by New England painter Harry Pidgeon.  This will be open until 12 October at Mark Widdup’s Cooks Hill Galleries in Newcastle.

This painting, slopeswest, shows the New England Tablelands merging into the patchwork quilt of the Western Slopes and Plains. The different soil colours in the fields together with sky and horizons makes for some very attractive and striking scenery.   

Harry Pidgeon at Cooks Hill provides an introduction to the artist, as well as links to past exhibitions. Harry Pidgeon exhibition: Naturally touched provides links to the exhibition, while Harry Pidgeon’s opening at Cooks Hill reports on the opening.

I followed Paul and Harry through the Misses Cooper to Armidale Demonstration School and then to TAS the year behind. I didn't know Harry well. One year behind is actually a considerable gap at an early age. However, I find the similarities in early life patterns interesting 

The next painting is simply called dialogue boxes.

The Gallery records a little of Harry's career in these terms:   

When nature and art touch each other they become one, this is how Harry grew up in rural New England with its backdrop of thunderhead clouds, mountains, ravines, and small townships. Constantly going bush, observing nature, birds and animals he was always drawing and painting. As a keen observer of nature he was regularly painting outdoors by the age of seven with the Adult Art Education students from the Armidale Teacher’s College. From the beginning he loved the bush’s nuances and throughout his life has walked, camped, canoed, studied and painted its many discourses.

It was always Harry’s intention to be a painter and by the time he arrived at The National Art School in Sydney he was using watercolours with the force of oils. He was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Klee, Edward Hopper, Lyonel Feininger and Wayne Thiebaud, all of whom had early careers in the world of mass communications. It was no digression that after graduating Harry decided to join the then largest advertising agency in the world - the American owned J. Walter Thompson Company as a graphic artist and an art director working on national and international accounts.

In the early 80’s Harry segued to painting full time and over a 5 year period won more than 50 art awards in Sydney, Brisbane and interstate regional centres. Concentrating on exhibiting, his career now includes 28 solo or feature artist exhibitions and dozens of group shows. Galleries exhibited at include: Barry Stern, Trevor Victor Harvey, Holdsworth, Philip Bacon, Red Hill, Riverhouse, Schubert, Cooks Hill, Eddi Glastra, Bell Gallery and CAZ and Biota in Los Angeles USA.

Road Tunnel Old Grafton Road

This photograph by Gordon Smith, Inside, looking out, shows the view towards Grafton down the old Glen Innes Grafton Road from inside the road tunnel.

It may seem hard to believe that this was the main road to Grafton for more than one hundred years.

Down this road crawled heavy drays and bullock waggons laden with wool for shipment from the busy port at Grafton. Is it any wonder that fights for better transport should form such a constant theme in New England's history?

Gordon noted that the road was built by convicts in the 1800’s, while the tunnel was cut by a contractor in the 1860s.

Greenhood orchid

This photo is by Gordon Smith. He comments:

I hadn't seen a greenhood orchid for years until we came across several patches of them in Cathedral Rock National Park. We had them on our property about 8 years ago, but, even after keeping a close eye out for them, have yet to see them again.

The photo reminds me of how little I know of New England's vegetation. I had never heard of a greenhood orchid!

Gwydir River - Rocky River

Photo: Rocky River School. This school, the first National School in northen New South Wales, was held in a slab hut intil 1870, when a brick classroom and attached residence (still standing) was built by Alexander Mitchell (builder of McCrossin's Mill, Uralla).

Following the introduction of compulsory education a new wooden schoolroom was built in 1885, and this, with two additions, forms the present school building. A second teacher was appointed in 1903, with enrolments peaking at 155 in 1916. Since then Rocky River has been a two-teacher school, apart from a brief period in the 1960s when a third teacher was appointed.

Downstream, Kentucky Creek becomes Rocky River. The little township is about 4 km from Uralla (2o km from Armidale) on the Bundarra Road.

Today little remains, but this was gold rush territory.

Gold was discovered at Rocky River in 1851. In September 1856 the population reached 4,500. In that year, 1856, Rocky River produced 40,000 ounces of gold, worth around $32 million at today's gold prices. This provided sometimes rich pickings for miners, storekeepers and the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt.

In my first post in the Gwydir series I mentioned that Thunderbolt had been killed at Kentucky Creek. Northeast from this spot on the New England Highway can be found Thunderbolt's Rock where Thunderbolt is reported to have watched for the gold coaches

Production declined thereafter, so that by 1866 the population had declined to 700, the majority Chinese. At this field, as with many others in New England, the Chinese were a major presence. The photo shows the interior of the Chinese Joss House, now vanished, at Rocky River in 1908.

For those who would like to visit Rocky River, please visit nearby Uralla first for an introduction to the history of the area.

Introductory post. Last post. Next post.

Photo: Gordon Smith, Great Northern Railway, New England Tablelands

Back last October I carried an introductory story on the history of New England's railways. I see that Gordon Smith is presently running a series of photos on the Great Northern Railway, the inland line that used to link Sydney and Brisbane.

The series starts here.

Armidale's Hail Storms

Photo: Armidale after the storm, nineMSN.

Yesterday, 23 December 2006, a major hail storm hit the eastern edge of Armidale, the University city in the centre of New England's Northern Tablelands.

The twenty minute storm left a trail of destruction in its wake, with homes unroofed, windows smashed, cars damaged, trees stripped of foliage and glass from broken windows strewn about the streets.

Around 1,000 homes as well as other property including the local exhibition centre were damaged. The city has been declared a natural disaster area.

Photo: Gordon Smith, Armidale Exhibition Centre after the storm.

Hail storms are a relatively common feature of Tabeland's weather. Usually they do little damage. However, this is the second if somewhat smaller major storm to hit Armidale in the last ten years.

The story that follows is largely drawn from Peter Burr's story on Australia's severe weather. I have put in the link here, although I notice that there are problems in accessing it. I appear to be drawing from a cache copy.

On the afternoon of 29 September 1996 most Armidale residents were in doors, many watching the Rugby League grand final.

A storm had been building to the south west. By lunch time the sky became darker with storm clouds building to the sound of distant rumbling thunder. Just before 2pm an initial storm arrived with rain and small hailstones - around 10 millimetres diameter. The rain stopped at 2.30pm but intermittent thunder continued.

While no Armidale residents knew it, there had been no storm warning, a huge cumulonimbus storm cloud or a supercell had been building.

Inside this cloud massive updraughts were sweeping tiny particles of dust and ice up into the higher reaches where supercooled droplets of water were waiting to freeze onto them upon impact creating small hailstones. These hailstones were then falling to the lower levels before again being caught in the updraughts.

At 3pm this supercell approached the city from the south-west - a dark menacing cloud with an unusual colour described by many said later as orange or pink. The thunder increased and light rain started falling.

At 3.23pm the first of the hailstones fell on the city. At this stage the stones were 10 to 20 mm in diameter. They fell for about two minutes, then stopped briefly.

A roaring sound was then heard from the south-west. Unfortunately for Armidale, after making many trips up and down the hailstones circulating in the giant cloud had become bigger than golf balls and, too heavy to remain aloft, had started plummetting to the ground.

The huge hailstones made a deafening sound on roofs, and as they hit roads and hard surfaces they bounced several metres back into the sky. The wind started gusting from the south-west which was devastating for thousands of south and west facing windows - the sound of breaking glass accompanied the roaring of the hail. At 3.30pm it was all over.

The city had been extremely unlucky. Thunder storms are not unusual - the city averages 56 such storms annually - but severe hail is unusual. In this case, nearly all the major hail was dropped directly on the city itself.

The damage was astonishing. Eighty per cent of city buildings had been damaged, many severely, while some 3,000 cars received hail damage, creating a damage bill of over $A200 million, making it in insurance terms the third largest disaster in Australia's history.

In the longer term the effects were not all bad. The need to repair the damage created a building boom that lasted several years, leaving the city (always attractive) with a refurbished feel.

Photo: Gordon Smith, after the storm. This photo shows the scene in Armidale after the last storm as the combination of warm ground with the cold air and water creates mist. As Gordon notes, the scene now looks very pretty and peaceful, but the mist hides the storm damage.