Round up of local history stories across the New England media no 2

Photo: patrol post, Greta Migrant camp

Over on my New England History blog I have begun a regular round-up of stories from the local media on local history. This is the second in the series.
My aim is to build another resource that can be tapped to by those wishing to explore the history of New England or of their specific region or locality.

By their nature, many of these stories cannot be relied upon to be absolutely accurate, but they are useful in providing information and ideas.    

New England writers and writing - the local historians

In aggregate, the local historians probably form the largest group of New England writers, especially if combined with the overlapping group of family historians whose writing often extends beyond the immediate family into broader topics such as station histories.

The first local historical writing seems to have been associated with civic events such as anniversaries. Here local newspaper editors such as E C Sommerlad in Glen Innes seem to have played lead roles. They were used to writing, were committed to their communities and also controlled the printing presses. They also wrote and published on a range of other topics through their papers, pamphlets and books, adding substantially to the total body of New England writing.  

In 1928, the Armidale Teachers' College College was established, followed by the New England University College in 1938. They brought the first trained historians to the North, while the students they educated generally came from the North and were interested in local and regional topics. This combined with a rising interest in local history. leading to the formation of local historical societies. The Richmond River Historical  Society was founded in 1936. Within twenty years, most Northern centres had their own historical societies. These not only provided local historical forums, but also began to collect records and memorabilia and to establish museums and displays.

Even in the 1950s, there were still very full local histories. This was not dissimilar to the position in Australian historical writing in general. An explosion took place over the next thirty years. By the end of the eighties there were hundreds of titles, most with very small print runs. General interest in Australian history was growing, but beyond that the existence of the Teacher's College and University in Armidale had a huge direct and indirect impact at every level in the process.

Not all the local histories were well written. Some were mere compilations of newspaper stories, catalogues of things considered to be locally important written in isolation from broader events. They provide a useful resource, but are boring to read unless you know and are interested in the area in question.  Others, however, are very good indeed. This includes both those books written by professional historians such as John Ferry's Colonial Armidale and those written by amateurs, if often amateurs with some form of study at the University of New England,

Note to readers:  This piece is a work in progress, the start of my attempt to define and describe the various threads in New England writing over time. I have over four hundred separate New England titles on my shelves, and i know that I have barely scratched to surface!                

Fire guts Inverell's historic Byron Arcade

Back in July 2008  in a New history of Inverell's Byron Arcade I wrote of the work of the Inverell Family History Group in documenting the history of Inverell's historic Byron Arcade. Sadly, the building has now been gutted by fire.

The attached photo from The Northern Leader shows the scale of the fire.   Thirteen weatherboard units and six businesses in the CBD were destroyed.
 
While my thoughts are with the twelve people made homeless by the fire and the business owners who have to rebuild, I also thought of the loss of Inverell's history.

The Family History Group itself lost its office in the blaze. I imagine that this included a lot of carefully collected records.

Inverell has been very lucky in the work of its local historians, including Elizabeth Wiedamann's two books. Elizabeth and I did postgraduate studied together at UNE and I have recently been re-reading the first volume (here and here). As Elizabeth records, Inverell has had a history of fires in the main street.
John Caling kindly sent me some photos of the aftermath of the fire, supplied to him by a relative in the Family History Group.

This first photo shows the front of the building after the fire from roughly the same position as the first photo.

At the time of the fire, the Inverell District Family History Group was working on a Pioneer Register and was seeking contributions from the community. The Register was to include include the names of people who lived in Inverell and surrounding areas prior to 1910.

My family will miss out on inclusion since we came a little later. In 1912 my grandfather, David Drummond, came to Inverell to manage Maxwelton, a wheat block created out of the newly subdivided Bannockburn Station. Mum was born while they were living there, so I can claim a personal Inverell connection.

We have some family photos of this period. I must do a post or posts some time on the Inverell connection. Its actually quite important in our family history.

The last photo is another shot of the damage from a different perspective.

I hope that the Family History Group has a copy of the material already collected on the Pioneer Register.

It must be very hard from their viewpoint to face the challenge of re-building.  

Postscript:

I have been getting a lot of hits on this post, so that I thought that I should do a progressive update just pointing to key press articles. I will continue the update over the next few days:

• Back at work after fire Inverell Times
• Smoke alarms save lives Inverell Times
• Fundraiser for fire victims Inverell Times
• Text message alerts owner of fire Inverell Times
• All hell broke lose says fire victim Inverell Times
• Torbay lends support after fire Inverell Times
• Alarm alerted Katrina to fire Inverell Times
• Our homes could have been saved from fire Inverell Times
• Climbing out of the ashes Inverell Times