Back to Belgenny 2024, a festival of living history

Back to the farm

Living history was alive and well at Belgenny Farm at South Camden on a slightly overcast Saturday in August for the 2024 Back to Belgenny festival.  The day was a festival of living history, with reenactments, traditional trades, and stalls selling arts and crafts of the past.

Shafts of sunlight greeted the early arrivals, who set up their stall gazebos, presenting produce. Those with food stalls set up their cooking equipment, and the traditional tradesmen set out their hand tools.

The crowd started to pour in just before 11 a.m., the official opening time. The schedule was packed with activities, and hundreds of visitors enjoyed the festivities. There were 1200 pre-sold tickets.

Activities included sheepdog trials, live music, Macarthur cemetery tours, vintage cars, art activities, market stalls, displays, demonstrations and guided history tours of the site.

The setting

The farm setting, with the farm buildings, illustrates the stages of agriculture and how one stage transitions to the next, starting with the pastoral period, then cropping, and lastly, dairying.

Ghosts were everywhere. If walls could speak, they would tell tales of the past: ploughing fields with horse teams, workers emptying milk cans at the creamery, and husking corn at the granary. Visitors could immerse themselves in these stories embedded in the farm buildings, which had changed little from their working days.

The farm buildings on the site were created by the needs of the day and the type of farming practised by the Macarthur family.  Belgenny Farm was the working heart of Camden Park Estate, the Camden outpost of the Macarthur pastoral empire, with its economic hub at Elizabeth Farm at Parramatta. The farm has undergone several transitional stages caused by improvements and changes in agriculture.

Raising the flag

 The 73rd Regiment of Foot, Governor Macquarie’s regiment, established an encampment on the former working horse paddock. At 11 a.m., regiment members raised the Union Jack over the encampment and officially opened festivities. Regimental members did a parade drill, demonstrated live canon firing, cavalry tent-pegging, and re-enacted a Redcoat Battle. The 73rd Re-enactors are part of a thriving living history movement that spans the globe and closed the day by lowering the Union Jack at 3pm.

The hub of the farm

The former Home Farm’s central courtyard was the day’s centre and became busy, just as it would have done daily when the site was still a working farm.  The toing-and-froing of visitors was reminiscent of a busy working day on the farm with working horses, deliveries, and constant movements of spring carts at the creamery.  The courtyard is surrounded by layers of the past with stables, the creamery, the manager’s cottage and the hall.

In the centre of the courtyard is the bell, once located near the smokehouse, that rang in and rang out the workday. In 1935, tragedy struck when the bell fell on the head of WA Channell, killing him as he rang the bell. The current brick monument is a memorial to Channell.

Vicarious immersion for visitors

The blacksmith shop had an operating forge and working blacksmith, and visitors immersed themselves as he shaped the red-hot metal with a hammer and anvil after extracting it from the forge. The current location of the blacksmith shop dates back to the 1930s, when it was rebuilt behind the stables and the community hall was built in 1937.

The blacksmith shop was originally on the hall’s site, and some of the old building materials were used in the new location west of the stables. The blacksmith shop was always the centre of any Cowpastures colonial farm, repairing farming equipment, sharpening and repairing hand tools, and making horseshoes, gates, hinges, bolts, wheels, and other farm equipment.

Across the courtyard in the old horse paddock was the drover’s camp. Camden Park drovers moved sheep from the farm around the estate and between Macarthur properties. Drover Jake from the Friends of Belgenny Farm supervised the open-fire cooking damper mixed by John. The Friends ladies sold damper cooked to perfection in camp ovens. The camp aromas wafted through the long lunchtime queue for damper and golden syrup, satisfying any hunger pangs.  

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution arrived at the farm and brought mechanisation and refrigeration. It ushered in the dairy revolution with industrial-style milk separators represented by the creamery.

The granary, the dovecote, the fuel shed, the manager’s cottage, the community hall, the engine room, and the pigsties were all part of the dairying story. The vineyard disappeared, and there is the thoroughbred grave, where profits allowed the gentry to indulge in horse racing and breeding in the Cowpastures.

Mechanisation replaced hand tools, traction engines replaced hand threshing, and stationary engines replaced horsepower. The 1900 engine room was built on the corner of the stables. The flour mill adjacent to the engine room ground wheat into flour using belt-driven mechanised power for use on the farm or for sale.

What does the farm represent?

Belgenny Farm is a living representation of the actions of a settler society in the local area through the activities of the generations of the Macarthur family and those who worked on the estate, including convicts, tenants, share farmers, and others.

The Home Farm was the central hub of the Macarthur family Camden Park Estate until the railway arrived at Menangle in 1863.

The group of farm buildings creates an English-style landscape now unique in Australia, telling the story of the Cowpastures and then the Camden district.

The farm is a statement about the settler society, which is the outstanding local representation still in existence.

 English colonialism created a frontier that begat violence, actual or implied, that changed the Dharawal-managed landscape into the ordered, structured setting of the Cowpastures that survives to the present.

Belgenny Farm is a rare collection of farm buildings that is the current representation of that story and provides today’s visitors with a glimpse into the past through reenactments, traditional trades, history tours, and other activities.