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Camden Teamsters Memorial, when the horse was king on the Yerranderie Road

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Tribute to mining and industrial heritage

If you wander along the John Street heritage precinct, you will come across a quaint monument with a large wagon wheel reminding you of when the horse was king on the Yerranderie Road.  

The Camden Teamster’s Memorial is on John Street, Camden. The memorial is between Macaria, a Victorian gentleman’s townhouse, and Tiffins Cottage, an early Victorian cottage. (I Willis 2023)

Before, motorised transport teams of between 13 and 16 horses pulled wagons along the Yerranderie Road that were no more than a goat track in places, up and down steep inclines, through bushfires, floods and droughts.

The Teamsters Memorial, an item of public art, is a tribute to the memory of these horses, the men who worked with them, and the district’s industrial and mining heritage. 

Australian Town & Country Journal 30 August 1911

What was a teamster?

These hard-bitten characters could handle a team of up to 16 horses pulling a wagon loaded with up to 15 tons of ore.

Wikipedia defines a teamster as someone who drives a team, usually of oxen, horses, or mules, pulling a wagon in Australia, sometimes called a bullocky. In 1912, the term carrier was used to describe the teamster.

These men, and they were only men, were skilled horsemen with a tough, dangerous job. Teamsters were out in all weather, working dawn to dusk, and some died on the job.

Photograph from The Australasian Journal (Melbourne) published 1 October 1932.

The Camden teamsters carried ore from the Yerranderie Myall gold & silver fields to the Camden railhead between 1900 and 1925.

At its height, Yerranderie had a population of around 3000 people, with 16 mines extracting silver and lesser amounts of gold and lead. Between 1900 and 1926, over £2 million of silver was extracted from the Yerranderie fields.

Royalty on the Yerranderie Road

In the early days of mining operations, the teamsters were at the height of their reign. They were the royalty of the district and commanded their authority over the mine owners at Yerranderie. Without their services to cart ore from Yerranderie to the Camden railhead, mining operations at Yerranderie stopped.

The teamster would load his wagon at Yerranderie, unload at the top of the Bluff (at Nattai) and go back for another load. On his return to the Bluff, he would reload the remainder and head to the Camden railhead. This process would take about five days.

One of the information boards on the side of the memorial (I Willis 2023)

The horse teams

The horse teams would be between 13 and 16 horses carting a flat-top wagon with a load of 13 to 16 tons of ore.

In 1908, there were 54 horse teams on the Yerranderie Road carting to the Camden railhead.

Bennetts of St Marys NSW built a common flat-top wagon type used by the teamsters.

The going rate for carting ore was £2/ton. (1908) The rate varied little across the years the Yerranderie fields were operational.

The high cost of cartage meant that only the highest grade ore could be sent for refining at Sulphide Corporation at Cockle Creek on Lake Macquarie via the Camden railhead.

Lower-grade ore remained at the Yerranderie mines as waste. Partial treatment of the ore was tried with varying success.

One of the information boards on the side of the memorial (I Willis, 2023)

There was a serious attempt by the mine owners to bypass the stranglehold of the teamsters from 1906. The mine owners tried to have the state government build a light tramway to the top of the Bluff and, at one stage, from Thirlmere to Yerranderie (1910). The NSW Government was never really interested in any of these proposals.

In 1904, the idea of using camels to cart ore was floated. The idea did not last long.

The authority of the teamsters started to wane in the pre-war years, and there were moves to unionise and fix cartage rates by the Australian Carrier’s Union (1913)

Others plying the Yerranderie Road

The Yerranderie teamsters were not the only ones plying the Yerranderie Road.

There was a daily mail coach that ran between Camden and Yerranderie. The passenger fare was  12/6 one-way from Yerranderie to Camden (1908), which had come down from a height of 30 shillings.

Camden News, 9 November 1911

Bullock teams occasionally appeared on the Yerranderie Road, carting cedar logs extracted from the Kowmung area of the Blue Mountains (1911).

Bullock team on the Yerranderie Road coming up The Bluff carrying bales of wool (Facebook)

A local ecology

The teamsters and the horse teams supported a local ecology of farmers growing hay, blacksmiths at The Oaks and Camden, breeding horses, wheelwrights, wagon makers, and many others.

The memorial

The memorial has a rear wagon wheel, a front axle and two hubs. These are mounted on a steel frame set in a concrete base. The wheels are timber construction with a steel rim. There are three metal information boards.

Construction was completed by Eric Henderson of Ungarie, formerly a teamster who worked for Cook & Co.

The memorial was opened in 1977 by 95-year-old Mrs Jean McCubbin, the widow of a former teamster.

The opening of the Teamster’s Memorial in 1977. (Camden News 24 April 1977)

The memorial plaque commemorating the opening in 1977 (I Willis 2023)

The memorial was restored in 1995 and 2003.

Wheelwright Neil Johnston working on the wagon wheel from the memorial in the 2003 restoration project. (CHS)

The mythology of the horse team

The memorial is a wonderful, evocative reminder of times in the district when the horse was king.

A Bennett wagon is on display at the blacksmith shop at the Wollondilly Heritage Centre.

There is a certain degree of mythology around the teamster, best exemplified by The Australian Teamsters Hall of Fame in Queensland.

Driving teams are still practised today, and there are driving competitions at Barellan, horse teams at the Royal Easter Show, on ABCTV, and occasionally at Belgenny Farm.

A teamster and horse team on the ascent out of Burragorang Valley on the Yerranderie Road. The horse team is pulling a loaded flat-top wagon with silver ore. At the rear of the horse team is a passenger coach. (early 20th century, WHC&M)

Updated 29 December 2023. Originally posted on 21 December 2023 as ‘Camden Teamsters Memorial, when the horse was king on the Yerranderie Road’.

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Mileposts captured the distance of the past

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Camden Mileposts

On the Camden Town Centre edges are two white concrete posts with numbers and letters. What are they, and what do the letters mean?

These white concrete posts are mileposts from when the Hume Highway ran up the centre of Camden along Argyle Street. The letters indicate destinations and the numbers are distance in miles. These items are part of Camden’s engineering heritage.

A concrete milepost on the southern end of the Camden Town Centre on the road verge of the former Hume Highway, now the Old Hume Highway. (I Willis, 2021)

The letters: M is Mittagong, S is Sydney, L is Liverpool, and C is Camden. The distance is a mile:  an imperial unit of measure from before the time of metric measurement. The mile here is a statute mile which is 5280 feet or 1.609 km, as opposed to a nautical mile used in air and sea transport and is different.

The English mile

Mileposts dated back to the Roman Empire and were placed alongside the Roman roads. Distances were measured from the city of Rome. The mile originated from the Roman mille passus, or “thousand paces,” which measured 5,000 Roman feet.

The first mileposts along English roads appeared in 1593 and were standardised in England under the reign of Elizabeth I. The English mile was a different length from the Scottish mile and the Irish mile.  These measures were not standardised in the British Commonwealth and the US until 1959. (Sydney Morning Herald, 22 August 1935. https://www.britannica.com/science/mile)

In the colony of New South Wales, the first sandstone milestones were located on the Parramatta, Liverpool and South Head Roads from 1816 on the instructions of Governor Macquarie. Milestones provided accurate reference marks along with the expanding public road system for travellers on coaches. (Crofts and Crofts, 2013)

Macquarie Obelisk

In the colonial period, Governor Macquarie’s Obelisk of Distances was erected in 1818 as the official starting point for all distances in NSW. It was located in what was then the centre of Sydney and is now Macquarie Place. The monument was also ‘a symbolic peg’ as the furthest extent of the British Empire in the early 1800s.

Obelisk of Distances in Macquarie Place Sydney was designed by Francis Greenway and built-in 1818 under the orders of Governor Macquarie c1926 (SLNSW)

The placement of milestones in colonial NSW set a precedent. They were placed along the left-hand or southern side of the roadway, with the destination facing Sydney. The posts were meant to be seen by travellers coming from either direction to measure their distance from Sydney for the benefit of stagecoach drivers. They also ensured the driver was on the correct road, as many were bush tracks. (Crofts and Crofts, 2013)

Concrete mileposts

The two concrete mileposts in Camden were part of the road improvements by the NSW Department of Main Roads in 1934.

The decision to implement a programme of mileposting followed the first annual conference of state road authorities in February 1934 held in Melbourne. The meeting decided to adopt uniform national procedures for mileposting and road warning signs for roadworks, among other matters. It was felt that uniformity of services would help interstate travellers. (DMR, 1934)

A concrete milepost on the northern entry to the Camden Town Centre on the roadside verge of the former Hume Highway ran along Argyle Street Camden. (I Willis, 2021)

In 1934 the department allocated £134 to the program in the Sydney area. (DMR, 1934)

The DMR Main Roads magazine stated that

In the days before the advent of the motor vehicle, when travel by road was slow and was done on foot, on horseback, or in horse-drawn carriage, few things gave greater service, or were more eagerly looked for, than the mileposts. (DMR, 1934a)

According to the Department of Main Roads, mileposting before 1934 provided signs that gave directions and the distance of important towns. Mileposts had lost their importance to the traveller because the car speedometer gave ‘progressive mileage’ stated a departmental report. (DMR, 1934a)

Road maintenance

Mileposting in 1934 was implemented with one specific aim.

The purpose of the mileposts now is to provide a convenient system of reference marks along the road for the use of those whose responsibility is to maintain the roads in a proper state. (DMR, 1934a)

The stated purpose was for the milepost to be a reference point along the road to give a precise position for any roadwork needed. Information to travellers was only secondary. (DMR, 1934a)

Mileposting to 1934 had been haphazard, with much work generated at a  local level and many gaps. Road maintenance was a secondary consideration, with information for travellers paramount. Much work was ‘incomplete’. Groups of mileposts were only based around important towns, sometimes following main roads and sometimes not. (DMR, 1934a)

The 1934 mileposting project was partly triggered by the 1928 classification of all roads in NSW into state highways, trunk roads and ordinary roads.

The 1928 changes saw The Great Southern Road through Camden renamed the Hume Highway in 1928. The 1929 Razorback Deviation shifted the highway to the east, away from the former Great South Road (now Cawdor Road). (DMR, 1934a)

Different types of mileposts were used in 1934 for different purposes.  Concrete posts were used in Sydney and country towns like Camden, and timber posts were used elsewhere.

Specifications and drawings for mileposts as outlined in the Department of Main Roads journal Main Roads (May 1934), where the DMR mileposting project was detailed for all roads in NSW (Main Roads 1934a)

There was a strict protocol for the letters and numbers on the posts, with letters and numbers incised and painted black and distances measured from the post office, sometimes not.  Posts were placed on the left-hand side of roadways leading from Sydney or the coast, as they were in colonial times.

Posts were located with a clear view from the roadway of 200 feet with specific instructions on distances from roadways and locations for cuttings and embankments. On bridges, the mileposts were clamped to the handrails.

In mid-1934, the NRMA suggested the mileposts on the different highways should be painted in various colours. (Kiama Reporter and Illawarra Journal, 20 June 1934) The suggestion was not taken up.

One supplier of the concrete mileposts was the Hume Pipe Coy (Aust) Ltd. (Main Roads, August 1938)

Wooden Mileposts

In the Camden area, the Camden Heritage Inventory states there were wooden mileposts along Cawdor Road, formerly The Great South Road. They pre-date the concrete mileposts.

Timber milepost c1927 on the verge of The Great South Road, now Cawdor Road. (2021 I Willis)

In a 2002 survey for the Heritage Inventory, the three Cawdor Road timber mileposts were intact.

The posts were local hardwood cut by a sawmill in Edward Street in the late 1920s and delivered to The Great South Road (Cawdor Road) site by Camden teamster Les Nixon. (NSWSHI)

In a recent search, I could only locate one intact timber milepost in fairly poor condition.

This timber milepost c.1929-1934 is located on the former Hume Highway at South Camden, now Remembrance Drive. This milepost is located on the 1929 Hume Highway Razorback deviation that moved the main road from the Great South Road, now Cawdor Road. (I Willis, 2021)

This timber milepost c.1929-1934 is located on the former Hume Highway at South Camden, now Remembrance Drive. This milepost is not on the Wollondilly Shire Council heritage inventory. The milepost is on the roadside verge adjacent to the Camden Valley Inn. (I Willis, 2021)

References

CROFTS, R. & CROFTS, S. 2013. Discovering Australia’s Historical Milemarkers and Boundary Stones, Sydney, Roberts and Sandra Crofts.

DMR 1934. Department of Main Roads Ninth Annual Report for the year ending 30th June 1934. Sydney: NSW Legislative Assembly.

DMR 1934a. The Mileposting on Main Roads. Main Roads, 5.

Updated on 15 August 2023. Originally posted on 13 November 2021 as ‘Capturing the distance of the past’.