My Great Great Grandfather, Defender of the Rabbit Fence
In 1913, Henry purchased a block of land known as Colloden Farm, south of Mungalla, and on the 30th of December the very next year, he married Ida Keziah Irwin at Orabah, the home of her parents. Henry would take her to live in various cottages, some he bought, some that were provided by the Leichhardt Rabbit Board. At one stage he operated the Mungallala to Toomoo Mail Run, a 50 mile trip made every Saturday, returning Monday to deliver local postage to the mail train bound for Brisbane.
He had his first child in 1915, one Henry Gordon Waldron and in 1917, took a job once again with the Leichhardt Rabbit Board as a boundary rider. Allocated a cottage at the Billabong south of the Mungallala Railway Station, this became “Home Sweet Home” for two generations of Waldron family over the next fifty years. Abraham Thomas, the second son of Henry, and his wife, May Waldron and their children, my grandmother Ruth, and great uncle Desmond, would be the second generation that lived at the cottage, leaving the home they had grown fondly attached to in 1959.
My great great grandfather Henry Gardiner Waldron was born on the 7th of October 1886 and spent his early years in Roma, on a farm called Sandy Flat. He, his parents, and his siblings, Alfred and Janet, operated a dairy farm where they churned their own butter to be sold in the local stores, and brewed wine from grapes grown in their vineyard.
1906. At the age of twenty, Henry left the farm to work with the Leichhardt Rabbit Board. He used one of the poison carts, constructed specifically for the job at the time, to travel over a large area of country south of the Mungallala portion of the rabbit fence. The area he worked was a buffer between two rabbit netting fences, obviously to provide more security in case any of the critters got through either of these fences in their travels. There are notes in the stories that tell of trapping camps operating as well to stem the tide of rabbits moving up from New South Wales, a growing concern back in these days.
In the 1920’s, Henry began to stock Colleden Farm, the property he had bought all those years ago. He started with Australian Illawarra Shorthorn cattle, a good milking breed. He used to say that if you couldn’t get three gallons or more from them on green feed, they weren’t worth milking. Thomas, the author, and Henry’s son, noted in the biography of his father that they had all kinds of fancy names for the cows, like Buttercup, Daisy and Strawberry. One in particular named Jemima, who was named after a girl Henry used to know, and everyone thought jokingly was “his old tart”.
Henry would still work as a boundary rider right through the 1920’s into the early 1930’s, but in his time off he would tend to his growing herd, eventually expanding his farm with more land, renaming it Waldrona and populating this acreage with Clydesdale horses. Henry would only use the best of brood mares and pedigree sires, which would get him top dollar from horse buyers who came to the district. The good money (25 to 30 pounds per head) made from this horses would continue until tractors and earthmoving machines would begin to replace the old manual labour style of horse drawn equipment in the late 1940’s. For comparison, a weekly wage was two pounds ten shillings, so it was phenomenal money at the time.
One of the Poison Carts used to control population.
Coming to the end of Henry’s story, he would go on to sell Waldrona in order to purchase new land, the properties of Kiora and Glenelg (formally Orabah, where Ida’s parents once lived) in the early 1930’s. Glenelg would eventually become four blocks of land amalgamated into one, and to this day remains in the family, owned by my uncle, Graham Chambers, who inherited it from my grandfather, Harry Chambers. Harry moved to the property in 1941 and became owner in 1950.
Henry and Ida moved to Roma in 1945 and he finally retired from his boundary rider job with the Leichhardt Rabbit Board in 1951. There he stayed until he came to Toowoomba in 1962 where he would spend the rest of his days in peace as a keen gardener and chicken breeder. An energetic, patient, and loyal family man he died in Toowoomba on the 16th of February, 1874 at the age of eighty-seven, and is buried in the Toowoomba Garden Settlement.
(R.I.P Henry).
(This story was originally written by Abraham Thomas Waldron, entirely from memory, in 1990, and is presented here an edited version)