Parry's Expedition

In March 1832, Australian Agricultural Company Commissioner Sir William Edward Parry passed through the Murrurundi district with a party that included Henry Dangar, Charles Hall, William Telfer, six assigned servants and two Aboriginal guides, on their way to inspect land on the Liverpool Plains.

They camped on the banks of Pages River, opposite William Henry Warland's farm, before crossing the river and following a rough valley road hemmed in by high hills. A wall of pudding-stone forced them to unload their dray entirely to get through the pass, before the country opened out again onto the plains.

There they were joined by local Wanaruah and Kamilaroi people. Parry noted with interest that although the two groups could not understand each other's own languages, they conversed fluently with one another in English - a shared pidgin picked up from the settlers already moving through the district.

It was Dangar's second trip through the area, and a handful of settlers had already followed his earlier path - among them Thomas Haydon and William Warland, along with small settlers and ex-convicts such as Benjamin Hall, who had arrived in the colony aboard the Midas in 1827. Remote from any real law and order, the district was already earning a reputation as a place where disreputable men passed through to drink at one of the two hotels or stock up at Rundle's Store before pushing on over the range.

The Jewboy Gang & Bushrangers

In December 1840, the infamous Jewboy Gang arrived in the village, having been hunted out of their usual haunts further down the valley. They had already robbed a store at Muswellbrook and bailed up the town of Scone, where twenty-three-year-old storekeeper John Graham was shot and killed at St Aubins Inn.

Reaching Murrurundi, the gang bailed up some thirty people at James Henry Atkinson's Travellers' Rest Inn - among them, quite possibly, the town's own postmaster and pound keeper. What they didn't know was that Edward Denny Day and his pursuit party, including Dr John Gill, were only a few hours behind them. The gang was run down and captured after a dramatic shoot-out at Doughboy Hollow, and later hanged. By 1843 Murrurundi had earned itself four constables and a chief constable.

The Jewboy Gang were far from the district's only brush with bushranging. Thunderbolt was said to have interfered with the mail on these roads, and it was on the hill just beyond town, on the way to Wingen, that a man named Wilson murdered a citizen named Clark - a killing still remembered fifty years later, and marked by a monument on the roadside that, sadly, later fell victim to vandalism.

The story never really left the district's memory. The Scone Advocate re-told 'The Battle of Doughboy Hollow' in 1898, and The World's News revisited it again in 1934 under the headline 'Doughboy Hollow: The Capture of the Jewboy' - both opening the same way outsiders always seemed to see the place, as one of the prettiest towns in New South Wales and, nowadays, something of a sleepy hollow. The 1934 writer wasn't so charitable about the early settlers themselves, noting some 'were not very particular as to branding each other's clean-skins' before adding, drily, that 'they almost deserved to be raided.' By 1935 the tale was still good enough for a Sunday paper in Brisbane, which ran it under the headline 'Wore Mourning At Hanging.'

The Ben Hall Family

Murrurundi in the 1840s was said to be infested with 'rogues and vagabonds', and an Association was formed to deal with the cattle duffers and horse thieves working the district. In August 1845 the Government Gazette carried a notice offering a reward - and a ticket of leave or conditional pardon - for the capture of Benjamin Hall of Murrurundi and Alexander Paterson, both wanted for horse stealing and both on the run. The Gazette did not mince words: Benjamin Hall, it stated flatly, was 'long notorious as a cattle stealer.' Within that same month the reward for his capture climbed from ten pounds to fifteen, each notice signed off from the Police Office, Murrurundi.

Townsfolk, it seems, were reluctant to turn on one another even for a reward. Lockup keeper James Gowan was dismissed after being accused of tipping Benjamin Hall off to 'keep out of the way' - he later became the local schoolmaster instead, his pupils including nine-year-old Mary Hall.

Six months after the reward notice, Benjamin Hall's children were cross-examined in court at Maitland - thirteen-year-old William and his young sister Mary. William had been held in a dark, boarded-up room near the Murrurundi lockup to frighten a confession out of him, and was said to have cried so much in his fear that it brought tears to the lockup keeper's wife. A fellow prisoner warned him: 'beware of men in wigs, only give them such answers as suits.'

Despite being called 'old in crime' by the prosecutor, William evidently impressed someone in that courtroom - a gentleman offered to take him on as an apprentice, and his mother Eliza consented. Benjamin Hall himself was captured two years later, near Bathurst. William's little brother would grow up to become far more famous than either of them: Ben Hall, one of Australia's best-known bushrangers.

Benjamin Hall senior's own trail ran out quietly a few decades on: an 1877 report noted only that 'the father of the bushranger' had died in the Liverpool Asylum - a long way, in every sense, from the notorious cattle-duffer the Gazette had once warned the colony about. Even his famous son's birthplace became a matter of dispute: when newspapers of the 1940s went looking for details of Ben Hall's early life, some gave Murrurundi itself, others named Breeza, further out on the family's later run.

Law and Order in a Lawless Town

In April 1848, four men stood trial in Maitland over the assault of a constable in Murrurundi. A half-drunk William Wilsdon had abused Magistrate William Henry Warland in the street; when Constables McDonald and Doyle were sent to arrest him, the gathered crowd obstructed them, and reinforcements were roughed up trying to help. All four accused were acquitted anyway - a constable testified, loyal to the townsfolk to the last, that the real blows had come from a different man entirely.

The presiding magistrate that day was Edward Denny Day - the very man who had captured the Jewboy Gang seven years before. He could be forgiven for thinking the rough little town hadn't changed much.

The district's earliest policing had been just as makeshift. Captain E. Mayne, the first Commissioner, held the extraordinary power to order any 'doubtful character' found beyond the ranges to return within them. The first police station was a slab building with a set of stocks out the front, where offenders were exposed to public ridicule - drunkenness earning a fine of a pound, or six hours locked in place for all of Murrurundi to see.

A Traveller's Description

Passing through in the late 1840s, the writer Joseph Phipps Townsend left behind an affectionate sketch of the town. Murrurundi, he wrote, was 'a fair specimen of an inland town' - two well-built inns, one kept by a kindly widow of 'homely English aspect', a slab-built Catholic chapel with broken windows standing beside its open graveyard, a scatter of brick cottages and bark huts, and a courthouse set a little apart in the bush.

A Church of England clergyman travelled twenty-five miles to hold service once a month; a Catholic priest visited from Maitland four times a year, and - in Townsend's telling - made a habit of collaring 'every stray drunkard, of whatever denomination' and talking them into taking the pledge. A large store stocked anything the bush might require, and in one of the bark huts lived a good-natured doctor, in no particular hurry to go home, gradually building up a herd of cattle and horses while he read Blackwood's Magazine.

The Page River, Townsend noted, 'runs, or rather lingers' behind the town. Everyone seemed content enough, grazing their stock on the common land and wanting for little - a peaceful picture, even if the district's reputation for lawlessness hadn't entirely faded.

Founding the Town & Haydonton

Half a century before it was written up, the Valley of the Page was untouched country - mimosa groves lining the road, and Aboriginal people hunting kangaroo undisturbed along the river. William Henry Warland was among the earliest settlers, farming to the south of the future town and leaving his name on Warland's Creek and Warland's Range. Lieutenant Cory, one of the Upper Hunter's pioneer squatters, settled nearby at Bickham with just 300 ewes - a flock that grew to 2,000 before ill health forced him to lease the property on. Writing up the district's history for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, a local correspondent remembered the valley in much the same spirit - 'redolent with the perfume of native trees, and in springtime brilliant and beautiful with their bloom.'

Peter Haydon took up land from the Crown and was succeeded, after his death in 1842, by his brother Thomas - a man remembered with real affection, whose liberality funded the district's earliest Catholic services. Thomas Haydon died in 1855; his funeral procession was said to have stretched two miles. The same 1875 sketch remembered him fondly, recalling how Mr. Haydon 'was looked upon by every one as a kind and sympathising friend, whose counsel and assistance were ever at command' - liberal, it said, 'to the last degree.'

There was no shortage of debate over where the township itself should go, before a site near the Range won out and was surveyed around 1840. Thomas Haydon opened his own land for auction in third-acre allotments soon after - some selling for £40 apiece - founding the settlement of Haydonton, which for many years outgrew Murrurundi itself. The old Haydonton Inn still stands today, better known as the White Hart Hotel. 'Perceiving thus,' as the town's own historical sketch put it, Haydon 'opened his estate and submitted the land to auction in allotments' - and Haydonton was born.

For years the two settlements were separated by the Page River, crossed first by a modest footbridge - Gordon's Bridge, named for the doctor who helped build it - before the Arnold Bridge finally joined Haydonton and Murrurundi properly around 1864.

Churches, School, Bridges & the Railway

The town's first place of worship was a simple slab Catholic chapel, visited by a priest from Maitland only every few months, later replaced by a proper stone church. The Church of England first held its services in the old Court House before building its own wooden church; the Presbyterians met near the old loco sheds, and the Methodists raised a wooden chapel of their own - each denomination slowly building up a congregation as the town grew around them.

The Murrurundi School of Arts, a stone building erected in 1873, became a hub of town life - home to a growing library, two billiard tables, and public meetings, until the Oddfellows' Hall took over as the main gathering place in 1897. It later became home to the town's own Council chambers.

Postal communication with Sydney began in 1839, but it was the railway's arrival in 1872 that changed everything - bringing such a rush of travellers and trade that the town's population swelled to around 2,200. The boom didn't last forever; once the line pushed on to Quirindi, Murrurundi's trade quietened again. All the same, the town was formally proclaimed in December 1894, having already become the seat of its own Municipality back in March 1890. The Maitland Mercury had announced the big day in advance - 'OPENING OF THE RAILWAY TO MURRURUNDI, THURSDAY, APRIL 4TH' - urging every town from Newcastle to Scone to 'make a general holiday of the day, and come to the demonstration.' Three weeks later, the same paper's correspondent was more candid: business, he admitted, had 'in no way been improved by the opening of the railway' - the boom, it turned out, would take a little longer to arrive than the trains had.

The Burning Mountain & Timor Caves

Not far from town lie two of the district's strangest natural features. Mount Wingen - the Burning Mountain - has smouldered underground for longer than anyone could say, believed to be fed by a seam of kerosene shale ignited by no one quite knows what. By the 1870s, some fifty acres of surface ground had been left bare by the slow-burning fire beneath, the air around it thick with the smell of sulphur.

Sixteen miles from Murrurundi, the Timor Caves offered visitors an entirely different kind of wonder - chambers hung with stalactites, floors crusted with stalagmites, and a roof thick with 'myriads of bats.' The passages were said to be so intricate that explorers tied a cord to themselves on the way in, just to be sure of finding their way back out again. One early party reported a pool of water at depth they never reached, its distance guessed only by the sound of a dropped stone.

The district held other riches too - gold in the quartz reefs at the Hanging Rock, seams of coal and kerosene shale, and even a short-lived silver mining venture, troubled by too much lead mixed in with the ore. Perhaps strangest of all, the fossilised remains of a giant diprotodon were unearthed at Chilcott's Creek and now sit in the Sydney Museum - a reminder that this valley's history runs a great deal further back than its first Free Settlers, or its first Felons.