History in the telling

   

Cobbadah church

 

The reason I was heading so far west on my journey was so I could swing by the town where my grandfather Terry was born and his grandmother Bridget died. His father John died there in 1916, not long after Terry enlisted and was heading to the Western Front, part of one of the largest town call ups. I stopped by Cobbadah church, up the road from Barraba, where John was married. The town, I was soon to discover, was also where the artist Grace Crowley came from.  Here is a portrait of her cousin Gwen from Bingara.

The guys at the Bingara Museum were really friendly and happy to search through their files for anything relevant to me and later took me through their significant collection, including a school house. They were able to give me a copy of my grandfather with the other recruits from the town.

The Roxy Theatre has been restored to a fine standard and has a cafe and tourist centre operating on the premises. Hopefully it will have a healthy second lease of life.

 

On the way out of town, there is the opportunity to visit a memorial to one of the darker sides of our colonial history. The significance of this site is not just in the fact that a massacre of Aboriginals occurred there, but that it was the first, if not only, time that white men were arrested, charged and hanged for such a crime and the documentation and investigation undergone at the time are testament to the commonplaceness of such behaviour and the mindset of the communities. Not only the opportunistic and violent nature of many men on the frontier, but also that there were some white people who stood up against such tyranny too. A good site to look at is http://www.myallcreek.info/