Barrington Tops, development and conservation on Maitland’s edge
The Barrington Tops, on the Hunter Valley’s northern edge, has long been an area of great developmental potential. It is also important for its wilderness value, and a long battle has been waged between developmental and conservationist interests over how the area should be treated. Years ago Maitland played a part in the battle. Largely, the council favoured ‘development’, but the rugged impenetrability of the area discouraged investment both public and private.
Barrington Tops: rugged country
(Getty Images)
The Tops, occupied for millennia by the Gringai, Wonnarua, Worimi and Birpai people, were first explored by Europeans during the 1820s. Settlers, surveyors and scientists soon followed. Cattle were brought up to the high country to graze by the 1840s, gold strikes attracted fortune-seekers, and bushrangers like Captain Thunderbolt and the Governor brothers (Jimmy and Joe) used its isolation and impenetrability to evade authorities.
The extensive timber resources of the southern slopes were being exploited by the 1870s - sawmilling dominated the valleys of the Paterson, Allyn and Williams rivers for some decades - and council and commercial interests in Gloucester, Dungog, Newcastle, Maitland, Singleton and Scone were soon dreaming of great developmental possibilities.
A Pender and Foster sawmill in the Upper Allyn
(Doug Brown)
Potential development
What emerged, especially from the 1920s, was a partly co-operative, partly competitive effort between these interests to ‘open up’ the Tops for exploitation. Transport was critical, and there was much lobbying of the state government for funding to improve build or improve roads. The vision was ambitious: a health resort (sanitorium) and tourist destination including large hotels, a racecourse, trout-stocked streams and lakes, and even skiing facilities. People with entrepreneurial bents saw the Barrington Tops as the ‘Katoomba of Newcastle’ and the ‘Kosciusko of Sydney’. Even an airfield was proposed. But access was very difficult, though the Barrington Guest House was able to be built by 1930.
Barrington Guest House, 1935
(Mike Scanlon collection)
(reproduced in Newcastle Herald, 10 June 2016)
Skiing briefly did take root for a time. By 1933 the Northern Ski Club had been formed in Newcastle and its members were making arduous journeys on rough tracks to ski runs they had carved from the bush. But the runs were short and the snow unreliable - a situation that has worsened over the 100 years due to climate change and atmospheric warming. The Tops are too far north and, with the highest peaks less than 1600 metres above sea level, the area is not sufficiently elevated for sustainable skiing.
Just as problematic was cricket, though a match was played in 1924 between Stewarts Brook and Ecclestone at above 5000 feet. The wicket was a mat laid on ‘chipped’ snow grass. The snow grass away from the wicket was long and boundaries were difficult to hit.
A Barrington Tops vista
The Maitland interest
The West Maitland Municipal Council and the Maitland Chamber of Commerce, enthusiastically supported by the Maitland Mercury, joined in the lobbying for grand-scale development from the 1920s. in 1924 a future Mayor, Alexander (Sandy) McDonald, was instrumental in organising a trip to the Tops by a large group of parliamentarians, local government leaders, businessmen and media figures. The purpose was to build support for road development to open up investment possibilities for local businesses.
The councils of the Hunter Valley were competing for limited resources because there could not be a road to the Tops from every direction. Maitland was at a disadvantage here, because a route up the valley of the Paterson River would have been extremely difficult to construct through the most rugged terrain of the whole area.
Eventually, in 1978, an east-west road was built across the Tops linking Gloucester and Scone, providing access to the Gondwana rainforests and other natural attractions. No road all the way to the peaks and the plateau was ever built from the Maitland side.
Recent times
The enthusiasm for major recreation-based development eventually abated. Conservation interests gained momentum, preservation was increasingly emphasised and there was lobbying for a ‘primitive reserve’ or a National Park. A National Park was declared in 1969 and the area was later listed as being of World Heritage importance. Nowadays, there is even an ‘Aussie Ark’ at Tomalla, on the northern side of the Tops, propagating the Tasmanian devil which is afflicted with disease and endangered in its native Tasmania.
The Barrington Tops National Park in 1988, streams radiating in all directions.
(Dulcie Hartley)
References
Hartley, Dulcie, Barrington Tops: a vision splendid, the author, 1993.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: progress v conservation on the edge of our city’, Maitland Mercury, 18 November 2022.
Maitland Mercury
