Ned Ryan (c. 1835 to 1893)

Stonemason Edward (Ned) Ryan is mostly remembered for his well sinking exploits.  As a bushman and surveyors assistant he also did much to aid the early development of the Northern Territory. 

Early in his career, Ned accompanied explorer John McKinlay on his 1866 wet season survey of Arnhem Land. Trapped without food on the East Alligator River, the fifteen man team faced death on a makeshift raft Ned and a fellow bushman made from the skins of their 27 pack horses. The party drifted 13 kilometres out to sea before reaching the safety of Escape Cliffs.   During the six day voyage, the leaking raft attracted constant attention of crocodiles and sharks. 

Two years later, still seeking adventure, Ned joined George Goyder’s team which surveyed the outpost now known as Darwin. 

In 1885 he began sinking the wells which were vital to new settlement in arid Central Australia. For five years he was the foreman of a team that established water supply points around Alice Spring to Ti Tree. 

This well, hand dug by Ned Ryan’s camel party in 1889 was part of a South Australian Government move to encourage settlement through what was then its northern territory.

In 1872, the Overland Telegraph Line from Adelaide to Darwin was completed, linkingAustralia with the overseas telegraph network.  It began an era of rapid world communications for the Australian Colonies, and provided the safest route for travel and settlement through Central Australia.

Ryan Well was one of several that the Government sank along the track that followed the Overland Telegraph Line.  Drovers’ sheep and cattle valued its salty water, which was raised originally by a hand windlass and later by a whip (used with a horse or camel). 

In 1914, the Glen Maggie sheep and cattle station was established around this well and the owners charged a small fee per head to draw water for travelling stock.

In the 1930s, the spread of motorized transport and machine drilled water bores robbed the well of its earlier importance.   

In 1860 John McDouall Stuart commenced the first of three attempts to traverse the Australian continent.  On his first attempt he discovered Bonney Creek and named it after Charles Bonney, a former Commissioner of Crown Lands for South Australia.  Stuart initially established temporary depot sites at waterholes situated a short distance to the west of the well. Later these sites were also used by the Overland Telegraph Line construction teams. 

The first record of a well on Bonney Creek is from the period December 1878 – January 1879.  At this time a well sinking party was sent ahead of an expedition led by AT Woods and Arthur and Alfred Giles, who were overlanding cattle and sheep to the north. The shaft excavated by Giles’ party was fairly shallow and it is likely that it was near, if not at, the present site. 

The present well was probably sunk between 1880 and 1883 by well sinkers working under contract to the Telegraph Department.  The Post Master General, Charles Todd, noted the completion of Bonney Well in his 1884 report.  Todd described it as:

74 miles N. of Barrow Creek – Shaft size – 6ft x 3ft – Depth 35 ft and producing fresh water at a rate of 1000 gallons per 24 hours.

A major refurbishment of the well was undertaken in 1892.  The 2 metre high stone dump with headframe for a whip, the stone tank stand, a 10,000 gallon tanks and new iron troughs were built.  It is that remains from this era and later period that are visible today.

The South Australian Water Conservation Department was handed responsibility for the maintenance of Bonney and other government wells on the North-South Stock Route in 1896.  At the same time a Water Conservation Reserve was declared over 5 square miles surrounding the well.  

During the 1930s an itinerant missionary named Annie Lock formed a camp on Bonney Creek about 300 metres from the well.  She was equipped with a horse drawn buggy and a small supply of rations, which she regularly distributed to groups of Aborigines.

During the mid 1930s the well was replaced by a bore that was sunk alongside and all the well structures gradually fell into disrepair.  During WWII an Army catering corps detachment established a staging camp at Bonney Well in order to feed troops and drivers in military convoys travelling on the North-South road.  It was during this period that the windmill received all its .303 bullet holes and most of the timber whip posts and water trough stumps were removed for firewood.

In 1983-84 the National Trust of Australia (NT), with funding from the National Estate Grant Program, commissioned restoration works to the stone sump and tank stand.  It is one of only three remaining stock wells on the North-South Stock Route with stone dumps intact.  In October 1996 Bonney Well was declared a heritage place under the Northern Territory Heritage Conservation Act, 1991.

The Hatches Creek Wolfram field, ten kilometres south of this waterhole, brought hundreds of miners to the area during several mining booms from 1914.  The need for a mining warden, and troubles between the early pastoralists and Aboriginal people led to the building of a Police Station in the early 1920s on the site of the old Frew River Homestead. 

From Erhhard Eylmann, anthropologist, 1896.

“The station people were … supposed to have shot every cattle duffer (thief) they caught … I heard from a very reliable 20 year old lad that the Whites were supposed to have captured a large number of Lubras (Aboriginal women) and had only set them free some weeks later … When allegedly the stockmen’s spirits were getting out of control every clan’s warrior had besieged the station for a few days; both their intention to burn down the buildings and murder the oppressors was foiled by the vigilance of a great number of kangaroos and blood hounds inside the palisade fences.” 

White settlement, a troubled era. 

From the diary of Partridge, a camel train leader.

“—he (McDonald, Manager of nearby Elkedra station in the 1890s) battled there for seven years against the blocks ‘til the owners saw the impossibility to continue to raise cattle on such an exposed and far off place.  He had been speared through the left leg above the knee; his head shows where it was once opened to none too tender advances of a tomahawk; the forehead above the right eye has been fractured; his right arm hit with a boomerang which penetrated his shoulder. 

Gold was first discovered in the Kurundi area of the Davenport Range, north west of here, in 1898.  Some individual prospectors have had good finds, but gold mining has never proved profitable on a large scale in the Kurundi area. 

Tungsten: The black gold of war time.

Outcrops of heavy black tungsten ore, or Wolframite, were confirmed at Hatches Creek, south east of here, in 1914, just in time for the outbreak of World War I.  Tungsten, also known as Wolfram, is of great importance in hardening steel.  It was suddenly of great demand for armour and weapons, and 1914-18 saw the first mining boom at Hatches Creek.

Mining at Hatches Creek was tough and basic.  Veins of quartz were followed underground and gouged out with pick and hammer.  Shafts were dug out by hand and dynamited.  Quartz rocks with tungsten ore were roasted with firewood to make the rock brittle then crushed by hand.  The separated tungsten ore and supplies were transported to and from the railhead at Ooodnadatta, 1120 kilometres south by Afghan camel teams.

At the end of World War I the value of tungsten ore dropped dramatically and activity at Hatches Creek all but ceased.  World War II and the Korean War provided the Tungsten markets needed for the last two booms at Hatches Creek.  

In early 1896 the Frew River and Elkedra cattle stations were abandoned.  Conflicts with Aboriginal people, a drought which lasted from 1889 to 1894 and poor cattle prices had taken their toll.  The Davenport Range was left to Aboriginal people once again.  Pastoralism didn’t recommence in earnest here until the late 1920s.

The ruins in this area have not yet been surveyed in detail.  They are the remains of the first Frew Rover homestead set up and abandoned in the 1890s and of the Police Station built on the same site in the 1920s.

A Brief Police Presence

Mounted Constable Jones arrived here on December 19, 1918 and a police station was built early the following year on the site of the old Frew River cattle station.

A police presence in the Davenport Range had been mooted since the troubles in the 1890s and a mining warden was needed for the Hatches Creek area.

This police presence was however short lived.  With the end of World War I mining petered out at Hatches Creek.  There were few Europeans remaining in the area when on September 1921 Mounted Constable Mackay who had replaced Jones closed the station and left it to the elements. 

Like isolated communities anywhere in the world, the centre of Australia drew its share of adventurous characters.  Their tales, like those of Tom Nugent (alias Tom Holmes) would have entertained many over an evening meal. 

During Tom’s early life, he was widely acclaimed as the clever and daring leader of the ‘Ragged Thirteen’ a gang of vagabonds who roamed the Northern Territory and the Kimberley at the turn of the century. 

In 1896 he arrived in the Tennant Creek region with a mob of cattle and established Banka Banka Station.

Tom and his family were frequent visitors to the Telegraph Station.  He died in 1911 and his grave lies a short distance west of this building. 

Jerome Murif was the first of a new wave of travellers who pedaled bicycles or drove the new ‘auto-mobiles’ across the continent. In 1897 Murif arrived at the Tennant Creek station half starved from his hazardous journey. 

“At Tennant Creek during the many days I remained at the telegraph station, I could eat almost continuously.  My happiest thoughts were centred around the dinner table, and there was a savage delight in the partaking of every meal.”

In 1908, Frances Birtles cycled from Sydney up the east coats, across to Darwin and then down through the centre of Australia.

“At Tennant Creek I was most hospitably received.  I had a good clean bed which was a longed for luxury and a splendid meal of beef and vegetables, after which I had a look at the garden.  The vegetables were growing as well as I had ever seen them anywhere, and I came to the conclusion that even the desert will grow anything when water is obtained.”