Thanks for the photo, now I can go hunting.
Mudgee?
- Thread starter Legion
- Start date
I've just sent another email chasing up the Mudgee Historical Society, in case they had forgotten about our very urgent enquiry 
.
In the meantime though, here's something I wrote about how a weird quirk of history, related to the demise of the Mudgee quarry, means that it's more common to find Turkish Oilstones here in Aus than basically anywhere else in the world. I posted it on the honing forum originally, but the below is slightly amended to include a good joke about New Zealand.
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For a while I, and a few others I've spoken to, have found it curious that in Australia old examples of Turkish Oilstones are relatively common - I come across them far more often than I do Washitas, a stone produced in much greater quantities, and which largely replaced the Turkish stone in many other countries. The penny dropped for me a month or so back when trying to research about the historic Mudgee Sharpening Stone from New South Wales.
As far as I know the Mudgee stone was the only Australian whetstone ever quarried on a reasonably large commercial scale. The opening was announced with much fanfare, and a clearly significant commercial investment, in January 1890, and by March they had had to double the shifts worked in order to keep up with demand. Yet less than two years later production had ceased entirely, for want of custom.
To sustain a commercially viable whetstone business you need to be in a country with enough people who need whetstones, and when I say 'people' - that usually means 'industries'. In 19th century Britain, as well as having a far larger population than Australia you also had a sizeable cutlery industry, and even then much whetstone quarrying was still the by-product of quarrying for building stone. Earlier in the 18th and 19th centuries there had been quite significant production of scythestones, but the industry died out completely in a very short space of time after advances in the automation of agriculture during the industrial revolution. So what did the owners and investors of the Mudgee Sharpening Stone Company imagine was going to sustain them?
The answer obviously, was sheep. There are a lot of sheep in Australia; today over 100 million, second only to China, and more than four times as many as New Zealand - an island nation to the east of Tasmania notable for being populated almost exclusively by sheep. Lots of sheep means lots of wool, and lots of wool means lots of shears that needed sharpening. The Mudgee stone was marketed directly at shearers as an alternative to the expensive imported stones they had been using, and initially it clearly went rather well. But production had begun at exactly the wrong time. The rapid uptake of a sheep shearing machine, created by Frederick Wolseley in 1888, killed the Mudgee Sharpening Stone Company dead in much the same way that automated harvesting had done the British scythestone industry 80 years before:
'But by February 1892 the Mudgee Sharpening Stone Company had ceased production owing to slow demand and the accumulation of stock. Sadly, by September that year the directors of the company had abandoned the idea of reopening the works. It was the rapid acceptance of the shearing machines invented by Frederick Wolseley from 1888 into the big station woolsheds which sounded the death knell for the Mudgee stones.'
And the quite specific timeline of that event I think has an interesting impact on how relatively common Turkish stones are in Australia in comparison to Washitas. Below is the only picture I've been able to find of what the Mudgee stone actually looked like (it's a type of slate), and we can see that Turkish stones and Washitas were also favoured by shearers:
By turn of the century commercial production of Washita stones in the US had probably already been established for at least 50 years. But it wasn't until 1889 that the stone eventually made it to the UK, here's a contemporary account of how it immediately rendered the Charnley stone obsolete:
'In the year 1889 the “Washita”. An imported stone, appeared on the English market, and was hailed with delight by all woodworkers , who straightway discarded their “Charnley Forests” for ever.'
We can I think assume that at that time the Washita would not have been shipped directly to Australia from the US. The pacific ocean is big, and considerably more ships were going the other way round. Washita stones were taken to the Britain and often rebranded by companies there; A B Salmen for instance sold Pike Washitas under a label identical to the Pike one but with their own name and logo. Indeed when Pike Norton created a subsidiary company in the UK in the early 1930s a large part of the reason was to establish more direct trade with other markets, and in particular - Commonwealth countries.
So if the Washita stone only arrived in Australia in 1889 at the very earliest, then like the Mudgee stone, it coincided almost exactly with the introduction of automated shearing machines and the total bottoming-out of the main market demand for whetstones in Australia. A market that had until that point been overwhelmingly dominated by the old Turkish Oilstones which are, perhaps unsurprisingly, still common to find here.
.In the meantime though, here's something I wrote about how a weird quirk of history, related to the demise of the Mudgee quarry, means that it's more common to find Turkish Oilstones here in Aus than basically anywhere else in the world. I posted it on the honing forum originally, but the below is slightly amended to include a good joke about New Zealand.
---
For a while I, and a few others I've spoken to, have found it curious that in Australia old examples of Turkish Oilstones are relatively common - I come across them far more often than I do Washitas, a stone produced in much greater quantities, and which largely replaced the Turkish stone in many other countries. The penny dropped for me a month or so back when trying to research about the historic Mudgee Sharpening Stone from New South Wales.
As far as I know the Mudgee stone was the only Australian whetstone ever quarried on a reasonably large commercial scale. The opening was announced with much fanfare, and a clearly significant commercial investment, in January 1890, and by March they had had to double the shifts worked in order to keep up with demand. Yet less than two years later production had ceased entirely, for want of custom.
To sustain a commercially viable whetstone business you need to be in a country with enough people who need whetstones, and when I say 'people' - that usually means 'industries'. In 19th century Britain, as well as having a far larger population than Australia you also had a sizeable cutlery industry, and even then much whetstone quarrying was still the by-product of quarrying for building stone. Earlier in the 18th and 19th centuries there had been quite significant production of scythestones, but the industry died out completely in a very short space of time after advances in the automation of agriculture during the industrial revolution. So what did the owners and investors of the Mudgee Sharpening Stone Company imagine was going to sustain them?
The answer obviously, was sheep. There are a lot of sheep in Australia; today over 100 million, second only to China, and more than four times as many as New Zealand - an island nation to the east of Tasmania notable for being populated almost exclusively by sheep. Lots of sheep means lots of wool, and lots of wool means lots of shears that needed sharpening. The Mudgee stone was marketed directly at shearers as an alternative to the expensive imported stones they had been using, and initially it clearly went rather well. But production had begun at exactly the wrong time. The rapid uptake of a sheep shearing machine, created by Frederick Wolseley in 1888, killed the Mudgee Sharpening Stone Company dead in much the same way that automated harvesting had done the British scythestone industry 80 years before:
'But by February 1892 the Mudgee Sharpening Stone Company had ceased production owing to slow demand and the accumulation of stock. Sadly, by September that year the directors of the company had abandoned the idea of reopening the works. It was the rapid acceptance of the shearing machines invented by Frederick Wolseley from 1888 into the big station woolsheds which sounded the death knell for the Mudgee stones.'
And the quite specific timeline of that event I think has an interesting impact on how relatively common Turkish stones are in Australia in comparison to Washitas. Below is the only picture I've been able to find of what the Mudgee stone actually looked like (it's a type of slate), and we can see that Turkish stones and Washitas were also favoured by shearers:
By turn of the century commercial production of Washita stones in the US had probably already been established for at least 50 years. But it wasn't until 1889 that the stone eventually made it to the UK, here's a contemporary account of how it immediately rendered the Charnley stone obsolete:
'In the year 1889 the “Washita”. An imported stone, appeared on the English market, and was hailed with delight by all woodworkers , who straightway discarded their “Charnley Forests” for ever.'
We can I think assume that at that time the Washita would not have been shipped directly to Australia from the US. The pacific ocean is big, and considerably more ships were going the other way round. Washita stones were taken to the Britain and often rebranded by companies there; A B Salmen for instance sold Pike Washitas under a label identical to the Pike one but with their own name and logo. Indeed when Pike Norton created a subsidiary company in the UK in the early 1930s a large part of the reason was to establish more direct trade with other markets, and in particular - Commonwealth countries.
So if the Washita stone only arrived in Australia in 1889 at the very earliest, then like the Mudgee stone, it coincided almost exactly with the introduction of automated shearing machines and the total bottoming-out of the main market demand for whetstones in Australia. A market that had until that point been overwhelmingly dominated by the old Turkish Oilstones which are, perhaps unsurprisingly, still common to find here.
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The 1890 article says that the new main works/factory stood on ground in Budgee Budgee adjacent to the main road connecting Mudgee and Cassilis, "the quarry being some mile and a quarter back upon the hillside". The same article said the quarry was a mile away. Veteran NSW shearing judge Max Endacott says the largest quarry of the Mudgee stone was at Budgee Budgee.
I have no idea how many acres the Havilah estate may have encompassed back in the day.
I would bet a full tank of gas AND a dozen eggs that this pond is the old whetstone quarry.
What I really don't understand is why stonemason Denis Barry Acton was talking about slate coming from a quarry 12 miles west of Mudgee.
I have no idea how many acres the Havilah estate may have encompassed back in the day.
I would bet a full tank of gas AND a dozen eggs that this pond is the old whetstone quarry.
What I really don't understand is why stonemason Denis Barry Acton was talking about slate coming from a quarry 12 miles west of Mudgee.
- Thread starter
- #25
I know the works at Budgee have a spring on them. That's not the mine, but where they were cut.
- Thread starter
- #26
This is a parish map showing the land owned by the Underwoods. The road looks a similar shape to the spot you pointed at in Google Earth.
