Abydos - Woodstock Reserves

Values

Abydos-Woodstock Government Research Station has historic significance as the site of discoveries which have enabled continued farming in the Pilbara

Abydos and Woodstock have significance as sites of failed pastoralism, before the Government Research Station findings

Woodstock Station Homestead has significance for the quality of the stone construction in the earliest buildings

Woodstock Homestead was one of the earliest buildings in the area, and demonstrates an earlier way of life, first as a wayside pub and later as a station homestead

Woodstock Homestead has historic links to the wagon route to the Tambourah goldfield

Abydos-Woodstock has significance as the site of many scientists conducting research into diverse areas, including agriculture, botany, geology, archaeology and zoology

Abydos-Woodstock has significance as a site where Indigenous people were employed to work on the pastoral land, and thus show interactions between white settlers and traditional owners of the land

The site complex on the Abydos-Woodstock Reserves is part of one of the richest rock art centres of the worlds. Site components include engravings, painting, grinding patches, gnamma holes and artefacts. The petroglyphs may be the oldest rock art in Australia, and are potentially the world's largest surviving collection of Ice Age art

Woodstock 65B has strong contemporary social value via the retention and rejuvenation of Aboriginal connections and is highly valued by those who have authority to speak for the place, and other Indigenous communities. It has significance as an important site for Indigenous people, both past and present, who have lived and worked on and around Woodstock Station and Abydos Station. This importance is reflected in the number of traditions, beliefs and songs associated with the engravings

The petroglyphs are of high research value, having been created over a long and continual timeframe, and their content has the potential to contribute to a wider understanding of the cultural and natural history of WA, including its prehistory

The site has the potential to contribute to the understanding of the pattern of human occupation of WA potentially dating back 26 000 years

The site is highly valued by the national and international community of rock art specialists, academics, and heritage professionals

Physical Description

Woodstock Homestead was built in three stages. The earliest stage dating from 1883-84 has granite walls now pointed in an embossed cement pointing. The stone central core is completely surrounded by verandas, the western side of which, adjoining the veranda of the later kitchen (dating from c.1914), is enclosed. The roof is hipped with vented gables.

Immediately to the west stands the kitchen block also of granite with a similar roof but on an opposing axis.

To the south is a newer wing. The whole of the roof sheeting has been replaced with recent corrugated iron sheeting.

Abydos Homestead (1882, 1937-38)

Comprises a large sitting room, dining room and bedroom opening onto wide surrounding verandas, fitted with substantial shutters. The original galvanised iron kitchen remains, as do two sleeping rooms. The house is constructed of asbestos on a timber frame and has a replica of the 1882 domed iron roof.

Woodstock 65B Petroglyphs

Woodstock site 65B is located near the abandoned Abydos Homestead. It is a granite conical boulder pile, rising about 80 m above the surrounding plain. It bears an estimated
2 000 petroglyphs, which are scattered in several concentrations around its slopes, with a notable occurrence of very elaborate and detailed human figures found near the summit. Large boulders form a distinctive shoulder on the western slope, creating an area of level ground where petroglyphs of very different ages occur in close proximity, even on the same panels.

History

Aboriginal population known, reflecting the settlers’ indifference to Aboriginal culture and society and the resultant dislocation of surviving traditional Aboriginal landowners, many of whom became stockmen, domestic servants or pearlers.

Although Abydos Plain has a broad homogeneity in its physical features, its coastal areas are more amenable to human intervention, as are the coastal plains to its south. Hence, the surveyor, F.T. Gregory, seeking grazing lands in the Northwest in 1861, recommended the country between the Ashburton and De Grey Rivers for ‘judicious’ settlement. Reports of pearls around Nickol Bay were an added enticement.

New arrivals flooded in, many already equipped with the necessary skills and stock.
W. Padbury and his manager C. Nairn settled on the De Grey River in 1865, while
J. Withnell and O. Wellard selected stations on the Harding. Ships brought settlers, sheep, cattle and horses, some of them from Victoria through the port now known as Cossack.

In 1866, an overland stock route linked Geraldton with the newly proclaimed town of Roebourne. By 1867, pastoral development encompassed 61 land grants totalling 5.8m acres. Aboriginal stockmen shepherded the stock and provided labour for the booming pearling industry, which supplemented many pastoralists’ incomes.

In 1934, sheep numbers peaked at 1 807 800 through graziers’ efforts to increase stock to compensate for falling wool prices. Numbers declined by more than half during the next twelve years through mismanagement and over-grazing. When, from 1969 onwards, wool prices dropped, a change from sheep to cattle occurred until, by the 1980s, cattle numbers exceeded those of sheep. During the 1969-72 recession, many stations changed hands, a number being acquired by Aboriginal groups.

Woodstock (Reserve 22627) and Abydos (Reserve 22626), now comprising 150 000ha, are 150km south of Port Hedland, between the De Grey plains to the north and the Chichester Range to the south. The area is dissected from north to south by two major routes: the Port Hedland-Wittenoom Highway and the Port-Hedland-Newman ore-carrying railway and its adjacent service road. From the highway, a road to Marble Bar runs past Woodstock Station Homestead, where there is an airstrip for the Flying Doctor Service.

There were six successive phases in the occupation of the Abydos-Woodstock Reserves: Aboriginal, public house, pastoral, agricultural research, museum vestment, and Aboriginal Reserve.

The Aboriginal inhabitants of the first phase were probably Kariera speakers, with some Indjibani speakers on the southwestern borders. Countless petroglyphs, grinding patches and occupation sites throughout the area bear witness to their rich cultural life.

In the second phases, 1893-1910, a public house at Woodstock catered for prospectors and miners. During this period, c.1899, the pastoral period began on Woodstock with additional leases being granted. Abydos was a pastoral property from its inception in 1882.

1945 marked the collapse of pastoralism and the departure of the graziers from the Abydos-Woodstock Reserves. Controlled by the Department of Agriculture, 30 years of pastoral research commenced. Awareness of the wealth of Aboriginal engravings gradually dawned on Europeans from the late 1930s.

After the Department of Agriculture withdrew in 1976, both stations were vested in the Trustees of the West Australian Museum, where they were utilised as Reserves from the study of Aboriginal culture, material, historic buildings and grazing.

Abydos-Woodstock Reserves was one of the first Aboriginal site complexes to be entered in the Register of the National Estate by the Australian Heritage Commission. The Aboriginal community from neighbouring Yandeearra Station have informal cattle grazing rights, and Aboriginal people claiming a genuine interest have freedom of access to their cultural sites.

Woodstock Station Homestead

Woodstock Station Homestead (1883-84) was one of several wayside pubs on the old wagon route from Cossack-Roebourne to the Tambourah goldfield. Others were at Mallina (1881) and Yandeearra (1882). The Tambourah goldfield (1883) had at one stage 500-600 men working, three pubs and a Post Office connected by telephone to Marble Bar.

Billy Look (or Looke) held the first licence at Woodstock, previously owning Lalla Rookh Station to the north. Initially intending to establish a sheep station, he was prompted by the gold finds at Tambourah to build Woodstock as a public house instead. He employed a skilled stonemason, Edwards, to construct the property from granite quarried from one main dome 1.5km away. Edwards had previously built Williambury on the Gascoyne. Soon after completion of Woodstock Homestead, Edwards committed suicide.

The original building comprised only two large rooms, with a wide veranda and separate kitchen. Additions (possibly 1898), evidence 50cm thick walls, a bedroom opening onto the front veranda facing Coorong Creek, a bar room (6m by 4m) in the middle of the house, and smaller room opening onto the bar room. Adjacent and opening onto the back veranda was a kitchen and cook’s room of stone. Until the 1960s the road ran between Coorong Creek and the house. Travellers’ accommodation was a galvanised iron shanty of three or four rooms with wooden shuttered windows on a rise, some 80m from the homestead.

Life at Woodstock Inn has been described as follows:

No women were on this place… Guests, staff and owner were invariably in drunken stupors, thanks to the practice of keeping and freely dispensing only [overproof] rum. Cash was scarce and gold dust, which was plentiful, was the common currency. Not only did the inn provide for prospectors and miners, but for police, recruiters of Aboriginal labour and their unfortunate victims, and on one occasion, for a party of 23 pseudo-explorers and their two tons of special provisions.

At some stage a Post Office, whose foundations are still visible, was built adjacent to Woodstock Inn and telegraph link to Whim Creek existed.

Look left Woodstock by 1898, to be replaced by Fred Prentice who advertised ‘enlarged and renovated hostelry’, with attractions including fresh vegetables and meat. However, his stay was short, since by December that year the lease was held by Billy Pead. It is unclear when Woodstock ceased operating as an inn, but as Tambourah’s alluvial gold declined Pead stayed on as an accountant while his wife worked the station until 1910.

Transfer of the lease occurred several times in the early 1900s, until Percy Draper and Ronald Parker took over in partnership in 1913/14. They added a large stone drawing room to the homestead, using the existing veranda as a breezeway, and a kitchen block, both probably 1914. The difference in quality of the stonework from the fine original is obvious. Parker managed Woodstock employing an accountant-overseer, a white stockman, a Chinese cook, Aboriginal stockmen and house-girls and an Irish housekeeper. At this time, Woodstock was the mail depot for the surrounding area and people came in once a month for letters and goods from the large station store.

Various land transfers took place over the subsequent years, so by 1929 Woodstock amounted to 267 486 acres. Conditions in the late 1930s were recalled as follows:

There were usually four or five white men; two or three stockmen, an overseer and two jackaroos – it varied. A jackaroo was paid £2/10 with all found. This was quite generous for those days. Jimmy Todd was a fencing contractor. The Aboriginal labour lived at Coorong Creek, camping. There were about forty to fifty in the whole bunch – it depended on the season. We didn’t employ all of course, but there’d be a good dozen working for us when we were busy. They got their food, clothes and rations from the station. They earned some money, and the working men usually bought their own clothes. The Aborigines were never a permanent population. There weren’t any ‘originals’ among them; they were mainly mixed race… not that many full bloods.

As elsewhere in the Pilbara, from the mid-1930s, Woodstock deteriorated and in 1945 it was foreclosed, and the Drapers forced to leave. Neighbouring Yandeearra, Kangan and Abydos met the same fate. A finale to pastoralism on Woodstock was the destruction of the homestead roof and the substantial shearing shed by a summer cyclone in 1945.

Abydos Homestead

In 1880, 62 000 acres of land was demarcated as two leases in the area later known as Abydos. Frederick Arundel Wedge leased this land from 1887 until sometime before 1893. He also took up considerable property around the Turner and De Grey Rivers, including Tabba Tabba and Wallareenya Hill. He is remembered today by a street named after him in Port Hedland.

The next available record (1892) shows Dalgetys as lessees of the same area and an adjacent 20 000 acres to the west. Occupants to 1919 were the Hester family. They sold the station to brothers Clem and Fred Leeds as a going concern. Fred Leeds’ daughter, Mary, recalled life on Abydos from her birth there in 1929 to their departure in 1945:

The spring provided plenty of excellent water. We kept three milking cows and enough cattle for our own meat supplies. Father used to take us to ‘Wall Street’, two high walls of stone near our home. He used to shoot plenty of kangaroos there to supplement our beef. We kept out butter, milk, meat and eggs in an early-style cooler, using charcoal and water… and we salted beef. Abydos had a large vegetable garden edged with oleander trees around the house.

Apart from the Leeds brothers, the household comprised Fred’s wife and daughter, a mixed-descent child called Nancy, who was brought up with Mary, and Una Parker, an Aboriginal Woman. Una was both house-girl and friend to Mary until she left Abydos.

Station employees included a white overseer and mainly mixed-descent stockmen from other areas. Most of the Aboriginal people spoke English and all of them returned to some kind of traditional bush life for three months during the summer. Mary Leeds remembers one occasion when a young boy was initiated at Abydos. This may have been at Stinking Pool, a ceremonial site near the station’s northern border.

The original homestead was built about 1882 when Wedge’s claims were accepted. Like Woodstock, the walls were of granite and mud and plastered over inside. Both house and adjacent separate kitchen had high domed iron roofs for coolness. There were two separate sleeping rooms near the house, with elegant walls of pressed metal, whose date of construction is unknown, as well as other outbuildings.

Around 1937-8, the Leeds built a new homestead on the foundation of the old and to the same plan: large sitting room, dining room and bedroom opening onto wide surrounding verandas. The family slept on the verandas, which were later fitted with substantial shutters. The original galvanised iron kitchen remained, as did two sleeping rooms. The new house was asbestos on a timber frame and with a replica of the old domed iron roof.

The name Abydos is taken from the site of Aswan Dam. Since the Leeds brothers had wartime experience in Egypt, it seems likely that they named the station in 1919 and it was the extended to apply to the whole plain.

By 1945, the flocks were reduced by half and Dalgetys foreclosed on Abydos. Fred Leeds gained a position as secretary to the Port Hedland Roadboard, and Clem returned to the family home in Fremantle.

Abydos-Woodstock Government Research Station

The widespread failure of pastoral leases in the Pilbara led to questions over the viability of the sheep industry there. The Premier, and former Minister for Agriculture, Frank Wise, caused the Government to purchase Woodstock and Abydos in 1946 as an agricultural research station.

From 1946 to 1976, then, Woodstock and Abydos were under the control of the Department of Agriculture. They attracted scientists from a variety of disciplines, including agriculture, botany, geology, archaeology and zoology. Woodstock Homestead was modified to provide accommodation for such visitors.

For most of this period the manager was R. Sherlock, who lived with his family in Abydos Homestead because of the cyclone damage to Woodstock in 1945. When Hank Suijdendorp, newly graduated in agricultural science from UWA, arrived at the research station in 1951 to begin work, Woodstock remained abandoned and roofless. For six months he lived at Abydos, before the PWD replaced the lost roof and Suijdendorp could bring his family up from Perth. This was to be their home for the next three years.

The research station is now credited with solving the problems of the sheep industry in the Pilbara and producing sustainable management plans for pastoral stations in the area. One pastoralist recalls that ‘Abydos Station made the Pilbara!’ Suijendorp notes that ‘the important outcome is that the Pilbara is still being occupied by pastoralists who took notice of this research… the carrying capacity is still increasing and this is the only area in Australia to do so’.

Vestment in WA Museum

In February 1978, Woodstock and Abydos were officially invested in the Trustees of the WA Museum as Reserves for the Preservation of Aboriginal Cultural Material and Historic Buildings and Grazing. The Museum was to retain full control of the Woodstock Homestead and that area of Woodstock east of the Newman Railway Line, while leasing the western section of Woodstock and all of Abydos to the Yandeearra community for grazing purposes.

Woodstock 65B Petroglyphs

Scientific interest in the rock art began in 1938 when the Frobenius Institute Expedition visited Woodstock and Abydos. In 1966, with mining developments rapidly expanding the WA Museum tried to protect some areas by means of fencing, erecting notices and explaining to mine workers the need for their cooperation.

Most of the granite outcrops on the Woodstock/Abydos pastoral leases and the Abydos Plain generally contain engravings. The number of motifs varies from a few simple tracks to hundreds of often complex engravings. A range of motifs has been recorded; tracks and human figures are common, but depictions of animals and weapons also occur.

The human figures on the Abydos Plain are generally: long; with elongated bodies, long flowing limbs; have one or more ‘antenna’ at the back of the head; split/two-digit hands and feet; dog/kangaroo-like beaked faces; and large genitalia on the male figures. They have been dated as the oldest rock art in Australia – more than 26 000 years old. The number of petroglyph motifs in the region is believed to be over a million, making the Pilbara the world's largest surviving concentration of Ice Age art.

The Pilbara carvings are the same age as cave engravings at Malangine in South Australia, and the two sites share the same distinctive art style – carvings at both sites depict multiple circles with edges that come close to each other but never intersect.

According to the senior Aboriginal custodian for the Woodstock area (which lives close to the abandoned cattle station of Abydos), Mr Gordon Pontroy the petroglyphs date from ‘early days’, and ‘the different circles in the carvings show the camp places of the people up in the sky – the people who look down and see the carvings. Mr Pontroy is also familiar with songs relating to the Woodstock Petroglyphs.

Although there is little specific information regarding the mythological significance of rock art, Aboriginal people generally respect them since they concern the historical and traditional past of former inhabitants, and they link into a generalised tradition of creation beliefs and symbols. A number of examples, however, within the Pilbara still have active ritual and mythological significance.

Comments from Indigenous people regarding the Woodstock petroglyphs include:

‘The numerous sites of cultural significance… at Woodstock and Abydos have great tribal significance to the various tribal groups comprising the Mugarinya Community… There are many sites on the land currently being used and these sites are being cared for by community members.’

‘We don’t know what all those carvings mean, but when we go and have a look at those places, we sometimes see things which remind us a bit of things we have in our Law today. That’s why we think those places with carvings might have been really important places for those Old People in the early days – something like a Parliament – that’s why we feel a bit uneasy in those places.’

‘[The engravings] – a memory of what’s been going on in the real early days, when that emu and kangaroo were men. When we sing the song for that, we sing about what they did in the early times… those must have been the most important things at that time.’

It has been observed that the importance of such art lies in the celebration of Ancestors’ creation journeys and of places along the routes they took, rather than as individual pieces of art in isolation. For this reason, at least two instances are recorded of people preferring to have sites destroyed by development rather than have the rocks removed to ‘safety’. It is not that people regard the art as insignificant, but that it loses its significance out of geographical context.

Uses

Historic Themes

Creation Date

Publish place record online (inHerit):

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This information is provided voluntarily as a public service. The information provided is made available in good faith and is derived from sources believed to be reliable and accurate. However, the information is provided solely on the basis that readers will be responsible for making their own assessment of the matters discussed herein and are advised to verify all relevant representations, statements and information.