I don't know if Stuart Magee is still around but if he is I shouldn't think he would mind my quoting from his excellent little booklet "The Clyde River and Batemans Bay" which, published in 2001, is now out of print. Here we go:
The need for the place arose in the 1850s when Braidwood and its satellites such as Major's creek, Araluen and Mongarlowe were up to their ears in the explosion of people and commerce surrounding the discovery of gold.
The movement of goods, people and information between Braidwood and Sydney was chancy and oh so slow. Depending on the weather, bullock trains might take three weeks or three months. Horse-drawn carriage or dray was usually quicker but limited in capacity and expensive. Down the mountain lay the very navigable Clyde and then a 24-hour run by steamship to Sydney. There was, as I understand the historian Reynolds, some competition between Currowan and Nelligen as to which would receive Braidwood's blessing, and Nelligen won out.
So, in the 1850s, the town was laid out and the road from Braidwood was opened. And a tough road it was too. There is a number of old photos showing the grim results of teams of horses and bullocks going over the side of the Clyde Mountain road.
Years after the road opened it was still both difficult and dangerous. The Moruya Examiner of 16 October 1915 reported the death that month of Mr J E Rogers. He was driving his team of nine horses from Nelligen to Braidwood with a three-ton load. At a spot ten miles from Nelligen, near where the road of the day crossed Currowan Creek (not far from where today's road crosses Cabbage Tree Creek) he and his team went over the side of the road and plunged down a precipice. Rogers and seven of his horses were killed. The remaining horses, badly crippled, were put down the next day.
Quite apart from the danger of the road, it was so difficult it took about eight hours to cover those ten miles or 16 kilometres, and they hadn't even started on the Clyde Mountain itself.
Nevertheless, the carriage of goods between Sydney and Braidwood was such a brisk business that Nelligen boomed! Over the next 20 years there arose four pubs, two stores, a blacksmith, a bakery, a police-station, a court house, schools, churches and a post-office.
Above all was the terminal building of the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company. If today you were to set up your picnic in that nice little park between the general store and the wharf you would be smack in the middle of the 126 x 45 feet ISNC's jetty and store (oh, very well then, 38 x 14 metres).
Twice a week the steamers plied between Nelligen and Sydney, stopping at the far less consequential village of Batemans Bay on the way. The size of some of the paddle steamers, and later screw steamers, is astonishing. The Kembla, a paddle steamer in use on the Clyde from 1861, was 183 feet long. The S.S. Moruya was 150 feet and 530 tons. The S.S. Allowrie was 180 feet. It ran aground on a mudflat in the river on one occasion and had to await the high tide to float it off. The last steamer to call at the Port of Nelligen was in 1952 - 99 years after the first.
If growth was to be the main objective then Nelligen bumped into a major hurdle in the 1870s - the gold fields centering on Braidwood started to run down. However, there were other industries to take up some of the slack.
Timber, for instance. Today there is only one timber mill left in the area and that's the one on the left of the highway as it climbs out of Batemans Bay heading south. There were, in days gone, not less than nine mills up and down the river each employing about ten to twenty workers. The old photographs show them standing in solemn groups between immense circular saws - solid men, black and white, all hats, vests and pipes.
Wattle bark had its following too - for tanning leather - but these days the law no longer permits it.
In the early 1900s much of the wool from around Braidwood came down the Clyde Mountain road to be shipped from Nelligen. The alternative was to cart it to Tarago whence it would go by rail to Sydney. I am told it was dearer that way.
The most enduring commercial activity at Nelligen has been one of the pubs, the Steampacket, and that brings us back to the subject of Mrs Adelaide Neate.
Adelaide Neate née Schofield who was born in 1888 at "Orange Grove"which is the adjoining rural property. Her father was Nelligen's ferryman.
Later she also became owner of the "Steam Packet Hotel"
If you were to go poking about in the graveyard at Nelligen - a prospect which might not have immediate appeal as light entertainment for a sunny afternoon, but let me tell you it's a lovely spot - then you would find yourself impressed by one of the great matriarchal lines of Nelligen. In 1845, Hannah Lovell gave birth to a daughter, Mary Ann. The mother lived on till 1899 when she died at 103. Mary Ann saw out only 69 years but, my word, was busy in the interim. By the time she was 19 she had married James Sproxton and given birth to the first of six Sproxtons. The Sproxtons left their mark on Nelligen.
Jim Sproxton, born 1880. Jim's father had been the ferry master when he was a boy.Jim had spent his life driving the horse coach from Araluen to Goulburn.
I don't know what happened to James Sproxton but, as I read the tombstones, Mary Ann then went off to wed James Schofield. The issue from that union consisted of John and, when Mary Ann was 44, Adelaide.
Adelaide became Mrs Adelaide Neate when she married James Neate. That, I'm informed by two of today's keepers of local records and antiquities - Mrs Betty Heycox and Mrs Elaine Ison (and those are both big names in the history of Nelligen) - was in 1913.
After the war the Neates or, as some records have it, "Mrs Adelaide Neate and her husband" bought the Steampacket Hotel which, at the time, stood on the corner where the general store is located today. When it burned down in 1924 they re-established it a few doors down in the building still known and signposted as the "Old Steampacket". She stayed there till 1967 when she transferred the licence to the building which still operates as the Steampacket on the Kings Highway.
Particularly in its former location, it was a busy pub, and it wasn't the only one Adelaide Neate owned. She had hotels at Greenwell Point, Araluen, Rockhampton and Windsor NSW, where her husband is buried.
Everyone in Nelligen seems to have known her. She was a wheeler/dealer they say, who acquired a lot of property. She was a tough lady they say, but charitable and well respected. She gave to the town the extensive area at the junction of the creek and the river now known as Nelligen Park, and many hope to see the day when it is once more known as Neate Park.
Adelaide Neate, in this area where huge families were so common, had no children. Sources I decline to name speculate it was perhaps because she didn't have time to get pregnant.
As the gold and the timber and the flow of goods from Braidwood all wound down, and the shipping became unprofitable, the Steampacket continued on. The fact thatit, the old one, was opposite the ferry ramps, did it no harm at all. In the 1950s and 60s, on a holiday weekend, traffic on the Braidwood side of the river would commonly wait four hours to get on the Nelligen ferry. The fellas would opt to walk up ahead in order to see what the problems was, and leave wives to edge the car up as the queue moved forward. Hours later, the kids would be dispatched to see where their father was and, in any event, to fetch back a ration of tea and scones from the shop. The shop too, I might mention, was owned by the pub.
Part, if not most, of the problem lay in the fact that the ferryman would wait on the east or Batemans Bay side "for a load" - something which took a while on Friday evening for all the traffic was headed the other way. Still, rules are rules, and one must accept that that was the cause of the ferryman's dilatoriness.
As they will tell you down at Benny's store the snip which cut the ribbon when they opened the grand new bridge in 1964 was a terminal cut for the old Steampacket. Thus, it had to move again and, as you know, set up business again on the highway, though business is well short of the brisk trade done in days of yore. Is there any truth in the rumour, do you know, that there are plans to convert the bridge into a drawbridge - like the one at Batemans Bay - so as to let the tall ships pass by?
Of all the institutions which have faded from Nelligen's scene the one which most takes my imagination is the Nelligen Philharmonic Society, recorded in Bailey's "Behind Broule". It was there in the 1870s. When it started, when it stopped and what it did in the interim, I know not.
On our epic journey down the river, as we came under the bridge, we cut the motor and cupped a hand to an ear to see might we yet catch from the hills the last echoes of the final strains of some long gone strong quartet. But some bloke rumbled his truck over the bridge. Ah well, there you are then!
It would seem a worthy project, do you not think if the Canberra Philharmonic or the South Coast Music Society, or some such, were to propose the re-establishment of the Nelligen Phil. on an occasional basis. Friday nights at the start of summertime long weekends would be good.
This is the Country & Western Music Association giving its final ear-perforating performance for 2009 at the Nelligen Hall
I should think there would be good local support and, logistically, Nelligen stands ready and able with the Mechanics Institute which has a stage, good wooden benches and some plastic seats. If some patrons were to bring their own folding chairs there would be seating for about 100 souls.
Actually, I provided a wee concert myself on my last visit to Nelligen.
I was ferreting about again in the graveyard. It is set on the side of a hill in amongst tall eucalypts and is in two parts. In the first part you come to there is a prevalence of McCauleys, Egans and Fitzgeralds - all names well sprinkled throughout Nelligen's history. In the second part, separated by a 50 metre belt of tall trees, there are more names equally well embedded in local history but the Irish names are not so noticeable. "In death are we yet divided!"
I was chiefly on the track of Adelaide Neate and sorely perplexed by the tombstone engraved:
of
Adelaide Neate
Loving wife of James Wilkins
Daughter of
James and Mary Schofield
Died 10 April 1983
Aged 94 years
So, how did Miss Schofield marry James Wilkins but obtain the name Neate? I might have died wondering but for the revelation in Reynold's book that the man she married was James Wilken Neate.
Anyway, I was having a wonderful time. Bruce Sproxton, who died in 1974, was in luck. His nice little wooden cross had come to bits but I happened to have a tube of glue in the back of the wagon. As Ausonius pits it "Death comes even to the monumental stones and the names inscribed thereon."
I was driving out of the place when I noticed one grave on its own on the other side of the road. There is a lady there, Teresa Langworthy, buried in 1903 at the age of 58, with only one sentiment endorsed on the headstone - "Waiting". I looked and wondered. Why was Teresa in such a lonely spot and for what was she waiting? To be reunited with some unmentioned partner? For the last trump? As I stood looking, the CD in the car which had been playing away quietly was just reaching a track where the great Scots tenor, Kenneth McKellar, sings, as only he can, the beautiful song "Angels Guard Thee". It seemed not wholly inappropriate to the occasion.
So I opened all the doors and the tailgate, and turned the volume up flat chat. The music streamed out over all the graves, soared up through the treetops, and seemed to me to be well received by the audience. I kept an eye on Teresa's spot when Kenneth got to the line "wake not yet from thy repose".
He might indeed have directed the words to Nelligen itself. There it sits so peacefully in the south coast sun, running down from the knoll to the banks of the river, enjoying its retirement immensely. In 1915, Comyns in his "Tourist Guide to the South Coast of NSW" wrote "Nelligen is the outlet by sea for an immense area of country including the large and prosperous districts of Braidwood, Araluen, Queanbeyan, Bungendore, Captains Flat, Majors Creek, Tarago, Currowan, Brooman and Runnymede". The recently founded Canberra, you might note, didn't even rate in that galaxy of stars.
After such a pivotal role in the development of the southern parts of the state, Nelligen has been deserted even by the highway and left to fend for itself.
All up and down the coast the faces of small towns are being tarted up and titivated by tourism boards and enthusiastic councils. But Nelligen remains untouched and unimpressed by such progress. Not even the modern marvels of reticulated water and sewerage have imposed themselves upon it.
Yes, Nelligen is growing up! This was its telephone directory when I arrived in 1993: a total of 52 telephone subscribers! "Riverbend" was still registered as belonging to R G Macpherson
If I lived there I would hope not to see it change. But you sense it may just be resting after its great exertions and sooner or later some bright spark will again see it as the right place to do heroic things.
There is so much more in Stuart Magee's delightful book but I won't spoil your anticipation as I am sure there are still copies out there somewhere. Try your local bookshop or ebay!
Stuart remarks that "It I lived there I would hope not to see it change." Well, I drink to that!
As for knowing where its name came from, for a plausible explanation click here.
