The launch of John Lean’s fifth book, The Settlers of North Bank, Raleigh and Repton, brings to an end his detailed chronicling of land settlement in the Bellinger Valley from the 1860s to the 1960s.
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His intention was to provide as comprehensive an account as possible, starting with Conditional Purchase Registers held in Armidale and drawing upon the resources of the Bellinger Valley Historical Society, including their indexed microfiche archives of the Raleigh Sun and the Northern Courier.
John has incorporated newspaper articles, especially obituaries, private letters, parish maps and photographs to portray how the early settlers lived and worked together.
He began the first book in the series, The Settlers of the Never Never, after researching his own family history in the 1980s and noticing how the same names kept recurring in the records and wondering about the connections between them.
“My great grandfather was the first selector west of Thora,” John said. “At the Fernmount cemetery where all the family was buried, I was intrigued by all the other names that came up in the writings, in the papers and letters. I thought it would be interesting to see how these people were interrelated.”
However, at the time he was pursuing a corporate career in Sydney, so his investigations had to wait until retirement brought him permanently to Bellingen Shire.
John was born 1936 and grew up in Sydney, but from the age of 12 he was regularly put on the train by his father to spend his holidays with his father’s cousin Nicol Beattie, who lived at Thora.
His great grandfather’s original selection, Roseneath on Darkwood Rd, was out of family hands from 1939 until the Leans bought it back in the late 1960s.
Like many local farms, it transitioned out of dairying and into beef production when the UK entered the Common Market and began sourcing butter from Europe rather than Australia.
After leaving Sydney in 2000, John farmed multiple properties in Bellingen Shire and also became engrossed by the resources available at the Museum.
The book on the Never Never settlers sprang from personal interest, but he was soon persuaded to extend his research.
“The Historical Society got onto it and said we want to print this. Then they said, but you’ve got to keep going.”
Over the next ten years, he added Settlers of the North Arm, Setters of the Upper South Arm and Spicketts Creek, Settlers of South Bellingen and the Lower South Arm, and finally the latest one, Settlers of North Bank, Raleigh and Repton.
He admits he did them in the wrong order; logically, the last two should have been first, as settlement began by the sea and extended westwards.
“But the bottom line is – and I’m prepared to swear – is that those five books cover 95 per cent of every portion of land in the Bellingen Valley and their progressive ownership,” John said.
He notes that accurate information was harder to obtain post-1920, because when the blocks converted to freehold he had to rely on Council records, which are incomplete due to flood and fire damage.
Apart from being interested in his ancestors and their friends, another motivation for John’s research was a sense that the pioneers were being forgotten.
“The reason I started on these books, apart from my interest in the Never Never, was I became aware that a lot of people thought the history of Bellingen started about 1970, when the land use changed [from large farms to smaller lifestyle blocks] and the refugees from the city arrived.
“And I thought, hold it, there’s another 100 years of people that have built this valley up, cleaned the land up and started it all. And unless somebody puts it together, they’re going to be lost.”
At the book launch on Saturday December 2, John will be joined by Wal Tyson who is, like John, one of the few pioneer family descendants who still own the original holding claimed by their great grandfather.
And to the obvious question of what next, there is an obvious answer.
He’s going up the hill to investigate Dorrigo.
Book Launch - The Settlers of North Bank, Raleigh and Repton
Launch by John Lean with special guest Wal Tyson (long time resident and descendant of original family settlers to the area)
December 2 at 10am, Bellingen Museum in Maam Gaduying Park (Shire Council Park)
Enjoy a cuppa tea, cake and other nibbles
The museum will be open from 10am to 2pm