THE BODALLA ESTATE

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The Bodalla Estate

‘Not to have seen Bodalla is not to have seen New South Wales.’

The Bodalla Estate, along with the Kameruka Estate near Candelo and the Ayrdale Estate near Wolumla, was one of three particularly historically-important, very extensive, dairying properties on the NSW South Coast.

It was owned by Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, an opportunistic and very successful Sydney businessman.

Mort was an auctioneer and a broker of wool, hides and tallow. In 1848, he extended his business dealings to financing pastoral properties in eastern Australia and, subsequently, was approached by John Hawdon, a squatter on a 12,998-acre ‘Boat Alley’ property on the southern side of the Tuross River.

Hawdon had secured a 14-year lease on the property in 1847 and had an option to purchase the land for £1 per acre. He needed the finance to do so.

Mort negotiated to take a half interest in the property, in a partnership with Hawdon. That deal was finalised and the land was purchased on 22nd January 1856. Eight days later the title to the land was transferred to Mort.

Within two months, 13,000 acres of land had been surveyed for subdivision into 32 blocks. These were put to auction (the auction being, naturally, conducted by Mort & Company!) as ‘The Devonshire Estate’. The few blocks that sold realised between £6 and £10 per acre!

Unfortunately for Hawdon, not enough of the blocks sold and he found himself in financial trouble – which, by 1860, resulted in Mort becoming the unencumbered owner of Boat Alley (Bodalla).

Mort originally intended a 4,000 acre ‘Comerang’ portion of Bodalla to be his country retreat and he engaged noted Sydney architect Edmund Blacket (who designed Sydney’s St Andrews Cathedral and the main Sydney University building) to design his ‘Home Farm’ residence. This included a central room capable of accommodating over 100 people where Church of England services were held on Sundays. These were celebrated by Thomas Mort himself whenever he was in residence at Bodalla. (The Catholics celebrated mass in Comerang’s Coach House.)

By 1861 Mort had, according to the Sydney Morning Herald (14.2.1861) decided ‘all available land is to be converted, under the new arrangement, into one monster dairy farm’ so that he could supply fresh milk at a cheap price to Sydney. (He actually had a much broader vision: to make Australia the principal country from which Europeans – especially those in Britain and France - sourced their food.)

So, as it was soon reported, ‘a large yearly expenditure has been spent, and is still kept up, in clearing, fencing, road making, building and all things that are described as estate management. These are permanent investments on the property, and the money could not have been better spent…’ (Sydney Mail & NSW Advertiser, 13.2.1875)

Gangs of Chinese labourers were engaged to help clear the property and Mort was not afraid to import the most up-to-date labour-saving devices for his property from the United States and Europe. Where he was faced with an obstacle, he looked for solutions – for example, early on, developing refrigerated railway carriages to enable fresh milk to be transported from the Berrima-Moss Vale area to Sydney.

As might be expected, a wide range of agricultural activities were pursued - crops included maize and potatoes, and pigs were raised to supply ham and bacon, which was then sold through Mort’s Bodalla Stores in Phillip Street in Sydney.

And Bodalla’s milk, of course, was used to produce cheese and butter.

Cheese making was commenced at Comerang in the early 1860s. Local dairy farmers were already making cheese and sending it to Sydney; what Mort did was to hugely increase production and to ensure that Bodalla Cheddar Cheese was both of high quality and ‘of unvarying character’. In achieving this, he transformed what had essentially been a local cottage industry into a large and efficient manufacturing enterprise, and created a well-respected ‘Bodalla’ brand for his cheese and other products.

By March 1864 Mort’s Bodalla dairy was producing about one ton of cheese a week.

So, within a relatively short period, the Bodalla Estate had become ‘The model dairy farm of New South Wales’ (Australian Town & Country Journal, 1.1.1876) ‘one of the few showplaces of the industrial progress and enterprise of the Colony’ (Sydney Mail & NSW Advertiser, 26.6.1886) and it was being suggested that ‘not to have seen Bodalla is not to have seen New South Wales.’ (Sydney Mail & NSW Advertiser, 13.2.1875)

By 1874 the Bodalla Estate was employing 230 people and a village had been created to supply the needs of their families. In the late 1870s/early 1880s the township moved to its current site, following extensive flooding of the area on several occasions in the 1860s and 1870s, and the re-routing of the main north-south road. With the exception of the school, every building in the town (including 52 cottages that had been erected) was Estate owned.

Unfortunately, Thomas Mort died of pneumonia on 9th May 1878.

The Bodalla Estate was valued at £600,000 at this time.

Whether Mort’s dreams for Bodalla would have ever been fully realised is debatable. In particular, transport of the Estate’s products to Sydney, and to the other potential markets he believed existed around the world, was a challenge because there was no nearby suitable port – an issue his successors tried to address, unsuccessfully, when they constructed a tramway from Bodalla to North Narooma in 1883 or 1884.

Control of the Estate initially passed to Trustees. Under their control, the dairy herd increased and production from the cheese factory rose to around 300 tons per year.

In 1887, following the passing of a special Act of Parliament, ownership of the Estate was transferred to the Bodalla Company Ltd which was wholly owned by the Mort family. For some years expansion of the Estate continued, improvements were made to the Estate, and the Bodalla brand products were imaginatively and aggressively promoted:

‘For Christmas 1892, the Estate produced the two largest cheeses ever made in Australia – one 4,000 lb, the other 3,000 lb, each containing £30 in half sovereigns…the following Christmas, the Estate made two even bigger cheeses for (Sydney grocer James) Kidman, each weighed about two tons and contained fifty £1 coupons. They were shipped to Sydney in the ‘Trident’ from Moruya. To maximise the promotional value, tenders were invited to transport the cheeses from the steamer in Sydney and cart them around the city and suburbs with 18-bullock teams. Kidman’s shop windows had to be removed to get the cheese into the shop.’ (from ‘Bodalla and the Morts’)

In 1893 the Bodalla Estate’s best land was surveyed and then subdivided into 13 farms that were leased to tenant farmers for seven years. The company guaranteed to keep the cheese and butter factories open and to buy the tenants’ produce at ‘highly remunerative prices’ – something they were unable to do, particularly because significant competition was now being experienced from Bega cheese. By 1900, most of the farms were again being worked by men receiving wages from Bodalla Estate.

During the first two decades of the 20th century the Bodalla Estate, under the management of Douglas Hutchinson, seemed to be resistant to change, did not keep up with changes in that were taking place in the dairy industry, preferred to pay dividends to the company shareholders rather than investing profits in upgrading infrastructure, and seemed oblivious to market changes (the Kameruka Estate, for example, was now producing Cheddar, Edam, Leicester, Derby, Stilton and other ‘fancy cheeses’; the Bodalla Estate produced only Cheddar Cheese).

By June 1914 plans were afoot to sell the Estate, but these were put on hold when World War I commenced.

In 1923, by which time the Estate was in ‘a deplorable state’ and was being seriously impacted by drought, 15 parcels of land were offered for sale. A further 12 were offered for sale the next year. Not all sold – and the indications are that Bodalla Estate had dropped in total value over the years to less than £140,000. Over a few years from 1926, all the properties in the Bodalla township were sold – mostly to those already living or working in the town.

This was, as Laurelle Pacey concludes in ‘Bodalla and the Morts’, ‘the end of the famous Bodalla Estate under one ownership and the disintegration of a basically self-contained community.’

(Postscript: Dissatisfaction with prices being paid by the Bodalla Company led to it ultimately being purchased by a newly formed, dairy farmer-owned Bodalla Co-operative Cheese Company. Cheese production ceased in 1951, with local milk then transported to a Streets Ice Cream facility in Moruya until that was closed in 1952. A new Bodalla Cheese factory opened in 1954 and operated until 1987, after which the local milk supplies were sent to the Bega Dairy Co-operative. The residual assets owned by the Bodalla Estate, including a ‘Big Cheese’ restaurant and tourist complex, were sold in late 1989.)

Sources: Bodalla and the Morts by Laurelle Pacey; The Bodalla Estate from 1860 to 1989 by Helen Townend; Wikipedia; aussietowns.com.au; bodallavillage.com.au

Image: All Saints Anglican Church, Bodalla. Thomas Mort was a prominent Anglican layman. He and his first wife, Theresa, chose the site and had plans drawn up by noted Sydney architect Edmund Blacket. Mort also ordered windows from England. When Mort died in 1878, Bodalla residents decided to erect a memorial window in the church so, at the family’s request, Blacket enlarged his original plan for the church and included a rose window on the west end. The church was completed in 1901 and is a memorial to Thomas and Theresa.