WHIPSTICK

WHIPSTICK

‘The little township of Whipstick (5 km east-south-east of Wyndham) …received its name from the teamsters who used to camp there on the trip from Monaro to the seaboard with the Monaro wool clip. It was here that they cut their whip-handles for the place was famous for its young mountain ash, stringybark and she-oak trees. The teamsters called these young trees whipsticks.’

Whipstick was a mining settlement. Bismuth, molybdenum, gold and silver were its attraction.

A Dan Crawley discovered gold at Whipstick in 1891 and the Great Jingera Pty. Silver Mining Co. took out lease on the area. It was to work the area for about 40 years.

In 1897 a small one-room, one-teacher school opened at Whipstick - an indication that the settlement might be assuming some permanence. Mirroring the fortunes of the mines, it sometimes operated as a full-time school, sometimes as a provisional full-time school, and sometimes as a half-time school. It struggled on until finally closing in July 1929.

In its early days, Whipstick was basically a tent township. But it did take on an air of permanency in the early 20th century with, in addition to the school, a general store, an array of miners' bark huts, weatherboard cottages and two boarding houses being built. At its peak, the town became home to around 60 men who were to work the mines in the years leading up to World War I.

From 1922 to 1927, the Australian Tanning Extract and Bismuth Company had a wattle bark tannin extraction plant (the tannin being used in leather tanning) in Whipstick.

In January 1929, ‘Driven by a strong wind, (a bushfire)…travelled on to Whipstick mines, where every building, except the school house, was reduced to ashes. The wattle bark extraction plant, which had cost £30,000, and the dwellings of Messrs. Taylor, Jones, David Robertson, Thomas Jones, Charles Tasker, and George Grant were among those that were burned out. At Whipstick mines the wind caught up the burning debris, and carried it 10 miles away on to properties at Lochiel…’

The school building that had survived the 1929 fires succumbed to another major bushfire that swept through the area in 1952.

A world-wide shortage of molybdenum during World War I resulted in BHP briefly reopening the Whipstick mines – but only from 1941 to 1943.

Today the township of Whipstick has simply become ‘a locality’.

Photograph: The entrance to a Whipstick mine.