Between The Rivers—The Cobar Never Never, which chronicles Cobar’s settlers, shearers and sheds
Local author and historian John Collins has recently released his fourth book which is an account of the stories of Cobar’s settlers, shearers and shearing sheds.
The Land Between The Rivers—The Cobar Never Never is a hefty 614 page tome filled with facts, photos, interviews, anecdotes and humorous stories that takes in approximately 120 shearing sheds within the Cobar Shire.
“I feel I represented the whole of the Cobar Shire. I haven’t been to every shed, but I’ve represented it,” John told The Cobar Weekly.
“There’s also five sheds outside the Cobar Shire, but only just,” John said.
“Toorale and Dunlop, just over the river, I couldn’t leave them out; Curraweena which is just inside Bourke shire; and another one, Coronga Peak which is also in the Bourke shire but in the Cobar Pastoral Protection Board area; and The Overflow, just in the Bogan Shire.
“It was getting too big, I could of just kept going and going and going.”
And he did keep going and going as the book took five years to complete.
“I didn’t have a writing schedule, I just sat down whenever I felt like it,” John said.
“I put in hundreds of hours of research on Trove (what a wonderful resource that is) and of course driving around.”
John estimates he did about 11,000km visiting and photographing woolsheds and interviewing the people who’ve worked in them.
“There were times I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew,” he said.
John’s book is filled with lots of characters that were found in woolsheds of the past and also in the present day.
One of those characters is Jim White who was one of the area’s early gun shearers. Jim was born in 1894 and began shearing at 19 and later ran the shed at Dunlop. Jim could shear 150 a day with blades and over 170 with machines.
Arthur ‘Pop’ Burgess is another featured shearer. ‘Pop’ could shear 90 with blades while 150 was his best with a more modern handpiece.
John talked to Ken Mazoudier and Greg ‘Banjo’ Barklimore who he said both “have lanolin running through their veins”, to the left-handed gun Rod Lumber, and to Eric Manns, the jack-of-all-trades.
He recounts stories from a few of the larrikins in the sheds, John ‘Boistie’ Josephson, Peter ‘Tiger’ Fisher and Michael ‘Dog’ Lawrence.
John said ‘Dog’ would have a go at roustabouting and pressing, anything except shearing.
“I reckon I could eat a sheep faster than I could shear one,” Dog told John.
John spoke to people like Barry Brilley Jnr, who was the son of a gun shearer and started shearing at age 14 and also the Johnsons at Glenhope who have four generations of shearers in the family.
He also has stories from gun pressers including Paddy ‘Bream’ Harpley and Wally ‘Wombat’ Schofield, wool classers like Barry Artis and shearers’ cooks such as Fay Moore, Issie Pretty and Judy Henry…See this week’s edition for more on this story.
