History Notes - Alan Cunningham
History Notes by Margaret Currell and added to by Julie Williams
In 2023 Margaret Currell wrote “History Notes” about the botanist and explorer Allan Cunningham, who passed through the Barraba district in 1827 while exploring the countryside inland from the Hunter Valley to Brisbane. Her main reference was an article from a 1960 Royal Historical Society Journal. Allan Cunningham was born in Wimbledon, Surrey in 1791 and was working at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1814 when Joseph Banks sent him to collect plants in Brazil. Two years later he was in New South Wales and joined Oxley’s expedition to the Lachlan. He later visited what is now Queensland stopping at Magnetic Island and spending time on the Endeavour River.
Governor Darling decided that Cunningham was the most experienced man to lead an expedition to what is now northern N.S.W. following up on Oxley’s 1818 expedition to the Peel and then exploring north to the New England Tableland. Rough country and the drought saw him head further west and north crossing the Namoi River, just north of Carroll, where he caught some fine cod fish.
Cunningham continued north crossing some very dry land until on May 17th he reached Buddle’s River, now known as the Manilla River. He remarked “there was little water in the channel” and he also briefly saw five natives in the river but they took “instant flight”. This crossing of the Manilla River was in the vicinity of present-day Taylor’s reserve on the way out to Hawkin’s Creek on the Trevallyn Road, six kilometres from Barraba. There is now a Cunningham memorial to mark the crossing. How many people have stopped to read the plaque unveiled by the late Elsie Capel in 1970?
From here he proceeded north following the valley of Bingara Creek to the Gwydir River which he thought was the Peel River and then onto Warialda and north to the Darling Downs and the Condamine River. He stayed in this area for a little while before setting out on the return journey, passing through our area to the west of the northern journey. He followed the Horton River and then Rocky Creek before turning south about Hell Hole Creek where he found some very tough country to climb over to the Boomi and then up over the Mount Kaputar Range and home via Boggabri/Gunnedah.
There is more detail about Cunningham’s adventures in “A Beautiful Sward of Grass” – Allan Cunningham’s 1827 Exploration of Northern NSW, held in the Inverell Library.
Allan Cunningham's exploration began from his depot at Segenhoe, Scone, on 30 April, 1827, with rations for 14 weeks and well-constructed measuring instruments. His friend Peter Macintyre, manager of Segenhoe, guided him up a steep pass over the Liverpool Range, out of the Hunter Valley. Once onto the Liverpool Plains, the party was proceeding north when, from a hill near Currabubula, the sight of the rugged Moonbi mountains ahead caused Cunningham to deviate westward before continuing on the northerly course. He therefore bypassed the New England Tablelands; almost the entire area from Bendemeer to Tenterfield being discovered by the first settlers. He also missed the western plains, although on a previous expedition he had come close to Boggabri, leaving this area to be explored by Mitchell in 1831. Instead, he travelled along the north-west slopes. Fording the Namoi near Carroll, he entered a country of high ridges, stony gullies and scarce feed, which was a spur of the Nandewar Ranges. Cunningham's journal describes his day-to-day progress through the upper north-west slopes.
20 May, 1827: During this day Cunningham crossed the east-west traverse of the Nandewar Range, near the present Bingara-Barraba road, and entered the Gwydir Valley. The group travelled north down Halls Creek and camped that night about 11 km south of Bingara, where the grass was "fresh and luxuriant" and where a "small limpid stream, running through the centre of the vale, murmurs over the stony bed of its channel". He named the vale Stoddarts Valley.
It was here that he found "faeces, two or three days old, of horned cattle, and the trodden grass showed where 8 to 10 animals had rested" - 250 km north of the nearest stock stations! Cunningham concluded that "Europeans had been wandering through that part of the Interior".
21 May: The company of explorers continued northward, following Halls Creek to its junction with a river, about which Cunningham wrote "seemingly the Peel", but when he crossed it downstream on his return journey, the same river was named the Gwydir. It took time and effort to make a crossing over a "gravelly bed 250 yards in breadth", and the party camped the night on the northern bank. Twenty years later the town of Bingara began at this crossing.
22-23 May: Leaving the river, in a NNW direction, the explorers skirted the rough country and cypress-covered hills to the east. After 22 km the country opened out and Cunningham could see that the Nandewar mountains to the westward terminated and that there was heavily timbered land beyond. About a kilometre to his west was a "rocky ridge of hills" (Mt Rodd) and "to the north east the country rises to a considerable elevation, and a very lofty ridge, crowned with cypress lying nearly east and west, from the back of which rose a very sharp cone". He called the cone Braco Peak, now Balfours Peak, and the high ridge Mastertons Range, now known as Mastermans Range. "About noon on the 23rd we reached the wide but shallow reedy channel of a river forming simply at this season, a long chain of ponds" (Warialda Creek), which he followed upstream for 6 km and made camp, somewhere between the modern Gwydir Highway bridge and the sawmill at Warialda.
Allan Cunningham was acknowledged as being the most prolific Australian plant collector of the early nineteenth century, as referenced by Anthony Orchard in “The dispersal of Allan Cunningham’s botanical collections” – 12 May 2014. His publications included seven major papers and 57 shorter papers on subjects including taxonomy, geology, physical geography and zoology. He died on 27 June 1839 of consumption in Sydney aged 47. He was clearly very capable and versatile and packed a lot into his relatively short life.