Urisino Bush Xanadu, a cultural oasis, a unique cultural icon.

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Urisino’s history is as rich as the men who once owned it.

Sir Sidney Kidman, an Australian Icon, who once owned more land than anyone on earth used Urisino as a strategic watering hole, (it’s billabongs are said never to run dry) as he ran his vast herds of cattle across the Australian Outback.

George Wallace Henderson was the shy pastoralist who made Urisino “a Xanadu of the West” hiring chamber musicians from Sydney and beyond he would host dinner parties where it was mandatory to dress is your best clothes and sit down at the great room and be entertained with fine food and sophisticated entertainment. All the more fascinating as this was the 1930’s and you were 120 miles “back o’Bourke”.

He helped establish the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the Far West Children's Health Scheme (Nancy Bird-Walton was the first pilot for the airborne nurse, based at Urisino.)

He is credited with being the first Australian entrepreneur to use an aircraft as a business tool and along the way he became one of the richest men in the country.

There are many photos from the time showing, manicured grass lawns, rose gardens, vineyards, vegetable gardens, all enclosed by a fence to keep the sand out. Nowhere in Australia’s Outback history is a place like Urisino, Bush Xanadu. Henderson became very rich from his time as a pastoralist and was a large contributor to the performing arts, particularly in Sydney. He became a large donor at a time when the Sydney Opera house was being built in the 1960’s and Australia was just beginning to appreciate what he had been living in the bush for the past 40 years.

His wife Margaret Doyle, who, in Sydney, was the first woman announcer on ABC radio, herself a keen music lover and supported the arts for many years after George died.

In 2005, $16m was donated from the George Henderson Trust to the Sydney Orcestra, the largest donation to the Performing Arts in Australia’s history.

Nancy Bird Walton, the youngest female Australian to get her licence, flew constantly to Urisino in the 1930’s was amazed at the style and sophistication of the homestead as it was “easily the social centre of the west”.

 

Wilson, Sir Samuel (1832 - 1895) First Great Australian Owner from 1870’s up to his death in 1885.

Sir Samuel Wilson (1832 - 1895), by unknown photographer, courtesy of Herald & Weekly Times Portrait Collection, State Library of Victoria. H38849/4983

WILSON, Sir SAMUEL (1832-1895), pastoralist and politician, was born on 7 February 1832 at Ballycloughan, County Antrim, Ireland, son of Samuel Wilson, farmer and landowner, and his wife Mary, née Singley. Educated at Ballymena, he had an aptitude for mathematics; although inclined toward a career as a civil engineer he spent three years as a linen manufacturer and farmer.

In May 1852 Wilson reached Victoria with his brother John who, with other brothers Charles and Alexander, had already established squatting runs in the Wimmera region. Samuel, after some success as a miner at Ballarat, Fryer's Creek, Ovens and Bendigo goldfields, prospered as a carrier of supplies from Melbourne to Ballarat and Pleasant Creek (Stawell) diggings, where he earned the sobriquet 'Bullocky Sam'. After managing Kewell station, which had been taken up by Alexander and John in 1845, Wilson sold his property in Ireland; with his brothers' help he bought from William Taylor Longerenong station at the junction of the Wimmera River and Yarriambiack Creek. There he created a system of dams and channels that foreshadowed the vast Mallee-Wimmera water gravitation scheme of today.

Wilson revisited Ireland in 1859. On 10 December 1861 in Melbourne, in a ceremony performed by Rev. Irving Hetherington, he married Jean, daughter of William Campbell; they had four sons and three daughters. The building of Longerenong homestead began next year and the property was subdivided into Longerenong, St Helens, Marma Downs, Green Hills and Kirkwood stations. The Wilson brothers, who had other extensive Wimmera holdings including Ashens, Vectis, Walmer and Talgany runs, acquired also Yanko on the Yanko Creek, New South Wales. Expert management enabled Wilson to gain sole ownership of Longerenong in four years and, in 1869 when the partnership was dissolved, to buy out his brothers; land values at the time were very low because of drought, but in the good seasons that followed he was able to complete most purchases by 1871.

Wilson supported the work of the Acclimatisation Society by experimenting with ostrich farming and with the breeding of Angora goats. In 1873, from T. and S. Learmonth and for the record price of £236,000, he bought the graceful homestead of Ercildoune near Burrumbeet with its famous merino stud. He bought freehold estates in the Western District at Mount Bute, Marathon and Corangamite to replace the Wimmera holdings that he sold to Albert Austin and W. H. Bullivant in 1874, and the New South Wales leases of Coree and Goolgumbla. By 1879 he held 117,452 acres (47,532 ha) freehold in Victoria, 150,000 acres (60,704 ha) freehold in New South Wales where he had Toorale and Dunlop stations on the Darling, as well as 2,500,000 acres (1,011,725 ha) leased in New South Wales and Queensland where he held runs along the Diamantina and Bogan rivers. At Ercildoune he established breeding ponds for English trout. He also spent £1000 in importing salmon ova for release in Victorian streams.

Wilson represented the Wimmera in the Legislative Assembly in 1861-64 and the Western Province in the Legislative Council from 1875 until his resignation in May 1881; according to Alfred Deakin he was 'ridiculed...and never attained any political influence'. His gift in 1874 of £30,000 to build a hall at the University of Melbourne was realized in October 1879 when he set the foundation stone for the Gothic Wilson Hall. He made many other donations to charitable and religious bodies. Governor Sir George Bowen, in recommending him for a baronetcy in 1874, estimated Wilson's average annual income as almost £100,000, stated that he owned 600,000 sheep, possibly more than anyone else in the world, and described his position and style of living as similar to an 'opulent country gentleman' in England. He was knighted in 1875.

In 1881 Wilson retired to England where he bought Hughenden Manor. Prominent in the imperial federation movement, he contributed articles to the National Review, September 1884, and the Nineteenth Century, April 1885. He was unsuccessful at an election in Buckinghamshire that year, but he represented Portsmouth in 1886-92. After visiting Australia in 1893-94 Wilson returned to England where he died at his residence in Grosvenor Square, London, on 11 June 1895. The rebuilt Wilson Hall is his chief memorial. A son Captain Gordon Chesney Wilson married Lady Sarah Churchill, aunt of Sir Winston; a daughter married the Earl of Huntingdon. Two sons were living at Ercildoune at the time of his death.

Sir Sidney Kidman Second Great Australian Owner

KIDMAN, Sir SIDNEY (1857-1935), pastoralist, was born on 9 May 1857, probably at Athelstone near Adelaide, third son of George Kidman, farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Mary, née Nunn, who were married in St Mary's Church of England at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England, in 1848. Next year they migrated to South Australia. George Kidman died about six months after Sidney's birth. His son was educated at private schools in suburban Norwood but left home with five shillings in his pocket and riding a one-eyed horse which he had bought with laboriously acquired savings. He stole away by night and made his way to Poolamacca station in the Barrier Range where his brother George found him a job with George Raines, a landless bushman who roamed about with his stock, squatting on the unfenced runs wherever he found good feed. This 'corner' country of New South Wales later became the heartland of Kidman's pastoral empire.

The boy shared a dug-out in the bank of a dry creek with an Aboriginal known among whites as Billy. Treating him seriously as a friend and equal, Sidney learned from him tracking and other bush skills and so became a better bushman than most white adults. He learned also to admire and exploit Aboriginals: for the rest of his life he rarely travelled in the back-country, where he was most at home, without an Aboriginal guide and offsider. When Raines moved on, Kidman worked for a year or two as a rouseabout on Mount Gipps station, the site of the fabulous silver-lead-zinc discovery at Broken Hill a decade later. When he asked for a rise he was sacked, but found work as a stockman for a neighbouring shanty-keeper, German Charlie. Here he saved enough money to buy a bullock-team. Thenceforth he worked for himself and soon employed others.

Kidman contracted to cart supplies in the country between the isolated settlements at Mount Gipps, Wilcannia, Swan Hill (Victoria), Menindee, Bourke, Tibooburra, Louth and Cobar. He also drove mobs of horses and cattle, sometimes to market in Adelaide. Following the discovery of copper at Cobar in the early 1870s he set up a butcher's shop and, like James Tyson at the Bendigo gold rush twenty years earlier, made enough money to establish himself as a large squatter. In 1878 he inherited £400 from his grandfather and traded with it successfully. He increased his capital by setting up coaching businesses in western New South Wales and in Western Australia. He supplied them with horses and began providing the British army in India with remounts. He grew richer still by continually buying cattle and selling them to his brother Sackville, who conducted a large butchering business at Broken Hill.

These activities were a means to an end. In 1886 Kidman bought his first station, Owen Springs on the Hugh River, south-west of Alice Springs. Long before his thirtieth birthday he had conceived the idea of buying a chain, later two chains, of stations stretching in nearly continuous lines from the well-watered tropical country round the Gulf of Carpentaria, south through western Queensland to Broken Hill, and across the border into South Australia within easy droving distance of Adelaide. Many stations on this 'main chain' were watered by Cooper's Creek and the Georgina and Diamantina rivers which sometimes brought northern tropical rain-waters to the centre even during droughts. By the 1890s he had begun to acquire his second chain of stations strung along the Overland Telegraph line from the Fitzroy River and Victoria River Downs in the north to Wilpena station in the Flinders Ranges near Adelaide. Thus, by moving stock from drought-stricken areas to others, by selling in markets where the price was highest, by his detailed knowledge of the country, and by his energy and bushcraft he withstood the depression of the 1890s and the great drought of 1902. By the time of World War I he controlled station country considerably greater in area than England or Tasmania and nearly as great as Victoria.

By the war's end he had become a national institution, having given fighter aeroplanes and other munificent gifts to the armed forces. In 1920 he gave to the Salvation Army £1000 and a half share in one of his cattle-stations. In 1921 he gave his country home at Kapunda, the scene of his annual horse-sales, to the South Australian government for a district high school. It may have been mere coincidence that he was knighted next day. He grew richer still by bilking the government of taxes. In August 1924 the Federal treasurer, Dr Earle Page, issued a writ for recovery of £166,067. Kidman was fined £10 with four guineas costs for having failed to furnish land tax returns, the magistrate remarking with breath-taking disingenuousness that 'a heavier penalty would serve no purpose to a man in Sir Sidney Kidman's position'. Three years later, after High Court of Australia litigation, the government accepted £25,132 in settlement of his land tax debts. By this time 'Kidman' meant in fact a complex of interlocking companies, partnerships and agencies with branches in all the mainland capital cities and some country towns. Kidman and his children seem to have controlled the whole apparatus from Adelaide. In 1927 he retired.

On 30 June 1885 he had married at Kapunda Isabel Brown Wright, a schoolteacher; they had three daughters and a son. His wife taught him much and they travelled overseas four times. Kidman was six feet (183 cm) tall and well built, with an affable manner and an easy smile. He made friends readily and was a good judge of people. Like Churchill, Napoleon and some other great achievers, he could go to sleep anywhere and in almost any position. He never touched alcohol or tobacco or was profane, even his bullock teams being abused only as 'jolly tinkers'. In the Kidman country stories of his meanness still circulate today, but in fact he was a generous employer and benefactor to many institutions. His reputation for meanness sprang from his hatred of wastefulness; he was known to sack employees he considered guilty of it. His strength had been as a dealer rather than a breeder: he exploited the pastoral areas rather than developed them. In old age he suffered from increasing deafness and rheumatism, but otherwise retained his faculties unimpaired until his death in Adelaide on 2 September 1935; he was buried in Mitcham general cemetery. Kidman's estate, amounting to some £300,000, was mostly left to his family, but much went to charities.

Noteworthy bequest that will change people's lives May 27, 2005

George Henderson has left a $16 million legacy to advance music, writes Steve Meacham.

Nancy Bird-Walton, the pioneering Australian aviatrix, is a woman used to provoking consternation.

She called her autobiography My God! It's a woman - the phrase that often greeted her when her Gypsy Moth landed on the dusty airstrips of outback Australia.

Yet in 1935 when she first arrived at the remote station of Urisino, 200 kilometres west of Bourke, it was her turn to be astonished. Here, under the patronage of a shy pastoralist called George Wallace Henderson, the daring pilot found a cultural oasis - in her words, "the most surprising place in the west".

"After landing," she wrote, "we walked along a bare track to the homestead, which is surrounded by a nine-foot-high corrugated iron fence. When you open the gate you feel you have walked straight into a garden of Eden.

"The fence had been built to keep out the drifting sand. Inside were smooth green lawns, clipped hedges, fruit trees, flower beds and vegetables, which had been watered every day by thousands of gallons of water pumped from artesian bores."

The surprises didn't stop there. At Urisino, the young George Henderson had created a bush Xanadu - a haven of urban sophistication where fine manners and highbrow music reigned however barren the landscape.

As Henderson's niece, Mary Turner, recalls: "Many stations got a bit sloppy. George was always conscious that it was easy to go a bit troppo in the bush."

So he insisted his jackeroos dress up for dinner, played opera on his gramophone, and expected polite conversation. He was equally discerning when it came to visitors.

When Mary Turner's older sisters made the long journey west to Urisino, they packed their finest dresses, knowing they would be expected to keep up the same punctilious standards expected in Sydney.

This was the young bachelor George Henderson, long before he met his wife, Margaret, long before he became one of the richest pastoralists of his generation, and long before he became one of Australia's greatest philanthropists.

Yesterday a bronze bust of Henderson was unveiled by Turner and Professor Kim Walker, dean of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, to celebrate the most valuable cheque ever handed over to the Australian performing arts in modern times. George and Margaret Henderson - who died in 1991 and 2002 respectively - bequeathed more than $16million to "the Con". It is the largest gift, by far, in the 90-year history of the Conservatorium, and one of the most generous in any field of Australian arts.

So who was George Henderson? And why have so few heard of him? The answer - says 89-year-old Olive Dunk, his long-time secretary and a co-executor of his will - is that "he was a very reserved, charming man", the kind of Australian who volunteered at the earliest opportunity to fight in World War I and never complained about the permanent limp he was left with after being shot in the trenches. More than anything, Henderson preferred to stay in the shadows rather than boast of his many accomplishments.

And what accomplishments they were. He helped establish the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the Far West Children's Health Scheme (Nancy Bird-Walton was the first pilot for the airborne nurse, based at Urisino). He became chief executive of one of the largest pastoral companies in the country, and steered it from a family-owned concern to a public company long before such floats became fashionable.

He is credited with being the first Australian entrepreneur to use an aircraft as a business tool. Along the way he became one of the richest men in the country.

But why bequeath such a large proportion of his fortune to strangers? The key, says Dunk, is that George and Margaret Henderson died childless. They married when he was 42 and she about 30.

"Not having children was a great regret," says Turner. "They tried everything ... it was a great sadness to them." Their final wish - according to Turner, who is Henderson's other executor - was to use their fortune to help future generations of young musicians whose predecessors had given them so much pleasure.

The Hendersons met in romantic circumstances. Margaret Doyle was a formidable individual in her own right - she was the first female announcer on the ABC.

Her uncle, way out at Urisino, listening to Doyle's voice over the crackling airwaves, was captivated, says Turner.

"I think he fell in love with her voice and followed it up to find its flesh-and-blood owner equally appealing ... He just made it his business to meet her."

They married in tough times: 1941, the middle of war and the middle of a terrible drought. "Margaret was thrown into the deep end at Urisino," Turner reports. "All country properties were denuded of labour. All you had were very old men and a few young boys."

Years later, when Turner saw the Oscar-winning movie Out of Africa, with Meryl Streep, as Karen Blixen, stepping down from the train for a new life in Kenya, she was reminded of her first glimpse of Margaret, "tired, rumpled, travelworn" but still retaining "an air of glamour".

After the war the Hendersons moved to Rannoch, near Blayney, where they discreetly modernised the rambling homestead and planted an outstanding garden. Here they were better able to indulge their shared passion for opera and Mozart.

By then Henderson's career had taken off. At Urisino, he had learned from his senior partners - W.W. and Edward Killen - who had bought Urisino and three other far west stations from cattle baron Sir Sidney Kidman.

By 1950, the empire had expanded with the purchase of eight other stations in NSW and Queensland. All of the properties were consolidated under one company, Pastoral Developments, with Henderson as managing director. More stations were added, three of them as far away as Western Australia.

Two years later the family took a crucial decision. Rather than keep their fortune tied up in the land, they would float the company. In 1955, Henderson became both chairman and managing director - a position he held until 1963 when the company was acquired by Dalgety's.

The glory days might have been over, but it allowed the Hendersons more time to indulge their love of opera, flying regularly to performances at Bayreuth, the New York Metropolitan and Salzburg. During their travels they came to realise just how disadvantaged talented Australian musicians were compared with Europeans or North Americans.

They resolved to do something to reverse the musical exodus, but the full extent of their generosity had to wait until after Margaret's death. Now the cheque has been handed over. The money will be invested, with the interest generating three postgraduate scholarships, in piano, violin and opera - worth about $50,000 each a year - plus a teaching position at the Con.

"This will change people's lives," says Professor Walker. "There is musical capital in abundance here in Australia, but what has been lacking is the focus on postgraduate studies and the scholarships to provide that. This is really is the start of a new era."

 

How the Henderson gift compares:

1. 2005: George Wallace Henderson's gift to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music - $16 million
2. 2001: Dr Orde Poynton left funds to be split between the National Gallery of Australia and the Australian National University - $13 million (estimated)
3. 2002: Lady (Mary) Fairfax donates to Opera Australia/Opera Foundation Australia - $1 million each
4. 1997: Advertising guru Peter Clemenger donates to Victorian Arts Centre and National Gallery of Victoria - $1 million each
5. 2005: Sydney lawyer Kenneth Reed donates to Australian Ballet - $1 million
6. 2003: Japanese businessman Haruhisa Handa donates to Perth International Arts Festival - $1 million

 

Largest single gift from an individual (non-arts)

1. 2005: Marjory Norman Edwards from Adelaide left to various charities and institutions - $37 million

 

Milestones in Australian arts philanthropy

1. 1903: Adelaide surgeon Dr Morgan Thomas left £65,000 ,then Australia's largest single cultural bequest, to be divided between South Australia's art gallery, library and museum
2. 1904: Alfred Felton left £200,000 to establish a fund to buy art for the National Gallery of Victoria
3. 1934: Sidney Myer left about £153,000 ,which led to the formation of the Sidney Myer Fund and Myer Foundation Source: Artsupport Australia.

Nancy Bird Walton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nancy Bird Walton during her period as the Australian Commandant, Women's Air Training Corps (WATC) from 25 July 1942 to 1 November 1944
Lived	October 16, 1915(1915-10-16) - January 13, 2009 (aged 93)
Birth	Kew, Australia
Nationality	Australian
Aviation
Known for	youngest Australian woman to gain a pilot's licence
Flight license	27 September 1933
Awards	Order of Australia (1966), Order of British Empire, Venerable Order of Saint John

Nancy Bird Walton, AO, OBE, DStJ (16 October 1915 13 January 2009) was a pioneering Australian aviatrix, and was the founder and patron of the Australian Women Pilots' Association.

In the 1930s, defying the traditional role of females of her time, she became a fully qualified pilot at the age of 19, and became the youngest Australian woman to gain a pilot's licence.

Born in Kew, New South Wales, Australia on 16 October 1915 as Nancy Bird, she wanted to fly almost as soon as she could walk. As a teenager during the Depression in Australia, Nancy Bird found herself in the same position as many other children of the time, leaving school at 13 to assist her family.[1] In 1933, at the age of 18, her passion drove her to take flying lessons. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, who was the first man to fly across the mid-Pacific, had just opened a pilots' school near Sydney, and Bird was among his first pupils. Most women learnt to fly for recreation, but Bird planned to fly for a living.

When Bird was awarded a commercial pilot's licence at the age of 19, through a legacy of 200 pounds from a great aunt plus money loaned from her father (which she paid back) Nancy bought her first aircraft, a de Havilland Gipsy Moth. Soon after Nancy Bird and her friend Peggy McKillop took off on a barnstorming tour, dropping in on country fairs and giving joyrides to people who had never seen an aircraft before, let alone a female pilot. Whilst touring, Bird met Reverend Stanley Drummond. He wanted her to help set up a flying medical service in outback New South Wales. In 1935, she was hired to operate the service, named the Far West Children's Health Scheme. Bird's own Gipsy Moth was used as an air ambulance. She bought a better-equipped aircraft, and began covering territory not yet reached by the Royal Flying Doctor Service. She told others that it was rewarding but lonely work.

In 1936, Nancy Bird entered an air race from Adelaide to Brisbane, and won the Ladies' Trophy. In 1938 she decided to have a long break from flying. A Dutch airline company (KLM) invited her to do some promotional work in Europe, where she stayed for a couple of years. She returned to Australia soon after World War II broke out. She began training women in skills needed to back up the men flying in the Royal Australian Air Force. She was 24 when she married an Englishman, Charles Walton, and had two children. He preferred to call her "Nancy-Bird" rather than "Nancy", and she became generally known as "Nancy-Bird Walton". In 1950, she founded the Australian Women Pilots' Association (AWPA), where she remained president for five years. Nancy-Bird Walton became Patron of the AWPA in 1983 following the death of Lady Casey, the original Patron. In 1958, she decided to return to flying after a twenty year absence.

Throughout her life Walton was notable for her support of charities and people in need. This generous spirit saw her invested as an Officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1966. She was later appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia. She was the starting block for generations of female pilots. She was never involved in an accident, despite the risks of early aviation.

The National Trust of Australia declared her an Australian Living Treasure in 1997.

The first Airbus A380 delivered to Australian airline Qantas was named in her honour. Her name on the A380 was originally written "Nancy Bird Walton", but Qantas respected her preference for the hyphenation that her late husband used ("Nancy-Bird"), and the hyphen was added before the aircraft's naming ceremony.

One of her last main interviews was for the feature length documentary film Flying Sheilas which provided a unique insight into her life along with seven other Australian female pilots.

On 10 September, 2008, shortly before her death, Walton conducted a 45 minute interview for the one hour documentary A Very Short War.

On January 13, 2009, she died of natural causes at the age of 93.

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