From White Well to Whitewells: the formation of the Whitewells Pastoral Lease

The chequered succession of boundaries, owners, surrenders and amalgamations

The leases and leaseholders of Whitewells Station have a complex and chequered history. The various Whitewells pastoral leases were never viable in their own right, leading to many sales, surrenders and amalgamations. The story told below is based on scraps of evidence, old maps and plans, many of which are not dated, and a broken trail of old lease documents. Many older official files in the Pastoral Board were not archived and appear to have been destroyed.  There is much more to be discovered before the full story can be told.

The process by which the current lease for Charles Darwin Reserve was defined is a convoluted one of excision, amalgamation, surrender and struggle. The current Whitewells pastoral lease, PL 3114/529, was issued in 1966. It is an amalgamation of a number of leases issued over the years, many of which had been cancelled and re-issued with different lease numbers as the Land Act was progressively amended to change lease conditions.

There were many different owners who have worked and managed the land in various combinations and with different styles and objectives. Sometimes the leases were held in partnerships that incorporated various sections which were operated in conjuction with the neighbouring Ninghan, Mt Gibson and Wanarra Stations.

The owners included a well established pioneer farmer, 'knockabout' returned soldiers with rural backgrounds, the head of a vast rural business empire, a station manager who made good, an industrial chemist turned man-on-the-land, an abattoir owner, and husband and wife teams working as equal financial and working partners, or until the marriage failed. In making a living off the land, co-operation with nature and fellow humans was the key. 

A master plan with layers of leases added and/or deleted was kept by the Pastoral Board as a ready reference of current ownership. 

The boundaries through the years

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1. The first known lease: Banawar Spring – A550

The earliest known lease on Charles Darwin Reserve, pastoral lease A550, was issued c. 1870 to Augustus James Clinch. Clinch’s leases included lease A550 surrounding the point marked on early maps as “Banawar Sp PD” – the PD referring to the 'doubtful position' of the spring. The name Banawar Spring later disappeared from this site and it is now known locally as Pigeon Rock (not to be confused with Pigeon Rock Well on the north-western boundary of Charles Darwin Reserve). Its Badimia name is Marnbi Gudaru. The Banawar name is now applied to Banawar Rock and soak just west of the Charles Darwin Reserve boundary, on Wanarra Station.

Clinch had been one of the Irish shepherds for the English landowning farmers of the Victoria Plains district around New Norcia, to the south of Whitewells. Clinch was able to apply for land himself and eventually established a large farming enterprise at Berkshire Valley, near Moora to the south west. From there he spread his sheep flocks into the country across Mongers Lake, establishing an outpost at Jibberding Spring LINK and taking up pastoral leases on other springs between Mongers Lake and the northern end of Lake Moore. 

Like most settlers Clinch and his shepherds would have followed the original ‘native tracks’ and used the waterholes as the centre of their sheep run – picking the 'eyes' of the country.

The Banawar Spring site was part of the Aboriginal network of watering holes and tracks which eventually became the Great Northern Highway. It is a registered and protected site under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1973, listed as ‘ceremonial’. There was once a stone arrangement and a cairn at the site, but these appear to have been removed.

The Banawar Spring lease became PL70/40 in about 1891 when it passed into the hands of Padbury, Loton and Co, a Perth firm of merchants and owners of ships, and agricultural and pastoral enterprises, who took over the A.J.Clinch leases at Jibberding and along Mongers Lake. 

It then became PL183/97 and then PL305/97, held by M. Brown who took over some of the Padbury, Loton leases and became a partner with Seeligson as owners of some of the leases which now constitute Wanarra Station, the western neighbour of Charles Darwin Reserve. 

By 1919 it was vacant; in 1920 it was held by Clune and Seymour as PL3368/93, then by 1924 it was held by Clune and Maslen of Mt Gibson Station as PL3868/93 until taken by T.E. Barr Smith as PL3902/93 to add to his 1925 purchase of Ninghan Station.

In 1935 it was combined with the block to the north-west as PL392/506. After it was sold to Green and Macpherson from the Barr Smith estate in 1948, it remained as part of Ninghan until transferred in 1957 to Denis and Vera Mason who had purchased the ‘Whitewells’ leases from Ninghan in 1953.  It was finally absorbed into the consolidated Whitewells lease PL3114/529 in 1966.

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2. Bank of NSW: PL70/562 (Part of Ninghan Station)

The original Ninghan Station, centred on Mt Singleton, lies to the the north-east of the Charles Darwin Reserve. The Ninghan Station lease was extended some time between 1889 and 1891 with lease PL70/562 extending west from Mt Gibson range. The PL70/562 lease covered the north-eastern corner of what later became Whitewells Station. The lease was cancelled some time after 1894, and by the time P.A. Connolly purchased the Ninghan leases from the Bank of NSW in 1905, the boundary had been retracted eastward to the current Ninghan – Whitewells lease boundary.

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3. The western block: M Brown

At the time M Brown held the Banawar Spring lease, he also took up the lease for the narrow strip of 30,000 acres which abutted its north-west corner and formed the boundary with the Wanarra leases to the west. This land became PL204/109. It has little pastoral value as it is covered almost entirely with dense, unpalatable sandplain shrublands of the Joseph land system. The only worthwhile grazing was around two granite outcrops which would have held some water after rains, and several small patches of woodland.

Like the Banawar Spring block, the western block also had a sucession of leases and ownership. It first appears on plans about 1913 as PL417/97 held by M Brown; then as PL204/109 it went to J.H.Z. & C.C. Seeligson of Wanarra; then it was taken over in 1919 over by McCarthy and Finlason shortly after they took up the main 200,000 acre Whitewells lease.

The western block then appears with lease numbers PL3717/93 and PL3747/93 until it was granted to T.E. Barr Smith as PL3905/93 in 1927, after he bought the Whitewells leases to add to the Ninghan leases. In 1935 it was then surrendered, amalgamated with the Banawar Spring block as PL392/506, and reissued to Barr Smith.

The eastern boundary of this block formed the eastern boundary of the Shire of Perenjori until 1964 when the Whitewells pastoral lease was consolidated and the Shire boundary moved to the eastern boundary of the present Charles Darwin Reserve.

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4. McCarthy and Finlason – White Well Station 

The founders of Whitewells as a pastoral station were two decorated returned soldiers from World War I, James McCarthy and Rupert Finlason.  Having served in the same unit, the 51st Battalion, they met up in Perth after the war and applied for 200,000 acres of vacant land surrounding the Banawar Spring lease under the Soldier Settlement Scheme. Pastoral Lease 3679/93 was granted to them from 1919 to 1948 at an annual rent of £1 per 1,000 acres, totalling £200 a year. The lease covered most of the current Whitewells lease except the western strip, and included the land to the south now known as the White Well unallocated Crown land (named from the  White Well water reserve) which has been earmarked to become a government nature reserve since the mid 1980s.

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5. PL392/506: Tom Elder Barr Smith

In 1925, the wealthy South Australian businessman Tom Elder Barr Smith, head of the vast Elder Smith rural empire, bought the Ninghan leases from P.A Connolly, a prominent Western Australian businessman and horse racing identity who had built the station up into a thriving enterprise. Barr Smith then purchased from Clune and Maslen the White Wells leases which included the original McCarthy and Finlason 200,000 acre lease (PL 3679/93 transferred on 5 October 1926) and the enclaves of Banawar Spring (PL3902/93 transferred on 1 October 1926) and the western block (PL 3905). He operated them as part of Ninghan Station, but in 1940 surrendered a large area in the south of the White Wells leases, ending the era of the large property initially taken up by McCarthy and Finlason. It is presumed Barr Smith held the leases in his name on behalf of the Elder Smith company which ran them, and was a figurehead rather than actively involved in the management.

Ninghan Station was a showpiece, running almost 30,000 sheep by 1929, employing a big workforce, manning an outcamp at Dowdsfolly Well on the northern boundary of White Wells, and clearing and cropping the White Wells homestead paddock to provide fodder for stock horses and camels (it was known then as the ‘Ninghan Farm’). Again, it is not clear what elements of the existing pastoral infrastructure of Charles Darwin Reserve date from Barr Smith’s era.  However, the boundary ‘dog fences’ LINK to Vermin fences on the Charles Darwin Reserve which remain as described on the 1927 soil maps may have been built soon after he purchased the leases. 

In 1929 the current northern boundary of Charles Darwin Reserve obtained its unusual angle. Pastoral lease boundaries were normally required to run north-south and east-west unless following a river or lake edge, but Barr Smith came to an arrangement with his Wanarra neighbour to share Good Friday and Pigeon Rock Wells which were inside the White Wells lease PL3679/93. Unlike other lessees who had informal land exchanges with neighbours, Barr Smith ensured there would be no subsequent arguments by having the lease boundary amended formally to follow the new fenceline.

Barr Smith was an absentee owner, and his Ninghan leases were operated by a representative of Elder, Smith & Co. in Perth and a manager on the property: Clohessy, Draper and then in 1937 Lindsay Cue Macpherson, who eventually came to own, then sell, Whitewells and lose Ninghan.

Under Barr Smith, Pastoral Lease 392/506 was created in 1935 from the surrender and amalgamation of the two component leases – the Banawar Spring block PL3902/93 and the western block PL3905/93.

Having amalgamated the two leases to create the single lease PL392/506 in 1935, five years later Barr Smith gave most of it up in ‘the surrender’, when he handed about about two thirds of Whitewells Station back to the Crown in 1940.

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6. The surrender

Whilst pastoral leases were often surrendered in order to be re-issued with new leases as changes of terms and conditions were made to the Land Act, in 1940 Barr Smith gave in to the hostility of most of the White Wells landscape and gave up most of his White Wells lease.  He surrendered voluntarily everything south of a line about 3 km south of the homestead, about 172,000 acres of mostly dense yellow sandplain shrublands with little water. He was apparently not impressed with, and not using, the southern two-thirds of his White Wells leases, and saw no reason to continue paying the rent. This admission of defeat by one of the most successful wool pastoralists in Australia went unheeded by successive lessees and Pastoral Boards who continued to try to ‘develop’ the country at the southern end of Whitewells.  Only Denis Mason (1953-1972) held out against the Board, arguing that even old Lands Department soil mapping showed it was unsuitable for sheep, and he should not be required to run them there. 

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7. Jack Green and Lindsay Cue Macpherson: PL392/505

From 1937 Barr Smiths’ manager on Ninghan was Lindsay Cue Macpherson. (The middle name ‘Cue’ came from the goldmining town of Cue about 200 km further north.) 

When Barr Smith died in 1941, his leases consisted of Ninghan and the northern section of White Wells which had been retained after the southern sections had been surrrendered. They were held in his estate by Elders’ Trustees, an arm of his vast pastoral company Elder Smith. Macpherson was retained as manager.

In 1948 the leases were sold to William John Green (known as Jack Green), the publican and storekeeper at Paynes Find who held other pastoral stations in the area. Green brought Macpherson into a partnership with him.

When Green died in 1953, Macpherson purchased Green's share through a mortgage to Elder Smith & Co Ltd. The Ninghan and White Wells leases were then transferred to Macpherson and his wife Marguerite in equal shares.

Macpherson scaled back the pastoral operation, reducing sheep numbers and ceasing the cropping at White Wells.  By the mid 1950s Ninghan was running only 11,000 sheep, down from almost 30,000 carried by Barr Smith in the late 1920s. In 1959 it was almost completely destocked following drought, and sheep numbers have rarely risen above 15,000 ever since.

From about 1940 Ninghan was regularly seeking rent relief from the Pastoral Board. This was due partly to drought conditions, but it was also the legacy of overgrazing in the Barr Smith era (and probably earlier).  A once ‘fine pastoral country’ had been reduced to a struggling sheep station.

In 1953 the Macphersons sold the component leases of the 75,801 acre White Wells block (consisting of the residual of PL 392/505 and of PL392/506) to the Masons. The sale was made ‘on terms’ to help reduce their debt on the purchase of Green’s share.

The lease titles were finally transferred in 1957, thus ending the era of Whitewells attachment to Ninghan.

When the Macpherson marriage subsequently broke up, Marguerite Macpherson took the Ninghan leases.  The station manager ‘made good’ had been undone by domestic strife.  Ninghan was then sold to the Carters, ending the connections with the Barr Smith era. 

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8. The Farrell Block (PL 392/602): From Farrell to Crane to Elliot to Mason

In 1948 farmer William James Farrell of Wubin took up the lease on northern half of the land surrendered by Tom Elder Barr Smith in 1940. The block covered the Banawar Spring block which had been originally issued to A.J. Clinch about 1870, most of the western block which started as PL417/97 under M. Brown, and the middle section of PL392/505

The Farrell block is mainly dense shrubland on yellow sandplain, classified as the Joseph Land System and unable to be grazed except for a year or two after fire, but it contains areas of York gum and mixed salmon gum and gimlet with palatable shrubs. Its drawback for pastoralism is the lack of water. Only Brown Well was reliable.

When Farrell took on the block, the improvements from Barr Smith’s Ninghan era still existed. ‘Improvements’ included the construction of wells, windmills and tanks, fences, stockyards and roads, and other fixtures required for running a sheep station. Wells included Bown, Smith and Joseph wells, although Smith Well had been abandoned. Fences included the South Boundary Fence, the eastern boundary fence with Mt Gibson Station, the fence down the South Track, the fence from Smith Well to Brown Well and across to the eastern boundary, the fence from Brown Well to St Joseph Well, and from St Joseph Well to the eastern boundary near the Great Northern Highway crosses. The remains of all the fences, some of which show on a 1927 plan of the station, could still be found in 2006.

The Farrell block was transferred to farmer Walter George Crane of Claremont on 27th December 1950. Crane died on the 4th May 1951 and the block passed into his estate.

Joseph Thomas Elliott of Cunderdin, a pastoralist, became the next lessee on 6th August 1953, then on 25th November 1959 the block was transferred to the Mt Gibson Pastoral Company Pty Ltd, mortgaged to Elder Smith & Co. Ltd.

The Farrell block returned to Whitewells Station on 6th June 1962 when it was transferred to ‘Denis and Vera Mason.

On 8th August 1966, PL 392/602 ceased to exist when it was surrendered and included in PL 3114/529, Whitewells Station.

Apart from this lease and a wheat and sheep farm at Wubin, William Farrell also held a lease over the block of Crown land known as Kourigee, near Mongers Lake on the Dalgary Road, south-west of Charles Darwin Reserve.

From 1932 to 1934, Farrell had an interest in a goldmine in the Retaliation field in the north-eastern corner of Whitewells. He also had a small digging named the Winifred after his daughter. He supplied meat to the miners from a farm further south, and he and his daughter (later Winnie Vincent) became well known characters in the area.

The lease was also granted subject to the provisions of the Mining Act, 1904, which allowed access to prospectors and miners, and the Forests Act, 1918.

This was the standard form of a pastoral lease. Although the Land Act required the lessee to manage the land ‘in a husband like manner’, the lease document itself demanded attention only to the tools of production and not to repairing any erosion or decline in the condition of the land. After the enactment of the Soil Conservation Act in 1945, such matters were left to the Commissioner for Soil Conservation, who was however invariably excluded through political pressure from acting on pastoral leases.

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9. Consolidation: Whitewells Station from the 1950s

The Masons

The modern era of Whitewells as an independent pastoral property began with Denis and Vera Joyce Mason in 1953 , Married Woman, both of White Wells Station, Perenjori’.

Mason was an industrial chemist who had analysed the oil mallee samples from the area collected by Government Botanist Charles Gardner. After leaving chemistry and taking up other jobs, he decided that distilling eucalyptus oil in the Ninghan area would be a profitable venture. When oil prices failed, but wool was profitable he ventured into pastoralism. 

At the time the Macphersons had been mortgaged to Elder Smith & Co Ltd for their purchase of Green’s half from his estate.

Actually it was owned by Ninghan - Jack Green. He gave Lindsay Macpherson the opportunity of buying a half share in Ninghan to be paid for out of his profits, which was very good system: it kept Lindsay – he was a very good stockman -  and it suited Jack Green because he was getting it run and paid off. Of course when wool went up during the Korean War, it went up to a pound a pound, and Lindsay paid off his half share, in the wool clip, and shortly afterwards, before we came into it, Jack Green died, and Lindsay had the opportunity to buy the other half of it, and to help him finance that he sold this to us. Denis Mason 24 July 2004, interviewed by C.Nicholson

In 1962 the Masons added the 392/602 lease to the south, formerly Farrell’s, purchased from the Mt Gibson Pastoral Company. Following amendments to the Land Act in 1964, when the many separate leases making up each pastoral station were amalgamated into single leases, the three White Wells leases were consolidated into the current Pastoral Lease 3114/529 (Crown Lease 480/1966), at the time containing 169,627 acres. 

‘Whitewells’ became the ‘Approved Station Name’, by order of the Minister for Lands, after the Masons nominated it for the consolidation. 

Whitewells was not viable on its own as a pastoral property. Since 1957 it has never carried more than 3,800 sheep, and fewer than 2,000 in the periodic droughts. From about 1955 the Masons operated it while managing Wanarra Station next door, then took up far more profitable wheat farming near Perenjori to the west.

Well, a couple of thousand sheep would have been a good living at the prices we took it on. But of course wool went down and down and down and wages went up and up.  We didn’t find out actually that it was uncommercial because it never actually became uncommercial for us because we moved to Wanarra and we had the joint income . Denis Mason, ibid

Despite the Pastoral Board determining that Whitewells, if sold, should go only to a neighbouring station because it was too small to be viable, the Board allowed its sale to its successive owners because they operated it in conjunction with other farms and businesses.

After protracted disputes with the Pastoral Appraisement Board over his level of development on the property, the Board insisting on more waters and stocking of the southern end of the lease, and failing to gain approval to re-clear and crop the homestead paddocks at Whitewells, the Masons sold in 1971 to Bruce Boucher.

Bruce Boucher

When Bruce Boucher purchased Whitewells Station from the Masons in 1971, he had the lease issued in his son Kevin’s name.  In 1986 it was transferred to Bruce, Florence and Gregory Boucher, then in 1990 to the sole name of Bruce Samuel Boucher. 

The Bouchers were wheat farming at Buntine to the west, and Kevin and Mrs Boucher remained on the farm while Bruce ran the station which remained unprofitable. Droughts led to destocking in 1982 and 1995, and the maximum number of sheep shorn was 2,290 in 1989. About 7,000 sheep were considered by the Agriculture Department to be the minimum profitable number to carry. The rental of the Whitewells pastoral lease was assessed on a carrying capacity of 5,718 ‘small stock units’ (sheep), but after the 1994 Range Condition Report the Pastoral Board set a limit of 2,500 sheep in summer, upsetting Boucher who was trying to sell the station on the basis of carrying 5,600 sheep. He complained to the Board:

I tried to sell my station by tender during the year and I had about 35 fairly interested people and 5 who were definitely interested until they were told that the sheep numbers had been reduced from 5,600 to 2,500 they decided not to tender….I feel I have been leasing the property under false pretences… Would you please give this matter your earliest attention as age is creeping on and the other hip is starting to give problems. Department of Agriculture, file 660/75 folio 128, letter, B.S. Boucher to the Pastoral Board, 9 November 1994

The pastoral inspector brokered a compromise, allowing 4,200 sheep in summer after a good winter, if more water was provided in the southern end of the lease. However, two attempts at building dams along the south boundary fence produced little or no water.

Boucher’s attempts to be granted a cropping leases over 10,000 acres of the station, and over the grazing lease he held over the former Whitewells block to the south (the White Well VCL), also failed. 

He then sought permission to run Angora goats and pigs, but was denied by the Agriculture Protection Board who considered both animals being a vermin risk – although he is said to have run a few pigs near the homestead. He then turned to tourism, developing accommodation and a small caravan park, and catering for wildflower and bird watchers, goat shooters and horse riders, and establishing Whitewells’ reputation as a 'station experience'.

During Boucher’s time, the reserve for the Emu Proof Fence was resumed in 1980 across the northern corner of the lease. The fence was constructed in 1981. 

Boucher sold to Robin and Edna Tapper in 1997.

The Tappers

The Tappers purchased Whitewells in 1997 intending to run the station as a sheep holding property for their pet food abbatoir near Perth . They attempted to open up the south-west corner for sheep by building a dam, Robin’s Dam. They upgraded the tourism accommodation, hoping to tap the Asian tourist market, and employed caretakers to manage the sheep and the tourists.   Drought, rising costs, the Asian financial crisis, the difficulty of finding reliable managers and erratic tourist income led the Tappers to sell to Bush Heritage Australia in January 2003.  Mrs Tapper loved the Whitewells wildflowers and was content to see the country return to nature rather than continue to struggle under sheep and feral goats.

Bush Heritage Australia

Bush Heritage Australia purchased the Whitewells pastoral lease in 2003.  It is now known as Charles Darwin Reserve and has come almost full circle on its return to the condition in which the early pastoralists found it, not ‘a fine pastoral country’ but a fine wildflower country.

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10. White Well vacant Crown Land

On the southern boundary of Charles Darwin Reserve lies a 36,000 hectare block of bush which stretches to the edge of the cleared farmland at Jibberding. Known as the White Well VCL, it is unallocated Crown land (generally previously known as ‘vacant’ Crown land or VCL).

The report The Flora and Fauna of vacant Crown land at White Well, Shire of Dalwallinu, Western Australia by Burbidge, Dixon and Fuller Department of Conservation and Land Management Technical Report Technical Report No.24, October 1989 stated that the White Well area possesses elements of both the South West and Eremaean Botanical Provinces constituting a vegetation unit termed ‘transitional woodland’. This vegetation, with its unique blend of species enriched by stately ‘goldfields woodlands’ is not well represented in existing nature reserves ‘ (ibid p13), and recommended that the area be declared an A class reserve for the conservation of flora and fauna and vested in the National Parks and Nature Conservation Authority. The chain of small salt lakes running into Mongers Lake is one of the few remaining uncleared paleodrainage systems in the south-west of Western Australia.

Conflicts with potential mining on the eastern side of the block were resolved by 2006, but Native Title claims remained to be negotiated. Whilst the land remained unallocated Crown land under the responsibility of the Minister for Lands, the Department of Environment and Conservation became authorised to manage it along with all other unallocated Crown land in Western Australia.  

In 2000 the land was placed on the Register of the National Estate, as White Wells Vacant Crown Land,  Great Northern Highway, Jibberding WA (Place ID 18161).  The Australian Heritage Commission (replaced by the Australian Heritage Council in 2003) listed it for its natural values as being :

highly significant as it contains a large and relatively intact area of native vegetation types representative of the eastern wheat belt region.

Australian Heritage Database, Place Details, www.ahc.gov.au