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Wollar is a village in
New South Wales New South Wales (commonly abbreviated as NSW) is a States and territories of Australia, state on the Eastern states of Australia, east coast of :Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria (state), Victoria to the south, and South ...
, Australia. The town is located north west of the state capital
Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...
and north-east of the regional centre of
Mudgee Mudgee () is a town in the Central West (New South Wales), Central West of New South Wales, Australia. It is in the broad fertile Cudgegong River valley north-west of Sydney and is the largest town in the Mid-Western Regional Council Local gov ...
, near the
Goulburn River National Park The Goulburn River National Park is a national park located in New South Wales, Australia, northwest of Sydney and it is south-west of Merriwa. The Goulburn River National Park is located in the Hunter Valley region and covers approximately ...
. At the , Wollar and the surrounding region had a population of 304. By the the village of Wollar and district was reduced to 69 persons living in 50 private dwellings.


History


Aboriginal occupation

The area was originally occupied by the
Wiradjuri The Wiradjuri people (; ) are a group of Aboriginal Australian people from central New South Wales, united by common descent through kinship and shared traditions. They survived as skilled hunter-fisher-gatherers, in family groups or clans, a ...
people. The nearby
Goulburn River The Goulburn River, a major inland perennial river of the Goulburn Broken catchment, part of the Murray-Darling basin, is located in the Alpine, Northern Country/North Central, and Southern Riverina regions of the Australian state of Victor ...
(into which the Wollar Creek flows) was an important route for Aboriginal people between the inland region and the
Hunter Valley The Hunter Region, also commonly known as the Hunter Valley, Newcastle Region, or simply Hunter, spans the region in northern New South Wales, Australia, extending from approximately to north of Sydney. It contains the Hunter River and its ...
. 'Wollar' is a Wiradjuri word meaning 'rock waterhole'.


'Wandoona' pastoral run

In January 1830 Richard Fitzgerald commenced paying
quit-rent Quit rent, quit-rent, or quitrent is a tax or land tax imposed on occupants of freehold or leased land in lieu of services to a higher landowning authority, usually a government or its assigns. Under English feudal law, the payment of quit ren ...
(land tax) of £7 15s per annum on a grant of one thousand acres of land on Wollar Creek (in Phillip county). The grant of land had been promised to Fitzgerald by Sir
Thomas Brisbane Major-general (United Kingdom), Major General Sir Thomas MacDougall Brisbane, 1st Baronet, (23 July 1773 – 27 January 1860), was a British Army officer, administrator, and astronomer. Upon the recommendation of the Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke ...
, Governor of New South Wales, in February 1824. A “Village Reserve” was surveyed north of Fitzgerald’s land grant. Richard Fitzgerald had arrived in the colony as a convict in 1791. Through his agricultural knowledge and steadfastness he was given increasing responsibilities in public farming. Under Macquarie he held the position of superintendent of agriculture at Emu Plains. By the early 1830s Fitzgerald was a wealthy private landholder, with land grants in the Gulgong and Cassilis districts (including his holding on Wollar Creek). When Richard Fitzgerald died in 1840, his son Robert inherited the land on Wollar Creek. By this stage Robert Fitzgerald already had extensive pastoral holdings in the colony. He expanded the run at Wollar, named ‘Wandoona’, to encompass 5000 acres. Wollar Creek in the vicinity of Fitzgerald’s property became a favoured camp-site for stockmen travelling to Mudgee and Gulgong.


The early township

In January 1868 George Willoughby, a storekeeper of Wollar Creek, was declared insolvent. In March 1868 a government notification was published defining the portions of Crown Land beside Wollar Creek to be set apart as sites for the village of Wollar and adjoining suburban lands. In February 1873 a site was dedicated for a Catholic church at Wollar on the western outskirts of the village at the corner of Phillip Street with Fitzgerald and Maitland streets. In 1875 a wooden church was erected on the site. At about the same time a wooden Anglican church was erected on Crown land on the opposite side of Wollar Creek to the township. In November 1874 a publican’s license was granted to Margaret Willoughby for the Old Wollar Inn at Wollar. In April 1877 a notification was published for the upcoming sale by public auction, in the insolvent estate of George Willoughby, of four allotments in the village of Wollar on which was erected the "Wollar Inn", including a kitchen, stables and out-houses.


A panicked district

In July 1900 after two indigenous men,
Jimmy Governor Jimmy Governor ( – 18 January 1901) was an Indigenous Australian who committed a series of murders in 1900. A total of nine people were killed by Governor or his accomplices. Governor and his brother Joe evaded police for fourteen weeks befor ...
and Jack Underwood, murdered members of the Mawbrey family and a governess at Breelong near
Gilgandra Gilgandra is a country town in the Orana region of New South Wales, Australia, and services the surrounding agricultural area where wheat is grown extensively together with other cereal crops, and sheep and beef cattle are raised. The town i ...
, Wollar suddenly became a focus of attention by police authorities and the colonial press. The reason for the attention was that Governor’s mother and younger siblings were living at the township. Underwood was captured soon afterwards, but Jimmy Governor and his younger brother Joe took to the bush and were still at large. A visitor to Wollar soon after the Breelong murders noted: “When we rode into the town we met men armed to the teeth, riding round looking out sharply for any sign of the blacks”. The police had brought all the local aborigines into the township in order to keep them under surveillance. At night they were locked up in a hall which had been “appropriated for their accommodation”. Such was the fear and panic in the Wollar district that “families from up and down the Wollar Creek have flocked into town, and every available place is crammed with humanity”.A Panic-stricken District
''Daily Telegraph'' (Sydney), 30 July 1900, page 7.
With Jimmy and Joe Governor still at large the police were particularly wary of Jack Governor, the next oldest of five brothers. In the end five “able bodied” indigenous men, including Jack Governor, were locked up in the Wollar police station “for their own and the public safety”. In August 1900 the men, manacled and handcuffed, were bought into the Mudgee lockup. In September it was decided to send the Wollar Aborigines to the Mission Station near
Brewarrina Brewarrina (pronounced ''bree-warren-ah''; locally known as "Bre") is a town in north-west New South Wales, Australia on the banks of the Barwon River in Brewarrina Shire. It is east of Bourke and west of Walgett on the Kamilaroi Highway, a ...
on the Barwon River. The women and children remaining at Wollar, including members of the Governor family, were conveyed to Mudgee in a “four horse conveyance”. One "old man" called Peter, "who was lawyer enough to know that the authorities could not shift him", opted to remain in Wollar. The men who had been detained in Mudgee gaol were released, and “that evening the whole party left by train for Brewarrina”. When they arrived at their destination they were taken to the Aborigines’ Mission Station on the river nine miles from Brewarrina.


Consolidation

In December 1903 a visitor to Wollar commented that Wollar “is not a city of much traffic, and even its streets, or rather where the streets ought to be, are heavily grassed, and grazed upon by sleek-coated cattle and horses”. The writer predicted that “from the very nature of its surroundings Wollar is destined to a career of stagnation, and will probably become smaller instead of bigger”. In March 1905 a new Catholic church at Wollar was opened, replacing the old wooden church built in 1875. The St. Laurence O’Toole Catholic Church, in "restrained Gothic style of roughly-hewn stone", was designed by the architect Harold Hardwick of Mudgee. The walls were constructed of quarry-faced sandstone cut from nearby Willoughby’s Knob, the stone blocks loaded onto a dray and transported to the building site. The ceiling of the church was of Wunderlich tin-plate panels with an embossed pattern. The church is now de-consecrated and is owned by Peabody Energy, proprietors of the nearby Wilpinjong coal mine. In 1914 the wooden Anglican church was replaced by a sandstone structure opened in September. The St. Luke’s Anglican church, with its distinctive crenellated parapets, was designed by Harold Hardwick (who had also designed the Wollar Catholic church). In 2009 the Anglican Church stripped St. Luke’s church of its fittings, pews and the stained-glass windows and put the building up for sale without consulting local parishioners. The church was purchased by Peabody Energy.


Shale oil

In May 1930 it was reported that the Australian Imperial Shale Oil Co. Ltd. had “taken up 400 acres of shale country, about three miles from Wollar”. The land that was acquired was described as having “millions of tons of shale, very rich in oil”, from which the company intended to extract petrol. A workshop, stores and a gantry was erected and a prospecting tunnel had been commenced. In January 1935 the Australian Imperial Shale Oil company demonstrated to a group of visitors the process of retorting oil from shale using a system invented and erected by Ernest Schultz and his son. The machinery was installed at the site of the Wollar shale mine and the automated process featured "low temperature carbonisation" of the shale. The company claimed that “the cost of mining and retorting to the point of producing oil was approximately 3d per gallon”. No mining had been carried out at the Wollar mine “for some time” as the company was focussed on proving the “commercial possibilities of the retort”. The prospects for a shale oil industry in Australia was the subject of government investigation in the mid-1930s and by 1937 the Federal Government had concluded that extracting oil from coal in Australia could only compete with the imported product if it were heavily subsidised. By June 1939 the Australian Imperial Shale Oil Company’s freehold land at Wollar, as well as buildings, machinery and equipment were advertised for sale by the receivers, Mackenzie Harris & Co. of Sydney.


Wilpinjong coal mine

The majority of the Wollar townsite is surrounded by land approved for coal exploration by the State government. The United States mining company
Peabody Energy Peabody Energy is a coal mining company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Its primary business consists of the mining, sale, and distribution of coal, which is purchased for use in electricity generation and steelmaking. Peabody also marke ...
operates the nearby Wilpinjong
open-cut In civil engineering, a cut or cutting is where soil or rock from a relative rise is removed. Cuts are typically used in road, rail, and canal construction to reduce a route's length and grade. Cut and fill construction uses the spoils from cu ...
coal mine. The Wilpinjong open-cut coal mine is located about six kilometres north-west of Wollar village. Thermal coal from the Wilpinjong coal mine provides fuel for the Liddell power station and also exports coal across the world through the Port of Newcastle. The American parent company Peabody, self-described as “a leading coal producer, providing essential products to fuel baseload electricity”, has been an important contributor to organised
climate change denial Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetor ...
. The company had been “long known as an outlier even among fossil fuel companies for its public rejection of climate science and action”. When Peabody Energy filed for bankruptcy in April 2016 the company’s filings revealed extensive funding of a range of climate denial organisations and front groups, as well as scientists with contrarian opinions.


Impacts of coal mining

Peabody has purchased almost all the houses in Wollar. The planned purchasing of homes by Peabody has seen a decline in the population of Wollar. Community members meet quarterly with Wilpinjong Mine leaders through the Community Consultative Committee (CCC). Community representatives requested an annual target of homes to be removed for safety and visual improvement reasons. Understandably not all residents agreed to sell their homes. The Wollar Public School was temporarily closed in 2019, the Rural Fire Service remains operational and the town's drop-in medical service is no longer offered due to low demand. Wilpinjong Mine looks after community facilities that includes the Wollar Community Hall, public toilets and church buildings. Areas in the town, such as the public hall, the school, the school residence, Wollar General Cemetery and Henry Harvey Memorial Park, are Crown land owned by the government. In October 2013 Wilpinjong Coal was accused of repeatedly breaching its Environmental Pollution License by operating heavy machinery during adverse weather conditions. The Mudgee District Environmental Group cited photographic evidence provided by Wollar residents “showing high levels of dust pollution leaving the mine site and blowing through the village”. In November 2020 the NSW government published the ‘Wollar Initial Suitability Assessment’, which sought to justify a further release of land in the vicinity of Wollar for coal exploration. The potential release totalled approximately 80 square kilometres in an area encircling Wollar village. In April 2021 Deputy Premier Barilaro announced that the land surrounding Wollar village was released “for potential coal exploration”. Bev Smiles from the Wollar Progress Association accused the State government of failing to carry out an assessment of the social, environmental and economic impacts on the local community as required by the government’s own framework for issuing new coal mines. Mining companies supported over 5,600 jobs and injected a $1.3 billion into the Central West region where Wollar is located in 2021/22 financial year. This spending included over $406 million on wages and $861 million on goods and services from 1,000 local suppliers. In August 2024, Wilpinjong Mine was awarded the Environmental Excellence Award from the NSW Minerals Council for a biodiversity project at site.


References


Gallery

File:Old house Wollar.jpg, An old house at Wollar NSW. File:Protest signs at Wollar, NSW.jpg, Protest signs at Wollar (photographed in 2011). File:Wollar at Dawn.jpg, The Wollar General Store (closed and shuttered). File:Wollar PAC Boycott 2016.jpg, Wollar PAC Boycott 2016 Mudgee Town Hall.


See also

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Mudgee-Wollar Important Bird Area Mudgee-Wollar Important Bird Area is a 1627 km2 tract of land in the Central West region of New South Wales, Australia. It lies about 250 km west of Sydney, extending eastwards from the towns of Mudgee and Gulgong, and encompassing t ...
*
Acland, Queensland Acland is a rural town and locality in the Toowoomba Region, Queensland, Australia. In the , the locality of Acland had a population of 3 people. Originally built to support what would become Queensland's oldest continuously worked coal mine, th ...
{{authority control Mining towns in New South Wales Ghost towns in New South Wales Shale oil towns in New South Wales