A collection of 23 vintage photographs of Yardea Station and environs in the Gawler Ranges, South Australia, circa 1905
Original gelatin silver prints (uniformly 122 × 165 mm, but three have been trimmed a little), all captioned in ink on the verso (four are dated 1905).
All prints are unmounted as produced; two have a short tear to one edge, one of these (and one other) have a small piece missing from one or two corners; one is a little creased; two are a little marked; overall, the condition is excellent.
Yardea Station is a pastoral lease approximately 400 kilometres north-west of Adelaide; it was the first property taken up in the Gawler Ranges, in the late 1850s. 'Lying on one of the main east-west corridors through the Ranges, Yardea became the main postal depot during the late 1860s. A stone police station was erected in 1873, staffed by two police troopers who had been placed there a year earlier to keep order and to distribute rations to Aboriginal people who were increasingly attracted to Yardea.... After the Yardea police were withdrawn in 1885 the building served as a post-office and telegraph station, and then as a repeater station when a direct telegraph link to Western Australia was established in 1903. During the 1890s, when most of the Gawler Ranges station leases (including Yardea) were abandoned due to a combination of high government charges, drought, and uncontrolled dingo numbers, the building was still staffed by three telegraph station employees' (Philip Jones in 'Naturally Disturbed', 2010, 'an interdisciplinary collaboration between Sue Kneebone and Philip Jones. The exhibition engages with the complex history, intersecting narratives and unexplained absences that relate to Yardea, a pastoral property in the Gawler Ranges in South Australia, once managed by Sue Kneebone's great-grandfather'). Elsewhere, in her PhD thesis of the same name, Sue Kneebone writes: 'In late 1903, at a time of high demand and high prices for sheep, Yardea was taken up by James Grey Moseley with his station manager, my great-grandfather Arthur Bailey ... The Yardea lease ... by then included Paney, Yartoo and the old Pondana and Cacuppa stations'. A small number of these images have been located in the collection of the State Library of South Australia, with some attributed to W.R. Evans, who appears to have been on the staff of the Eucla Telegraph Station around this time. One of the present photographs is captioned 'A. Cole, Post Master | A. Bailey, Manager Ya[rdea]'. Nearly all of the captions mention Yardea; Pondona [Pondana] and Paynea [Paney] are also noted. Pastoral pursuits are well-recorded: these include 'Mowing Crop', 'Hay-Stack', 'Stooking Hay', 'Hay Carting' (all dated 1905), 'Mustering Cattle', 'Bullock Team', 'Shearing', 'Wool Team', 'Woolly Sheep', and 'Horses'. There is also a fine image of a 'Camel Team en route for W.A. passing through Yardea'. Other scenes are 'Rock Hole, Yardea' (from above and below), 'Dam, Yardea Station', 'Stone Dam, Paynea [sic]', and views of the Yardea Gorge, Pondona Hills (two views, both with sheep), 'Hills, Gawler Ranges', and 'Deep Well, Yardea' (featuring a horseman and a stone hut). People are visible in seventeen of the photographs, and in at least seven instances, they are Indigenous men. Offered with a cabinet card photograph (145 × 105 mm, mounted on plain card) of the fresh grave site at Yardea of Sarah Cole, wife of Alfred Cole. A notice of her death appeared in the Adelaide 'Chronicle' on Saturday 26 June 1897: 'COLE. On the 20th June, at Yardea telegraph station, Sarah E[lizabeth] B[roughton (née Garrett)], the dearly beloved wife of Alfred Cole and second daughter of C.J. and the late William Garrett, late of Port Lincoln, aged 33 years and 9 months'. She was the mother of six children. The presence of this poignant photograph in the collection suggests to us a Cole family provenance. [24 items].
Item #122043
Price (AUD):
$3,000.00