Today it was time for me to finally go past the border into New South Wales. I put on some nice music, and had a leisurely drive down the highway to Tenterfield.

My first stop was the Tenterfield Saddler – yes, like from the song.

Apparently the building was first constructed as residence in the 1860s, and only became a saddlery in 1870 when it was purchased by a saddler – C.H. Pavel. It was sold again four years later to the Australian Joint Stock Bank, who sold it on again 1895 to go back to being a private home for two years. In 1897, it was sold again to a saddler, Dan Egan. And between 1908 and 1960, it was occupied by George Woolnough, grandfather of Peter Allen.

Now it’s run by volunteers and it’s less of a saddlery and more of a museum or nostaliga collection. So here’s a few photos of old stuff.

Then I wandered over to the Centenary Cottage Museum, but unfortunately it wasn’t open – the volunteers who usually ran it had come down with the flu. So instead I drove on to Stannum Historic House. For those of you who’ve been on the trip to and from Armidale, you’ll know it as the big pink house next to the petrol station.

It’s a B&B/restaurant, but they also offer free tours! It’s awesome – you don’t need to pay money or anything, just go up to the reception and ask. It was built in 1888 by John Holmes Reid, designed by Italian architects, on a foundation that was excavated down to granite.

So you can just imagine how swanky it was back in the day. Hey, it’s still swanky now! And it’s called the Stannum house because the Reid family made their money in tin mining, and stannum is Latin for tin.

These are photos of the front hall.

 

 

This is a replica of an 80 year old Monopoly set. The board is made of wood and felt, the houses are silver and the hotels are gold. The player tokens are gold too.

There was a whole bunch of very pretty stuff in the place. The fireplaces were made of marble.

Also, I seem to be having a problem with the word ‘dining’ today – every time I type it, it comes out as ‘dinging’, and I have to go back and correct it.

It would have had more beds when the original Reids were using it though – they had twelve children!

A spiral staircase going up to the third floor. Apparently it was built with Stanthorpe timber, then shipped to Ireland, then later shipped back as one whole piece to be included in the house.

Then there was a ladder going up to the lookout. I took lots of photos of the view.

After that awesome tour, I went on to the Railway Museum. Along with Stannum, this was one of the highlights of the trip, so prepare for more information about trains than you could ever need.

That was just in the reception area. The actual museum was in the old train station, and when I stepped out onto the platform, this is what I saw:

They have a bunch of actual train carriages that you can go inside and check out!  I knew that would be a lot of fun, so I saved that for last.  Instead, I went into the old station master’s office.

They had lots of model trains on display behind glass cases, which were very pretty.  The glass was rather reflective though, as you can see:

Look at it go!

 

Though I wonder if the person really was ‘unknown’, or if the station workers just agreed with their graffiti and decided not to dob them in.

 

This is exactly what it says – photos of the workers building the train line.  It’s easy to forget just how much work went into it.

 

These were all inside a place called the Trike Shed, and these are the little cars that run up and down the track, usually transporting people or materials to sites where they’re working on the train tracks.

I admit, I was expecting some pretty rough accommodation, but it was actually rather nice. Shared kitchen and dining area, but everyone got their own room to sleep in – backpackers do it worse than that!

That’s a lot of levers.

Maybe it’s just me, but that seems to ride a fine line between helping and teasing.

There were stairs down to the tracks so you could walk among the carriages and locomotives.  It felt a little bit naughty – we’re always told to stay off the tracks, so when I went down and walked back and forth across them, it gave me a false sense of daring.

Lots of photos of interesting machines coming up.  I also took pictures of the signs attached to them, so you too can be informed!

First up, are the ones you could walk around but not duck inside of:

Now, below are the ones you could go inside.  They often had displays inside as well.

Apparently the ‘occasional passengers’ were usually the train drovers.  They were paid by the stock owner, and usually just accompanied the animals to market to make sure nothing went wrong.  There were resting paddocks along the way where the cows would be unloaded, spend a few days in a paddock, and the drovers would have to keep an eye on them.

As you can see, there was some room for sitting down, and the kind of tiny toilet you’d find today on aeroplanes

In fact, why not have a whole display of lumberjack equipment?

Oh look, they do!

You can see the compartments – the little door open at the bottom was where the dogs went.

This was a fogging machine, basically used to spray sheep with insecticide inside a tent or shed.

This controlled the speed of the engine by regulating the amount of fuel.  Wikipedia calls them centrifugal governors, but I like flyball governor better.  It’s also very Australian, I feel – we don’t give things fancy names if we can help it.  It has ball weights that fly around, so we’ll call it a flyball.

The main controls, labelled nicely.

 

The ‘mobile workshop’ mentioned on the sign:

The stuff below was tucked away in a little room in front of the toilets.

Maybe I’m not getting something here, but being given a bench seems a very strange present.

Lots of people in Tenterfield have sheep or cows in their backyard, so this is a familiar sight.  And a rather nostalgic one – it reminds me of when we used to drive through here on the way to see Aunty Sandy.

At this point, I was too late for lunch at that Stannum resturant, so I stopped at another place and grabbed some pizza.  Didn’t finish all of it, so the leftovers will be dinner at some point.  After that, I went to see the Tenterfield cork tree.

Apparently it was brought from England in a jam tin and planted in 1861.  The bark on cork trees looks very weird and bumpy (or maybe it’s just this one).

I stopped at the Forest to Furniture gallery, a little woodworking gallery with a lot of paintings as well – it’s a very nice place to just drop in for a few minutes.  Then I went on a tourist drive that promised a scenic lookout.

The drive turned onto unsealed road, travelling through some farmer’s properties.

Now I really felt like I was on a farm – all those years at Aunty Sandy’s have made me feel that it’s not a proper farm unless there are wild rabbits all over the place.

I turned a corner and got a big surprise – controlled burning on the side of the road.  When I first saw the flames, I was genuinely worried, thinking a bushfire had started…until I saw it was burning in a line.

You can see the smoke billowing from where it’s still alight.  I got a video of the fire too:

The smoke smelled interesting – not nice like a pure wood fire, but still not exactly bad.

Seriously, I never saw any sheep in this paddock.  Plenty of cows though.

More controlled burning, both finished and in-progress.

Finally, I turned into Mackenzie National Park, and got a nice view from the lookout.

Then I completed the circuit.  I passed a free range chicken farm on the way, and couldn’t resist getting a picture – I’d never seen one before.

It was very late in the afternoon by this point, so I headed back to Turtle Shell to write this up and get some rest.  I was having internet issues though, which is why you didn’t get this until now.