Moving along from Warwick I head on down the road to Texas, which is just on the Queensland side of the Dumeresq River, the Dumeresq has as it’s tributary the Severn River, the Dumeresque itself flows into the McIntyre to end up in the Darling river system.
At one point along the Dumeresq if you point the nose and follow it you will stumble into Texas named after the great state in the south of the United States. It actually got its name like so many things and places in Australia as a bit of a joke. Texas was originally a property settled by the McDougall brothers who left their property to take a tilt at the Goldfields and again like so many others in Australia found the chances of making it big as gold miners a bit of a joke. They returned to find their land had been taken over by squatters and a land dispute ensued.
The McDougall brothers won the dispute in the courts and then promptly named the area Texas after the rather larger and more deadly land dispute between the United States and Mexico, joke or not the name stuck. Texas or more accurately the district in which it belongs was the first Australia area to grow tobacco commercially and Italian families flocked to the area in a gold rush of their own to grow it. As a reformed smoker I guess the benefits of losing the crop was greater than the prosperity gained from growing the stuff. Luckily the Italian farmers are an adaptable lot and they live there still partaking in the local horticultural pursuits. There is a huge feedlot operation in the area and although the employment opportunities are limited it does bring commerce into the area.
If you then head on down a bit further down that same road this time going south east you are following the Dumeresq to Bonshaw which has as its main features a postcode and a weir.
The post code is simply what it is and the weir is one place in which the lucky angler might catch a mighty Murray Cod, this has some relevance because the river system which is called the border rivers eventually make its way south. The rivers hereabouts make up a great part of the wriggly bit that makes up some of the eastern part of the NSW/Old border.
The reason I have mentioned some of the more obscure places in Australia is the tremendous consequences for the local Aboriginal peoples that habituated this lovely and fertile area. These people were of the tribal group known as the Bigambul people which is a sort of generic name for a conglomeration of smaller sub groups. The entire peoples of the Bigambul people took up arms against the white intruders and waged a different type of warfare against the settlers. The focus was on the commercial aspects of settlement that is the farms and buildings of the white settlers. Usually the enmity between the warring parties took the form of violence against the person of the opposing group. The Bigambul people realised the white settlers were there as part of an economic reality and attacked the means of that economy. White settlers found the danger and inconvenience of losing homesteads and outbuildings a serious impediment to the economy of the district.
The outcome was signified by the formation of the Native Police by the Governor in 1848. The Bigambul people eventually lost and the small remnants that survived the encounters soon found the only thing left to them was to work for the settlers who offered almost non existant wages and many of these former foes worked for survival rations.
The tragedy has been somewhat rectified by the winning of Native title rights for the original peoples in February 2001. the area encompassed by the Native Land Title covers most of the original 26, 000 sq. kilometres of the Original peoples.
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