Sunday History Photo / Sandstone WA

Thanks Doug for another most enjoyable read.

Thank Doug,
With a mate, I went through there a month or so again, saw all the places mentioned too.

The National Pub does great meals at good prices.

There were lots of guys with metal detectors running around when we were there. Don't know how they went, everyone kept quiet about where they went and what they found.
Not really surprised about that.

We found the Cemetery, lots of child deaths, mainly typhoid or infancy and not surprisingly adult males of varying ages where cause of death was mine accident
.
They were hard times, the young of today have no idea what hard times are.

Disco.

Thanks Doug for another interesting Sunday History story photo.
Just a little bit of editing and correction needed there. Sandstone did not decline to a population of 200 people until 1919, which is omitted in your paragraph.

As with all goldfields towns in W.A., WW1 hit Sandstone hard. Blokes walked off the mines to sign up to fight, as soon as the punch-up with "Kaiser Bill" was announced.
As a result, the bigger mines stopped operating because of the almost total lack of labour.
Even small shows were abandoned - many of the prospectors decided that 6 shillings a day in the employ of the 1st AIF and a chance to bump off a few intensely-disliked Huns, was a lot more attractive than scratching for a tiny bit of occasional gold in the Sandstone dust.

The 1st AIF pay was so generous, it grated with the Poms - and the Diggers were often referred to by the Poms, in a derogatory fashion, as the "six-bob-a-day-tourists".
Of course, the Pommy soldier was only being paid a fraction of that, thus the jealousy.

Once WW1 was over, very few miners returned to the W.A. Goldfields - most went on to agricultural pursuits as farming boomed between 1919 and 1929.
The "Soldier settlement" scheme by the W.A. Govt helped this change along, too. The W.A. Govt gave solid assistance to returned soldiers in three ways.

1. The Govt would buy farm land and set up the returned soldier on it. The soldier was given 40 years to pay for it, with lower interest rates for the first 5 years and the option to defer the first 5 years payments if the soldier was unable to make the payments, due to poor seasons or other factors.

2. The soldier could buy a farm with assistance from the W.A. Govt owned, Agricultural Bank of Western Australia (later called the Rural & Industries Bank, today known as Bankwest). The ABWA had been established in 1895 to assist W.A. farmers.

3. "Assistance" that is not listed in detail, was also given to other soldier settlers. It's possible these were soldiers who already had some farming assets and who required additional land, or it is possible these soldiers were granted pastoral properties in places such as the Murchison and Goldfields.

In W.A., the Soldier Settlement scheme was probably a lot more successful than in the other states, as the rainfall was more reliable, and the scheme was well-administered.

As at the 30th June, 1924, the area of W.A. farmland acquired or set apart for WW1 soldier settlement was 9,094,711 acres - of which 253,478 acres comprised private land purchased at a cost of 607,215 pounds ($1,214,430).
This total acreage comprised 1,095 soldier settlement farms.
In addition, another 3,170 properties with an area of 25,353,775 acres were purchased by returned soldiers with the assistance of the Agricultural Bank.
Assistance was also given to an additional 859 soldier settlers who occupied areas totalling another 2,789,200 acres.

For value comparison indications, a new Ford Model T car in 1919 cost 255 pounds ($510) and the basic wage in 1919 was around 10 shillings ($1.00) a day or 3 pounds ($6.00) a week.

So, as you can see from the figures, the move from mining into farming in W.A. after WW1 was pretty substantial, with more than 5000 new farms being commenced as a result of the W.A. SS scheme.

Cheers, Ron..

Great read Doug, thanks . . . a bit of normality to the 'turmoil of change' :)
(The forum is greatly improved, with improvements in some cases too !!)

The sandstone (?) arch looks interesting.

Thanks Doug.Sandstone was the surprise of our 2008 trip. We went to see the arch - that was well known, but instead of just overnight, we stayed three nights in their wonderful caravan park, and three touring days in the area. Such a neat town in a large Shire with a tiny population.