There is no longer a great deal of 'old' Blackwarry left.
It sits high on the Grand Ridge Rd, 40 kilometres south of Traralgon and 25 kilometres north of Yarram. It has magnificent views down to Wilson Promontory and the Ninety Mile Beach, and north to the Great Divide.
When I went looking on the web almost all I found was advertisements for places to stay and properties for sale. Fair enough, but that did not tell me much. In 1997, though, there was a "Back to Carrajung" book prepared which included a small section on Blackwarry. It was tucked away on a bookshelf. Heaven knows how long it had been there, but it provided more information than the web.
The first bloke to settle in Blackwarry seems to have been Hans Kjergaard, a Dane (there was a surprising number of Danish folk settling in these hills, particularly down toward the Poowong end). Kjergaard took up a 180-acres selection in 1880, and added the same amount again in 1890. He retained his Danish ways, always wearing wooden clogs. When he extended his house to two stories he built the staircase up the external walls, a Danish custom, and in 1905, when he sold his farm, he went home to Denmark.
There was some excitement when traces of gold were found on his selection. A tunnel was dug and some gold was found, but not in payable quantities. In 1911, six years after Kjergaard went home, the Comet Gold Mining Company sent another tunnel into the hillside and found more gold. This company worked two shifts a day for almost a year. Again, the gold was not in payable quantities.
The locals must have admired him because in 1913 or thereabouts a small public hall was built on a part of the property and named the Kjergaard Hall.
Between 1880 and 1897 there were only another 18 or so selectors who moved into Blackwarry.
It was terribly hard country, steep and heavily forested. Some of the trees matched the other giants in the Strzeleckis with many trees having a girth (circumference) of more than 70 feet. One giant measured 121 feet around. In the Back-To-Carrajung booklet it is claimed that one tree yielded 13,050 palings and some milled timber.
The first and very small hall was lost in the 1898 fires and the community battled long and hard for a combined hall and school. It had possibly been a Mechanics Institute. There was another built in 1901 but it too was very small. The Kjergaard hall was big enough to double as a school.
State School 3427 Backwarry opened in 1902 and had a chequered career. The first two Head Teachers were ladies who married local men and had to be replaced because the Education Department would not employ married women. It was half-time (with Balook) for a time and was closed at least once for lack of enrolments. It stopped operations in 1950 and was officially closed in 1952.
State School 3846 was called Blackwarry West and had an even shorter career. It ran only from 1914 until 1921 and was closed for part of that time. It was once known as Kjergaard State School, I see that Carrajung had four schools, including Carrajung East, Carrajung Lower and Carrajung South. Carrajung was not far away and became the main school for the area. It began in 1913. With transport so difficult schools could be too far apart.
There was a proposal to build a railway from Traralgon over the range to Meeniyan and public meeting and letters to the government resulted in a route actually being surveyed, passing through Carrajung and Blackwarry. This was in 1902-03. Alas, it was not to be, but when the parliament voted on it was lost be a very small margin. Victoria had had a burst of 'railway madness' and too many lines had been built without a good business case. (Sound familiar?)
One settler, Jonathon Tanner, seems to have been a real livewire. He was one of the Tanners who settled here. In 1885 six settlers had come to Blackwarry, and four of them were Tanners. Jonathon had the first milking machines in the area and the first Dodge car, but he was of greater importance for establishing a creamery.
At first the dairy farmers would let the milk stand overnight in big, shallow pans. The cream would rise to the surface and be skimmed off, to make cheese or butter, which could then be transported down to the Alberton railway station to go up to Melbourne. Butter fetched a better price than cheese, but a delay on the railway or a really hot day could ruin the butter very quickly.
The next step was the creamery – the book mentions Henry Tanner's creamery – where the farmers would bring their sledges in with the milk cans. The milk was separated and the cans went home full of skimmed milk, mostly used for feeding pigs.
The next step was the arrival of the separator so the farmers could collect their own cream and avoid the long journey over bogy tracks to the central creamery, but the greatest boon in those first years of the twentieth century was when the Yarram Butter Factory sent wagons out into the hills to collect the cream.
From 1900 there was a delivery system for groceries and so on. The first to do this was W. McDonald of Traralgon but he was soon followed by others. Men on horseback would move through the district collecting orders and taking them back, so that a wagon could go up into the hills with all the necessities of life.
Life became easier still when Harry Read started a butchery at Balook "in the early 1900s", and would deliver meat by packhorse through the community.
Another great leap forward was in the mail service, a critical facility to people new to strange country who wanted to touch base with the good folk back home. At first the Blackwarry mail came across from Carrajung in a marvellous roster system where the settlers took turns to ride over to Carrajung and bring back the mail to the Daniels' place, where the settlers would pick it up. Meggie Daniel had a licence to sell stamps and it would have logical enough that when the Post Office was officially opened in 1902 the Daniels should have operated it. Instead, it was 1911 before the Daniel family took it over and they ran it right up to 1950 when the office was closed and the site sold off.
Blackwarry was always a tiny community but it was a real community. I knew nothing about it, except as a name on a map, and I still do not know how it was named and why, which I find very frustrating.
