As you travel around the Mallee and Wimmera and for that matter much of outback Australia, you pass by many twisted, rotten and leaning poles along the roads but take no notice of them. If you look closer, you will find some with telephone wires hanging from them, if you stop to study them, you will find that they are made from many types of trees and some are even water pipes or the wires are attached to a growing tree or in some cases dead trees that just happened to be in the line and position where a post was required.

Have you ever wondered why there is such an assortment of materials used to provide these phone lines to the outreach properties. Why didn’t the PMG of the early 1900’s use a common poles for their lines?

The pole in the picture above is located in the bush on the West side of the Albacutya bridge. It sits alone in the bush, a sign that there was once a home or something in the area, but there is no other sign of settlement. The home that it serviced is long gone but this pole stands proud as a monument to what was once there.

I have added a new page and new photo album on the telephone poles in the Mallee that I have photographed in my travels.

Telephone Poles in the Mallee page

Telephone Poles Album

For some time I have been trying to locate the first homestead that was set up by John Coppock when he arrived in 1846. He had spoken with Robert William Von Steiglitz (the second son of an Irish Barron) and discovered that the Hindmarsh Run boundary was the 36th parallel later to become the location of the netting fence in 1895. John asked what the land was like to the north and Von Steiglitz replied that he didn’t know as he had never gone up there having arrived on his run only a few months earlier. It was agreed that Coppock would leave his stock at Hindmarsh while he explored the land to the north. It appeared a suitable location with the north end of lake Hindmarsh included inside the boundary and another unnamed lake to the north. Coppock named the northern lake Albacutya a name the aboriginals used for it and named his squat Albacutya Run. He settled at the northern end of Lake Hindmarsh and established a homestead but ended up in an argument over what side of the 36th parallel he had built on with Von Steiglitz. After some debate that was at a stalemate Coppock moved his homestead north closer to Lake Albacutya. I have been searching for the first homestead for some time and had been told that I would know it when I found it as either Coppock or his companion Egerton had planted almond trees on the site. I tend to believe it was probably Egerton that planted them as he returned later to his own run at Mount Egerton near Buninyong and Coppock never planted nut or fruit trees at the new homestead. Local rumour was that the home was on a sand dune ridge close to lake Hindmarsh so I have been looking around and had located what I thought would be a likely site but could not get to it until after the harvest as it was surrounded by crops. I was discussing the location with Trevor Petschel a local that was born in the area, who told me he thought he new the site I was looking for, but was unaware of how it got there and agreed to take me to see it. It was on the sand dunes I was going to explore and indeed there was a number of almond trees surrounding the site as well as imported peppercorn trees. It puzzled me as to why John Coppock would pick this location but trevor pointed out that it had two advantages. The first was that it had a soak close by. (This was a hole at the bottom of the rise that collected water that would slowly seep from the sand dunes that held it after rain providing a waster supply of drinkable water near by. The other was that it had two higher sand dunes that served at lookouts for passing travellers etc. I was delighted to find the location but had not taken my camera with me and to make things worse we were followed by an eagle that hovered very close above our heads as we walked over the dunes but I couldn’t get a photo. Yesterday 30 December 2014 I took my brother to see the site but discovered that the dunes all looked much the same so we wandered through the sand for some time and to my excitement we not only found the homestead site again (which by the way was 27 minutes north of the 36th and therefore Coppock was right he had built on his own land) but the eagle was following us again just as it did the first time I went there, only this time I had the camera. A hawk decided to also join the party but was not hovering like the eagle so I didn’t manage many pictures of it as it darted around. You will find more of the photos in the photo pages under Albacutya.