DEEPWATER RAILWAY STATION
CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT PLAN
SECTION 2 DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE PAGE 1 1

2.2 HISTORY OF THE PLACE
Deepwater Pastoral Station and Village
Like many other New England villages (and railway stations), Deepwater was named after the dominant pastoral holding in the local area. However, the district was originally Yagambal territory.41 According to linguistic data collected at the turn of the twentieth century by Dr John MacPherson, the Aboriginal name for the area was 'Tal'gambone' or 'Dal'gambone', meaning `dry country with many dead trees'.42 Traditionally it has been believed that Aboriginal groups moved from the tablelands to warmer inland and coastal districts during winter. However, Luke Godwin has pointed out that the early records of Deepwater station contain numerous references to a considerable Aboriginal presence in the area during August through December 1841.43 During the next couple of years the uneasy relationship between the first pastoralists and their employees and indigenous kingroups broke down, and a succession of murders and summary retaliations culminated in the `Bluff Rock Massacre'.44
Archibald Windeyer took control of the Deepwater run in 1839.45 By 1847 the holding amounted to between 50,000 and 60,000 acres supporting about 10,000 head of sheep.46 Deepwater has long been associated with the Windeyer, Cadell and Macansh families, a partnership that by the 1880s also controlled the Myall Downs station in the Yetman district, as well as the Annandale run in New England.47 At 154,000 acres, Deepwater/Annandale was the biggest pastoral holding in the Tenterfield land district, and about 3500 cattle and over 32,000  sheep were then depastured on the estate.48

The owners took advantage of the railhead at Deepwater to transport the wool clip soon after the Glen Innes-Tenterfield extension opened for business in 1886. By this point, however, another important industrial development had taken place in the district.
Substantial tin and silver deposits were discovered in the region in the early 1870s, and both alluvial and deep lead mining was undertaken in the Deepwater district. 'Tin-mining is undoubtedly the mainstay of this division', wrote the local mining registrar in 1891, `and it is considered a good poor man's field'.49 The latter remark
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Sources
41 See L. Godwin, `inside Information: Settlement and Alliance in the Late Holocene of Northeastern New South Wales', Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of New England, 1990, pp. 94-5.
42 J. MacPherson, `Some Words from the New England Vocabularies', Mankind, 1 (1934), p. 234.
43 Godwin, `Inside Information', p. 127.
44 See J. Ferry, Colonial Armidale (St Lucia, 1999), pp. 25-8.
45 GIE, 16 December 1957, p. 5.
46 NSWGG, (Supplement), No. 87, 14 August 1848, p. 1017; GIE, 12 October 1939, p. 10.
47 GIE, 16 December 1957, p. 5.
48 `Alphabetical return of the several holdings in the colony ... as at 1 January 1885', Department of Mines (Stock and Brands Branch) Annual Report, 1885, votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales (Sydney, 1885), Vol. 3, Appendix 2, p. 407.
49 Annual Report of the Department of Mines and Agriculture, New South Wales (hereafter ARDM),
1891, p. 119.