BOB CAMPBELL . Australian Folk Musician

__Ulan was settled in the early 1880s with a few large land holdings and a number of small settlers who were doomed to failure because they were settled on small forty acre lots which I know as a forty acre blockie that one would be lucky to sustain a cow or two, let alone a family.  However a thriving community did develop there.

Coal was found at Ulan in the 1920s and it is interesting for me that one of the first two miners was called Bob Campbell. 

In the 1950's a power house was built and a mine was opened by Hogan and Gorman to supply coal for the power house.

Moolarben Creek was dammed to supply water for the power house.  This became known as the Lagoon and became a popular recreation spot for generations of Ulan and Cooks Gap families.  It is now fenced off by Moolarben Mine which forbids locals to go near it.  No doubt The Lagoon will go under to make way for the profit of a Chinese coal company. 

A feature of Ulan was Ulan coloured stone which can, or could, be found in front of the Colonial Inn Restaurant in Mudgee.

In the 1940s during WWII petrol was in short supply.  This restricted communications and transport so a charcoal burner at Ulan produced charcoal for a charcoal gas burner used on the Mudgee, Cassilis mail car driven by a Lionel Butler.

One property that became legendary was Bobadeen Station which produced cattle and sheep and employed a lot of people in those labour intensive days.

I live on Cope Road near Cope State Forest, so I find it interesting to learn of the story of ‘Cope’s Ghost’. I’m not sure when but a man called Cope was drowned in Duridgeree Creek.

From then on there have been regular sightings of the ghost at certain times of the year.   The late Col Highett told me of a number of sightings along Cope Road in front of my place.

Moolarben, the property, was selected by the Swords family who maintain a connection to the property from which the Chinese mine, Yancoal has adopted as its title.

It is also interesting that Herbert Byers, the man who shot Aboriginal bushranger, Jimmy Governor, through the jaw prior to his capture, lived at Moolarben.

This property was associated with The Levens, McKay, and Murphy families among others. It was used for dairying, cropping and grazing. It also had a school until the 1950s.

My small property is called ‘Sportsman’s Hollow’.   Jimmy Governor killed the owner of the place, Alexander Mckay, in July 1900.  Jimmy had worked for Mckay who was seventy years old and had married a widow from Cooks Gap.

There is a Mckay Street in Ulan and the Ulan cemetery has graves of a number of Mckays. I have written and recorded a radio play about the Governor outbreak which became the biggest manhunt in Australian history.  See my Jimmy Governor Radio Play.

The house where Herb Archer lived has recently been purchased by Yancoal, owners of Moolarben mine and bulldozed.  This house was next door to the Methodist church which has also been demolished and removed (see slideshow). 

The overwhelming and rapid coal mining expansion around Ulan has destroyed my personal peace, and the Moolarben Mine has deliberately and methodically set about demolishing a unique community that has built up just on the eastern edge of the Great Dividing Range since the eighteen eighties.

Moolarben Mines, owned by the Chinese multi-national company, Yancoal, have sneaked around, bought up houses and land from strategic people, bought them out on the basis they had to keep it secret and then, as the residents moved out of their houses in Ulan, the houses were bulldozed. 

I have taken hundreds of photographs of the destruction and have many more from other residents around the Ulan area.

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Around 1975, I had met concertina player, Sharon Frost's great uncle, Dick Beazley who lived in the bush near Turill not far from Gulgong in central western NSW.

He was in his sixties then and had lived alone in the bush for his entire life except for a period during World War Two when he served with the army in New Guinea.  Dick played the fiddle and mandolin as well as a number of other instruments. The current timber and wood expert in the Gulgong district, Dave Tattersal, says Dick taught him much of his timber expertise.

When Sharon first took me to meet Dick, he was living in two shacks he had built himself on a small block of land at Turill just north of Ulan village. He operated a modest sawmill alone and cut sleepers for the railway. We were amazed at the number of musical instruments, as well as thousands of other items, he had stored around his camp. I eventually bought quite a few instruments off Dick and I still play instruments I got from Dick.

We had visited Dick whenever we had the chance and when I became a full time student, I had much more time to spend with him.

He introduced me to Dooley Chapman of Dunedoo who was well into his eighties and was the best concertina player I have seen in the old style. Dick also introduced me to the well-known Kurtz family of Cooyal with whom I remain good friends.

Most of all, Dick introduced me to the Ulan community where he was a popular, and greatly admired character. Dick introduced us to the Cassilis community which had a pub and club where Dick was a regular, but more importantly, he introduced us to the Ulan pub which was the hub of the community.  When we first arrived there the publican was Alf Richards.

A long term local, the ‘Ulan Cowboy', Jimmy Westwood, wrote a really good song about Alf called “Comin’ Out Of It’.  Jimmy has written a few great songs about Ulan and its characters.

I’ve travelled the world quite a bit but never have found a place with such a concentration of colourful characters. The band we formed on our arrival in the area, Home Rule, played for many pub nights, dances and concerts to raise money for a variety of community causes and just to have a good time.  The skill at old time dancing of Col and Sandra Highett, the unique singing of Big Bill Cashell, Scrubby Phil Boyd, Jimmy Westwood and others, and the fiddling or banjo mandolin playing of Dick Beazley were always a feature of any gathering.

Dick played his music, drank when he was dry and worked when he felt like it. I have since adopted the simple philosophy that contends, ‘The road is the goal’. Put differently, ‘Stop to smell the flowers’. Without putting it into words, Dick epitomised that idea by making the best of every situation. On any trip he would want us to stop the car to look at trees, plants, animals, creeks where there might be gold, or for anything else that took his fancy. He was often late but he always got there and his influence was pulling me in the direction of the bush.

When Dick Beazley died, Sharon Frost arranged his funeral on behalf of her grandmother, Fran Frost, Dick’s sister.  I conducted the service for him in the Methodist church and then played one of his favourite tunes, Danny Boy, at his graveside. On Dick’s gravestone, we had written the words of one of his best mates, Col Highett, “Good Mates are hard to find”.   Later on in the 1990s we organized a small music festival in Ulan called the ‘Dick Beazley Memorial Weekend’ which was very well attended.

At the beginning of 1984 I was lucky to be appointed as a teacher at Gulgong High School and to purchase a house with forty acres four kilometres west of Ulan.  I remain there today and had hoped to see out my days there writing and playing music.

However the overwhelming and rapid coal mining expansion around Ulan has destroyed my personal peace, and the Moolarben Mine has deliberately and methodically set about demolishing a unique community that has built up just on the eastern edge of the Great Dividing Range since the eighteen eighties.

As I have sat on my front veranda watching the ever increasing traffic which has already been the cause of many accidents and road deaths as well as the dust and noise, a number of songs came together including Killer Black Coal.  I have now recorded that song and on Saturday, 8th 0f October, a large number of people around the Ulan area affected by the coal mines, came to my house with placards to appear in a video clip of the song. That video clip is now on YouTube and a number of other places.