Book Review
12 Dec 14
In the 1950s the big folding maps then handed out for free by service stations showed Putty in fairly large bold type. It then must have come as something of a shock to those bold motorists travelling from Windsor to Singleton when they reached the spot marked on their maps.
Perhaps expecting a rural village and hoping for a cool milkshake or a cup of tea in a roadhouse or even some petrol from the local garage, they were startled to be greeted by nothing but a locked local hall and an old school house. Today, the latest on-line edition of Google Maps doesn’t even show Putty. It has the Putty Road running from Windsor to Singleton but just a gap between national parks where Putty appeared on the old paper maps.
Anyone stopping there is greeted by nothing but a row of adventurously constructed rural mail boxes and a locked local hall. There is little else but a farm house or two that can be glimpsed in the distance.
So what is Putty? It is not a town, not a wide swathe of prime agricultural land, it is not even a forgotten hippy colony populated by aging groovers.
What it is, is simply told. Putty is a state of mind.
Katherine McKenzie has distilled the essence of this surprising little community, scattered through a series of narrow valleys in the Great Dividing Range, into a fascinating book that examines the history, the people and even the future of Putty.
How many Sydneysiders of today remember that the Putty Road was once the main highway (and we use that term with some suspicion) between Sydney and Newcastle? The coast road was cut by so many lakes and streams that waiting for the innumerable punts made it a very slow trip -- and most of the punts didn’t operate at night.
If you wanted to get to Newcastle in a hurry in 1850, you took a steamer along the coast; but it you wanted to take livestock you took the Putty Road.
In the early 1800s, a local Aborigine called Myles led explorer John Howe over the ancient tracks used by the local tribes to travel from the Hunter Valley to the Sydney basin. Their route became the Putty road -- and as soon as it was opened the land-starved people of Sydney rushed to settle in the all but hidden valleys that then and today make up Putty.
The original road was too rough for carts or carriages but it was a good stock route and pack horses could carry heavy loads of goods up and down.
As McKenzie recounts, from dozens of interviews made over the past decade with the valley’s oldest surviving residents, it was not long after the first farm was established in 1824 that Putty residents were growing crops and breeding livestock that were driven or carted on the better bit of the road running north to Singleton and Newcastle.
One of the first successful farmers raised turkeys and pigs -- and he drove flocks and herds of them on the six-day trip to the Singleton markets. Each night the turkeys would be driven up trees and kept there by watching sheep (turkey?) dogs and each morning the birds would be forced through a run of warm tar, followed by sand, to protect their feet from the punishing road surface.
For 30 years from 1880, the Government spent 35,000 pounds upgrading the Putty Road until it was suitable for carriages and drays -- but it was still an official stock route. It wasn’t until World War II that the road from Windsor to Putty was improved to the extent that someone driving a motor vehicle could expect to get to Singleton without being bogged or wrecked.
Such isolation made the residents of the valleys remarkably self sufficient. The book is full of stories of early settlers living under conditions that few young people today would believe. There was no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing and no local stores you nip down to if you forgot the candles.
One old resident who was moved to a nursing home in Singleton in the 1960s couldn’t get used to the indoor plumbing. “In my house you ate inside and went to the toilet outside,” she exclaimed, “These days people go to the toilet inside and eat outside.”
In the mid-1950s, truckies discovered that the Putty Road was a quicker route north than the coastal Pacific Highway and for some years it became the most dangerous road in the country with dozen of serious accidents. Things didn’t improve until insurance companies refused to cover trucks using the road.
But life in Putty wasn’t always involved with logging and farming, the nearby location of the big Singleton Army Camp meant Putty even had a “war”. In 1961 Operation Icebreaker saw 4000 troops staging a war game in the valley as Centurion tanks rumbled along old fire trails and RAAF jets strafed and blasted Kindarun Mountain with rockets. The locals complained that the guns and bombs stopped the cows giving milk and the hens laying eggs.
As well as detailing how the locals battled to get their children educated and how they learned to entertain themselves with parties and concerts at the local hall, McKenzie examines how the valley survived the devastating bushfires 1994 which ravaged the national parks all around them.
At one stage the Army was called in and their engineers established a communications centre with a dozen phones on the verandah of a farmhouse so the firefighters could keep in touch with each other. One local was told by the communications officer that he was welcome to use the phones and that he could call anywhere in the world. He declined the offer: “I don’t know anyone outside Putty.”
McKenzie tells how the big family holdings that once covered Putty have now been split into smaller farms. The average local is no longer a farmer or logger but likely to be a lawyer, an actor or an architect seeking to find the soothing isolation of the bush.
While still fighting drought, bushfires and the unforgiving elements, they recently staved off an initial threat from the coal seam gas industry that would have changed Putty as nothing else has in 190 years.
D.D. McNicoll
Putty Tails & Trails is available from
Putty Hall - when open for events
Colo Heights Service Station
Dymocks Rouse Hill Shopping Town
Hawkesbury Museum, 8 Baker Street, Windsor
Wisemans Books, 299 Windsor Street, Richmond
Wo Man Halfway Roadhouse, Putty Road, Garland Valley
Bulga Bridge Cafe, Putty Road, Bulga
Singleton Books Etc, Cnr George & Cambridge Streets
Singleton Visitor Information & Enterprise Centre, Townhead Park, New England Hwy
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