Epic 3,500km trek, 11,000 sheep, and the young drover history forgot

A freshly hewn marble headstone stands out from its grey surroundings in Perth’s historic Karrakatta Cemetery.

After 80 years buried in an unmarked grave, Wallace Ogilvie Caldwell, who died aged 80 in 1941, and his wife Sarah, who died a year later, are finally being commemorated.

Etched into the gleaming marble is Wallace Caldwell’s claim to fame.

Head Drover — Longest Sheep Droving Trip in Aust. History  – 1882 VIC to NT  –  3,500 km.

Regrettably, no photograph of the man behind this epic undertaking has ever come to light. 

A story nearly lost to time

Mr Caldwell’s feat, and the story behind it, would have been buried with him if not for a quirk of fate and some impressive detective work.

Tom is the great-grandson of his namesake, Thomas Guthrie, who was a wool trader and prominent pastoralist in the 1800s.

From the 1860s he amassed extensive sheep holdings.

Twenty years later, the wool industry was supercharging the Australian economy, and Thomas wanted to expand his empire.

“He’d got a tip-off for this land that was being opened up on the Barkly Tablelands [in the Northern Territory] and he went to Adelaide to the auction and put his hand up,” Tom said.

However, no-one had ever tried running sheep in the Northern Territory, which was then on the frontier of European settlement in Australia.

The Barkly Tablelands were 3,500 kilometres from Thomas’s Rich Avon Station at Donald in Victoria’s Wimmera region.

And most of the latter part of the journey to his newly acquired land, in the Territory’s central east, was unmapped.

The flock that would make droving history

Unaware of the challenges ahead, Thomas assembled a massive sheep flock of 10,000 ewes and 850 rams.

This is where 21-year-old Wallace Caldwell entered the story.

In September 1882, Thomas hired Caldwell as his head drover, and he, a handful of stockmen, two supply wagons and a pack of sheep dogs set off on the longest sheep drive in the nation’s history.

Caldwell was, from all accounts, a highly competent drover but also possessed brash, youthful optimism.

“How [did] he ever imagine he would find somewhere in the middle of the Northern Territory?” marvelled Tom Guthrie, who published a book about the epic sheep drive in 2014.

Initially, Tom’s knowledge of the story, gleaned from excerpts in his great-grandfather’s memoirs, was patchy.

Then a stroke of luck delivered him a thrilling discovery.

Found in a bin, published decades later

In the late 1980s, the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame published an account of the sheep drive sent to it by retired former governor-general Sir Paul Hasluck.

As a young journalist at The West Australian newspaper in the 1930s, Hasluck had rescued a short, typed manuscript from the office wastepaper bin.

It was the first-hand account of the epic droving trip, written by Wallace Caldwell 50 years after the event.

Sixty years later, when Hasluck was cleaning out his own office, he rediscovered Caldwell’s recount and recognised its historical value.

When researching for his book, Tom Guthrie became aware of the Caldwell document at the Stockman’s Hall of Fame and realised that it was describing the extraordinary droving expedition of his great-grandfather’s sheep.  

Caldwell’s account of the expedition — which took 15 months — described the fierce drought they encountered in western New South Wales, the daily battle to save the flock, the piles of dead sheep, and the expedition’s dwindling rations.

But their fortunes changed dramatically, with an abundance of pasture and water, when they reached Queensland.

In December 1883, the expedition reached Avon Downs Station in the NT, with fewer than half the original flock.

“3,700 ewes and about 475 rams,” Tom said.

“It’s just a remarkable story.

Honour at last for the drover in the unmarked grave

In time, the sheep flock flourished to about 70,000. But wild dogs and the tropical heat took their toll and, eventually, after several decades, the sheep were replaced with cattle.

While writing the book, Tom discovered Caldwell had completed another epic droving trip in 1890, fording flooded rivers to move 11,000 sheep from the Thomson River in western Queensland to Bourke, in NSW.

He then tried prospecting, selected land near Bunbury in Western Australia, and retired to Perth, where he died in 1941 at the age of 80.

Several years ago, Tom discovered Caldwell’s grave was unmarked.

He could find no relatives, so he bought the plot and commissioned a headstone, which was unveiled during a small ceremony involving his own family and friends several weeks ago.