Wickepin is located 210 km south east of Perth via Brookton and Pingelly, and 38km east of Narrogin.
This blog is a guide to historic attractions in the town and signposted parts of the adjoining Facey Drive Trail.

Wickepin has become famous for its association with Albert Facey, the author of the best selling book "A Fortunate Life".
Other remarkable former residents were poet, author, and playwright Dorothy Hewett, and the Church of the First Born sect who established the New Jerusalem settlement east of Wickepin.

The success of Facey’s autobiography A Fortunate Life is one of the remarkable events of Australian publishing. Originally published by the Western Australian-based Fremantle Arts Press in 1981, the book was subsequently published by Penguin and is regularly voted into the top 10 of the most popular Australian books. It was subsequently made into both a play and a successful TV mini-series."

                  Wickepin Town Attractions
1. Murals  can be seen all over town including the Police Station, Wickepin Swimming pool, Wickepin Primary School, Wickepin Newsagency and the Wickepin CRC.

2. Toolseum. Explore this intriguing collection of agricultural tools and photos of a bygone era. Open for viewing by appointment only. Bookings can be made 1 week in advance by contacting the CRC  or email
[email protected].

3. Boarding House 52 Wogolin Road opposite the Toolseum. Private residence. Built around 1910, this was originally Wickepin's community hall. Albert stayed here between 1912-13 while working for the Railways and the Water Supply.

4. Community Resource Centre .Visit the Centre for brochures and information on local attractions and facilities. 
                                                        Contact. 0898881500 or email [email protected].

​5a A.B Facey Homestead  is situated in the main street and is the home that Facey and his family walked out of in 1934 during the Great Depression. The house is much more than just another wheatbelt dwelling. It is a unique opportunity to view the harsh and simple lifestyle of the small wheatbelt farmer in the early 1930s.

6. Heritage Walk Trail. This is an attractive and easy 1.8km trail featuring numbered historical attractions and quirky artwork. Follow the map as some sections of the trail are not clearly marked.

Two Gnome Villages are in the townsite and they are happy to receive visitors. The creator started her gnome family 25 years ago and has accumulated 1700 Gnomes that are all numbered and recorded. Worth a visit for a giggle.

​​2d Gillimanning Approximately 11 km from McCall's farm.
The Facey family camped here when they first came to the area. The town of Gillimanning was established in 1905 although Albert mentions the place as early as 1903 when they moved to Archie McCall's nearby property. By 1907 a weekly mail service had been established between Narrogin and Gillimanning from where the family collected their mail. A very active and dedicated community developed facilities for the area including a community hall and school which opened in 1909. The townsite is unusual in that it is located on a ridge a few kilometres south of Gillimanning Spring. 

 For information on regional Wickepin attractions,click these hyperlinks
Yealering and wide world of Wickepin brochure
Malyalling nature Reserve
Lake Toolibin
Harrismith

References and useful websites
Wickepin WA - Aussie Towns (1)
Wikipedia  - Dorothy Hewitt
Wickepin Shire Council website
"A Fortunate Life" A.B. Facey Penguin Books 1981
​Gillimanning blog 
New Jerusalem: A Historic Wickepin Cult Location

Note- private property, do not enter.

This block was part of the New Jerusalem Settlement. The Bergin home block at Malyalling Rock and it were rated as having the best soils of surveyed blocks in the district at the time.
​The Prosser family ran the Cornwalls Store which was located in the vicinity of the White Well Tarling Hall from 1908 to 1912. The Prossers left the store to buy this farm from Mr Jago. They later moved to Wickepin, but their bachelor son Harry lived in the house. Prossers sold the house to Tony Sartori.
Rex Bergin recalled that in 1961/62 he and Harry lunched in the old house, when he was shearing for Tony Sartori (Harry was a roustabout). The farm was then sold to the present owner.
The derelict house is an interesting mixture of syle and material, which grew and changed over the decades. It is in a lovely position in a valley beside a creek and has a large stone well. Judging by extensive drains and banks in the adjoining creek, and wall damage in the house, I reckon that the house had most likely been occasionally flooded. 

I think that the original house consisted of the lounge, bedrooms and the present kitchen, which had solid fitted  rock and mud cement walls.
The two front rooms had a high arched roof, with flat roofs on the front verandah and back rooms.
​Interestingly each layer of rooms behind the front two becomes increasingly narrow. 
Rooms 5 and 6 also have mostly stone and mud walls, except for the two outside walls (room 5 missing, room 6 galvanised iron) 

All of the roof timbers are milled jarrah, which indicates that the roof had been replaced.
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A corridor runs down the centre of the house. The lounge and bedroom 1 were fine rooms with plastered and painted walls and a pressed iron ceiling.
The south facing lounge window has been converted to a servery. I think it looked on to a rear verandah before the house was extended and a kitchen was  installed.

The kitchen and bedroom 2 are a bit deceiving. All remaining walls were coated by painted masonite fibre boards, but masonite was not available before 1935. Where masonite has fallen off one can see the original wall treatment - hessian painted with a lime render.

Bedroom 2 has a deteriorated lino covering. A clue to the age of the lino was found in English Pix magazines used as underlay. One magazine showed Victory in Europe Day celebrations in 1945. A 1940 edition featured Australian troops enjoying themselves in Singapore in 1940, which was quite thought provoking. Within a year the Japanese overran Singapore, and these men either died or were in dreadful prison camps.

​Room 5 is a bit of a mystery. It is smaller than the others, it has mud mortar walls on three sides,and the easter wall is missing. The wall between the kitchen and room 5 looks like a later addtion using wattle and daub type construction. An image shows thin jam and sheoak pole reinforcement filled with local mud (probably mixed with a straw type material).
Room 6 also has mud mortar walls on three sides, but they are the higher grade stone construction. The western wall is more recent galvanised iron with a jarrah frame THe interior is lined with masonite. A gas bottle fitting on the outside suggests that it was a bathroom and or laundry in 1970's-1980s.
​Room 7 at the back is definitely the  most recent. Unlike the others this has cement rather than jarrah board floors and is entirely enclosed by galvanised iron.

At the back of the house is an elegantly built little outhouse, which was built with the original house, and more recently housed the electricity generator.
Prior to that I guess that it may have been a butchery or meat storage room. It is much too elegant for a dunny.
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The original shed frames  still stand up the back.
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What a tale this house could tell. 

​While reading local history and talking to veteran Wickepin farmers I was fascinated by tales of a Jewish settlement there. The people in the settlement were not Jewish, but Church of the Firstborn Christians whose tale deserves more attention. I have made this blog from sources in the text.

How did this happen? James Cowley Morgan Fisher was a classic cult leader, but in my opinion, the group thrived due to cooperative and tolerant Christian principles espoused by Emanual Swedenborg, and the common sense of Fisher’s two eldest sons.

​The Sect at Wickepin
There were about 100 members based at Nunawading Victoria. Their faith was an amalgam of Jewish and Christian beliefs as espoused by John Wroe and the Christian Israelites filtered by the idiosyncratic mind of Fisher.   As group grew it began to fragment. To overcome this Fisher ordered his sons to find a new location for the whole group in rural WA.  Fisher members who later moved to WA all had farming backgrounds and many had ties to the Firstborn dating from the 1860s.

The WA colonial government attracted newcomers through a generous policy of land alienation. Settlers could select up to one thousand acres at ten shillings per acre, with the cost spread over twenty years. Free homestead blocks of up to sixty acres were also offered, although farmers had to meet residence and improvement conditions.

They chose the Yarling Creek locality, 40 km east of Narrogin. Opened for selection in 1893, the area was said to have excellent land 'suited for cereals and fruit', and there was an abundance of fresh water easily obtained from springs, soaks and shallow bores, such that there was 'practically no fear in regard to a water famine during the summer months’.

Solomon and Samuel Fisher returned to Victoria to inform their father's followers and prepare to move west. There was no legal provision for communal property title in WA, so each man had to apply for land on adjoining blocks. William Butler and Charles Peters (both related to Fisher through marriage), who had come to WA with Solomon and Samuel, negotiated with the Lands Department, and signed applications for about four thousand hectares on behalf of their colleagues in Victoria. The area was named  ‘New Jerusalem’.
Unlike most new settlers, group members (about 70 in total) were well funded. From the sale of their Victorian properties, they brought an estimated £5,000 to invest, a fortune for the time. The money enabled them to build substantial homesteads, and purchase and acquire the newest and most modern farm machinery.
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Fisher arrived in WA in early 1902. Fisher and his followers worked together to build wooden slab huts and to clear their rich flats along Yarling Creek. They shared livestock and farm equipment, although each family lived on its own block.
A spirit of sharing, fellowship and intense community was fostered through services and social gatherings. Their cohesiveness was evident in the family and neighbourhood connections between most members. The sect's rural character meant that day-to-day familiarity sustained relationships and avoided social contamination from an urban setting. 
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By the time of Fisher's death, New Jerusalem was less of an isolated religious group and more a progressive farming settlement, with leadership provided by Solomon and Samuel Richard Fisher. The arrival of the railway and their leader's senility coincided. New Jerusalem continued as a farming community, but it became ever more part of the prosperous Wickepin community rather than a religious group.
There very little physical evidence of their occupation, presumably because buildings were mostly wood.

The group had a significant positive impact on the Wickepin district and was applauded by the local newspaper and a range of State bureaucrats and politicians.
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In January 1906, New Jerusalem was visited by WA's Minister for Lands (Newton Moore), Director of Agriculture (Charles Chaplin), Surveyor General (Harold Johnston), local member of parliament (George Cowcher), and several Agricultural Society members and reporters, all of whom stayed overnight. Moore (soon to become Premier) was 'very much impressed with the New Jerusalem settlement … they have made commendable progress, and there is every indication of the members becoming prosperous settlers'.The visitors observed that 'a spirit of co-operation and mutual help permeates the whole community and governs all its actions. While communism is entirely absent, the settlement might nevertheless be described as one large family, in which the stronger help the weaker'. They were impressed with the social conditions, and with the regularity of the settlement — the 'homesteads each surrounded by an orchard and garden, stand[ing] near to and in view of one another' — and they admired 'the bright and happy faces of the settlers and the healthy appearance of the children'. The 'whole scene presents a picture of close settlement rarely seen in WA'.

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​Other families who might have been connected with, or were very friendly with New Jerusalem, are Bergin, Boyes, Jago, McCracken and Zinkler. From 18 to 22 selectors in the Wickepin area participated in the New Jerusalem community, some marrying in.
I found this amusing anecdote in the booklet ‘As They Remember It’ available at the Wickepin CRC.
‘Other members included the Robinsons, Zinklers and the Rintouls, who had two girls. Martin Mahar and Mick O’Keefe both Irish were tracking these girls and used to go to the service. One day the preacher ticked them off, so they got some barbed wire and laid it across the pathway. When the preacher came out his arms stretched across these girls he tripped and over he went. Martin and Mick reckoned they got even then’.

Fishers's early history is disputed, but this is the latest interpretation.
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1831 born James Cowley at Nailsworth Gloucestershire
1840 migrated with his family to Adelaide
1850 married Louisa Phillips in Melbourne. While living in a brothel he was convicted of passing forged cheques and transported as a convict to Van Diemen’s Land
1852 escaped to Melbourne, and assumed the surname Fisher (that of his paternal grandmother), later adding the forename Morgan
1853 Although still married to Louisa he married Caroline Chamberlain. They had two sons Solomon and Samuel before she died during childbirth in August 1855.
1858 Fisher married Emma Pickis Kefford. His mother-in-law, Rhoda Harriet Kefford was a gifted orator who had earlier founded the 'New Church of the First-Born' based on Swedenborg's doctrine. Under her influence Fisher underwent a dramatic religious conversion
1861 he became leader of this sect. Based on the religious principles and practices inherited from his mother-in-law, who died in 1867, and from divine messages, he developed this sect into what he called the 'Church of the Firstborn. He was a faith healer in addition to receiving divine messages. On moonlight nights he led his followers through the country-side banging tins to exorcise the devil.
1871 Fisher and his sect were embroiled in a public scandal. Fisher's failure to save a child's life through faith healing led to civil action by the disgruntled father to recover £34 from Fisher, who had supposedly claimed to be Christ 'with divine power to heal all diseases, whether of body or soul'. The action failed but, a sect member Hyam Rintel testified that his wife, Jessie, had been taken away from him by Fisher, who 'coolly told me he had a revelation that I was to give up my wife to him'; the result being that 'not one of the four children she has now is mine'. Jessie Rintel was the sister of Fisher's wife, Emma, both living with him until their deaths. John Bignell was reported as saying that 'Fisher declares that he himself has the spirit of David … and David had a large number of wives and concubines'. Bignell named the women with whom Fisher lived as his wife Emma and two of her sisters.
1902 the family group migrated to Wickepin
1910 Emma Pickis Fisher, Fisher's legal wife for 52 years and the registered mother of his eight children, died at New Jerusalem on 14 May 1910 aged seventy-nine, Fisher ignored his second wife of forty years, Jessie Rintel, and took up with her eighteen-year-old granddaughter Ruth Mahala Rintel. They eloped and married then returned to live in the family home. This caused considerable discord.
1913 Fisher died and was buried in an unmarked grave
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While Fisher was apparently a polygamist, his sons and daughters and other members lived monogamously, and the practice of polygamy at New Jerusalem disappeared with Fisher's death.

A few examples of this tolerance are.

• Swedenborg rejected the idea of original sin, and salvation being achieved by faith alone. Charity to others and the ten commandments were equally important.
• He renounced racism. He believed that the "African race" was "in greater enlightenment than others on this earth, since they are such that they think more 'interiorly', and so receive truths and acknowledge them."
• He was tolerant of other religions. If a person is unaware of the doctrines but has believed in one God and lived a life of love for goodness and truth, according to Swedenborg, they will learn them after death.
• Swedenborg did not condemn all sexual activity between those who were not married. While he was particularly against infidelity, Swedenborg believed that all erotic love between a man and a woman – even that which arose within unfavourable circumstances – still had the potential to develop into true conjugial love. Marriage was considered a union of souls, and this can only exist between one man and one woman.

 
There is a Swedenborg Foundation and Swedenborgian churches around the world.

Further information
A Messiah for the West: J. C. M. Fisher and the Church of the Firstborn in Western Australia
Australian Dictionary of Biography

Curious features of the Bain brothers is that they were all lifelong bachelors, and all died at the age of 72.
I could find few references to them in local history books. Their estate (four blocks of land – about five million dollars was left to the Dumbleyung shire and the Dumbleyung Mens Shed. I guess there are plaques around Dumbleyung installed by grateful recipients.
 
For a visual exploration of the houses and shearing shed see this   Google Photo album
Click individual images for information

​Greetings fellow Foxies,
                                    
This fascinating glimpse into the past near Wedin siding was part of a 600 or 700 acre new land property belonging to Jens Peter Jensen who was born into a farming/fishing family in Vaby by Steze on the island of Moen, Denmark. Unfortunately he suffered from seasickness and immigrated to Western Australia for a new life in 1905.
In 1908, he took up a farm in Dorakin, married Dorothy Roberts in 1914 and they brought up six children.
After Dorothy’s death, Peter married Elsie May Richardson in 1947. They lived in the Toolibin school house and bought new land and they bought new land at Tincurrin and Wedin. They were real workers and Peter was ‘honest to a fault’.
According to my friend Don Thomson, they sold the block in about 1970 to Dick Fox. With his wife and two children Dick lived in the shack with adjoining caravan. I was lucky to get a shot of the caravan in 2011 as it has now gone. Dick was a very thrifty person and Don related a tale of how he had to lift and cart bags of superphosphate for old Dick from the siding each year (did Don good!).
The place became vacant when Dick sold out in the 1990’s.
 
The shearing shed is a fascinating mixture with railway sleeper sides, bush timber, and galvanised iron.
There is a great machinery graveyard of plant that would give Worksafe nightmares, including an engine head that has become embedded in the trunk of an ancient York gum.
 
Reference: Page 147 Harrismith Tincurrin by Bob and Mary Taylor (2000) ISBN 0646385305
 
For a visual exploration of the place see this Google Photo album

The dam was constructed around 1910 as a water supply for steam trains travelling on the first railway line from Narrogin to Wickepin. Water from the dam was piped to a huge tank, which could hold about 25,000 gallons of water, which was erected on 40ft jarrah poles. Originally erected to serve the needs of the rail transport and steam locomotives, the water provided water to the town’s residents when long hot summers depleted domestic supplies. The arrival of the Comprehensive Water Scheme and the Wickepin
Scheme water tank in 1964  ended Wickepin's chronic water shortage.
The 1908 tank near the centre of town, which had become a local landmark was demolished in 1974.

To get to the dam, drive about 4km south of Wickepin, turn right on to Brooks Road then right at the gravel pit that has been converted to a roaded catchment (see old dam sign). Go down an unformed track at the right (east) of the catchment that leads down to the dam.
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This spot is mainly of historical interest and as a picnic site. There are no facilities. Several tracks lead further into the reserve from the dam but they don’t lead to any road and may be impassable.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
 I was amazed to learn that from 1850 until World War I, German settlers and their descendants comprised the largest non-British or Irish group of Europeans in Australia. Locally this is evident in family names like Blythe, Braunholz, Fisher, Gath, Modra, Muller, Pustkuchen, and Wiese. Many arrived from South Australia and Victoria in the early twentieth century.
 Why Germans, and why here? A Google search revealed the following (over) simplified sequence of events that attracted these people to our district.

• Most German families came from the nation-state of Prussia with groups migrating to South Australia and Victoria beginning in 1838. Reasons include economic dislocation following the Napoleonic War, religious persecution, pressure to enlist in the Prussian army, and a British cash bounty to attract vineyard workers to Australia.
• A world depression in 1894, and a series of dry seasons called the Millennium Drought caused local financial hardship in eastern Australia.
• Paddy Hannan discovered gold at Kalgoorlie in 1894, and 15 years later the WA government created an agricultural bank to provide loans in order to attract colonists that would clear and farm large tracts of land that were opened up by railway lines.

 
Many of these people thrived and became good and popular citizens until The First World War.
Did you know that the Narrogin district had the highest army enlistment rate in the entire British Empire? (“Memorial 1 Narrogin and world War 1” by Maurie White. Editorial comment: this should be required reading, hopefully to avoid politicians repeatedly sending our youth to fight other countries’ wars!). The resulting lack of manpower to work the land, marry local girls, and the suffering of the survivors and there families set this district back for a generation. 
during the war, men were hounded to enlist. Virulent anti-German sentiment was fostered by war fever, terrible Australian casualties and propaganda.
Thankfully this declined after the war.

The history of the Braunholtz family is recorded in “Other Fortunate Lives” Editors Hazel Green and Elizabeth Heffernan 2008. Page 39.
I was shown the ruins of the homestead, adjacent to Wickepin Springs. The Braunholz family farmed in conjunction with the Irgens family (Norwegian). Malcolm Gath remembers Carl Braunholz as being very handy with machinery, which is evident in the wide array of machine parts present.
The Google Photo album shows the remains of both houses (I think) and associated sheds and bits and pieces.
See the images on
photos.app.goo.gl/egQaRiTH8kyk395v5

Aldinga is a historic farm that is located in the intersection of the Cuballing, Pingelly, and Wickepin shires. 
The property was named by John and Margaret McBurney who travelled across from Aldinga South Australia in 1902. They initially leased land from a Mr (John?) Snow, which may have been Aldinga. They established a house and for a while, a little retail store on the farm that supplied canned food, tobacco and tools of trade to sandalwood cutters, teamsters, kangaroo hunters, surveying teams and Noongars. This closed later as roads became available to the various centres.
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The original Aldinga house has been flattened and a fine new one built that is now also empty. Keith McBurney told me that the present car port covers the old Stratherne telephone exchange,  which even had a cellar.
The house and shed area has a crumbling splendour with a particularly fine granite stone shed. A well in the creek by the house would have been the reason a house was built here.
For a photo tour of this site see Google Photo images on https://photos.app.goo.gl/qev2q4RMKLiBRgbP6

  The house was relatively intact until relatively recently, but termites and the wind have reduced it to a shell. Nearby is another picturesque ruin of a shed complex, which indicates that this is was once the site of an earlier farm.
John Forest walked through this area. The survey team would place a survey peg at the camp site at the end of each day. Amos found one, which was held by Bill Butler before he died.
 
For a photo tour of this site see Google Photo images on https://photos.app.goo.gl/kupPuzDZvEWBGVLN6

​Gillimanning is a townsite and reserve on the Pingelly-Wickepin Road. The town was established in 1905 and never grew more than a school, hall, and race track although it had an active progress association. Now there is just a memorial rock in a parking bay. Apart from a closed gravel pit the reserve itself has interesting and good condition bush.
I wonder how they got water here as the site is on the top of a rise. Gillimanning Well is on private property a few km to the north.
I was intrigued to see the name "Cliffordville" along side the townsite on the lithographs. This refers to the manual telephone exchange operated by the Clifford family. It was initially on their farm north of Gillimanning, and then shifted to the farm on the east side of the townsite. 

On the side of a slope along Gillimanning Road I found an interesting sight on the side of a steep slope. A cottage with a car-tree!
The tiny galvanised iron wall and roofed cottage was the home of George Riley, A Noongar farm worker. With no power or water it must have been freezing in winter and baking hot in summer.
George owned the (Dodge?) ute downslope, that rested there after an accident. The old rock she-oak growing out of the engine bay is a testament to the decades that it has been immobile.
For a visual exploration of the site on Google Photos click 
https://photos.app.goo.gl/YMRjoewU62UHmLFS7

This edition is almost entirely based on word of mouth; I hope that it stimulates discussion that reveals more information.
 A colleague took me to a remarkable high point on his family farm between Yornaning and present Wickepin called Wickepin Springs. It is labelled Wickepin on the old lithographs and having permanent spring water, was apparently targeted as a town along a railway line from Cuballing to Kalgoorlie.

Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, there was a plan to construct a railway line to transport coal from Collie to Kalgoorlie. Cuballing was initially selected as the junction with the Northam-Albany line. Businesses and fine buildings sprung up, and farmers flocked to settle land east of Cuballing to have close access to a siding.
Neighbouring Narrogin was a serious rival (what’s new), despite a disadvantage of the steep section the existing railway at Chugamunning Hill between Narrogin and Cuballing where two locomotives were required to get up the slope ( if the junction was at Cuballing, Perth-bound freight from east and west could avoid the hill).
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Narrogin representatives wined and dined the relevant minister, which started a petitioning war to government with rumours of false signatures. In 1906 Narrogin was declared the winner, ostensibly because a Collie-Narrogin line was in construction. However a Cuballing resident told me that the minister had bought land east of Narrogin. (Hmm!)
So instead of a line from Cuballing Wickepin Springs, Gillimanning Yealering, We have Narrogin, Wickepin, Yealering.

The Mungerungcutting race track named after the adjoining Mungerungcutting Soak, remained in use for many years after the present Wickepin townsite was established.

The name Wickepin may have originated from Woorkabing Hill, a large granite rock with the  tower on Gillimanning Road.
Wickepin Spring is at the base of a large rocky outcrop.
We found remnants of an old mud and granite general store and a loading ramp, and with another spring up near the top of the Wickepin Springs rock.
 
For a visual exploration of the site on Google Photos click  https://photos.app.goo.gl/VJPr7HwiefHCJBTd6