Rhonda Campbell is a local resident with long ties to Toganmain, and she invited us into her home to share her family's story. Among the papers she shared is a birth certificate a hundred and forty-five years old, made out for a baby boy born on the station itself: James Gowans, 11 August 1881. Rhonda is his great-granddaughter, and the records and photographs she shared - going back to an 1872 wedding at Toganmain and forward across more than a century of births, marriages and deaths - tell the story of one working family's whole life on the run, long before it became the Woolshed Precinct it is today.
James was not the first of his family to call Toganmain home. His father, Thomas Gowans, had arrived from Scotland as a young man - born there in 1837 - and found work on the station as a labourer. His mother, Louisa Hughes, went one better: she had been born at Toganmain herself, around 1850, a generation before Thomas ever set foot on the place. The two were married at Toganmain on 6 November 1872, in the years when Thomas Robertson's family had only recently taken up the Toganmain lease.
Not every part of that story is a happy one. Thomas and Louisa lost two children in infancy, both buried on the station: Thomas and Agnes Louisa Gowans, who died on the very same day, 15 June 1874 - almost certainly twins - and a second daughter, also named Agnes Louisa, who died in 1888. The record of their graves survives in a private burial list for Toganmain Station, supplied years later by Mrs Robertson herself and printed in a local history of Darlington Point. It's a reminder that this same Robertson-era Toganmain, covered elsewhere on this blog in Appendix FF, was never only the story of the family who held the lease - working families lived and died on this ground too, and some of them never left it.
James Gowans grew up on the station his parents had made their home, and by the time he was a young man he was working as a rabbiter - a real job in the Riverina of the 1890s and 1900s, when rabbits were plague enough to employ men by the hundred keeping them off the grass. On 31 March 1906, at the Presbyterian Church in Hay, he married Annie Maria Jones, who had grown up across the border in Mortlake, Victoria. Their certificate that day was witnessed by Arthur Drinkwater and Elizabeth Walton.
The young couple were living at Carrathool when their daughter Mary Margaret was born in 1911, and the family's story from there follows a path many Riverina families took in the decades that followed. A son, Keith, went on to serve as a private in the Second World War.
Another daughter, Minnie, married Norman William Campbell at Darlington Point in 1924 and went on to raise nine children of her own.
By the time James himself died, the family - like so many who had worked the old pastoral runs - had moved on to Griffith, the town the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area built from the 1910s onward, not far from the water schemes Toganmain's own lessee had given evidence about a generation before.
That single Toganmain-born baby of 1881 now has descendants who carry names like Campbell, Wickey, Freeman, Deegan, Morgan, Gibbs and Stewart, spread out across the Riverina and beyond - many of them connected, through later marriages, to the Wiradjuri families of the Darlington Point and Griffith district. It's taken these certificates and photographs, and a remarkable hand-drawn family chart Rhonda keeps, to bring some of that story back together.
A hundred and forty-five years after his birth, the paperwork can still tell you exactly where a Toganmain family came from, and how far it has travelled since.
