A speech in Tenterfield, and a nation on the way

The speech

The State Heritage Inventory's entry for Tenterfield's railway precinct records that in 1841 Sir Stuart Donaldson ran 18,000 sheep on a property named Tenterfield Station, taking the name from a family home in Scotland, and that the township was gazetted in 1851, its first allotments sold in 1854.

The same inventory's entry for the School of Arts gives the building its historic significance as the setting of the Tenterfield Oration, which it dates to 24 October 1889 and credits to Sir Henry Parkes.

Tenterfield Shire Council's page for the School of Arts names the room the speech was given in: in 1889 Parkes, the Premier of the Colony of NSW, spoke in the Banquet Room, and the page treats the speech as the start of the campaign that federated the colonies.

What the speech called for comes from the same inventory, in its entry for the railway precinct. That entry sets out the historical events that tie Tenterfield and its station to Australia's history, and the speech is among them: in 1889, it records, Parkes spoke for Federation in what it calls his famous Tenterfield speech, and then left for Sydney on a special train. The entry counts the speech at the School of Arts among the significant events of the lead-up to Federation.

His train left from a station barely three years old: the inventory records the line to Tenterfield opening on 1 September 1886. The line ran north to the Queensland border at Wallangarra, and it was the original main line from Sydney to Brisbane, with a change of gauge at the border; north of Armidale it is now closed, and the main route between the two cities is the North Coast line.

The precinct's later life is dated too: the last mail and passenger train left Tenterfield in November 1988, the station closed on 30 November 1990, and a heritage museum opened at the site in 1992. The inventory counts the 1890 railway barracks among the oldest and most intact in the state.

The building’s own dates

The dates below are the ones the State Heritage Inventory gives in its entry for the School of Arts.

1. 1871The inventory dates a slab barn to this year, and records that the building's four major stages of construction followed the barn's demolition.
2. 26 November 1875The foundation stone is laid.
3. 7 September 1876The building opens, the day kept as a general holiday.
4. 1884The second of four major construction stages; the inventory gives the four as 1876, 1884, 1903 and 1913.
5. 24 October 1889The Tenterfield Oration, as the inventory dates it.
6. 1 March 2002The date in the inventory's listings field, which records the building on the State Heritage Register under number 01506.

The School of Arts

The building opened in 1876 as the Tenterfield School of Arts. Schools of arts like it were public educational establishments: they brought adult education, books included, to working people who might otherwise have gone without.

Architecturally, the inventory calls it a prominent building that reflects the society and era it went up in, dating back to the 1870s.

Its Main Hall, completed in 1903 in the Federation Free Classical style, is a memorial to the men of Tenterfield who died in the Boer War, which the inventory dates from 1898 to 1901.

A plaque put up in 1946 by the Governor-General, the Duke of Gloucester, commemorates the speech, the inventory's historical notes record.

The building carries on as a museum of local and national history, and as a theatre and cinema for live performance, film and community events; it also holds the Tenterfield Information Centre.

This guide is a short one because the record of the speech is short: two register entries and the building's own page carry what is dated about it.