Wrightville
[2] The branch railway, after it turned south from the road to Hillston, ran just outside the eastern edge of the village.
[2][9] The area of the neighbouring village of Dapville lay to Wrightville's north, on both sides of the Hillston road.
The local people collected pigments from mineral outcrops on Fort Bourke Hill, near the future site of Dapville, the adjacent village to Wrightville.
The new village began life at a time when Cobar, a mere 4 km away, was in decline following the slowdown of copper mining there.
[21] One reported explanation of the village's name is that Wrightville was named after Jabez Wright (1852-1922), carpenter, undertaker, trade union official and Labor alderman of Broken Hill, later its mayor and, from 1913, a colourful and somewhat eccentric Labor member of the NSW Legislative Assembly.
[23][24] However, Jabez Wright did not have much to do with the Cobar district, until he became a parliamentarian and represented the area, and that was many years after the village had been named.
[28] Wrightville was virtually a company town for the surrounding mines, the two largest being the Occidental and the Chesney, so naming the village after Joseph Wright seems more probable.
[29] However, by mid 1909, it was reported that the population was "decreasing, and instead of being as a few years ago a thriving and busy centre, we are now simply a struggling village, with little or no hope of a future return to prosperity.
[48] The village had its own branch of the Amalgamated Miners' Association, a trade union representing mine workers, which had a 'Benefits Section' to financially aid families of members who had been injured or killed at work.
[56][59][60] In keeping with the then widely-prevailing racism within the labour movement and the 'White Australia policy', the union branch rules specifically excluded from its membership,"Asiatics and other coloured aliens" but, in a somewhat more progressive stance, added a qualification that, "This [exclusion from membership] shall not apply to Aborigines, Maoris, American Negroes, or children of mixed marriages born in Australasia".
[98] The water supply remained a constant issue, with the village's householders primarily reliant upon their own rainwater tanks.
Especially in times of drought, the precarious water supply and inadequate sanitation led to serious outbreaks of typhoid fever.
A footbridge was built across it, in 1912, at the eastern end of Occidental Street, so that children going to the public school did not need to wade through it or walk along the railway to cross it.
[104] On 25 April 1916, the village celebrated 'Anzac Night', a first commemoration of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli a year earlier.
For whatever reason, Wrightville appears not to have been badly impacted,[107][108] in stark contrast to another mining settlement in the region, Canbelego, where the outcome was devastating.
[112] He had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison, with hard labour, for his crimes, in 1863, but received a remittance and was released early, in 1873.
[131] It was not a shortage of gold-bearing ore that led to the mine's closure, but the ineffectiveness of the new process, and the exhaustion of its owner's capital.
Once out of operation, the mine began to fill with groundwater, and reopening—even just properly assessing the mine—would incur the additional cost of dewatering.
[133] In July 1922, the operators of the Mount Boppy Gold Mine—itself in the process of closing by then—decided not to take up the option that they held over the Occidental Mine.
[134] That the capable management of the well-known Mount Boppy company had declined to take over the mine probably influenced others to consider it a lost cause.
[157] Instead, the Wrightville Council was in such a dire state—it had insufficient alderman to constitute a quorum, and no longer had a town clerk—that it was declared a 'defaulting area', in June 1922.
[159] Jabez Wright himself—by then the local member representing the area including Wrightville—spoke in the parliamentary debate on the Act, giving a short speech, defending the interests of the village bearing the same name as his own, on 6 September 1922.
After a period under the control of an administrator, tasked with the recovery of unpaid council rates, the municipality was abolished in 1924,[161][162][163][164] becoming part of the unincorporated Western Division.
In 1928, it was described as, "a sleeping village, where quietness prevails, though many old residents are content to remain there", and a fine house, once that of the mine's general manager, was rented for only a shilling a week.
[166] On 28 February 1927, the Anglican church (St David's), which had not been used for several years, blew down in a storm; its ruins were sold at public auction and the money used for repairs to the neighbouring rectory.
[168] By 1930, the village was fighting, ultimately successfully it appears, to retain the mail service from Cobar to Wrightville, although there was no post office between 1933 and 1935.
[172] The old Peak branch railway to the Occidental Mine, which had been closed beyond a siding in the Cobar township, in September 1931, reopened in July 1934.
[192] However, by the late 1960s, the remaining dilapidated buildings in Wrightville were considered an eyesore, and the site was bulldozed, erasing the last of the old village.
[199] The formation of the old railway, 'The Peak branch', is still discernible, in satellite views, where it ran toward the Occidental Mine and passed along the eastern edge of the village, as are the outlines of some of Wrightville's old streets.
There are documents and records relating to the village, its mines, its council, and some of its residents, in the New South Wales Government's State Archives Collection.
