Warren Blackwood Stock Route was developed in discussion with local families who used the stock route to move cattle around the region, these are excerpts from their stories, their full stories are available at state libraries:  

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​'….. we had a shanty hut at the coast which was quite comfortable not really comfortable. It was just an open…tin roof and where we slept had a few weatherboards, slab-boards up against the wall with about a half-inch gap between them’

Anthony Egerton-Warburton

 

Going to the coast was an annual trip for the droving families and many of them built huts along the route and on their land whether it was freehold or leasehold.

 

Some huts were simple lean-to’s with bush poles and sheets of tin designed to shelter the drovers and their provisions from the rain. Others were more permanent with walls, chaff bag beds and a little galley for cooking. Some families built cattle yards and sunk wells in an effort to make life on the coast more comfortable.

 

The Mottram family built a hut down near the Gardner River.

 

‘Well that was slab-walls and it had a tin roof on it. And our beds, they were slab beds too! So they weren’t very soft. But, you know, looking now, you’d say peoples wouldn’t sleep on those. But we didn’t think anything about it. We just… a few rushes on the top and there you’d sleep there like a log.’

Cliff Mottram.

 

The huts along the droving routes were simpler and usually made from tin and these were used by anyone who needed them.

 

‘There were two or three other tin huts on the road by the yards which we camped in if it was very wet. Often it was better out of them. They sometimes had fleas in them. Those sort of things, Snakes’.

Anthony Egerton-Warburton

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