People: The Blacksmith and the Wheelwright

Little is known of the early life of James Mires.

He was born into a poor family in Hamburg Germany in 1834. He was uneducated and unable to read or write.

In 1855, at the age of 21 years, he migrated to Australia on an assisted passage. Nothing is known of his movements in Australia until 1860, when he arrived at Rosalie Plains station, then owned and managed by William Kent I.

Top left: Station Smithy. Top right: Brands burnt into the door of the smithy. Bottem: Blacksmith tools from the Jondaryan smithy's shed. The shed and some tools date back to James Mires' time at Jondaryan.

On Rosalie Plains, James Mires was employed as a horse driver, operating the large horse-powered pump at the washpool during that year's shearing season. After the shearing was completed, James Mires was taken on as the station blacksmith's mate.

He was obviously an intelligent man and learned his chosen trade quickly, for in the following year upon the departure of the station blacksmith, he became the station's blacksmith.

In 1863, following the purchase of Jondaryan station by the Kent and Wienholt partnership and the impending sale of Rosalie Plains, James Mires transferred to Jondaryan station. At that time Jondaryan was in need of a blacksmith and William Kent did not want to loose his services with the sale of Rosalie Plains.

Thus began the long and illustrious association of James Mires with Jondaryan station, which only came to an end with his tragic death in 1883.

In 1864 Jondaryan acquired the services of a new wheelwright John Schell.

James Mires quickly formed a working partnership with John Schell and these two intelligent and inventive men were to prove to be of tremendous benefit to Jondaryan over their long association with the station, being able to turn their hands and inventive minds to anything that was required of them.

Jondaryan station although largely rich black soil plains, was poorly watered. Digging wells and excavating dams overcame this problem. Stock could be watered at dams without a problem, but water had to be drawn from the wells to water the stock, a very laborious task with the use of windlass and bucket, some of these wells were hundreds of feet deep.

In the mid 1870s, Charles Williams who was managing Jondaryan at that time, asked James Mires if he could construct a windmill that could pump water up out of these wells.

James mires set his inventive mind to work and with the help of his friend John Schell, the station wheelwright, the two men set to work on solving the problem.

Construction of a windmill to provide power for the pump presented no problem to them, but the development of a pump that could lift water up out of the wells from such a depth was a different matter and it took a lot of trial and error before they came up with a design that worked.

The pump was fixed in place at the bottom of the well and powered was provide through a wooden shaft that went through a series of guides fixed in place a various intervals up the well and was connected to the mill crank at the top.

The water was raised via a pipe that James Mires manufactured by rolling sheets of galvanised iron and riveting them together. The first operating mill was set up on Codrington outstation, not far from Bowenville in 1880.

The digging of wells by hand was a long, laborious and costly operation.

The principle of the percussion well-boring operation was developed by the Chinese thousands of years ago, but the mechanical percussion boring rig is a relatively modem development, the first one being made in America in the mid nineteenth century.

Charles Williams had an illustration of this American rig and asked James to try and construct one for him. This proved to be far less of a problem than the development of the windmill pump and within a year they had developed their first working percussion well-boring rig, which went into operation in 1881. This machine was powered by a steam engine.

This extremely productive partnership came to an end in late 1881, when John Schell departed from Jondaryan.

Two years later in 1883, at the age of 49 years, James Mires was to die, when he was drowned in the flooded Oakey Creek.

By a strange coincidence, 14 years earlier in 1869, James Mires had witnessed the death in very similar circumstances, of a close friend and fellow employee John White.

John White had gone across the flooded Oakey Creek to drink at the hotel in Jondaryan Township. A wire had been strung between two trees across the flooded creek and a punt was pulled across the creek using this wire, to transfer people back and forth across the creek.

When John White returned to the creek in the afternoon, James Mires took the punt across to pick him up. On the way back John White, somewhat the worse for the alcohol he had consumed, stood up in the boat tipping it up. It began to take in water and James Mires lost control of it.

The boat was swept away with White in it, leaving James Mires clinging to the wire and he pulled himself to shore along it. John White in the boat was swept away in the floodwaters until the boat was caught in a treetop and pulled under and White was drowned.

Fourteen years on, in 1883, James Mires was returning from having a few drinks in the Jondaryan Pub with the shearers. While trying to cross the bridge over Oakey Creek, he was swept off it by rising floodwaters and drowned.