The Unanderra milking cow that earned the title of world champion

Cows that could produce a whole lot of milk – the excess of which might be turned into butter, cheese and also skim milk to feed to pigs – could be quite significant earners for some Illawarra dairy farmers.

Much skilled breeding and valuing of the genetic qualities of various individual animals took place. This tended to transform even the most fanatically religious local dairy farmers into unconscious disciples of both Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin.

Dairy farming is a tough life and the poorer Illawarra farmers often needed to produce large families so that the free labour of the children might help make their dairying activities financially viable.

And so displaying a farmer’s finest cows and bulls at the various district agricultural shows was important, for a prize cow or bull could sometimes earn a farmer big money.

As a result of all this careful breeding activity some Illawarra dairy farmers were producing surprisingly high yields of milk and the district consequently gained a reputation that was even celebrated in folk song:

“This fact, e’er since I crossed the seas,
I rarely fail at meals to utter,
That Bathurst stands unmatched for cheese,
And Wollongong for yellow butter.”

Oddly, while there was lots of butter being produced, Illawarra actually went in for making very little cheese.

One has to look further down the coast towards Bodalla and Kameruka for cheddar that was even more highly regarded than that sung about being supposedly produced in Bathurst.

But when it comes to the price of a single milking cow, it was the Lindsay brothers of Kembla Park at Unanderra who hit the jackpot with a cow called Honeycomb.

In Sydney Honeycomb had claimed the championship of the world on the grounds that she yielded 84 pounds of milk in 24 hours at the Berry Show.

And at a private test she yielded 80 pounds of milk in 24 hours, which gave 41 pounds and 4 ounces of butter, which is proportionately a higher yield than that given at Chicago by a cow named Ida Marigold – or so The Australasian newspaper printed in Melbourne claimed in January 1894.

The owners of Honeycomb – the Lindsay family – had emigrated to Australia, arriving aboard the Orestes in Sydney in May 1841.

They soon settled at Charcoal Creek (the early name for Unanderra). George and Jane Lindsay had arrived with the intention of becoming farmhands but ended up doing a whole lot better.

It has even been claimed that George Lindsay was the first to send a butter keg from the Illawarra to Sydney. Whatever the truth of this, in 1859 the Lindsays purchased Kembla Park where a home was built.

One son, also named George, later acquired the Horsley Estate at West Dapto and so owned the beautiful Horsley Homestead where it was even possible in the 1980s for some Illawarra residents to have the good fortune to be married amid its exquisite Illawarra cedar joinery and fine garden, which back then still had clear views all the way to the escarpment.

One of the Lindsay family was later established at Horsley and another son at West Horsley. Curiously, “West Horsley” seems to have been on the east (nearer Dapto) and took its name from a place in England rather than its geographical positioning in Illawarra.

Nonetheless, it was the Lindsays who had purchased an Ayrshire bull, named Earl Beaconsfield, from a Mr Buchanan of Berwick in Victoria for £100.

In addition, two bulls, two cows and two heifers (all Ayrshires) were purchased from Mr James Wilson. It was from these sires that the celebrated cow Honeycomb was bred.

Despite Illawarra never becoming famous for cheese, the Lindsays together with James and Thomas Wilson of Victoria, did eventually establish a cheese factory at Brown’s old flour mill, located at Brownsville near Dapto.

But when the price of milk again began to rise, the cheese making was soon abandoned. Nonetheless, a cheese press used at the Brownsville factory is today held in the collection of the Illawarra Museum. It is a double screw model constructed from cast iron and tin components.

Finally, in 1969 a bottle containing several items was found at the old Kembla Park site at Unanderra. The first of the bottle’s contents was a threepenny coin made in 1881 that had a small hole at the centre.

The second item was a copy of the Wollongong Argus newspaper, dated 1 September 1886. Also found in the bottle was a letter that read: “Placed under this stone on 2 day of September 1886. This dairy was built for Mr John Lindsay J P by Mr William Newson for one hundred and ninety pounds. He was the largest ‘Ayrshire’ breeder in the colonies and was the largest prize-taker both for cattle and butter.”