Tenterfield Who's Who
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Carly Goodwin
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Distinguished and Famous people from Tenterfield
🗣️ Sir Henry Parkes
Henry Parkes's connection with Tenterfield included parliamentary representation before the speech that made the town nationally famous. After losing East Sydney in 1882, he was returned to Parliament for Tenterfield. On 24 October 1889, stopping on his return from Brisbane, the NSW premier addressed a banquet at the School of Arts. He argued that the colonies should unite under an Australian government, particularly to deal with defence, trade and immigration. Federation was already under discussion, but the Tenterfield Oration helped bring the argument before a wider public. The town supplied both an electorate at a difficult moment in his career and a stage for his best-remembered political appeal.
🎹 Peter Allen
Peter Allen was born Peter Woolnough in Tenterfield in 1944. A teenage partnership with Chris Bell became the Allen Brothers, followed by an international career in cabaret, recording and songwriting. His own performances made I Go to Rio and I Still Call Australia Home enduring favourites, while compositions for other singers brought another kind of success. He co-wrote Olivia Newton-John's I Honestly Love You and the Academy Award-winning Arthur's Theme. After his death in 1992, his life and songs became the basis of The Boy from Oz. The Tenterfield birthplace belongs at the beginning of a career ultimately celebrated on stages far from home.
The family connection also became a song: Allen’s grandfather George Woolnough was a saddle maker, remembered in Tenterfield Saddler in 1972. The town was therefore more than a birthplace in his public story; family memory helped carry its name into his songwriting.
🐑 Sir Stuart Donaldson
Stuart Donaldson, the first premier of New South Wales under responsible government, had a substantial pastoral connection with Tenterfield. He and R. R. Mackenzie acquired Tenterfield Station in 1840, with Donaldson the principal stakeholder and Mackenzie managing it. The station's name came from a family house in Scotland. A letter written the following year mentioned 18,000 sheep awaiting shearing, showing the scale of the enterprise. Donaldson's later premiership in 1856 lasted less than three months. His part in the district's early pastoral development therefore preceded his brief period at the head of the colonial government.
