Wednesday, 22 October 2025
Gunnedah Town Hall, Gunnedah
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

I too acknowledge the Kamilaroi people, the traditional custodians of these lands and waterways, and pay my respect to their Elders past, present, and future. I extend that respect to the Elders of all parts of our beautiful State from which you travel.

Tonight, in launching the book The Story of Gabo, we celebrate not only the Gabo wheat variety that transformed the Australian wheat industry 80 years ago, but also the spirit of determined, collaborative innovation leading to its development and refinement here in the Gunnedah district.

It is a story with roots in the year 1906, when two young^[1] Hawkesbury Agricultural College students met during a weekend walk collecting botanical specimens.^[2] As one of them wrote 42 years later, in 1948, it was a meeting that would prove doubly auspicious. I quote:

From that afternoon’s ramblings […] [sprang] [not only] a friendship which continues to this day, but [also, and] of more importance to mankind, an association that has produced a wheat, which according to those that have tested it in the field will revolutionise the wheat fields of Australia. The flour miller says it will make a tremendous difference to the flour milling business, while the baking trade says it will simplify the whole of their baking process.^[3]

The writer was Charlie Beeson; his friend, Walter Lawry Waterhouse; and the wheat, of course, Gabo.

After Hawkesbury Agricultural College, the two friends went, for over two decades, their separate ways.

Walter Waterhouse went first to Fiji, where he taught at a Methodist mission school before returning to enrol at the University of Sydney’s new agricultural science degree. An excellent student, he graduated with first-class honours and the University Medal in 1914, and was offered, in the following year, the 1851 Science Exhibition Scholarship.^[4] This, however, he declined, so he could serve, instead, with the AIF’s 2nd Battalion on the Western Front. There, in 1916, he was awarded a Military Cross for his “conspicuous gallantry” for actions at Pozières.^[5]

Invalided home the year after this with a gunshot wound to the shoulder, in 1918, he travelled to the United Kingdom on a Walter and Eliza Hall Research Fellowship to study at London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology.^[6]

By 1921, he was back in Australia and lecturing in Plant Pathology, Genetics and Plant Breeding, and Agricultural Botany at his alma mater, the University of Sydney.^[7]

According to the reminiscences of Dr Irvine Watson, a student of Waterhouse and later his assistant and important contributor^[8] to his wheat breeding efforts,

[His lectures] had the capacity to dramatise […] so that situations were depicted in a most realistic way. Students became disturbed to learn of immense personal losses that were being suffered by some farmers following plant disease epidemics. After these lectures one was left with a sense of urgency. There seemed to be no alternative but to become involved in research dealing with these problems.^[9]

It was an urgency that, despite a heavy teaching load, animated Waterhouse’s own efforts, particularly his research into Australian cereal rust, for which he received, in 1929, the University of Sydney’s first degree of Doctor of Science in Agriculture.^[10]

A fungal disease, rust was particularly problematic to wheat growers in the North West Slopes. As Charlie Beeson later explained, it was one of reasons the region “was at the time known as the Cinderella of NSW when it came to wheat growing [compared to the Riverina].”^[11] The black soil was deep and fertile, but the same climatic conditions that in good years were conducive to high wheat yields here—plenty of rain and warm temperatures—were the same conditions that, with paradoxical spite, promoted the proliferation of rust, which decimated crops and dramatically reduced the milling and baking quality of any grain that managed to survive.^[12]

What was needed, to unlock the enormous wheat growing potential of this region, was a rust resistant variety, which the now-Dr Waterhouse set about breeding.

At the University of Sydney, he had rudimentary facilities and some glasshouses but no fields for growing and selecting agronomically superior plants. Early selections for rust resistance were undertaken in plots at his old school, the Hawkesbury Agricultural College, but conditions there in the Windsor Valley were considerably different from here in the Namoi.^[13] What was needed was a local with some land, some enthusiasm, and a willingness to pitch in with the planting, extensive notetaking, and harvesting.

In stepped Waterhouse’s old friend, Charlie Beeson.

Charlie had been trying to grow wheat on his property Leyburn, just west of Gunnedah, since 1908, with only sporadic success, thwarted if not by drought, then rust. After a decade experimenting with different varieties,^[14] he heard from Waterhouse, who was looking for somewhere to trial the first results of his rust resistant breeding program. Beeson was more than willing. With “12 short rows, 12 feet long”, their collaboration began, described by Beeson thus

[it was the coming together of] the scientific and practical sides of the problem that each had been trying to solve himself. From that little plot with only two crosses, the work evolved until 14 years later the area of plots was 100 acres, there were 1500 strains, crosses, and varieties being tested.^[15]

It culminated in 1945, with one of about 357 strains drawn from a Gaza and Bobin W39 cross: Gabo, its name a combination of two letters each from its ancestors, Gaza and Bobin.^[16]

It was a game-changer, a triple treat. Not only was it rust resistant, but also high yield, as well as producing superb quality grain, delivering benefits to all sectors of the wheat value chain, from grower to miller, from baker to consumer.

By 1954 it was the most-widely grown variety in Australia and solidifying the Namoi Valley as a significant wheat-growing hub in our State, contributing considerably to its prosperity, pride, and agricultural progress.^[17]

It was also the result of a dedication to innovation and collaboration between this region and the University of Sydney that continues today.

Indeed, tomorrow, Dennis and I have the enormous privilege of visiting the University of Sydney Plant Breeding Institute in Narrabri, not only to see heritage wheat varieties including Gabo, but also learn about the Native Grains Project.

To Lindsay and Peter^[18], the warmest thanks and congratulations for your efforts in bringing this extraordinary part of our agricultural and scientific history so comprehensively to life.

To Gabo, to the University of Sydney, and to Gunnedah!