WARNING: Some nasty accidents are summarised below. At least they are not fatal, like those about to be reported for Ebor Sawmills, to which other First Transporters were sent.
Seven from First Transport to Megan
Albinas Kutka, who became a user of sawn timber rather than a maker of it, was sent to work for sawmillers Backhouse, Roebuck of Megan, New South Wales, on 21 January 1948. He was one of 7 First Transport men with this assignation.
This Bonzle map has a vibrant pink square focussed on Megan, NSW
inland from Coffs Harbour
There was one other Lithuanian in the group, Juozas Bazys. The four Latvians were Stanislavs Berzins (his third job after fruit-picking for SP Cornish followed by one week as a labourer in the Bonegilla camp), Evalds Karamuts, Nikolaus Kucina and Edvards Snore. A single Estonian, Helmut Karp, possibly could converse with the others in some German and limited English.
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| Megan Railway Station on the Dorrigo Branch Line in 1954: since the passenger service on the line did not close until 1957, our Baltic 7 are likely to have travelled from Sydney to Megan by train |
From Albinas’ story, we know that he and Juozas plus young Nikolaus Kucina were back at Bonegilla on 11 March 1948, little more than 6 weeks later. Either the physical nature of the work was too much for men who had been on reduced rations for much of the 1940s, up to boarding the Heintzelman, or they saw the machinery with which they were expected to work as too risky.
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| First Transport Lithuanians play basketball at Bonegilla -- note the ribs Source: Pix, 31 January 1948 |
Backhouse, Roebuck history
Their employer made its first appearance on the public record on 8 April 1941, when its registration was announced in the Sydney Sun newspaper, followed by the Daily Telegraph the next day. The company was to trade as sawmillers and timber merchants. It had 4 directors, Wilfred Backhouse and three members of the Roebuck family. It had a nominal capital of £2,500, the equivalent of $250,000 in 2024 according to the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Was the decision to name the company Backhouse, Roebuck an alphabetical one, or did Wilfred Backhouse put up the majority of the capital?
A Mill at Megan
Wilfred Backhouse made his next appearance in print in the Don Dorrigo Gazette and Guy Fawkes Advocate on 7 July 1944. This newspaper announced that “Messrs Backhouse and Roebuck Ltd, mill owners, of Sydney, have now bought the sawmill lately owned by Mr. Cockburn, and hope to restart this mill very soon. Mr. W Backhouse, general manager, of Sydney, recently spent a fortnight in the district and is expected to return any day.”
In May 1945, the newspaper announced that, “Mr. 'Bill' Backhouse, managing (sic) Backhouse, Roebuck Pty Ltd, will be taking a well-earned holiday commencing this Friday. Employees and friends (and they are many) wish 'Bill' a very pleasant holiday.” This reads like Wilfred Backhouse had become a very accepted member of the local community in less than one year.
Wilfred William Backhouse, Managing Director
The New South Wales Government Gazette of 1 December 1950 carried a notice to the effect that Mr Wilfred William Backhouse of Dorrigo, NSW, had stated in a statutory declaration that he had lost his original certificate of title to 2000 £1 shares in the Backhouse, Roebuck Pty Ltd company. So now we have Bill’s full name.
We also have evidence that he had contributed £2,000 when the company was set up. The notice states that Bill had shares numbered 1, 3 to 501 and 2901 to 4400, meaning that the company now had £4,400 in capital, some of which Bill might have put up after the company was set up. I’m wondering if W Backhouse put up close to the majority of the original capital and concluding that the evidence does not rule out the possibility. He certainly could have had the largest shareholding.
Back to Wilfred William Backhouse. The MyHeritage.com genealogy Website records that he was born in 1910 in Drummoyne, a Sydney suburb, to Joseph Wilfred Backhouse and Priscilla Way Ellis. A Commonwealth and State electoral roll for 1939 shows that he still lived in Drummoyne. By 12 March 1946, he was on the electoral roll for the State Division of Armidale and the Federal electorate of Cowper as a resident of Dorrigo.
On a personal note, Bill had married Minnie (or Mina) Davis Watson in Sydney in 1938. One family tree on Ancestry.com which includes Wilfred William born in 1910 says that he and Minnie had two children who were still living when the family historian was last on that page. There also was a tragically early death, of a baby named Eric (like one of his Backhouse uncles) who died on 9 January 1946. He was buried in Dorrigo Cemetery. He was not given a headstone, which makes him impossible to find outside Ancestry (if you search for a child of Wilfred and Minnie Backhouse).
Megan Mill History, and Accidents
The older the sawmill, the more risky its design and machinery to its workers. The mill which Backhouse, Roebuck purchased from Mr JS Cockburn was bought by this gentleman from a Mr H Milne. The Don Dorrigo Gazette and Guy Fawkes Advocate first mentioned Milne as the owner of a sawmill at Megan in January 1933.
The Megan sawmill appears not to have been recorded photographically, then digitised, so here is a nearby stand-in, Allan Taylor's Mill, captioned as being at coastal Coffs Harbour,
taken in 1950 -- but press advertising shows that this sawmill actually was at Woolgoolga,
25 Km north of Coffs
(Note the absence of walls, typical of Australian sawmills, and,
is that a fire in the middle of the photo?)
After purchase, Cockburn was said by the local press in May 1939 to have “thoroughly” renovated it and brought it up to date. “New boilers and planers (were) installed”. If this was not just what we now call “spin”, the sawmill was less than 9 years away from its modernisation when the Heintzelman 7 arrived.
Given that the press would be very interested in reporting accidents, it is good to know that none were reported after their arrival until one occurred on 3 April 1951. But it was nasty: an employee lost the first two joints of his right index finger on his right hand. At this time, we do not know if any of the original 7 were still with Backhouse, Roebuck.
On 1 May 1952, a mill employee became jammed between two logs but escaped serious injuries, receiving “severe bruising to both thighs, chest and shock”. A doctor and ambulance were called. The injured man was taken to the Dorrigo hospital for observation.
There had been at least three accidents earlier. The local paper reported in May 1946 that a worker received a fractured left leg and suffered slight shock when his leg became jammed between two flitches of a log at Backhouse, Roebuck's Megan mill. An ambulance took him to the Dorrigo Hospital where he was admitted. Only three weeks previously, he had suffered a crushed right foot when it was caught between two rollers of the log carriage on the frame saw at the same workplace. Was he back at work already because there was no such thing as paid sick leave?
A flitch of a log, by the way, is a longitudinal section cut from a log, especially an unedged slab with bark still on its edges.
A few months later, a worker had a piece of steel lodge in his right eye at the same workplace. The local paper reported in September 1946 that he was recovering under specialist treatment in a Sydney hospital. “It is expected the sight of the eye will be saved” does not tell us about the quality of that sight afterwards.
Six months later, the company was in the local courthouse, appearing before the Police Magistrate on a charge of not keeping all dangerous parts of machinery securely fenced. The equipment in question was a circular saw. Although a lawyer was engaged to defend the company, it was fined £20. It also had to pay court costs 10/- and £2/2- witnesses' expenses. The Reserve Bank says that the total of £22/12/-, with inflation, was the equivalent of $1,880 in 2024.
In July 1947, another employer suffered a fractured pelvis when logs rolled on him while working at the Megan mill. On the day of the accident he had driven into the timber yard with a load of logs on a truck. On knocking out the chock to unload, the logs rolled and one caught him on the leg and another on the back before he had time to get clear. He managed to get out of the way of a third log and saved himself from further injury. He too was admitted to the Dorrigo Hospital after first aid and an ambulance ride.
On 25 March 1949, when presumably 4 Heintzelman passengers continued to work for Backhouse, Roebuck, the company hosted a banquet to celebrate the opening of a new mill in Dorrigo. Employees were among the 30 or so attending, but no women, not even wives, were mentioned in the newspaper report.
“Mr Backhouse said his firm was tackling the problem of accommodation for its employees.” The official who opened the new sawmill, the State’s Deputy Director of Building Materials (then important enough to have its own Minister) referred to cottages which the company was building for its employees. Six self-contained cottages had been erected already and the firm was planning more.
We have to hope that the company was including its Baltic employees in its accommodation provisions. Four months later, the local paper noted that the company had sought Council permission to build single men’s quarters and a workshop. That was only 42 days before the end of the contracts to work as assigned by the Commonwealth Employment Service.
From information provided in his 1983 death notice, we can deduce that Bill Backhouse stayed in northern NSW and, probably, Dorrigo until retirement. The retirement is likely to have occurred in the 1970s and his death also was in the period during which Australian copyright laws do not permit digitising of printed material without explicit permission.
Fortunately, a dedicated volunteer of the Ryerson team has recorded that the death notice said that “William Wilfred” Backhouse, who died in Coffs Harbour, was “late of Scotts Head” and previously of Dorrigo. His death occurred when Bill Backhouse was 73 years old, with the notice appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald of 17 September 1983. Scotts Head is a coastal village 50 Km south of where the road to the coast from Dorrigo meets the coastal highway, perfect for a quiet retirement.
Both he and his wife, Minnie or Mina, opted for cremation rather than burial, and maybe the scattering of their ashes, as the cremation is recorded by Lismore Memorial Gardens, run by the local council, but there are no plaques or gravestones.
We noted in relation to Albinas Kutka’s story that Megan “sounded more like a girl’s name than a place name to a modern Australian”. The word can, in fact, be a family name, said to be of Irish origin and a variant of McGahan or McGann. But using feminine first names for place names has a history in Australia which starts with South Australia’s State capital, Adelaide, named in honour of the wife of King William IV of the United Kingdom.
Other place names shared by women and often named in their honour include the State of Victoria, Alexandra in Victoria, Lucinda in Queensland, Katherine in the Northern Territory, Clare in South Australia (also a family name), Augusta in Western Australia, Lowanna (near Megan). And a list of places which incorporate women’s names, such at Port Augusta in South Australia or Alice Springs in the Northern Territory is too long to continue. You get the idea. Megan, whether inspired by someone’s first or last name, is not unusual.
Sources
Ancestry.com ‘Wilfred William Backhouse’ https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/118913545/person/170181311907/facts, accessed 18 October 2025.
Ancestry.com ‘Megan Family History’ https://www.ancestry.com.au/last-name-meaning/megan, accessed 18 October 2025.
Daily Telegraph (1941) ‘Company Registration’ Sydney, 9 April, p 19 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/247564451, accessed 16 October 2025.
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