Above the door of Old Pelion Hut is a grey faded board fixed to the end wall on which the name ‘Emhlangana’ is carved. It has evidently been there for a long time. Over the years a number of people have asked me about it. My knowledge was very limited. All I knew was that when geologist Ken Burns did a survey of the Pelion copper mine in March 1958 he referred to Old Pelion Hut as Ehmlangana in his report (see KL Burns Preliminary Survey, Pelion Copper Mines, Tasmanian Mines Technical Report No 3, Hobart, 1958, pp. 34–36).

Recently, I learnt more. Fiona Rice, interpretation officer with the Parks and Wildlife Service was intrigued by it and with Steve Billingham of the Office of the Nomenclature Board, came close to solving the mystery. The found that the name is of Zulu origin and historically referred to both a place and a people in South Africa. There is currently a school, Ehmlangana Primary School, for example, northwest of Durban.

Then they found a newspaper account that indicated that the Wooton family residence at the Nook, near Sheffield was called ‘Emhlangana’. Checking the Wooton family on ancestry.com, revealed a Mary Wooton born in Natal in South Africa in 1864 and who died in Lorinna in 1933. With this the pieces of the puzzle started to come together suggesting that members of the Wooton family of Sheffield once lived in South Africa and that, after migrating to Tasmania, named their home after a place in South Africa.

How then did the name come to be applied to Old Pelion Hut and when?

There are a couple of possibilities. Mary Wooton married Daniel Wyllie in 1895. In his PhD thesis historian Tim Jetson reports that he interviewed one of their sons, Andrew (born 1898) in 1980. Andrew Wyllie (and his father Dan Wyllie) was involved in sheep and cattle grazing on Pelion Plains in the 1930s when Cox and Day held a grazing lease over the area. Interestingly, these men would routinely stay in Old Pelion when at the plains. Maybe it was Andrew or Dan Wyllie who named the hut?

The other opportunity is suggested by the name ‘LT Wooton 1941’, written on one of the inside walls of Old Pelion. That this may be the more likely option is suggested by the fact that Jetson also interviewed Laurie Wooton in 1980 and from him, apparently, came the information that Ehmlangana is Zulu for ‘meeting’ or ‘joining’.

When was it named? A search through the Old Pelion Hut logbook by Nic Haygarth suggests that it happened well before 1958 when Burns noticed it. There is an entry dated 12 January 1944 that reads: ‘ "Emhlangana". Expectation was not better than realization. But why is there nothing wrong with "Emhlangana"? Windermere has a troop of possums, Narcissus smokey chimneys etc, but "Emhlangana" nothing! ...'

Any additional information would be welcome.

Walters' Hut above Trappers

In January, David, a subscriber to this blog, and I had a brief exchange about a structure that once stood in the little wet lead above the Trappers Hut.

This structure was a cattleman’s hut built by Vin Walters and members of his extended family in the 1930s. The Walters family of Mole Creek took up land at Walters Marsh and the Horse Plain (now under Lake Rowallan) in a process that began with William Walters in 1877. By the mid 1920s the family, then in its third generation, owned nearly 400 acres there. In 1934 Vin Walters took up extra country in the form of a couple of grazing leases in the Walls of Jerusalem and on the Lake Adelaide Plain. He put cattle up there, beginning with an agisted herd of dairy cows, on and off until the Second World War. They built a rough hut at the top of the track to provide a bit of shelter when they were checking the stock. It was a decent sized structure with a gable roof, clad in corrugated iron, but was never finished. In the photograph I have of it, taken at Christmas 1938 (see below), part of one wall is covered by an old tarpaulin.

In 1946, when the Trappers Hut was being built, the corrugated iron on the building was removed to roof the Trappers Hut. All that remains today of the Walters’ hut is a pile of stones responding to the location of the fireplace and a couple of corner posts.