Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this page contains the names of people who have died.
I've been poking around the back country between Warren and Gilgandra for a while now, and two names keep turning up in the old stories and the modern property pages alike: Merrigal and New Merrigal. They sit side by side on the black and red soil plains north of the little village of Collie, and between them they carry close to 180 years of pastoral history: a Scottish squatter, an assigned convict who married the boss's daughter, W.C. Wentworth himself, the Pye family's string of woolsheds, a Bomber Command pilot who came home to run sheep, a homestead fire, and in 2026 a $20-million-plus sale. Here's what I've been able to piece together.
Where Exactly Is Merrigal?
First things first, because there's more than one Merrigal in New South Wales. The one I'm writing about is in the Collie district. Grain Central and the selling agents, Peter Milling & Co, put the homestead block of Merrigal at 531 Merrigal Road, about 11 kilometres north of Collie, "midway between Warren and Gilgandra" and roughly 90 kilometres north of Dubbo. New Merrigal is its neighbour. The Land in 2018 placed it about 10 kilometres north of Collie and 80 kilometres north of Dubbo, and the Australian Financial Review said it lies on the Collie–Bourbah Road.
Collie itself is a small village and parish in Warren Shire on the Oxley Highway. Wikipedia gives it as 522 kilometres north-west of Sydney, 100 kilometres north of Dubbo and 36 kilometres west of Gilgandra, with 194 people at the 2016 census. It notes that the name may come from an Aboriginal word meaning "water". There's also a cadastral Parish of Merrigal in the County of Ewenmar, Warren Shire, which takes its name from the same old run. Ewenmar County sits between the Macquarie River on the west and the Castlereagh on the east, between Warren and Gilgandra.
Don't mix this Merrigal up with the Merrigal down on the Lachlan near Hillston. That's a quite different station. Charles Sturt University's Regional Archives hold papers on a bridge over the Lachlan there from 1895–96, and John Oxley reached the Lachlan "near Merrigal Bridge" on 23 June during his 1817 expedition, according to Wikipedia.
Aboriginal Country
Long before anyone pegged out a sheep run, this was Aboriginal country, and the sources describe it in slightly different ways. Warren Shire Council's own economic development strategy says the shire "sits at the convergence of two Aboriginal Nation groups": the Wongaibon to the south-east, around Narromine, Trangie and Nyngan, and the Weilwan (also written Wayilwan, or Ngemba Weilwan) to the north and north-west. It says the Weilwan Nation takes in Warren, Gulargambone, Gilgandra and parts of Coonamble and Quambone, and runs out into the Macquarie Marshes. The council puts Aboriginal people at about 20 per cent of the shire's population.
Wikipedia's article on the Wayilwan calls them a group of the Ngiyambaa nation who spoke the "Ngiyambaa Wayilwan" dialect, and says the name comes from their word for "no", wayil. It describes their country as covering about 5000 square miles along the Barwon from Brewarrina to Walgett and along Marra Creek and the Castlereagh, Marthaguy and Macquarie rivers. For the Gilgandra district more broadly, Wikipedia's Gilgandra article says three language groups lived there before the squatters came: the Gamilaraay, the Wiradjuri and the Wayilwan. Wikipedia's Warren article says the Warren area "is said to have been occupied by the Ngiyambaa". I haven't found a source that names the people of the Merrigal country itself, so I'm leaving it at the district picture.
Warren's Aboriginal community tells its own story through Warraan Widji Arts. They write that in the 1800s the Wayilwan ancestors of Warren, facing severe discrimination, moved from the banks of the Wambuul (Macquarie) River to the Ewenmar Creek and made a home at what is now the Beemunnel Reserve Aboriginal Place. They say Ewenmar is a Wayilwan word meaning "respected place", the same word that names the county Merrigal sits in. They also note that "most of our ancestors who lived at the Beemunnel worked on the surrounding properties as stockmen and domestic servants". It's a good reminder of who did much of the work on the western stations.
The Squatters Arrive on the Castlereagh
Wikipedia's history of the Corduroy Road Ruin near Curban gives a good run-down of how the Castlereagh country was taken up. In 1836 Governor Bourke's regulations legalised squatting beyond the Nineteen Counties, and by 1836–37 licences were being issued for stations along the river near present-day Gilgandra, Curban, Armatree and Gulargambone. Names like Richard Rouse at Mundooran, Thomas Perrie at Breelong, James Bennett at Bearbong and Curban, and John Hall at Calingoingong appear among the early settlers. Over on the Macquarie, Wikipedia says Warren station was set up in 1845 by Thomas Readford and William Lawson junior, son of the Blue Mountains explorer.
Alexander McGregor Takes Up Merrigal – 1845
Every source I found agrees on the founder. Wikipedia's Corduroy Road article says simply: "Alexander McGregor had taken up Merrigal on the western side of the Castlereagh in 1845. His grandsons 'held large tracts of land from Armatree to Collie'." Grain Central's 2026 sale story says the same: Merrigal was "originally settled by Alexander McGregor in 1845".
Peter Austin of The Land filled in the family side in a 2020 story about Glenmuir, a block cut from the old run. He wrote that the Scottish-born McGregor took up the run "situated near present-day Armatree" with his wife Catherine and their two daughters in 1845. So the original Merrigal Run was a big, sprawling holding. It stretched from the Armatree side across towards Collie, and only later got cut down to the properties we know today.
John Jones – From Assigned Convict to Owner of Merrigal
This is the part I love. According to The Land, one of McGregor's daughters, Ann, married John Jones, "a former convict who had been assigned to McGregor and who in due course took over Merrigal". John and Ann raised five sons and five daughters there.
Jones turns up again in the souvenir booklet printed for Back to Gilgandra Week in 1937. In a paragraph about old pioneers, it says James Madgwick's father "in association with John Jones" took up a station in 1844 for Robert Martin. The station's name is smudged in the scan. The booklet adds a line that matters for this story: "John Jones later owned 'Merrigal' Station, Collie." So by 1937, local memory already linked Jones's name with Merrigal and with Collie.
The Land says the Merrigal country was later divided between the Jones sons. A portion called Back Merrigal went to Albert Edward Jones, who married Grace Bell from Scotland in 1894 and had eight children. Their son Ronald Bell Jones kept a piece of Back Merrigal called Glenmuir when the rest was sold off in 1964. Ronald was a bachelor and died in 1981. A neighbour, Ron Herbig, who owned another slice of Back Merrigal, managed Glenmuir and later bought it. Michael O'Brien bought it from Herbig's son Gary in 2007. When The Land wrote its story in 2020, Glenmuir was a 1525-hectare cropping block 37 kilometres south-west of Gulargambone, and only three families had ever owned it.
New Merrigal – Christie and Wentworth, 1855
New Merrigal has its own beginning, a decade after McGregor. Peter Austin wrote in The Land in 2018 that it was "taken up in 1855 by John Christie of Narromine Station in partnership with colonial politician and land baron W.C. Wentworth". That's the same Wentworth who crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813 and later built Vaucluse House. Austin says New Merrigal "underwent just three ownership changes before being bought by David Pye in 1933".
John asked me to cover "the subdivision that created New Merrigal". I have to be honest here: I couldn't find a fetched source that says New Merrigal was cut out of Merrigal. The only account of its origins I could read says it was taken up as a fresh run in 1855. The "New" may simply mean it was the newer holding next door. When Trove is back online, the old newspapers should settle it.
Wool, Shearing and the Big Sheds
For most of its life Merrigal was a wool place. The selling agents describe it as having "evolved from a traditional wool-growing enterprise" into mixed farming, and the old woolshed is still standing. It's a 12-stand timber-framed shed. Peter Milling & Co and The Land both say it was the first woolshed in the Collie district to be electrified. Grain Central goes further and calls it "one of the first in NSW to be powered by electricity". These days it's used for shedding sheep and for storage, and a modern five-stand raised-board shed does the shearing.
New Merrigal was a wool name too. In a 2018 piece about the Pye family's old Burragorang Valley station, Jooriland, The Land listed New Merrigal in the run of Pye sheds worked by their regular shearing contractor, Ray Cleaver. The others were Gingie, Morendah, Calga West, Ghoolendaadi and Branga Plains, and between them they shore "some 100,000 sheep". New Merrigal also carried a stud Merino flock in the Pye years, which Len Peel bought along with the property in 1973.
The Pyes at New Merrigal – 1933 to 1973
David Pye bought New Merrigal in 1933 and held it for 40 years, according to The Land. He belonged to a big pastoral family with stations right across the north-west. In 1973 came a double blow. The Land says Pye died "tragically" early that year, and that the "former two-storey station homestead was destroyed by fire in 1973". The sources I read don't say how either happened, and I won't guess.
Len Peel bought New Merrigal at auction later in 1973, along with the stud Merino flock. He was a dairyman from Hambledon Park at North Richmond on the Hawkesbury, and New Merrigal was the start of what The Land called his "western pastoral push". The family company was Peel New Merrigal Pty Ltd.
The Perrys at Merrigal – A Bomber Pilot Comes Home
Next door on Merrigal, the Perry family arrived in the 1930s. Jeff Perry's obituary in The Land in 2018, written by Phillip Perry, says his father, the pastoralist George Jeffries Perry, bought Merrigal in 1937. Before that the family was at Gunningbar, west of Warren.
Jeffries Earle "Jeff" Perry was born on 31 May 1915. In 1934 his uncle Tom talked the aviator Nancy Bird into flying her Gipsy Moth the 60 kilometres from Narromine to Gunningbar, and the 19-year-old Jeff was hooked. He learned to fly at Narromine, joined the RAAF when war came and was sent to Britain. On the way, his troopship rode up onto an iceberg. In Bomber Command he flew Wellingtons with No. 115 Squadron out of Marham in Norfolk. He did a long tour of 37 operations, mostly over the Ruhr, and came home with shrapnel still in his leg. The obituary also tells the story of him trying a loop in a Wellington over Scotland, as he told it to the author Michael Veitch.
He came back to Australia in 1944, married Sybil Coward in April 1945, and "remained on 'Merrigal' raising three children". The obituary says he got the place through "drought, flood, bushfire and wildly fluctuating wool and stock prices". His logbook was lost in a bushfire in the 1950s. Jeff and Sybil moved to Dubbo in 1996, Sybil died in 1999, and Jeff died on 21 April 2018, aged 102.
From Wool to Wheat
Like most of the district, both Merrigals moved from mostly wool to mixed farming. Wheat had a long history around here. A 1921 photograph shows 320,000 bags of wheat from the 1920–21 harvest stacked at Gilgandra. By 2018, The Land said New Merrigal had about 4320 hectares of "arable, prime hard" wheat country, of which 2600–2800 hectares were usually cropped, yielding about 3 tonnes a hectare. It also ran 4500 Merino breeding ewes and 150 Santa/Angus cows. On Merrigal, the 2026 agents counted 3242 hectares of dryland cropping country, with soils running from soft grey self-mulching clays to red loams.
The Sales – New Merrigal 2018
In July 2018 the Peel family put New Merrigal up for sale through Colliers International, as part of winding up the family company's farming assets. Len Peel had died in 2016, aged 86. The Land gave it as 6669 hectares (16,554 acres), while Queensland Country Life printed 6699 hectares for the same acreage. It had seven equipped bores, 39 dams and a brand-new seven-stand Eco Enterac woolshed, and the main house was a modern four-bedroom home built in 2016 to replace the one lost in 1973. In October 2018 the AFR reported it had sold to "a local producer working in the cotton industry". No price was given.
The Sales – Merrigal 2026
Merrigal had its turn this year. In June 2026 the Lean family, who'd bought it in 2007, listed the 5075-hectare (12,539-acre) property through Peter Milling & Co of Dubbo with a guide of around $20–22 million. Expressions of interest closed on 30 July. The Land reported on 4 September 2026 that it had sold to "local interests" "in-line with expectations". The price wasn't disclosed. At sale it had 22 main paddocks, five bores, 13 dams, frontage to both Merrigal and Wemabung creeks, and timber of belar, rosewood, wilga, grey box, cypress pine and coolabah along the creeks. There were three houses, including a double-brick manager's residence, and that historic 12-stand shed.
The Towns Around Merrigal
Merrigal people did their business in Collie, Gilgandra, Warren and, further afield, Dubbo. The 1937 Back to Gilgandra booklet mentions a "Ball at Collie" in that year's programme, and its memories of the old dances name a violinist from Collie among the musicians.
Timeline
- 1836: Governor Bourke legalises squatting beyond the Nineteen Counties, and Castlereagh runs follow in 1836–37 (Wikipedia, Corduroy Road)
- 1844: John Jones and Madgwick take up a station for Robert Martin (Back to Gilgandra, 1937)
- 1845: Alexander McGregor takes up the Merrigal run west of the Castlereagh (Wikipedia; Grain Central; The Land)
- 1845: Warren station established by Readford and Lawson (Wikipedia)
- 1855: John Christie of Narromine and W.C. Wentworth take up New Merrigal (The Land)
- Later 1800s: John Jones, McGregor's son-in-law and a former assigned convict, takes over Merrigal (The Land)
- 1894: Albert Edward Jones of Back Merrigal marries Grace Bell (The Land)
- 1933: David Pye buys New Merrigal (The Land)
- 1934: Nancy Bird flies to Gunningbar and inspires Jeff Perry (The Land)
- 1937: George Perry buys Merrigal (Perry obituary). Grain Central's "75 years" would point to about 1932
- 1945: Jeff Perry, back from Bomber Command, marries and settles at Merrigal
- 1964: Most of Back Merrigal sold. Ronald Jones keeps Glenmuir (The Land)
- 1973: David Pye dies. New Merrigal homestead burns. Len Peel buys the property at auction
- 1996: Jeff and Sybil Perry move to Dubbo
- 2007: The Lean family buys Merrigal
- 2016: New homestead built at New Merrigal. Len Peel dies
- 2018: New Merrigal listed in July and sold to a cotton grower in October. Jeff Perry dies, aged 102
- June 2026: Merrigal listed at about $20–22 million
- 4 Sep 2026: Merrigal sale to local interests reported
Where the Sources Disagree
- When the Perrys bought Merrigal. Jeff Perry's obituary in The Land says his father bought it in 1937. Grain Central (2026) says the Perrys held it "for three generations, or 75 years" until the Leans bought it in 2007, which would mean about 1932. I'd lean towards the family's own date of 1937.
- Where the original run lay. The Land (2020) places McGregor's run "near present-day Armatree". Grain Central and the agents put today's Merrigal 11 kilometres north of Collie. Both can be right: Wikipedia quotes that McGregor's grandsons held land "from Armatree to Collie".
- The size of New Merrigal. The Land gives 6669 hectares and Queensland Country Life 6699 hectares, both alongside 16,554 acres. That acreage works out to about 6699 hectares.
- Distances. New Merrigal is 10 kilometres north of Collie and 80 kilometres north of Dubbo (The Land). Merrigal is 11 kilometres and 90 kilometres (Grain Central, The Land 2026). They're neighbouring places, so the gaps may be real. Wikipedia puts Collie itself 100 kilometres north of Dubbo.
- The electric woolshed. Peter Milling & Co and The Land say it was the first electrified woolshed in the Collie district. Grain Central says "one of the first in NSW".
- Rainfall. 560 mm a year at New Merrigal (The Land, 2018) against 480–500 mm at Merrigal (agents, 2026).
- Whose country. Warren Shire Council says Weilwan in the north and Wongaibon in the south-east. Wikipedia's Gilgandra article lists Gamilaraay, Wiradjuri and Wayilwan for the district, and its Warren article says Ngiyambaa.
My Earlier Posts
- History Of Dubbo – New South Wales
- Jimmy Governor and Gilgandra – The Breelong Murders and the Manhunt of 1900
- The Wentworth Family of Vaucluse
- Names Of Railway Stations In New South Wales – Including Aboriginal Names & Meanings
- Clancy Of The Overflow – Banjo Paterson
Sources
- Grain Central, "Collie, Walgett farms, Delungra storage list in NSW", Linda Rowley, 25 June 2026: https://www.graincentral.com/property/collie-walgett-farms-delungra-storage-list-in-nsw/
- The Land, "Standout central west broadacre farming, livestock operation sold" (Merrigal), Mark Phelps, 4 September 2026: https://www.theland.com.au/story/9344102/merrigal-property-5075-hectares-sells-to-local-interests/
- Farm Online, "Merrigal a standout broadacre farming and livestock opportunity", Mark Phelps, 22 June 2026: https://www.farmonline.com.au/story/9295287/merrigal-lean-family-lists-iconic-5075-hectare-nsw-property/
- Peter Milling & Co, 531 Merrigal Road, Collie NSW 2827 (sale listing): https://petermilling.com.au/rural/531-merrigal-road-collie-nsw-2827/
- The Land, "'New Merrigal' comes with new woolshed", Peter Austin, 28 July 2018: https://www.theland.com.au/story/5544958/new-merrigal-comes-with-new-woolshed/
- Queensland Country Life, "Collie property New Merrigal delivers versatility, scale, reliability", 10 July 2018: https://www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/story/5517557/new-merrigal-offers-versatility-scale-reliability/
- Australian Financial Review, "Peel family sell historic New Merrigal holding to cotton farmer", Larry Schlesinger, 26 October 2018: https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/peel-family-sell-historic-new-merrigal-holding-to-cotton-farmer-20181026-h175dx
- The Land, "How 'Jooriland' joined pastoral Pyes' stable", Peter Austin, 21 October 2018: https://www.theland.com.au/story/5702106/how-jooriland-joined-pastoral-pyes-stable/
- The Land, "Moisture aplenty at Gular" (Glenmuir), Peter Austin, 29 February 2020: https://www.theland.com.au/story/6648518/moisture-aplenty-at-gular/
- The Land, "Farmer and wartime pilot attempted aerobatics in Wellington bomber" (Jeff Perry obituary), Phillip Perry, June 2018: https://www.theland.com.au/story/5440091/farmer-and-wartime-pilot-attempted-aerobatics-in-wellington-bomber/
- Back to Gilgandra Week souvenir booklet, 1937 (PDF scan): https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/f1f62acf-9b28-418c-8c0f-de967d7ec204/Back%20to%20Gil%20new%20merged%20ff.pdf
- Wikipedia, Corduroy Road Ruin Historic Site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corduroy_Road_Ruin_Historic_Site
- Wikipedia, Collie, New South Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collie,_New_South_Wales
- Wikipedia, Ewenmar County: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewenmar_County
- Wikipedia, Wayilwan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wailwan
- Wikipedia, Gilgandra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgandra
- Wikipedia, Warren, New South Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren,_New_South_Wales
- Warren Shire Council, Economic Development Strategy & Action Plan 2023–2025: https://www.warren.nsw.gov.au/__media_downloads/Policies/Warren%20Economic%20Development%20Strategy%20and%20Action%20Plan%20v8_ADOPTED%202023.pdf
- Warraan Widji Arts, "River Place Arts – learning through art": https://www.warraanwidjiarts.org.au/river-place-arts-learning-through-art
- Charles Sturt University Regional Archives, Collection 0132, Merrigal Station, Hillston (the other Merrigal): https://archives.csu.edu.au/index.php/0132
- Wikimedia Commons, for all images (credited under each picture): https://commons.wikimedia.org/
- Wikipedia, John Oxley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Oxley


























