New England

Distinguished and Famous people from New England

🎹 Peter Allen

Peter Allen was born at Tenterfield in 1944 and raised in Armidale, where he began performing at eleven in the New England Hotel. His grandfather George Woolnough, a saddle maker, later became the subject of Tenterfield Saddler. Cabaret, songwriting and international touring took Allen far beyond those beginnings, with songs including I Go to Rio and I Still Call Australia Home. The flamboyant stage image had a quieter family geography behind it: a grandfather’s workshop in one town and a young pianist finding an audience in another. Both places belong to the New England chapter of his life.

📚 Judith Wright

Judith Wright was born at Thalgarrah on Nganyaywana Country in 1915 and attended New England Girls’ School in Armidale. Her family’s pastoral history and her attachment to familiar country became important subjects for poetry and later historical reflection. She also campaigned for conservation and Aboriginal land rights, reconsidering the consequences of the colonial expansion in which her ancestors had participated. Her writing joins a strong sense of place with difficult questions about belonging and responsibility. New England remained part of the intellectual and emotional country she explored in her writing.

📚 Dorothea Mackellar

Dorothea Mackellar repeatedly returned to Kurrumbede, the family property on the Namoi River northwest of Gunnedah. Her father bought it in 1905, and her brothers helped manage the station. The landscape and working life formed part of the rural experience behind her writing. Mackellar was born in Sydney; the family’s Gunnedah properties became important places of experience and return. Kurrumbede provides a documented family and literary association, with the homestead, outbuildings and surrounding country preserving a setting she knew well.