Historian K. A. Austin, in his 1967 work The Lights of Cobb & Co., described the vast Australian network of routes serviced by the company founded by Freeman Cobb:
By 1883, Cobb and Co.'s operations were ... gigantic. ... total length of lines operated in Queensland and New South Wales was over 6,000 miles. Such ... can be compared with ... the Great Southern Overland Mail, which ran between San Francisco, California and the railhead at Tipton, Missouri, ... claimed to be the greatest staging enterprise in the world, ... (however) W. and G. H. Banning in an appendix to their book Six Horses, calculate that the length of the route was 2,325 miles. It is probable that, at their fullest extent, the (Cobb & Co. lines) constituted the most extensive system of coach routes in the world.
In 1886 Cobb & Co. decided to transfer its coachbuilding operations from Queensland's capital Brisbane and Bathurst, NSW to outback Charleville, 500 miles inland; on the face of it, to service those networks of thousands of miles. But the driving reason was, according to William Lees in A History of the Coaching Firm of Cobb & Co., (quoted by Austin in the above work):
... climatic. ... As our routes extended out west ... our vehicles built with the coastal seasoned timbers would ... crack and gape at all joints. ... after considerable thought Charleville, nearly five hundred miles inland, was chosen, and our whole plant and equipment was moved to there in 1886. ... the effect of this move was immediately apparent, for we purchased large stocks of timber and seasoned it in the same hot dry climate in which traps when built were used, and ... proved extremely satisfactory.
'The Ships of Charleville' were indispensable to outback settlers who relied on them utterly for supplies, especially in drought. Austin goes on to quote Randolph Bedford in a 1911 edition of The Lone Hand:
'From four on Tuesday morning to six o'clock on Wednesday night, the great seven-horsed coach lumbered across the interminable plain ... the top of its load fifteen feet above the earth; rolling over the central sea of waving grass. ... The great plain, ... so mysterious in the moonlight, became a yellow treeless meadow with the dawn. ... The big sun ─ quick, decisive and majestical in rising ─ brought the smell of hay, and made that great expanse of withered grass fragrant ... .'
Bedford’s writing was prototype poetry, welding emotional and physical human yearnings with the transcendental dreamscape controlled by the diurnal movement of light and vision that ‘lumbering’-ly turns desperately pessimistic nights into mornings of glad hope. ‘Interminable plain’. If only they knew. Them then; and they now.
The end came in the 1920s:
Mr W. E. Mead was the last of Cobb & Co.'s Road Managers. ... He was appointed in 1923, the year before the last coach made its final run. (Formerly, his) ... main duties were to keep in touch with the drivers, arrange for fresh horses at the mail changes and distribute wages. (Now, Mead had to) negotiate ... for motor trucks to replace coaches, and to teach the former coachmen to drive them.
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The Lights of Cobb & Co. The Story of the Frontier Coaches, 1854-1924.
By K. A. Austin, Rigby, 1967
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