William Munnings Arnold

William Munnings Arnold was born in Suffolk, England in 1819 (family tree – subscription required). In 1839, at the age of 20, he arrived in Sydney as a passenger on the ship Mary with capital of £1,200 to invest in land and livestock. He came to the Paterson River district, settling initially at Ravenscroft on the Allyn River near Eccleston.^[1]

He had arrived in New South Wales at the start of an economic depression, and in 1842 William Munnings Arnold was declared insolvent. From 1841 he was living at Carlton Cottage on the site of today's Tressingfield which is in the Woodville district just downstream on the Paterson River from where he would establish Stradbroke a few years later.

In 1844 William Munnings Arnold married Ellen Augusta Smith. It is interesting that both the bride and groom had a Church of England clergyman as a father. Ellen was the daughter of the Rev. John Jennings Smith who built St Paul's in Paterson, and this is of course where they were married. Over the next 20 or so years the Arnolds had nine children, the last of whom died in 1946.

It seems they continued to live at Carlton Cottage up to 1854. In 1848 Arnold purchased a 60 acre block of land from William Montagu Manning. This land was first settled by Anthony Dwyer in 1815 and Dwyer named the block 'Macquarie Farm'. By January 1850 Munnings Arnold was calling the place 'Stradbroke', apparently after the Earl of Stradbroke who was a great friend of his father. See the Stradbroke page for further details about the estate.

In 1856, when Legislative Assembly nominations were called for the County of Durham, William Munnings Arnold stood for election and thus began his long career in NSW Government. Harry Boyle provides a summary as follows:

His policies were radical: manhood suffrage, vote by ballot and electoral districts based on population. They were later incorporated in the Electoral Law Amendment Act of 1858. In the first election under this Act in 1859, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly as Member for Paterson, representing this district until his death. In 1860 he joined the Robertson Ministry as Secretary for Public Works and was instrumental in the introduction of the Land Acts of 1861. After Robertson resigned in 1861, Arnold continued in office in the third Cowper Ministry until 1863. In 1865, he was Secretary of Public Works and Secretary for Lands in the fourth Cowper Ministry. In November he became speaker and conducted affairs with such unfailing impartiality that he was never opposed and held the position until his death.

In 1875 William Munnings Arnold was tragically drowned in the floodwaters of the Paterson River while trying to save boatloads of pumpkins from the flood. The 1875 flood was the greatest in living memory up to that time. He is buried in the church yard of St Paul's at Paterson.