Ag reaping benefits of Waite's gift

After arriving in SA, he worked with his brother James, who held the Pandappa pastoral colony lease in the Mid North near Clare. His skills as a farmer were evident, and he soon took up his own pastoral lease at Paratoo, adjoining his brother's land.

Urrbrae House manager and author of The Waite: A social and scientific history of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute Lynette Zeitz said innovative thinking was instrumental in his success.

"Over the years, Peter Waite built up his own pastoral interests and worked with and for Thomas Elder," Lynette said. "Eventually, he became the chairman of Elder Smith & Co - a position that he held for over 30 years.

"What made him such a successful pastoralist was that he was an innovator.

"He was instituting some land management techniques that were decades ahead of his contemporaries. For example, on his Paratoo station he imported fencing wire and actually fenced off his properties and was a very big advocate of resting the land rotationally. He also realised that if you were going to run sheep in that part of the country you were going to have to have access to water, so he had a philosophy of big dams in big paddocks.

"In the 1864-65 drought, which was very severe, he had the foresight to agist some of his stock down in the South East and so when the drought broke he would have stock to replace his flock."

Eventually, his business interests reached a point where he no longer needed to live out on the station, and he then decided to look for a property on the Mitcham Plains on the outskirts of Adelaide near Thomas Elder's stately home.

"Urrbrae Estate was available when Peter Waite was looking for a new home, and its location was ideal," Lynette said. "Interestingly, initially he didn't have enough capital to buy the property outright, so Thomas Elder helped him out. "The family story is that this was in exchange for Thomas Elder agisting his horses on the property.

"Eventually the Waite family moved into Urrbrae House in 1877, but the house was basically too small for them so they had that house demolished in the late 1880s and the current house was completed in 1891."

Peter Waite's generosity came to the fore after tragedy struck his family. He had eight children with his wife Matilda, but three died at a young age.

"His eldest son James went to England, trained as an engineer and settled there," Lynette said. "There was never a suggestion of him coming back to take over since he was so successful in his own business.

"Peter's other son David travelled from Australia to the United Kingdom to visit James, but somewhere in the Gulf of Suez, he disappeared and was presumed drowned overboard.

After David's disappearance, Peter and Matilda had three remaining daughters, none of whom wanted to live in Urrbrae House after their parents passed away.

"He then made the decision to leave his house to the University of Adelaide for two reasons. The first was to create a research and education institute to promote agricultural science - that's the eastern half of the Waite Campus - and the other so half could be kept as a public park or garden in perpetuity.

"He also left a parcel of land to the state government on the western side of Fullarton Road for the creation of an agricultural high school, which in 1932 became Urrbrae Agricultural High School."

Peter Waite signed a deed of gift in 1914 detailing what would happen when he passed away. Peter and Matilda both died in 1922 and the estate passed to the University.

* Full report in Stock Journal, June 26, 2014 issue.