Before the railway arrived in Benalla, the township lived an autarchic or self-sufficient existence.
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Wherever possible, its shops bought their goods from local producers.
Hotels brewed their own beer.
Families raised and killed their own meat.
Every child cared for one or more poddy calves.
Mothers sewed most of their family’s clothing.
Vegetables and fruit came from family plots or were bought from Chinese market gardeners who tilled upstream river flats.
Even mattresses were manufactured in town as were almost all iron tools and fittings.
High-value or low-bulk goods could be moved from Melbourne by horse and cart.
The freight rate for these was based on the number of overnight stays a merchant’s horse and cart needed to walk the goods to Benalla. Accommodation was $3 per night.
These goods were then hawked around the Benalla area by Indian and other itinerant tinkers.
These tinkers commonly sold lace and other notions needed to finish dresses and other clothing. These items were popular and very low bulk.
Anything else not produced in the Benalla region came by bullock cart.
The freight rate for bullock carts was $240 per tonne.
Bullock teams were very slow.
A bullock team could take three weeks to reach Benalla from Melbourne.
Before the railway, even personal transport choices were limited.
Toota one of Benalla's most memorable characters
A traveller walked, rode a horse or travelled in a one-horse jinker or gig.
Safety bicycles, that is, the ordinary bicycle of today, and the roads necessary to use them did not begin to arrive until the late 1880s.
When the railway came to Benalla in 1873, bullock carts were doomed.
By 1881, freight for 10 live bullocks weighing five to five and a half tonnes in a single rail truck from Benalla cost $9 or $1.63 per tonne.
They would reach Melbourne the same day.
Previously, a farmer walked his stock to local saleyards for sale.
By 1899, freight for flour, a difficult substance to transport, cost $1 per tonne to transport from Benalla to Melbourne with a minimum of six tonnes.
If there was more than three tonnes but less than six, the rate rose $1.40 per tonne.
Two-hundred and eighty crates of perishable rabbit carcasses were transported in 1901 from Benalla to Melbourne.
The crates weighed nearly 18 tonnes.
The priority freight cost was $46.01 or around $2.58 per tonne.
With the rise of reliable long distance road freight, railways came under intense competition that grew worse every year.
In 1934 in the heart of the Great Depression, the government authorised a preferential freight rate for traders in stated towns if they sent all goods by rail.
This helped the railways resist pricing pressure.
Euroa, Benalla, Wangaratta and all the towns in this region were stated towns.
To prevent road services competing, trucking firms were not licensed as general long distance carriers to operate from the stated towns.
The anti-competition did not last.
Nowadays, railways are the 21st-century bullock team, used to transport bulky low-value goods.
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