Ellerslie: new information

The main mass of the Ellerslie meteorite was donated to the National Museum of Victoria (Vic) in Melbourne in March 1905 by Mr. Henry Crawford, from the Ellerslie Estate (now the Ellerslie pastoral station). The locality is recorded as about “80 miles north of Bourke, New South Wales” or “about 40 miles from Enngonia” (the latter in Donation register, 1905). At the time of the donation to the museum, Mr. Crawford was a co-owner of the Ellerslie Estate, but the exact find location on the 31,000 acre property was not recorded.

The date of the find is recorded in the original register as 1900 August. This information is at odds with various catalog entries for the Ellerslie meteorite, which state it was found in 1905 at Tego, Maranoa, Queensland. The source of the latter information is unknown, but Tego appears to be the name of a remote water bore somewhere in the Maranoa district of south-central Queensland, several hundred km from Ellerslie Station in north-central New South Wales. Uncertainty about the site might have arisen, in part, from the entry for Ellerslie in Thomas Hodge-Smith's catalog of Australian meteorites, published as a memoir of the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1939. For the site, Hodge-Smith gave Ellerslie Estate, but added the ambiguous comment that “the locality is across the Queensland border.” Hodge-Smith (1939) is a primary reference source for the Ellerslie meteorite in the NHM Catalogue. However, recent (August 2019) correspondence with a long-time resident on Ellerslie Station (Mrs. Nancy Robinson) has confirmed that the Station's northernmost boundary is along the border between New South Wales and Queensland, i.e. the property is entirely within New South Wales.

On the basis of this new evidence, the catalog entry for the Ellerslie meteorite should be changed to ‘Found August 1900. Site: Ellerslie Station (formerly Estate), via Enngonia, Brewarrina Shire, New South Wales, Australia. Latitude 29°07’41”S; Longitude 146°24’21”E (this is for the Ellerslie homestead).’

Submitted by Bill Birch, Vic. Note added 30-Jan-2022: see also Birch (2021)