Bendemeer, New South Wales

Bendemeer is a village of 485 people on the Macdonald River in the New England region of New South Wales, Australia. It is situated at the junction of the New England and Oxley Highways.HistoryThe original inhabitants of the land were Aborigines of the Kamilaroi clan. The first European settlement was in 1834, with the establishment of a sheep station at a river crossing on what would become the McDonald River. By 1851 a small village had grown around the station, which was known as McDonald River.In 1854 the village was renamed Bendemeer after a line in the 1817 poem Lalla-Rookh by Thomas Moore: There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream; And the nightingale sings round it all day long." Moore was referring to a stream that ran through the ruined city of Persepolis in modern-day Iran. The word "bendemeer" is a loose translation of the Persian bund (embankment) and amir (a local ruler). It was proposed as the village name by Thomas Perry, a local farmer whose grandfather had maintained a friendship with both Moore and the first New South Wales Surveyor General, Thomas Mitchell.In 1864 the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt carried out one of his first armed robberies by holding up the northern mail as it passed through Bendemeer.