Authors: Dr Sue Rosen and Dr Susan McIntyre-Tamwoy.

Client: National Parks and Wildlife Service

This  study was commissioned in February 2009 by the Baradine Office of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), which is part of the Department of Environment and Climate Change (DECC). The Baradine office of NPWS manages a number of reserves associated with the Pilliga Forest. The site of mill at Ironbarks Crossing is located in the Pilliga State Conservation Area. NPWS is responsible for the environmental land management of the area and for the conservation of places of natural and cultural heritage value. The outcomes specified in the brief were for research and analysis to record the history of the site and a recording of the extant physical fabric for the purpose of identifying the sites historic heritage values.

The mill at Ironbarks Crossing  was the first of a number of  Bradley & Wightman mills in the Pilliga. Teddy Dewson and Tom Underwood agree that the mill was most likely to have been known as the Pick Axe Mill at Ironbarks Crossing. It was established by Neil Bradley, a New Zealand immigrant who had come to Australia in the gold rush period.While the Pick Axe Mill  was a place of work and industry, it was likely to have also been a place of community and domestic life, and while not a unique community it was a type of community that was peculiar to the saw-milling and forestry life, perhaps similar to some of the more ephemeral mining communities that have waxed and waned across the state.