Need Advice on History research.

When I'm googling , I'm obviously not getting the keywords right because I'm not finding out what I want to know.

I'm trying to do some history research on my stock saddle.

As a kid I can remember riding in a friends huge old QLD poley , it was like sitting in an armchair but with huge front knee pads and sizeable thigh pads to back it up . Impossible to fall out of unless the horse turned upside down.
Well I always wanted one after that but never found it ; I don't even know what became of that saddle , it should have been made a museum piece.

In the mid 80's at a little trading post in Maddington that specialised in dealing in 2nd hand horse gear , I found what I thought would be my dream stock saddle. It certainly wasn't as massive as that old poley but it still had decent sized knee pads and thigh pads [which had all but disappeared from most modern day light stock saddles] and a decent deep seat.
I grabbed it firmly fore and aft and gave it a solid twist and screw and a bit more of a twist and tweak but the tree was sound so I handed over my $50 and rescued it from their junk bin collection of dried up cracked leather.

I proudly conveyed it back home to Jerdacuttup and presented it to the boss and said "whattya think ?" he gave it the twist and screw treatment too and said "well it's got a good sound tree , we should be able to do something with this ".

Then it was sit back and take stock of what needed repairing / replacing .

Rats or mice had wrecked the wool serge lining and the rye straw stuffing .
The under flaps were buggered , no doubt due to salt damage from horse sweat. The girth straps likewise were stuffed.
The top of one of the knee pads was badly abraded away ; could have been rats or could have been a drag mark.

But the seat , the skirt , the outer flaps and the other three pads were in good nick and the leather was still strong and sound albeit just a tad dry.

I wish I had before and during pics to go with the after ones but this is in the days when the faster bit of computer kit was a Commodore 64 [which my dad had and digital cameras weren't]

The ol' boy separated the top from the bottom , removed the damaged knee pad and recovered it , replaced the girth straps - now double leather and stitched and put them on new webbing nailed to the saddle tree , replaced the under flaps with some beeeyootiful thick leather cut from the butt end of a hide and restuffed it with rye straw and relined it with new Tasmanian woollen serge.
It had indeed been restored and was my dream saddle .
I have ridden many many miles in it now , mustered or done the rounds of heaven only knows how many sheep and cattle.

While the ol' boy was working on it , another old gent whose hobby was collecting old working horse harness dropped in for a visit. Now Staf[ford] didn't use his collection on horses but rather restored it enough so he could tour around shows and field days and set up his display to try and teach people how things were in the old days. He didn't do a bad job either and on show days his tent was always pretty popular.
What Staf commented on was the buttons on the front of my saddle with the makers stamp on them ; he said Arundel &Co had been a saddlers in Perth and he thought they closed down sometime between the wars , in the 30's possibly due to the depression .
So in the mid 80's , my saddle could have already been 50 yrs old at least .
Some of the googling I have been attempting tonight has found me a 1905 ad for E. Arundel & Co in The West Australian but I'm sort of at point non plus because I'm not finding out anything else ; I must be using the wrong key words when searching or something .


1. Tonight sitting under a thick layer of dubbin.
2. Makers stud.
3. I guess you'd call it a sort of busman's [or horseman's] holiday. Take the horse and saddle and travel about 500km away from the farm for a holiday - riding the horse. Top pic is taken in the bush over the road from here where I live now , believe it or not and the second one is down Manjimup way. My sister Ali is on her horse in the middle.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Really interesting Rosalie!
I googled them too and all I found was the one national photo archive pic: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

From googling I notice that several current saddleries have history info on stock saddles. Don't know how accurate or comprehensive they all are though. Was that the kind of thing you had been looking at?

Thanks there , that's a start and has given me another couple of avenues to explore .

Interesting, most trees were made from hardwood and shaped by hand.
Back in the 1960's I started makeing them from fibreglass and Polyester resin in a mold. This more than halved the weight without strength being compromised. Today there are extremely light alternatives which are stronger though higher in price.