SIR ROBERT Ramsay Mackenzie was born on July 21, 1811, at Coul, Ross-shire, Scotland - the fourth son of Sir George Steuart Mackenzie, 7th baronet, and his wife Mary, fifth daughter of Donald Macleod of Geanies, Ross-shire.
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With £750 Mackenzie arrived in the ship Wave at Sydney in April, 1832, and together with his brother James began to speculate in land.
Robert was quick to take advantage of an Act passed in 1836 to check the growing problem of illegal squatting on Crown Land.
Squatters were to pay an annual licence fee of £10 and this would allow them to take up as much land as they had stock to occupy it.
Robert Mackenzie selected around 20 square miles (5100 hectares) south of present day Bellbrook bounded by the Macleay River on the north, Mackenzie Creek (or Oreen Brook) on the west, and Warbra Brook to the south and east.
He called his station Glenelg however he did not live there, preferring the comfortable life Sydney had to offer. The station was left in the hands of overseers.
Robert Mackenzie's station Glenelg was visited by Crown Lands Commissioner Oakes on March 23, 1837. The superintendent was W Turner and there were 18 people living there.
There were 10 log houses, 15 acres in cultivation, 450 cattle, 12 horses, 5400 sheep and the station was 20 square miles in area. His concluding remarks were that Glenelg was a well conducted establishment.
The nearest other run was Major A C Innes' Moparrabah, nine miles away.
On another visit on October 15, 1837, Oakes noted that the population of Glenelg was now 72. This time he remarked that there were five outstations and Glenelg could muster 22 guns and pistols, cutlasses etc - an important consideration due to the increasing attacks on outlying stations by the Aborigines of the Upper Macleay as white settlement spread onto their traditional land.
Mackenzie had also purchased other properties in the New England area, Salisbury and Terrible Vale in 1837 which he also had run by managers.
Robert was said to have lived extravagantly and ran his finances in a slipshod manner. By 1839 he was heavily in debt and had to borrow money from Scotland.
Glenelg was taken over by Henry Betts and John Panton in 1839 and became part of their Warbra Station.
Commissioner Robert George Massie, Oakes' successor, noted that Mackenzie had failed to renew a licence for his station.
On Queensland's separation from NSW in 1859, Robert Ramsay Mackenzie entered politics there.
John Panton was the son of Sydney's first postmaster, George Panton. After his father's death, John came to Warbra with his mother, Maria, and some of his siblings.
Maria's brother, Campbell Ker, became manager of Warbra and neighbouring station Long Flat.
John moved to Queensland in 1851, leaving his two young brothers William Wemyss Panton and Frederick Goulburn Panton to assist Campbell Ker in running the station.
The Panton family brought down a young Aboriginal from Queensland to work for them. Known as Warbra Charlie, he remained with them for 23 years. After his untimely death, the Panton Brothers had him buried in the West Kempsey cemetery with his grave marked by a fine broken-column memorial.
Warbra Station remained in the Panton family until 1890, when it was sold to John McMaugh along with 5000 cattle and 1000 horses.
In later years, the property was subdivided. Today the name Mackenzie Creek is the only reminder of the lonely station established there in 1837.
