Peter Allen's Tenterfield Saddler

The Tenterfield Saddler at 123 High Street is one of the oldest continuously operating leather goods businesses in Australia. The building dates to the 1870s and was classified by the National Trust in 1972. It became famous far beyond the New England tablelands thanks to Peter Allen's 1971 song "Tenterfield Saddler" — a quiet, devastating tribute to his maternal grandfather, George Woolnough, who ran the saddlery from 1908 until his retirement in 1960.

Allen — born Peter Richard Woolnough in Tenterfield in 1944 — wrote the song as both a portrait of a craftsman and a meditation on time, memory, and the Australia of a vanishing era. His grandfather had made saddles and leather goods by hand for over half a century, serving the farmers and stockmen of the New England region. The song traces Woolnough's life from working man to lonely widower, and its final verse — about the grandfather's death — remains one of the most emotionally precise pieces of songwriting in Australian music. Allen rarely performed it without being visibly moved.

Peter Allen went on to extraordinary international success. He moved to New York, performed on Broadway, won an Academy Award for co-writing "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager, and Christopher Cross, and became one of the most charismatic live performers of his generation. He was married briefly to Liza Minnelli in the late 1960s — a union arranged partly by Minnelli's mother, Judy Garland, who had discovered Allen and his performing partner Chris Bell when they were a teenage duo playing RSL clubs in regional Australia. Allen died of an AIDS-related illness in 1992 at the age of 48.

The saddlery is still open today, staffed by passionate local volunteers who sell handcrafted Australian leather goods and Tenterfield Saddler merchandise. Peter Allen's red dancing shoes are on display at the nearby Tenterfield Museum. The shop itself is small and unpretentious — timber floors, leather smell, old photographs on the walls — and it carries a weight that goes beyond nostalgia. George Woolnough worked here for over fifty years. His grandson turned that life into a song that made a nation cry. The land the building stands on was originally purchased in 1858 by Sir Stuart Alexander Donaldson, who became the first Premier of New South Wales — another layer of history in a town that accumulates it quietly.

Tenterfield is a four-hour drive north of Sydney, or ninety minutes south of the Queensland border. The town sits on the New England tableland at around 850 metres elevation — cold winters, clear skies, and the kind of quiet main street where a saddlery can survive for a century and a half. It remains a key stop on any road trip through the region and a moving monument to the grandfather who inspired one of the great Australian songs.