About Walla Walla Press

Walla Walla Press began in 1997 with a mission to publish scholarly, well-researched titles in sports history.

We address a niche market focused on quality sports books involving analysis and criticism. The major publishing houses are becoming increasingly cautious and often won’t touch a title unless they can see big profits after publication. Walla Walla Press is happy to publish good books that may have a small market, with print runs as small as 500 copies.

Another objective is to be an author-friendly press. We aim to produce books that both look good and fulfil the author’s expectations.

As a result, Walla Walla Press publishes a number of worthwhile titles that otherwise would not see the light of day. Our first book was Sporting Immigrants: Sport and Ethnicity in Australia, which appeared in 1997, and in 2006 we established a special series to publish outstanding PhD theses.

Although our primary focus remains sports history, in 2003 we established a general list when we published Dead Parrot, a novel exploring the competitive sub-culture of bird-watching.

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About ‘Walla Walla’

A colonial station, an immigrant town and a legendary horse

When we adopted the name in 1997, we had little idea of the saga that is the Walla Walla story. It has three seemingly unrelated ingredients.

The station

The Walla Walla homestead was one of the early sheep stations of the Riverina, along the Billabong Creek north of Albury. Mary Larkham gained ownership of the property in 1838. The station probably derived its name from an Aboriginal word meaning ‘place of many waters’; others believe it meant ‘place of rocks’, pointing to nearby Morgans Lookout, a towering granite outcrop. Its history is documented in Peter Freeman’s The Homestead: A Riverina Anthology (Oxford University Press).

The town

Walla Walla is a small town of about 600 people, just south of the homestead and 60 km north of Albury. It was established by 56 individuals from six families who trekked in covered wagons from Ebenezer in the Barossa Valley in 1869, seeking new land for their community, which was of German descent and Lutheran by religion. Their history is documented in The Trek from South Australia to New South Wales 1869 to 1994, edited by Leon Wegener.

The immigrants named the town after Ebenezer in South Australia. But when a post office was established in 1878, colonial officials refused the name because an Ebenezer already existed on the outskirts of Sydney. The nearby station provided an alternative, and from that date Ebenezer became Walla Walla. The Zion Lutheran church, originally constructed in 1889, attests to a continuing strong German influence.

The horse

The legendary pacer Walla Walla (1922–52) was owned and trained by Les Martin of Dalton, west of Goulburn. After winning the Goulburn Cup in 1929, he took the Launceston Thousand and the Brisbane Derby in fine style before winning the Sydney Thousand in Australian record time in 1930. He set an Australasian record for the mile at Harold Park in 1933, then a world record at Addington, New Zealand, in 1934 for a mile from a standing start. Walla Walla raced both hoppled and unhoppled — without straps.

Running in red and brown stripes, he captured the public imagination. He often carried a sizeable handicap — as far back as 288 yards — and his ability to win against those odds gave rise to the popular phrase ‘further back than Walla Walla’. To satisfy his admirers, Les Martin took him round the show circuit, where he regularly won the prestigious mile event at the Sydney Show.

After pulling up lame in 1936, Walla Walla sired over 140 individual winners and in later years became an indulged family pet. A provision in the will of Les Martin, who died in 1948, ensured he would be honoured when he died. He was buried near the finishing post at the former Goulburn racecourse in 1952.

Local historian Leon Wegener unravelled the link. During the First World War the citizens of Walla Walla were targets of anti-German sentiment: school classes were conducted in English but church services were in German. Early in 1918 several leading German-descended citizens were arrested and taken to the Holsworthy Internment Camp near Sydney, where most remained until the end of the year. Around 1920 they went as far as Federal Parliament to have their names cleared. They received no official pardon, but the injustice attracted widespread attention — and Les Martin read the coverage. When it came to naming his new foal in 1922, he chose Walla Walla, after the ‘town of Walla Walla which had earned media fame from the years of World War I’.

So the three ingredients are closely linked: a town with an Aboriginal name and close links to early settlement in the Riverina, which became home to an immigrant community and later found fame through the achievements of a pacer. It is fitting, then, that the first book of Walla Walla Press was Sporting Immigrants, which demonstrated that the contribution of immigrants to Australian sport has not been properly documented or acknowledged.