Contents

Contents 1

Front cover 2

Imprint page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Preface 5

Stories in the dark 7

Adelong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

West Wyalong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

The King family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

The Puntons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

My father’s death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Pictures 48

Family trees 67

Sykes tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Cochrane tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Parker tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Stories

in the

dark

Letters from

Esther Perry nee Cochrane

to her grandchildren

Stories in the dark

Letters from

Esther Perry nee Cochrane

to her grandchildren

First printing 2002-08-12

Second printing 2005-03-17

Third printing, revised 2012-02-20

Improved screen viewing 2018-11-17

Preface

These stories were typed by my mother while she was living at Parkside when she

was in her seventies. She took up the typewriter, partly as occupational therapy to

regain the use of her hand after a wrist fracture, but mostly because she enjoyed

telling a good yarn. She liked being called Hett, a name bestowed on her by an

appreciated son-in-law, but her favourite name was Grandma. As a typist, she

would have described herself as a good pianist. During transcription of the text

to computer I have eliminated typos and introduced section headings, paragraphs,

footnotes and marginal notes, but otherwise the stories are as she wrote them.

They were typed on sheets of paper 145x187 mm using almost the whole page,

without margins and without paragraphs. The manual typewriter was tempera-

mental, and about half way through she typed

i wont try to use capitals from now on as they are not

working well.

In transcribing I have substituted upper case letters for lower case when that

seemed appropriate. Birth names only are given in the footnotes, the captions

to photographs, and the family trees.

Pam

August 2002

A sample page of the typescript

Stories in the dark

Dear Adam,

Do you remember when you were a little boy and I sometimes tucked you into

bed, you would so often say ‘Read me a story in the dark, Granma’, and it was

a while before I realised that you wanted me to tell you about the funny people I

knew when I was a little girl ‘in the olden days’. Andrew likes to hear about them

too, so I will use a carbon for the remainder of this letter and post him one too.

Adam

John and Margaret Fisher collection.

Adelong

Before I tell you of the people in that little town I must describe the town itself asAdelong

it was in about 1902 when I was a little girl,

but it was known even then that it

was past its heyday of prosperity, and one by one the mines were closing down.

There were three at the top of the hill above our houses, all silent but one. The

Great Victoria had produced more gold than any other mine in the State. The

Gibralter, known always as the Gib and four miles downstream, was still working

three shifts a day.

I never think of the town as dry and sunburnt, but always as green and lush. There

was scarcely one home that was not surrounded by its own orchard, and there was

a little creek that ran through the town along behind the gardens of the shops, and

half a mile downstream on the opposite bank were our homes, ﬁrstly where I lived

with my parents,

then my aunt’s,

then my grandmother’s family.

It is odd, but

the one person I see so clearly is my grandmother. She was born in Yass about

1850 of German parents,

and I remember her mother only as a dour old womanMa’s mother

eternally rocking in a chair on the verandah. She had a walnut tree that was like

‘the biggest aspidistra in the world’, and she went to bed in the snowiest, frilliest

bed I have ever seen—starched frills and ﬂounces in all directions. But she did

not inspire love, not as my grandmother did. All the family, including myself,

called my grandmother ‘Ma’. Her house was a timber one, pink, and all over oneMa’s house

wall was a banksia rose with great clusters of pale yellow roses, and I can see that

lovely wall even though the roses and the house are long since gone.

Beside that pink wall was another wall, and two long square-cut logs, and al-

ways in mild weather the whole family gathered and discussed everything—world

events, politics—while I played. In the whole town nothing was more beloved

than the creek. It was crystal clear and just deep enough for paddling, and its bed

was white sand with stones as smooth as glass.

Ma’s garden ended in a high bank with three whopping big willows with the creekMa’s garden

below, and can you think of anything nicer on a hot evening than swinging out

holding a handful of willow branch and dropping kerplonk into the water. I did

not know then what that lovely warm feeling was, but I know now that it was

happiness and contentment from living where it was so beautiful and, to be honest,

These letters were written by Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane (19 June 1898–1969, known

as Ett or Hett). She was born in Adelong and lived there until December 1905 when her family

moved to West Wyalong. Birth names only are given in the footnotes.

Joseph Cochrane (1867–1915) and Catherine Jane Parker (1874–1940, known as Marnie).

Her mother’s sister, Esther Mary Parker (1882–1970, known as Ett)

The family of her maternal grandmother Catherine Jane Walters (1854–1933, known as Ma)

and grandfather John James Parker (1850–1924, known as Gargie).

Robert Walters and Mary A . . .

My grandmothers, my parents, and me

L to r: Mary Jane McGuire aged 63, Catherine Jane Parker aged 29, Esther Evelyn Maude

Cochrane aged 5, Joseph Cochrane aged 36, Catherine Jane Walters aged 49. On back in

Esther Cochrane’s hand: Taken in Adelong when I was 5 (1903). Photographer: R Pum-

frey, Adelong, NSW. Print 147x201 mm mounted on grey cardboard. Pam Macdonald

collection.

My mother’s father

L to r: Catherine Jane Walters(?), John James Parker, Elizabeth Alice Adelong Parker(?).

John James Parker lost his sight in a mining accident. Print 108x154 mm mounted on

fawn cardboard. Margot Roberts collection.

having such beautiful food, most of it grown in our own gardens—every sort of

poultry—turkeys, geese, ducks, chooks, guineafowl. Pigs in their pens for when

we wanted ham and bacon, cows for milk, butter and cream, and all summer that

orchard with trees to climb for cherries, loquats, apricots, plums, peaches, pears

and apples, and against the fences raspberries and black and red currants. In the

winter we were quite well fed, as so much had been put aside in preserving jars.

Other little descriptions will follow (in little bits) and I promise that I won’t be

serious again, but before I end my little description of my home town let me say

that here and there wiggling down those green hills was a deeper shade of green

where a little spring came out of the earth and wandered down the hill, with cress

growing on both banks. Have you ever had fresh home made bread and butter and

cress? If not, you haven’t lived.

I must tell you about one funny man as I have been too solemn this time. He was Edwin

and the

moon

Edwin . . . and his two little girls went to school with me. One night he went ‘up

the town’. It was full moon, but before he got there a whopping big cloud covered

the moon, and in the darkness he fell into a ditch and nearly broke his neck. The

next night he went ‘up town’ again. It was still full moon and there was not a

cloud in the sky, but Edwin was armed with a rabbiter’s lantern. A friend saw him

and asked ‘Why the lantern on this lovely moonlight night?’. Edwin said ‘I’m

showing my independence of the goddamn moon’ and went happily on his way. I

think perhaps he wasn’t as eccentric as they all thought, but a very practical man.

We all needed the moonlight you know, as there was no town lighting, and in the

deep darkness it could be eerie as well as dark. On one of those creepy nights

when Ma was away and my father was somewhere else, my mother and I were

staying with ‘Gargie’ (my grandfather)

who told the most bloodcurdling ghost Gargie

yarns I have ever heard—so creepy that no one, even himself, dared go off to bed.

That was understandable in his case as he was blinded in an accident years before

when he was in his early twenties. So there we all sat creeping closer and closer

to the ﬁre, and our spines tingling with every gust of wind outside. Suddenly all

hell let loose—a most infernal racket was coming from the direction of the fowl

yard—turkeys, geese, ducks, fowls, all screaming blue murder in every language Patchy

in the

fowl yard

known to chooks. We guessed what it was all about. ‘Patchy’ was on the prowl

looking for his favourite dish—duck. He was an ancient Chinaman left over from

the days when hordes of Chinese did their share of gathering gold. Mostly they

washed it out from the sandy bed of the creek—some were still doing it—and

he used to bolster up his diet by a raid on our fowl yards, and as far as we were

concerned he was welcome to it. He was so frail even I could have blown him

over. These Chinese brought a lot of colour to us. Some of them began a market Chinese

mengarden, and would take the fresh vegetables from door to door in great round

baskets about two feet high with three pieces of ﬁne rope looped at the top. Two

John James Parker (1850–1924)

baskets were carried, ﬁnely balanced at each end of a very smooth pole, and with

the two baskets he would jog merrily all around the town. These Chinese sellers

always dressed the same—in tight blue jeans and tunic, and an Asian hat ∧ under

which was a long skinny pigtail which always fascinated us. They had a kind of

josshouse in one corner of the local cemetery (a tiny brick building, still there)

and part of the burial ceremony was the placing on the grave of bowls of Oriental

food which, believe me, no vandal ever took.

Christmas was a lovely time for us and the Chinese. Everyone who had been a

customer in any way in the previous year was given a gift—lovely jars of ginger

in syrup, and for me glass bangles in all the colours of the rainbow. They tinkled

like tiny bells when there were three or four or more on my arm, and they broke

very easily, but while they lasted they were heaven.

And no more until next time.

Love from Grandma

Dear Adam,

Who will I tell you about today? Our little creek ran through the town, down past

our three houses, then about half a mile downstream there was a weir, and in the

old mining days a lot of the water was diverted to a race—a deep narrow ditch in

which the water was sent to turn a huge water wheel that ran a battery that helped

separate the gold from the stone dug from the mines. I can remember the deep

throbbing noise of the battery, and when it all ceased. There was a lovely picnic

spot, with the shallow creek and a most gorgeous swimming hole. Old houses hadswimming

hole disappeared from the hillsides, but parts of the orchards were still there, mostly

with just quinces and almonds, which we would munch on the way home.

No one had swimming togs, and when we went for a swim it was in the most awful

collection of cast off garments, mostly worn-out petticoats and bloomers. One day

we started out for a picnic and forgot our swimmers, so my cousin and I were sent

back for them. She loved to play jokes, so as well as the collection of things we

usually wore she made a collection of what she would like us to wear—an inch

wide silver belt for my mother, a little collar for another, a glove for someone else,

and a garter for another. When we got back to the party she hid the petticoats and

things, and gave them just the belt and other nonsense. They scared the daylights

out of her by wearing them for their swim, and remembering it I think they looked

better in the nearly-nude state than in those terrible petticoats.

No one bought ready-made undies, and before my mother was married she boughtmaterial

for

nighties

dozens of yards of ﬁne white material to be made into nighties etc. Going home

that night with her boyfriend (later my father) he demanded to see the parcel, so

undid it and then wrapped it all around them so that they looked like a couple of

to Tumut

to Batlow

to Wagga Wagga

to Gundagai

Adelong

Creek

Adelong

Creek

0 1 2 km

0 1 mile

Adelong, NSW

1: battery. 2: Adelong Falls. 3: numerous mine shafts. 4: Victoria Hill. 5: the Cochrane,

Parker and Withers houses were probably near here. 6: Post Ofﬁce. 7: school. This map

is based on the Tumut 1:25 000 map made by the NSW Land Information Centre in the

1970s. Adelong Creek ﬂows to the north.

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane and her mother, Catherine Jane Parker.

Print 85x140 mm pasted onto album page, Pam Macdonald collection. On album page:

Self and Mum, March 1903. Esther would have been four years old and Catherine twenty-

nine.

ghosts tethered together as they wobbled down the road. All went well until they

tried to cross the creek by the plank—a thick piece of wood about a foot wide and

tethered to each bank (there were planks like this over the creek about every half

mile). By the time they got to the middle of the plank they realised how silly they

looked, and laughed so much that they fell in the creek, and all that material had

to be laundered before it could be sewn into garments.

Only once was that creek not my friend, and that was when we had a ﬂood, and creek

in ﬂoodit became a raging, muddy torrent hundreds of yards wide, with drowned horses,

cows, sheep, even big trees ﬂoating madly downstream. I was terriﬁed, and could

not come inside, but sat on the front verandah watching it slowly widening. In a

very little while it was its usual self once more, one foot deep and crystal clear

between green mossy banks. However it was not friendly to an old Chinese man

who tried to cross it in his spring cart. The cart tipped over, and by the time he Swaller-

puddenhad cut his horse clear his clothes were cut to pieces. He arrived at our door with a

wheat bag to cover him, and the poor old man was crying. My mother found him

some spare clothes and gave him some food, and that cheered him up. His name

was ‘Swaller-pudden’.

Unless it was raining or terribly cold just about everyone went up to the shops on Saturday

night

shopping

Saturday night. The shops were open until all hours—ten or eleven o’clock—and

one of the shopkeepers had put a great box on his verandah so the mothers of small

children, as soon as their shopping was over, sat on the box and the littlies went

to sleep. The three, four, and ﬁve year old ones played tag around the verandah

posts. Not very exciting, eh? But it was the most exciting few hours of our week.

The town had a band—not a very big one, but very true and tuneful. My grand- town

bandfather and his boys and a German family named Homan were the band. The

Homan family spread music all through the Riverina—if there was a Homan in the

town there was a band. My grandfather was a most talented musician, and played

more than one wind instrument. John Lemmone, who was Melba’s ﬂautist, said

the world lost a ﬁne musician because grandfather lived in a little outback town

and was blind. Sometimes when I see ‘Matey’ playing his ﬂute it makes the clock

roll back well over half a century, and I see my young uncles practising away at

their ﬂute and clarinet. One of them

was only six years older than I, and the

other

nine years older. They could all sing beautifully too and that may be why

we didn’t feel bored because we had no radio or TV. It was lovely to hear the

family singing in parts as they harmonised so beautifully.

When I was four or ﬁve years old, one of the worst bushﬁres we had ever known ﬁghting

bushﬁresswept through southern New South Wales and northern Victoria. The loss of hu-

man life was very high, and of sheep and cattle horrifying. We were not in great

Reginald Athol John Parker (1892–)

George R Parker (1888–1912)

danger even though the town was surrounded, as there were no thick forests of

trees close, but the people of one, two and three miles out were. A ﬁreﬁghting

brigade was set up. A small body of men was left behind to guard the town, and

all the other men went off in groups to help the small farmers and selectors in trou-

ble. Scattered around the district, too, were the wives and families of the district’s

teamsters. The teamsters drove the horse- or bullock-wagons, mostly taking wool

from the big properties, so they would be away on the road for weeks at a time,

leaving their families in small cottages, most even unfenced. It was a dreary life

at the best of times, but in bushﬁre times it was horrible.

I remember two things my father said one night on his return from a day ﬁreﬁght-

ing. One was ‘I saw the most pathetic sight today that I have ever seen. We went

out to see if Mrs Smith was in danger’ (she was a teamster’s wife with a young

family). ‘When we arrived she and her six-year-old were trying to put out a ﬁre

on the outside wall of the house, and she didn’t stop until her skirt caught ﬁre, but

we were able to take over’. Another thing that he never recovered from was a little

episode that happened that afternoon. There were several lonely families in that

same little valley, and it was decided that he would ride over the hill to the next

gully to look for help. He jumped off his horse and ran around to the back door of

a house, only to be told by the woman that lived there that she was alone and very

worried. He dashed back and as he remounted his horse he saw that her roof was

beginning to burn. As soon as he shouted to her and said to bring buckets three

men ran out of the front door, each with a bunch of cards in his hand. They had

been playing cards while their neighbours burnt. He rode off and left them with-

out a backward glance. So there were people even then whose motto was ‘I’m all

right Jack’, but the band my father was with managed to save that ﬁrst little group.

We were left with orders that as soon as the ﬁre came to within a certain distance

of the town, mothers would gather on the banks of the creek and if necessary dunk

the children in up to their necks. But it didn’t come to that, and we didn’t even

leave our homes.

Fire ﬁghting then was not like it is now. We had no ﬁre engines or hoses and relied

on saplings and wet wheat bags, so it was a losing battle if the ﬁres were ﬁerce.

My grandmother was a wonderful riﬂe shot, and used to love it when an eagle orMa and

the riﬂe a hawk came over looking for a young hen or chicken. She would dash for her

riﬂe, and down the hawk would come. I remember once a snake tried to get into

her aviary, and he had the same fate. She blew his head off, but didn’t touch one

scared little bird.

There was one family living not far from her home, in a little cottage—lots ofsinging

at night children—and on warm moonlight nights we would all gather on a big rock and

sing and sing. One of my uncles (George) played the mouth organ beautifully, so

we enjoyed it all very much. Another uncle, a bit older, was not content to allow a

group of young people to sit on a rock and sing, so decided to scare the daylights

out of us. So he went to the bottom of the orchard and donned a sheet, and he had

a broom to make it high or low. He was a fearsome sight in the moonlight, and he

wondered why we didn’t scatter, screaming with terror. What he didn’t know was

that my father had an idea he was up to some prank and followed him, so almost

as soon as the ‘ghost’ came into view we saw my father close behind him—and the ‘ghost’

gaining—with a nice sturdy stick in his hand. We watched delighted, until the

lovely moment when the ghost got half a paling across his bottom. That was the

end of our ghost. He didn’t have any enthusiasm to scare us after that. There were

no ‘kinders’ then, and we lived so far from the school that I did not begin until school

I was six and a half years old. Everyone was so proud that it was classiﬁed as a

‘Superior’ Public School. It was a nice brick building—or rather two buildings,

the second being the ‘Infants’, with a croquet pitch in between. The school was on

top of a hill looking over the town, and was surrounded by a white picket fence,

and almost all around were lovely big pine trees. We would plan a cubby, and the

walls were pine needles piled about eight inches high, and in the winter we would

see the snow on all the surrounding hills. It was a long way to school then as we

had to cross the creek by the rumbly town bridge. We could almost tell the type

of vehicle by the rumble it made. One evening there was a very severe one, and earth

tremorwe wondered what it was all about until the earth beneath us trembled and the

crockery in the kitchen began to crash to the ﬂoor. It wasn’t a real quake—that

was in New Zealand—so we only had the edge of it, and our earth didn’t open.

I still like going back to the old town even though so many of the homes of my

childhood are gone, including the three in a row where our family lived.

Dear Catherine,

Writing to Andrew and Adam today has made me think of so many things from

the days when I was a little girl. I was the only grandchild for over ﬁve years, until

my brother was born, so I always knew I was very welcome over at Ma’s. I would Ma

scuttle across a couple of paddocks and run breathlessly down the stone steps and

into whatever room she was in, and she would say ‘Halloa, pet, what very nice

things are we going to do today?’ and somehow after that anything became an

adventure.

One of my favourite days was when we would take a big basket and roam the big guinea hens’

nestsbare hill up behind her house, looking for guinea hens’ nests. They are notorious

for wandering everywhere to lay their eggs—in any little clump of grass or in the

lovely maidenhair fern that grew beneath the great rocks all over the hills. On one

glorious occasion we found a nest with ﬁfty-seven eggs, but we had to be careful

when we broke them for fear some of them were stale—they weren’t, as guinea

hens have community nests—all in together.

Ma tried her hand at everything. Once when a little bird of mine died—a littleMa

blue wren—she did a marvellous job of stufﬁng it. I wouldn’t care to have it done

now, but it stopped me from howling all around the house. We would clean and

dry rockmelon seeds, and she would thread them into a most elaborate necklace,

which I considered much superior to the Crown jewels—they were pretty good

too. Once I heard my father say ‘My mother-in-law has the most beautiful carriage

of any woman I know’. It worried me terribly to think that my father, who I

thought was just about perfect, could tell a lie like that, and I mooched around

mumbling ‘Why, she hasn’t got a carriage at all, only a sulky’. Ages after I found

that he meant that she stood and walked beautifully, something that she did not

pass on to any of us, unfortunately.

Now I will not say any more about the olden days but modern days. I am so

pleased you did well in the exams. Good girl. I am looking forward so much to

seeing you next week and so is Auntie Margaret. Brush up your German, as there

is an old lady here who natters away to me for hours, and I can understand only

about three words, but I watch her face and if she looks sad, so do I, and if she is

happy then I am too. She is an old pet. I am sending you this little picture because

I think it is pretty.

My love to you all from Grandma.

Dear Adam

I was thinking one day, when I listened to you boys and realised you all hadhorse-

drawn

vehicles

dreams of a Mercedes in the garage, of the way we went here and there. Men, and

boys and girls whose people had a paddock, had horses or ponies, and if we lived

at all out of town each family had either a sulky or a buggy. A sulky had one seat

to seat three, and it only had two wheels. A buggy had four wheels and a double

buggy had two seats, each holding three, and plenty of luggage-room on the ﬂoor

of it. If you really wanted to impress, each buggy owner had a pair of perfectly

matched horses, either black or chestnut, and there were buggy rugs—cotton in

summer, and very often skin rugs in winter.

The only time I didn’t love going out behind those prancing horses was when therehorses

and the

train

was someone to be met at the train. Almost all the horses were not geared to the

horrors of that pufﬁng monster the train and had to be got ready before it appeared.

They would be tied up ﬁrmly to a fence, then they suffered the ignominy of having

their heads put in bags, so that at least they did not have to see this awful monster.

My reason for not liking to take part in this performance was that the alternative

was such a thrill—and that was a trip in to the railway by the coach. It was exactlyhorse-

drawn

coach

the same as the Cobb and Co coaches, with two seats inside and some more up

beside the driver. There were three, and sometimes four horses, and they went off

at a great rate, carrying not only passengers and their luggage but His Majesty’s

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane aged four, and Esther Mary Parker aged twenty.

On back in Esther Cochrane’s hand: Ettie Cochrane and her Aunt Ett, and in another

earlier hand: To Ma from Ett with love on her 20th birthday. Print 47x68 mm mounted on

fawn cardboard. Pam Macdonald collection.

Esther Mary Parker aged twenty.

No caption. Print 40x65 mm mounted on fawn cardboard.

mails on the roof . It was eight miles from the railway to the town,

ﬁrstly after

four miles to a village called Grahamstown, then two miles to Shepardstown, then

the Big Moment when we went dashing up and around a steep hill—not a tree on

it, just great boulders as big as houses, and a dirt road around the shoulder of it. It

was called The Devil’s Elbow, and I used to be vaguely sorry when we got round Devil’s

Elbowit safely and were not tipped over to go plunging down the rough hillside, coach,

horses, and everyone. When I returned years later a good safe road had been made

around that hill lower down, and the coach and spanking horses had been replaced

by a motorbus.

There was a dredge at Grahamstown, an immense thing, which was taking the gold

dredgegold from the bed of the creek, and left it looking pretty horrible. Even when I

was a small girl I got comfort from knowing that the rugged narrow gully and

the falls would make it impossible for the dredge people to come up to the town

without dismantling the entire dredge and rebuilding it, and it wasn’t worth it. So

the green grass and the willows and the orchards were left undisturbed.

I told you we all had fur rugs for buggies and sulkies. They were usually possum mooning

possumsskin, and each family did their own hunting. I can remember my teenage uncles

going out when there was a full moon, and they would ‘moon’ the possum—get

the outline of it when it was between them and the moon, so it didn’t have a hope

of escape. Most of the men were marvellous riﬂe shots too, and their favourite

sport on Sunday mornings was taking pot shots at small tins. One uncle could put

a hole through the centre of a penny while it was ‘on the wing’. Fox hunting was

the most popular sport, and a lot of wives had fox furs around their shoulders—

some of them not so good.

My aunt

and my mother went to an afternoon concert one day. My aunt was Ett Parker

and the

fox fur

wearing a fox fur that went lower than her knees in front, ending in two thick

tails, besides which she had an elaborate hairdo eight or nine inches high and

topped by an equally high and elaborate hat. An old man was sitting behind her,

and early in the programme he began a campaign of ‘Eh, lady, take yer ’at orf’.

She went all haughty and ignored him, so he stopped his pleadings, but later on

when the concert was over and they were out on the footpath she looked down,

and one of the lovely fox tails was cut clean away, so the old ‘take yer ’at orf’ man

had had his revenge.

Dear Adam

When you came over on Monday we played ‘Memory’ and ‘Fish’, and I thought

of the games we had—or rather the ones we didn’t have. Our family was a bit

The railway station was probably at Mount Horeb, about 13 km north of Adelong.

Esther Mary Parker (1882–1970)

wowserish about ordinary cards, and their theme song was ‘The lips that touch

liquor shall never touch mine’. My father was an exception. On Saturday nights,liquor

when we were ‘up the town’, he would have two beers and a game of billiards with

a friend. Two beers were necessary, as no man worth his salt would ‘drink with

the ﬂies’—a solitary drink was known as a ‘Jimmy Woodser’ for some reason. We

didn’t miss the beer, as the home made brew was as tasty and refreshing as what

we can buy at the hotels now. One of my uncles made hop beer, which was just as

potent, and we had horehound beer, too. The horehound plants grew wild all over

the hills, a small sage green plant with fuzzy leaves. It made a beer more bitter

than hop.

Little girls weren’t catered for very much. Dolls, dolls, dolls, and we could not buy

clothes for them. My mother’s Aunt Jane and her family lived not far away. She

had ﬁve daughters and one son, and Uncle Jim was an old honey. The youngest of

the the girls was only two or three years older than I, and she was a real smartie.childhood

friend I tagged along after her like a willing little dog. She teased me unmercifully, but

I took it like a lamb, and we had more fun than anyone I know when we were

together—all home made.

Uncle Jim had acquired a merry-go-round horse, which had been made into a

rocking horse on immense rockers, and we loved it, but our star turn was our

home made music. We had collected, by diligent searching, two rows of empty

bottles, each hanging by the neck. There were eight of them in each row, and theybottle

music were perfectly tuned, so with a little steel poker each we had a great time playing

them. We even aspired to playing parts. We also had a scale of drills,

and did

the same with them. Dad was very amused one day. Just as he was leaving to ride

off somewhere, I yelled to him ‘Oh Dad, if you are going anywhere near the Gib,

bring back a drill that goes like this’, and I gave him a note in a shrill little treble,

and expected him to carry the note in his mind while he rode four miles to the

blacksmith’s shop at the mine.

We were not frustated musicians, though, as Aunt Jane had a lovely piano, andpiano

playing two of the girls were good players. The one who was my friend was a brilliant

player of popular music, and in those days and so far from the city, we did not

hear much classical music. Years later when I was away from there I would think

‘She was not that good’, and I would go back and listen, and it would be lovelier

than ever. So often it would be said ‘What a pity she has not learned’, but perhaps

being taught in the ordinary country way may have spoilt that ability to produce

those lovely sounds.

She kept her love of the absurd until her husband died very suddenly, and then she

reorganised her life so that it became somewhat absurd. She has the most beautiful

Lengths of steel rod or bar used for drilling rock in a mine

grand piano, but since he died she has not allowed it to be opened, nor will she

touch another.

Once she went to Tumut Show, and during Show Week there was always some Tumut

Showtheatre on—blood and thunder drama or vaudeville. This particular year it was

vaudeville, and their pianist fell and broke his arm. A local person told them to

get in touch with my cousin, so she played the accompaniments for each item. It

was a very corny show, and one of the items was a ﬁre-eating performance, and

she had to play thunder music for it. Well, he ate ﬁre and she thundered until she

was sick and tired of it all, so as he showed no sign of stopping she switched over

to a popular song of those days, ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’. The

audience knew it and roared their approval, and the actor was furious. However,

they had their revenge on her. She had hung up an expensive hat behind the stage,

and one of them pinched it.

I have just realised that in all the times we played together as little girls we never

once played with dolls. I envied her one thing, and wanted it very much. It was

a plain old beer mug, glass, with a handle, and my idea of heaven was a drink of

water from that mug.

Weddings were very simple, and most of them were in the sitting room of the weddings

bride’s mother’s home. If they were in a church, Wednesday morning was the

popular day as it was a holiday—the stores closed at noon as they were open until

ten or eleven o’clock on Saturday nights.

One thing that has developed from one of our old legends is that silly looking dog dogs

on the tucker box, on the Hume Highway some miles this side of Gundagai. It

has been put there, where there is a good stream of trafﬁc between Sydney and

Melbourne, whereas it should be way up on the other side of the town on the way

to Talbingo. I am enclosing a verse of the original poem, so you will see that it had

to be made a little more polite. Guess what! None of us had any cats, but there

were dogs in all directions, as the uncles all went hunting, so they had mainly

kangaroo dogs, which aren’t attractive pets—and once we had a collie which bit

me on the face, so it was sent away.

I know now that I was never bored or sad, and the most vivid of my memories are

of beautiful surroundings and lovely food. The orchard with its dozens of trees—

but I have told you about that, and the poultry, and home cured hams and bacon,

and great dishes of sweet corn, with butter melting through the cobs that an hour

before had been growing in the garden. Those big family meals of home grown

food gave me a feeling of protection and security that even the invasion of ‘Patchy’ Marnie

and the

goat

couldn’t take away. We had our moments of panic, but not too often. For a little

while we had a neighbour who had a goat which was an absolute rogue, and most

i wont try to use capitals from now on as they are not working well

destructive. No matter what my father did to protect his orchard and vegetable and

ﬂower gardens, that wretched goat got in and destroyed what it did not gobble, so

my mother decided that a desperate situation needed a desperate remedy. She

did not want the owner to see what she was doing, as he had been very helpful

about these invasions, so she decoyed the goat into the kitchen, got astride him

backwards, lifted his tail and put a rag soaked in turpentine under it. She was not

prepared for the result. He leapt bang into the dresser where our china was on

display, then tore through the wire netting fence, wrecking two panels of it, and

he didn’t stop until he reached home. Whenever he saw my mother after that he

tore away like mad. She had to pick herself up off the ﬂoor and carry two buckets

of broken china out to the dump. She had a genius for having an unfortunate end

to her efforts.

Once she and her sister spent two days peeling, coring and slicing apples, anddrying

apples stringing them in the orchard to dry. That night the cow broke in and ate the lot,

including the yards and yards of linen thread the rings were threaded on. We did

not have as many apple pies that winter. One evening she and her sister went to

the shops for some groceries, as it had been too wet to go by day and take the

children—by this time I had a brother

ﬁve-and-a-half years younger than I, and

Auntie had a son,

too. On the way home when passing the old battery (not theswaggies

later one run by the water wheel down below the weir) they went into it to get two

or three bricks to put in a corner of a garden bed. They were wandering around

in the dark trying to ﬁnd some loose ones, and Auntie called to Mum ‘Oh Kate,

here are some here’. Her voice woke up an old swaggie who had been sleeping

peacefully in the shelter of the old ruin. He woke up with a grunt, and they were

so scared they ran off, leaving a pound of butter and half a pound of tea on his

stomach. I do not know who got the greatest shock.

Swaggies were the order of the day, and there was an unwritten law that when they

came to our door at sunset, when their day’s walk was over, we had to give them

a day’s ration of tea, sugar and ﬂour. They would boil the billy and make a camp,

and we always gave them some meat as well. Have you ever seen a camp oven?

It was about ﬁfteen inches across, round, and standing on legs so that it was about

eight inches from the bottom of the ﬁre. The lid was high with a groove around

the rim, so when the food that was to be cooked was put in and the lid put on, hot

ashes could be heaped on the lid and the result was mouth-watering, especially

new bread. I never had any yearnings for the swaggies’ damper, though, as the

dough was just laid in the hot ashes to cook. Funnily enough, no one ever seemed

to expect the swaggie to do anything for his day’s rations except to be careful that

his campﬁre did not turn into a bushﬁre, and get on his way in the morning. They

would settle in for the winter in the ruins of the closed-down mine buildings. One

William Alfred Joseph Cochrane (1903–80, known as Bill)

William Athol Charles Withers (1905–81)

winter one of them did that up behind our house, and although we knew he was

still there, he wasn’t seen for a few days. My mother became concerned, so my

father went up to enquire, and found him very ill, so called a doctor. The swaggie

conﬁded his private life to Dad, and asked him to get in touch with relatives in

England if he died. Well, he died in Tumut hospital, and Dad wrote as requested.

He said we would have got a big shock if we had known who the relatives were,

but no amount of questioning on my mother’s part ever prised that little secret

from him. The boys had a weird collection of pets, and once had a baby fox and fox and

magpiea magpie, both at the same time. The magpie was tame and running loose, but

the fox was tethered like a dog. One day the magpie came too close to the fox

which bit its leg off at knee level. I was horriﬁed, and I think the magpie got over

it before I did. He was soon hopping around on one leg quite cheerfully.

One year in the middle of winter two people, a man and his wife, arrived in a

caravan drawn by two horses, and camped on the ﬂat just beyond Ma’s fence. It

worried her as the weather was terrible, so she sent a message to them to bring the

caravan into the shelter of the big barn, and there they stayed for the remainder

of the winter. They were quiet people, and were living out of doors for a year as

he was threatened with TB. Ma sent them little gifts of eggs and milk, and when

they were ready to move on they gave her their much prized parrot as a gesture of

gratitude, which was very understandable, but it brought its problems. The parrot the parrot

and

the parson

had spent most of its long life in just about every woolshed in the Riverina, and

its language. . . ! We ignored it, but not when the parson came. The parson was

a truly good person, and his calls all had the same routine—when he was seen

coming around the hillside afternoon tea was prepared, also little gifts of eggs,

cream, jars of jams and preserves, but before any of those activities were begun

the ﬁrst job was to get the bird into isolation, away down in the bottom of the

orchard, where he stayed until the reverend departed. So if we saw one of the

boys belting down the hill with a birdcage swinging, we knew the minister was in

the ofﬁng.

I have told you about Patchy, who used to steal the ducks. Another Chinese was

Lok Chew, well that was what his name sounded like. He turned from washing Lok Chew

and the

thief

gold from the creek to growing vegetables, which he brought around the town in

big round baskets. He was honest, and expected honesty from others, too. One

day one of my uncles stole a tomato from his basket. The next time Lok Chew

saw him he came up to my uncle—who was only a schoolboy at the time—with

a whopping big red tomato in his outstretched hand, and said ‘Come along, Jim,

here’s more marter, boy, come along, more marter, boy’. In his other hand which

was behind his back he had the biggest and most deadly looking stick which,

luckily for Jim, he saw, as one swipe with that and it would not have been more

‘marter’ or more anything for quite some time.

Most of the boys thought it good fun to bait the old Chinese, and there were manybaiting

Chinese raids, especially in the watermelon season—why I don’t know, as their families

all had gardens—and melons. One story went around that a group of teenagers

went up quietly one Sunday afternoon while the old Chinese were having a little

nap. Their hut was very primitive, with cracks a couple of inches wide in places,

so the boys got one man’s pigtail through one of the cracks near where he was

lying, tied it so he could not get it back, and then went off and yelled ‘Fire! ﬁre!’

and retreated, leaving much pandemonium behind them. I never quite believed

that story, but the boys stuck to it.

There were several groups of people there, mostly Australian born of English or

Irish or German descent, many like myself with aged great-grandparents still there

who had come such a long way—in the case of my mother’s family from Germany

in the 1840s, and from England earlier than that. There was absolutely no racial

prejudice and we were mostly judged on whether we paid our grocery bills or not.

But there was one group who simply would not mix in with the other people in the

town, and they were the Cornishmen and their families. Actually they lived in aCornish

people little group of homes almost a mile from the town, and we passed through it on our

way home from the railway. It was known, not affectionately, as ‘Cornish Town’.

They did not believe in dancing, or a visit to any of the local pubs or concerts, but

came up to the town in full force on Sunday morning for Chapel, (the Methodist

Church, which was then known as Wesleyan.) They had their Sunday school

picnic once a year in a paddock near the school, and if any non-Wesleyan little

boy or girl had the curiosity to linger and watch, one of the elders would send

them off in no uncertain terms—in thick Cornish lingo—something like this: ‘Get

thee home, you, get thee home. Thee be get no saffron cairk, you.’

The Show was the big event of the year, and we went to the surrounding townsAdelong

Show Gundagai and Tumut too, for theirs. I liked them, as ‘the Brungle blacks’ would

come in to them and give us an exhibition of their skill with boomerang and spear.

They had not then adopted our way of dressing, and looked most novel in their loin

cloths and head bands. We would throw coins to them after the demonstration.

But the star attraction at the Show was August Eichon. He was a recluse who

lived up in the hills miles out of the town. He lived very close to nature, and for

years watched the animals and what they did, especially in regard to a cure for

sicknesses. He watched them when they were suffering from snake bite, and over

the years he produced a snake bite cure—in fact it was a marvellous remedy forsnake bite

cure any form of blood poisoning. He had a platform at the shows, and entertained the

onlookers by having a snake bite a chook which he would treat with his mixture.

At ﬁrst it would look as if it was dying, then it would shake its head as if recovering

from a hangover, and in a few moments was as fresh as a daisy. Then he would

allow the snake to bite another hen and not treat it, and in a few moments it would

be dead, after which he would do a roaring trade selling his snake bite cure at a

shilling a small bottle. Needless to say, I was always in the back row of the chorus

during these demonstrations. He was an old practical joker too, and when he came

to town he would saunter in to the bar of one of the pubs, put his ‘luggage’—

a big red handkerchief—on the counter of the bar, and order a pint. Then the

handkerchief would begin to squirm, and the bar would be empty in one minute

ﬂat, when the other drinkers realised it was full of snakes. The poor pub-keepers

had to ask him not to come, as he was bad for business. He played one trick that

nobody laughed at, though. There was an elderly widow who had a little dark, snake

necktieovercrowded drapery store. He went in one day and asked for a tie, and when she

asked him just what colour etc. he had in mind, he said ‘Oh, something like the

one I have on’, and leaned across the counter while she reached forward to feel

the texture of the tie. His tie, of course, was a snake around his neck, with the

ends tucked into his vest.

I did not realise it, but the little town was dying, and was gradually becoming Adelong

in declinejust a shopping centre for the men on the land, and they were beginning to pros-

per. My mother went once with a neighbour to spend a day with relatives of the

neighbour. They were not well educated, but had prospered, and had built a lovely

new homestead. You can imagine Mum’s amusement when the farmer’s wife said

to her daughter ‘Maud, go and see if the old sow has got into the drorinroom’

(drawing room).

Then I knew we were joining the many who were leaving, and gone were the

days of sitting in the cool grape summer house, and reaching up for a fat bunch of

white or black muscatel grapes, or sitting in the ﬁg tree and eating ﬁgs until my

tongue was sore, or squelching under the mulberry tree, or searching for ripe cape

gooseberries.

I had been to school for only a year, and was seven-and-a-half

when we left— leaving

Adelongbetween Christmas and New Year—and all I remember of our departure was my

mother and her sister and Ma standing under the big ﬁve-crown apple tree, crying

bitterly. I do not remember their goodbyes to me. We got the train eight miles

away,

and went as far as Cootamundra, and the train went on to Sydney. We had

relatives in Cootamundra, and I vaguely resented them, although I liked them, but

when you are seven it is far more exciting to spend a night in a whopping big hotel

than with even a nice aunt.

This implies that the year was 1905

Perhaps at Mount Horeb—see page 21

West Wyalong

We caught the Temora mail at about six am the next day, and arrived at WestWest

Wyalong Wyalong just after eleven. In those days, Central Wyalong was really the end

of the line—years later it was extended to Lake Cargelligo. We left the train at

Central, and went in a decrepit old bus to West Wyalong—no Cobb and Co coach

type of bus with prancing horses, but only a couple of quiet old nags stirring up

the dust. I do not remember any excitement, but I remember feeling dismay as all

around us was this colourless dreary dusty landscape—mallee on each side of the

road to town. Mallee is not green, but a greenish grey, and there was not a blade

of grass anywhere. An old school-friend of Mum’s was waiting at our gate when

we left the bus, and asked us to come over at once, as she had our lunch ready,

and it was a lovely baked dinner served so beautifully. But when we returned to

the cottage that was to be our home— for a while I still failed to see its charms. Inﬁrst house

(Main Street) itself it was alright, but the garden! The house stood in a yard without one blade

of grass, indeed the earth was hard-baked, and even had drought cracks in it. The

only spot of green in the ‘garden’ was a poor, miserable pepper tree, looking half-

dead, which it was. I should have been grateful for that poor little tree for having

the guts to stay alive, but illogically I have hated them ever since.

That afternoon Mum went to a little shop about a hundred yards along the street

for some groceries, and as she entered this shop she was nearly bowled over by a

great billygoat with a bunch of carrots in his mouth, hotly pursued by the woman

who ran the little shop. There was a small collection of not-very-fresh vegetables,

tea, sugar and a row of bottles of boiled lollies and ha’penny sweets. We were half

way between West and Central Wyalong, and the shopping centre was about half a

mile away. There seemed to be hotels in all directions. It was a much newer town

than the one we had left and the mines, although not so famous as a couple of the

ones in the old town, were still giving a living to a lot of men. It wasn’t much of

a living though, as they had to work an eight-hour day for six days a week, andminers and

poverty if they took a few days off, it came out of their own pockets as there was no sick

leave, pensions, or widows’ pensions. The best they could do for themselves was

join The Manchester Unity or some such lodge, and then they were paid a small

allowance for a few weeks, and it was gradually reduced until they were ﬁnally on

half-a-crown a week, and his wife would have to go out and do someone’s laundry.

So when we hear people condemning unionism—which perhaps has gone too far

in the other direction—I remember the real poverty I saw in my childhood, when

men worked very hard for two pounds ten shillings a week (ﬁve dollars). We talk

about the good old days, but in a new raw town like West Wyalong the only good

thing about them is that they are a long way away.

In Adelong the sanitary arrangements were primitive—a deep hole in the ground,sanitation

and the privy built above it. We had not adopted the genteel word ‘toilet’ for it

then, and there was usually a rose pergola around it, making it a splendid place

to meditate. West Wyalong was modern—it had pans and a weekly visit from the

sanitary man and an annual outbreak of typhoid fever that had the little hospital

bursting at the seams. We had only the water that ran into our tanks from the roof,

and stealing water was so rife that tanks with outside taps had locks on them.

My mother had family in the area—aunt, uncle and several cousins. Two of them

were younger than I, so they were more like my cousins than hers. The afternoon

we arrived Clara,

who was then six-and-a-half, a year younger than I, came over

to meet me, bringing a ‘getting to know you’ gift—the pattern for a six-gored skirt,

which she had designed herself. I was most impressed, as I couldn’t sew a stitch,

and was not very good at learning, either. A neighbour’s young daughter joined

the merry party, and Clara and I soon learned that she was a little thief, so that as

soon as she lost interest in our game of dolls and left for home, we followed at the

right moment to catch her before she got through her gate. Then we would hold

her and shake her vigorously, and down would come a doll’s dress or petticoat

from where she had put them under her pants. She never got the message, and we

never ceased to overtake her and get our property back.

The ﬁrst two weeks we were there the temperature was up over 100 degrees,

hot

weathersometimes over 116.

I had always been a skinny little thing, with colds and

bronchitis, but I revelled in the dry heat, and almost never got a cold. The heat

almost killed my brother, and he spent the heatwave lying on a mat on the ﬂoor

under the dining table, with a wet sheet hanging almost to the ﬂoor to make a cool

breeze.

At the end of the holidays I started going to school, but oh what a difference from school at

Wyalongthe mellow old brick one I had been to before. This one was a long wooden one,

with three classrooms in a long row, and a long hat-and-coat room also running the

same length. The desks were long enough to take four pupils, ﬁve at a pinch, and

there were three groups of them, four deep in the end rooms, and two in the centre

room, so there were enough desks for about a hundred and thirty to a hundred

and sixty pupils, but the school was never crowded. We were supposed to eat our

lunch in a three-sided shed, but in that climate it was unbearably hot in summer,

so we all crawled under the school which was about three feet above the ground,

and there was a slight draught. No one warned me, and before I could unwrap

my lunch one of the town’s nine hundred and ninety nine goats had grabbed my goats

lunch, and tore off with it, devouring the lot, including the good linen serviette it

was wrapped in. My mother was delighted! The school grounds were not fenced,

and so we were at the mercy of those great stinking brutes, whose staple diet

Clara Ethel Parker (1899–), a daughter of William Robert Parker (1852–1914).

38 degrees Celsius

47 degrees Celsius

was mallee leaves and the labels from tins of jam or preserved fruit and anyone’s

washing hanging on the line if the lines were not up too high for them to reach. I

have told you of the two most notorious ones, ‘Hum some’ and ‘Stinkabit’.

Once we decided to put on a show for the beneﬁt of our long-suffering parents so

we marshalled all the talent we could, and believe me it was crook, and produced

a circus. We rented a room for threepence a night from Mrs Wesley—a neighbourkid’s circus

of ours who was reputed to be very wealthy. She had the usual little shop with

a handful of jelly beans and some bottles of warm lemonade, but her real source

of wealth came from half a dozen little one-room shacks which she rented to OA

pensioners for a shilling a week. One of the shacks had a ﬁreplace so it was

two shillings, and I think that the pension was ten shillings a week, so with what

was left the lucky tenant of that mansion couldn’t afford ﬁrewood anyway. My

mother and another neighbour used to send the old ladies a hot dinner on Sunday,

and I think they lived on the memory of it until the next Sunday. We rented one

of the rooms for our circus, and I was made the MC of the programme. Dad

was very amused when I announced with a ﬂourish ‘The next item will be by

our lady e-quist-re-enne’, and in came a little girl astride one of the local goats.

In case of accidents we had brought in an old kapok mattress which was so old

that it was really only a bag of dust. When some of the boys in the cast did

some somersaulting such a grey cloud of kapok dust arose that no one could see

the performance, and our audience left hurriedly with handkerchiefs held to their

faces, so our circus was not a success. In any case we were such a ﬁre hazard

a petition was begun to have us closed down, so our one attempt to go into the

entertainment racket was not a howling success.

We had a ﬁre brigade, which was only useful if the ﬁre happened near any ofdams

the few dams in the town. These were not natural, as it was so ﬂat there the

water could not make up its mind which way to run, so a spot was ﬁrst chosen

that was thought to be lower than round about, and tanksinkers came with horses,

ploughs and giant shovels about a yard square. The ground was ploughed, then

it was shovelled up and made into a bank surrounding the dam. Then gutters

were ploughed outwards from the dam at the corners. The sides of the dam soon

became almost as water-tight as concrete, so the only loss was from what the hot

sun drew up. But with only an odd dam or two any house or shop that began to

burn was doomed, and one summer over twenty shops were destroyed, mostly in

groups of ﬁve.

But back to the school. Because of the lack of fences and the dry climate theredrinking

water

at school

were no trees or gardens, and the drinking water came from the roof into half a

dozen tanks, the tops of which were not protected from the birds. After a bad

outbreak of fever the tanks were cleaned out, and literally hundreds of dead birds

were taken out. We were a tough lot in those days.

Our ﬁrst headmaster was Mr Williams and I loved him, and so did everyone else. Mr Williams

headmasterHe was simply skin and bone, and a frightful shade of yellow, but he lived for

years after he left us. When I was a young woman I went to see him at Stockton

(near Newcastle) and he looked just the same. The day he left our school we

all ﬁled past him at the gate—we had a fence by then—and everyone except the

tough big boys was in tears, and by the time the last one had gone past the poor

man looked as distressed as we were.

Mr Bennett followed him and was the exact opposite of our Mr Williams—he was

plump and his sense of humour took the form of taking a rise out of any student

who was not a favourite of his—usually me—and I couldn’t bear him. He also

used to choose me for the quite long walk over to his house to get his drinking

water, which had been boiled then put in the water bag to cool. I used to need to

be put in the water bag too, to cool off after my long trudge, with the thermometer

up over the hundred. But Miss Frazer was the worst. She taught sewing, and my

life was a misery as I was left-handed. She made me sew with my right hand,

and the result was very unfortunate, after which she would hold up my work and

say ‘Look what the left-handed maulie has done’, and they would all obediently

giggle. After not too much of that I wagged it, and had some lovely hours with

a quince or an apple under a nearby mallee tree, and read and read and read.

Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, and one I always wept over, Masterman

Ready, not to mention all the Elsie books—they were too genteel for words.

We only stayed in that house in Main Street for just over a year, then my father

bought another, bigger one, not in any street, but standing alone with the nearest second

houseneighbour about a hundred yards away. While we were still living in the ﬁrst one

we had a most unpleasant thing happen. One hot early evening we heard cries of

distress, so my mother went onto our back verandah to hear Mrs Wesley calling

out in fear, as a prowler had tried to go into her shop. While she was calling, the

prowler dashed in our front gate, across our front verandah, and down to our back

gate. By this time Dad had joined the act and went off in hot pursuit. He had been

a champion runner but the prowler had too much head start and got away. Two

nights later I was pulled hurriedly from bed by Mum, who had my brother under arson

one arm, and struggled through dense smoke to the outside air. The house was on

ﬁre. My father dashed out the back door, and there waiting to be used was a large

mobile tub of water. My brother’s pram had wooden wheels, and the previous

evening Dad had taken them off and soaked them in the tub of water, as in that

terribly dry and hot climate the wooden wheels shrank and could have fallen to

bits. So there was this ready-made ﬁre brigade. He told us later that he took up

the big tub and ran with it to where the house was burning. He got the ﬁre out, but

it left a horrible black scar about three feet wide going up almost to the roof from

the base of the house. And when he had time to look later, there on the ground

below was the remains of a nest of straw and twigs, all smelling of kerosene, so

the gentleman meant business. It had begun to burn inside too, but not severely

and was easily put out. I can’t think of any thing that happened while we lived in

that ﬁrst house that would endear it to me.

My most vivid memory is of myself standing in the shade of a telegraph pole,

waving ﬁrst one foot then the other in the air to cool the soles of my shoes enough

for me to continue walking on them, as they were so hot. I simply could not bearfootwear

it, and there were boys going to school who had never had a shoe on. I should say

boots, not shoes, as that is what everyone wore—leather lace-up ones during the

week and kid button-up ones on Sunday. There was no shoe polish as you know

it, just small cakes of a hard black substance which was put into an old saucer, had

water or vinegar added until it looked like thick black mud, then put on the boots

and allowed to dry. Then they were polished, and my word it took some elbow

grease to get a shine.

I loved the house we went to when I was eight years old—it was weatherboardsecond

house as most other ones were, triple-fronted, and it had some trees, the usual pepper

trees but also some cedar trees,

and my father soon had a nice orchard growing,

with hot-weather fruit—peaches, nectarines and apricots, and he sank a small dam

which was a joy, as the fence around it was covered by creepers. He had water

iris

growing on the dam (the type that became a menace in the North Coast

rivers). They had a lovely mauve ﬂower about eight inches high. We had a summer

house too, where we would have our meals on hot days, and when it was hot at

night we slept there on straw mattresses. There were no inner-spring mattresses

then, only kapok or feather, both terrible in the heat.

After the year we spent in that Main Street house this one was Paradise, as we

soon had not only an orchard but a ﬂower and vegetable garden, and shady places.

Each year from our ﬁrst winter in West Wyalong Dad’s uncle,

an old bachelorUncle Joe

living in retirement in St Kilda, came up and spent the winters with us. He was

almost totally blind, and had to be led everywhere he went. He was from Southern

Ireland and was a Catholic, and I would take him to Mass on Sundays. Also we

had bought a piano, and I was learning to play, and I soon learned his weakness,

which became a source of income for me. I would sit at the piano and warble

‘The Dear Little Shamrock’. I can remember the words still, ‘There’s a dear little‘The

Dear Little

Shamrock’

plant that grows in our isle. ’Twas St Patrick himself, sure, that set it’ etc. Very

corny, but it was always good for a little tip—whatever he found in his pocket,

usually a shilling, and on one glorious occasion two bob—which was a fortune, as

our pocket-money was threepence a week in those days. Bill, my brother, used to

foam at the mouth with fury, and on one occasion, when he went to the post ofﬁce

Probably White Cedar, Melia azedarach

Probably Water Hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes

Presumably he was a brother of Joseph Cochrane’s mother, Mary Jane McGuire, who was

born in County Meath, Ireland. Joseph’s father, William Cochrane, was born in County Derry.

The Red House?

Probably this is the second house in which the Cochrane family lived at West Wyalong.

Bill and Ett in foreground. No caption. Print 152x109 mm. Pam Macdonald collection.

William Alfred Joseph Cochrane (1903–1980)

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane (1898–1969)

Detail from photo on previous page. No caption. Print 152x109 mm. Pam Macdonald

collection.

and posted some letters, Uncle Joe said ‘Keep the change, Bill’. It was tuppence,

and Bill wouldn’t have it. He didn’t ask for more, just said ‘No thank you, Uncle

Joe’, but went out to the kitchen to Mum and vented his spleen to her. ‘She sits

and sings ‘The dear little shamrock’ and gets a shilling, and I walk about a mile

to the post ofﬁce and get tuppence, and he can keep it’.

Uncle came up every winter, and each year it was the same story. He and Mum

would discuss my education, and it always ended up the same way. Mum was

a non-church-going Protestant, and because I was her only daughter she insisted

I went to a Protestant boarding school, and Uncle thought that as he would be

paying the piper, he could call the tune—it would be a convent or nothing. So it

went on, and I went into ﬁfth class when I was nine (the highest in primary then),

and went through that class four years in a row, by which time I was so bored it

wasn’t funny. If given a say in the decision I would gladly have gone to a convent,

as the only girls in town who went away to school were Catholics, and I knew

them and I loved the uniform, which was ghastly—a dark dress with white collar

and cuffs as hard as cardboard and a boater hat like the ones worn by ‘Shore’ boys

now.

I was thinking about the old days on Saturday when I was voting (about whether

or not to open the hotels on Sunday afternoons). The hotels were open at night

when I was very small, and in my time at the house I liked so much, there was a

similar referendum— to close them at six pm, or leave them open as they were. hotel hours

referendumThese neighbours of ours were an old Irish couple with a grown son and daughter.

The two men had a contract to provide the mines with ﬁrewood for the furnace that

ran the engines that took the men and rock to the surface—and took the men down

too. The wood was in great logs about ﬁve of six feet long, and it was very hard

work. When we ﬁrst moved there we thought they argued at night, but it was the

son reading all the daily papers to his father. They were a most devoted family.

The father was Matthew and the son was Martin. Years later Martin went into

State Parliament, and was a Cabinet minister in (I think) JT Lang’s government,

but he died in middle age. The thing I remembered the other day, though, was

their method of voting on the liquor question. Matthew, who was nearer seven

foot tall than six, and stuttered, strode into the polling booth and in a voice like

thunder said ‘C-c-c-c-close ’em up’. His wife, who was about ﬁve foot nothing,

came in behind him, and in a high little voice said ‘Lairve ’em open’.

Matthew was most interested in the war news when the First World War was rag-

ing, and asked everyone he met the latest, with the result that the bright boys of

the town told him the most fantastic news. Everyone who met him would then ask

him the news. On one occasion he was most worried. When questioned he said

‘It’s bad, very bad. They tell me th-there are m-m-m-millions of b-b-b-bloody

Germans in Berlin’.

When I was eight I thought Martin was the most glamourous man in the world.

He used to wear a red handkerchief tied around his neck, but now, after over

sixty years, I remember his care of his family, and how pleasant he always was

to me. His mother said her family were born miles and miles from anyone, and

once all her children had an illness she had never seen before, which affected

their throats. They were all the same—pus closing their throats until she saw theydiphtheria

would suffocate if not helped very soon. She said (to herself, of course, as she

was alone) ‘If I had a brush I would paint their throats with kerosene’, so she

went out to the fowl yard and chased an old rooster round and round the yard

until they were both exhausted, then when she caught him she yanked out his tail

feathers and painted the children’s throats, and it worked well. Their throats were

cleaned of this horrible stuff and they got better. She said that years later she saw

diphtheria, and is sure that that is what they had. The real old pioneers had to have

courage and be resourceful.

And now I will post this before it gets any bulkier, and will have to send some

Christmas letters before I write to you again, but I like writing to you best, as

it makes me remember the funny things and the old days that I thought I had

forgotten.

Love from Grandma.

Christmas has come and gone, and I have been so busy with the season’s mailAdelong

and West

Wyalong

that I have not had time to write to my boys, but that is all over now, and you

will be getting letters more regularly from now on, I hope. Since I last wrote to

you, though, I have thought a lot about those two towns and the great differences

between them. Firstly the scenery. Adelong was always so lovely to a small girl

that it gave me such a feeling of contentment just to stand and watch those green

hills, or lie on my stomach and study the water as it bubbled over smooth white

stones. But West Wyalong! It was ugly and harsh, and so were the lives of so many

people there. In Adelong, if a person was down on his luck and was a trier, very

soon there would be a beneﬁt concert, and everyone who had a shilling rolled up

and all the local talent performed. Some of it was pretty crook, but everyone went

home feeling that a good time was had by all, and the person who was the receiver

of the small donation got more than money. Apart from that, West Wyalong was

ugly and as devoid of colour as it was possible to be. The mallee was grey, not

green, and the hundreds of mullock heaps were scattered round the landscape and

looked as attractive as acne on an unfortunate teenager. The big mines, True Bluemines

and Brilliant had great ugly poppet heads (I think that is what they were called),

but they were very high four-sided pyramids. Nearby was an engine room—as

ugly a piece of architecture as it was possible to produce. The engines sent the

cages down laden with humanity and they brought up the stone laden with gold.

There were two other mines like that, the Golden Fleece and the Barrier Reef.

Other smaller mines had an ugly contraption something like a merry-go-round,

with real horse power—a poor unfortunate horse which plodded around in a circle

all day, turning this contraption,

and the steel rope wound and unwound on a big

wheel overhead. It must have been very well balanced, because later on when the

mine closed down we would play there, and it took only a couple of us to turn it

while the others had a ride.

The only water to be seen was the thick brine which was pumped up from the

mines. It ran away in a small creek which dried up after a couple of hundred

yards, but left a coating of salt on the creek bed as white as snow. I was so hungry

for something pretty to look at that on a moonlight night I would watch it and tell

myself it was snow. It wasn’t snow if we paddled in it, as it was so full of minerals

that our feet would be inﬂamed and sore, and the boys who persisted had feet like

grey leather, with deep cracks in them. I am sure they would have been able to do

the Indian trick of walking over live coals.

In my eleven years there the one lovely thing I remember is my father’s garden.

From my ﬁrst winter there my father’s bachelor uncle came to spend the winter Uncle Joe

with us. He had been on the land on the Victorian side of the Murray River,

and rumour had it that he had made a pile. My father had spent his teens on the

property, but that is another story. When we moved to the ‘Red House’ where the the

Red Housegarden was, he settled in with us very happily. On most Sundays I took him to

Mass, and quite liked the ceremony. Otherwise he rarely left the place, but walked

miles each day. He had his regular beat, like a policeman, between certain trees.

He was with us when King Edward VII died, and he was very sad about it. Each

time he came to the end of his section and had to turn, he would stand and meditate

and shake his head very gloomily, and say ‘A sad day for ould Oiland. In only a

year or two he would have got us home rule’. Well, it took more than a year or

two to get it without Edward VII. The Church of England was heavily decorated

with black and royal purple, and I was most impressed.

When I see the wealth of gifts you boys get at Christmas I remember how austere Christmas

giftsours was, but I think your way is better. When I was about nine I showed my

parents a doll in a window, and told them that if it were mine I should be the

happiest little girl in the world. I put a good case, and was conﬁdent of success.

Can you imagine my feelings when in my stocking I got a leather school bag and

an imitation leather music case, and a curtain lecture for not displaying enough

gratitude. If they only knew how close they were to being clobbered with the

goddamn cases. But that was how it was in those days. Absolute necessities were

given to us as luxuries.

We were big enough as a town to have Wirth’s Circus and theatrical companies

come, complete with large tent, and they gave us East Lynne and other tear jerkers.

Known as a whim

Maggie Moore was the most popular. In my time, from 1906 for the next six orMaggie

Moore seven years, she came most years but was an elderly woman and plump, married

to a younger man who on the stage was quite good-looking. Her ﬁrst husband was

the original JC Williamson who began the theatrical business. Rumour of the day

was that he fell in love with one of his chorus girls, and Maggie divorced him for

his convenience but did not get much thanks for it, but don’t quote me.

I have told you of the crop of ﬁres. It was a dreary life, I think, and most of the

things I remember were the domestic crises that turned up, like the occasion when

I got the holy water and the eye drops mixed. I used to have to do the dusting onholy water

and

eye drops

Saturday mornings, and I would put the things on the bed, then heartily rub the

dressing table, then replace all the gadgets. On one occasion I put the holy water

on the side where the eye drops were kept, and vice versa. As the bottles were

the same size no one twigged, so the poor old man was crossing himself with eye

drops and putting holy water in his eyes. My father was most unimpressed and

refused to panic, his theory being that the holy water would be as good for his

eyes as the eye drops, and the eye drops as good for his soul as the holy water. A

man of few illusions was my father.

The King family

I think if I tell you about this family you will understand how the outback wasKing

family licked. We went to West Wyalong in the Christmas of 1905 and one hot Saturday

morning soon after we arrived a woman came to the door selling eggs, home

made butter, jam and other farm produce. She was a tall, slim woman not without

a certain dignity and had a rather sweet voice, but if it were possible to drop an

aitch she did so but picked it up again at the ﬁrst possible moment. She looked

so tired and frail Mum asked her in and gave her morning tea. She told Mum her

two daughters would be in the next Saturday. Later that day Mum’s neighbour,

a rather kind woman, said to Mum ‘You entertained one of the wealthiest and

meanest women in the district this morning’, but Mum was only concerned about

her frail appearance. Next week the two girls came, rather nice looking and well,

but not stylishly dressed, and with the most gorgeous complexions I have ever

seen. Mum liked them and after a while took them under her wing, as she knew

they rarely got in to the infrequent amusements we had in those days. When

Show time came around next spring she decided to ask their mother if she would

let them stay overnight with her so they could go to the visiting tent theatre (or

circus, I forget which) and Mrs King said ‘Mrs Cochrane, before Hi give you han

hanswer to that Hi ‘ave one question to hask you. Were you never han hactress?’

Mum’s reply ‘No, worse luck’ almost brought a refusal to allow the girls to come

in to the festivities, but Mum won in the end. Years later when one of them

was to be married Mum stood over Mrs King like an avenging angel and bullied

her into giving her a wedding reception—the excuse being that she did not have

enough china. ‘Then rent some’ said Mum, and she and the bride went to the local ‘Then rent

some!’hardware shop and did just that—a laundry basket full. Years later when Mum was

already dead and the bride herself was an old woman she said ‘The only fun and

happiness I had as a girl I have to thank your mother for’.

The second summer we lived there I was invited out to their property for a week or

two—I forget just how long but I was so homesick it was sheer hell. I ﬁtted in to

the household routine and hard work was a big part of it. It was a lovely property

twenty-ﬁve miles west of West Wyalong, and was a square block, I forget how

many acres but each side was a mile long.

The kitchen was a slab building and I asked if it was the original home, but was King family

homesteadtold no, the ﬁrst one had disappeared and it was the second one. A wooden walk

led several yards to the west to a three-roomed timber house—coming in from the

kitchen was a small passage with a small room on each side—then facing west was

a large dining room, with a verandah facing west and one to the south that joined

up with the back verandah of the latest building—a large stone house with a hall

running north and south and a sitting room and bedrooms. There were verandahs

around all four sides of this stone house and it could have been made a lovely

home, but years of economy had taken all joy of spending from Mrs King and

the ﬂoors of these lovely big rooms were bare boards, but I must say they were

smooth and as white as marble.

At each bedside and in the sitting room were rugs, dressed and tanned kangaroo

and emu skins. The kangaroo mats were soft but the emu skins were another

thing, like a nice carpet of bindi-eye. There was a horgan and I used to give it a

real bashing with the latest top-pop, which was ‘Yippy-i-addy-i-a-i-a’ and the less

boisterous ‘In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree’ and ‘Redwing’, and a good time

was had by all. Of course I had to do my chores before I could play the horgan and

one of my daily jobs was to scrub—on my knees—one verandah. There were six,

no seven—three around the dining room wing and four around the stone house.

The girls were kind to me in other ways, but hard work was so much a part of their

life that keeping me at it was just normal routine. They made their own bread and

killed their own beasts. Eggs, milk and butter were home grown.

There were three boys, ‘Hernest’, Bill and Wallace. I scarcely remember Bill. the King

boysHernest was the chief victim of the harsh days. He virtually managed that lovely

property but could not sign his name as he could neither read nor write. His

was the typical bush wit of the time. One morning I sat up to my usual boiled

egg for breakfast and did not notice that there was a bright expectant hush as the

big moment came when I lifted the top off the egg, which I did. Inside was a

little boiled almost hatched chicken, and when I ran outside and was sick that

made the joke complete. Wallace was only a year or so older than I and much

more versed in huntin’, ﬁshin’ and shootin’. I preferred the ﬁshing as we merely

took half a dozen lengths of string and some chopped-up meat and made bait

from them to catch yabbies. These were beauties, all as big as king prawns. Myyabbies

admiration of Wallace was unbounded as he would bring in a line with six or seven

great yabbies crawling around his hand and he would casually transfer them to the

waiting bucket, while I wouldn’t land even one (my usual haul) without a net. I

remember too that they were very strict in having the water boiling madly when

the yabbies had to be cooked. Oh, I loved them with fresh home made bread.

Generally Wallace was not unkind to me, but one evening he was in a mood and—

in the dining room—got his air gun and proceeded to pepper my back. It was

summer and I had only a thin cotton dress and undies, and those little black pellets

were sheer hell, but I gritted my teeth and would not howl for mercy. Nobody said

to leave me alone, and a monument to my pig-headedness was that he tired ﬁrst.

Wallace was killed in the First World War. Do you know I did not hold a grudge

against him for the pellets. Only one other time did he take a rise out of me and

that was one morning when he said he was going up on the roof of the verandah

and I was to stand down in the garden with my pinny held out. A pinny is the

kind of apron little girls wore in those days. Well, I was to catch the passionfruit

which he would get from the roof of the verandah. He had hurled down about a

dozen and then came a poor scared lizard right into my upturned pinny. I let the

ends go and then with one startled Aaaaooh I began a marathon up and down the

orchard with that poor lizard too scared to let go. But do you think that is why I

am allergic to practical jokes for the rest of my life?

Wallace and I had one guilty secret. Mr King, who was really an old dear, said toforbidden

grapes us ‘Listen to me you two. There are dozens of grape vines in the orchard, and you

are welcome to every grape in the place but don’t touch this vine!’, and he pointed

out one single vine. Real Genesis touch. Well, we would go down and have a party

with the grapes but time after time we would converge on that poor little vine, I

from the east and Wallace from the west, and arrive at the same moment. Then

we would pluck one lousy little grape each and bolt as if the gates of hell were

opening behind us, and walk around looking guilty for the rest of the day. Funnily

enough they were not very nice grapes, and I don’t know why we bothered.

Sunday was a day of rest, and early in the morning the tennis court was got ready.country

tennis From then on guests arrived on horseback and in sulkies, and I have never seen

better tennis outside White City. Hernest was a gem. He bounded around the

court and was not at all ungraceful. These parties and many like them at other

bush homes is the reason why I am a bad player. Everywhere I went the place

seemed to be crawling with players almost up to Davis Cup level, and I would

shrivel up with self-consciousness and fall over my feet, or anyone else’s.

There was another member of that family, Maggie, who being the eldest of six

got more than her share of hard work, and had left home before we knew them,

but I met her and she was nice. Ernest never married and Bill brought a bride

home from the First War, a Frenchwoman. I believe she took one look at the

kangaroo and emu mats and a day or so later there was one awfully big ﬁre in the

back yard, after which she went to Sydney to shop. She soon had a very elegant

house in town, but although she had good taste in furnishings she was rather an

ill-mannered woman, and would have dinner parties where she made all remarks

to her husband in French which none of her guests understood.

That was the pattern of life out there in those times. The parents worked like

navvies and denied themselves all but absolutely necessary things and the next

generation bought a fast car and a broad-brimmed hat and enjoyed it all, which

showed their good sense.

The Puntons

I told you that the one lovely thing I remembered was my father’s garden, but Punton

familya very pleasant thing to look back on was my friendship with my ﬁrst friend Vi

Punton. Her family lived on a farm three miles west of the town but Mr Punton,

who had come to the district in a bullock waggon in the very early days, also had

a business and property in town.

There were four girls and two boys at home

and with the parents and a maid and a couple of farm boys who came to the house

it took a very long table to seat us all. The maid had been with them earlier before

an unhappy marriage, and Vi told me that one night they heard an unhappy little

sound at eleven o’clock and going out to see found Martha with her two small

boys in a pram. They were still living in town then so they simply got up and

made a bed ready, and she was still with them years later and the boys nearly at

school age. Two sulky loads of people went in to the movies and if Martha wanted

to go then Vi and I simply didn’t go, but it was no blow as Saturday night at home

was really something. A grocery tenant of Mr Punton’s would give samples of

new sweets, and the things we concocted were weird and wonderful. We were left

in the care of one of the farm labourers (who would do that now I wonder) and

when he was in a benign mood he would shoot a rabbit in the afternoon and as

soon as the sulky loads had driven off he would stuff and roast it for us, and even

though we had to stay up until we were so sleepy, we voted it the best meal in the

world. One night Martha’s younger boy went to sleep standing up waiting for it.

He was standing in front of the stove and as he fell his little bottom was burnt by

George Punton and Elizabeth S Walker were married in 1887 and had (at least) seven children:

Helen J (1888–, m Connellan); George W (1890–); Jessie A (1892–, m Field); Mabel Lilian (1894–

1956, m Parker); Violet M (1897–, m Kemp); Frances T (1901–); Daisy I (1902–, m Anthoness).

the very hot front of it and we had to apply ﬁrst aid. But he still thought it was

worth it when he eventually sat down to his rabbit.

We tried our hand at amateur dramatics, but the best I can say of them is ‘Weamateur

dramatics meant well’. My cousin Jack Parker was a long term suitor of the second of the

two girls at home,

and he drove out on Sunday afternoons and spent the evenings

there. He was on the staff of the local newspaper and on great occasions he printed

programmes of the plays that we produced. It was a perfect place for theatricals

as the house was on a slight rise so the front verandah was a natural stage. Their

home followed the usual pattern, a main building with living room and bedrooms

and a verandah all around, the back verandah being the connecting link between

the house and the kitchen which was an immense room, and in the winter and

always at breakfast was dining room as well. Jess, the eldest girl at home, spent

the whole of Sunday morn in the kitchen cooking cakes and she was a superb

cook.

Mr Punton had his own ideas and stuck to them. For instance, he believed oneMr Punton

and jam should not eat jam until really hungry for it. And when he was he took a tin

opener, a tin of jam and a spoon, and retired to a quiet corner. It nearly drove Jess

mad. She tried everything but physical violence on him.

Our greatest thrill though was reading a book and then acting out most of the

scenes, and as some—not all—of the books we could get our hands on were sheer

melodrama a good time was had by all. Marie Corelli was our favourite and

we really let our heads go in Thelma, the pick of the bunch. We would raid the

older girls’ wardrobe and doll up in their dresses. Hobble skirts came into fashiondressing up

one year so we tied a scarf fairly tightly around our legs at knee level and shufﬂed

around trying to cope with that, a feather boa around our neck and a Merry Widow

hat with beautiful ostrich feathers and roses in all directions. One day the boy

who used to cook the rabbits came and found us sitting in the shed in a sulky (no

horse), so he stooped and picked up the shafts and ran madly downhill to the bank

of the dam, did a quick turn-around and ran the sulky into the dam. The water

was not deep and we were not in danger but we could not get out without getting

our borrowed plumes wet, so there we sat for ages before we could get him to

rescue us. Quite a come-down from driving down the straight behind Royalty at

Ascot. Sunday evening was given over to culture and we all gave a turn. I’m sure

the moderns would think it was nothing, but let’s face it—those people who were

good enough to sing a song produced a far more harmonious sound than many

of the pop groups give us now, so don’t laugh too much at ‘Have You Seen but a

White Lily Grow’. Of course there were some pretty pathetic performances too.

John William Parker (1890–1968) and Mabel Lilian Punton (1894–1956) were married at

West Wyalong in 1917. He was a son of William Robert Parker (1852–1914) and a brother of

Clara Ethel Parker (1899–).

There was a Lancashire man who used to visit us and would sing ‘When the Sunset

Turns the Ocean Blue to Gold’, and the chorus was ‘Oh, the old church bells were

ringing and the mocking birds were singing’ etc, and it emerged something like

‘OH, the old church bells were ring-ging and the mocking birds were sing-ging’.

My ﬁrst music teacher was Miss Walsh who thought we were doing ﬁne when she music

teachersgot me to play ‘Woodland Whispers’ but the thing I remember most about her was

that the whole time I had lessons from her I was never without a bruise from the

shoulder to the wrist on my right arm. From the elbow down I was hit by a twelve

inch ruler. From the elbow up I was pinched, which was worse. I prevailed on

Mum to send me to Miss F. . . and she was nice. She and her mother both taught

music, and had two pianos. My only disappointment was that I only had the bass

parts in duets, while my friend Vi had the treble always.

My father’s death

Uncle Joe was the one who set in motion the train of events that eventually killed Uncle Joe’s

advicemy father—that, and Dad’s refusal to see when he was licked. The brainwashing

began early in Uncle’s visits to us with ‘Go on the land, my boy—that is where the

money is’, quite ignoring the fact that ﬂy-blown, drought-stricken Wyalong was

a far different proposition from the lush green valley on the Murray River. Dad

realised this, and also that we did not have enough money to begin the project, father

buys landmainly fences and dams to start with, ‘But’ says Uncle Joe, ‘I will be here to help

you, my boy’, so Dad went ahead and entered a ballot, and Uncle Joe went ahead

to Melbourne and never came back. So there was my father left with this hungry

lump of mallee, and not much else but the determination to go it alone.

He bought the ofﬁce of the defunct cyanide works— a very well built building, cyanide

works

ofﬁce

and it was used as a camp, with a bed and rough cooking gear and tools to tackle

the mallee. He spent every moment he could, ﬁrstly putting up a six-wire fence

around the outside of the block. He had help with that, and that reminds me of a

funny little episode that happened after we had all moved out there to live. Dad

mentioned to Mum that if we saw old George (or Harry, or Jim—I forget his name)

in the town while we were there that afternoon to tell him Dad had a small job for

him. Well we did see him. He was driving his old horse and sulky across an open

piece of ground, so Mum called and waved and hurried towards him, and gave him

the message from Dad. That being over, Mum remarked ‘I was lucky that you saw

me when I was so far away’—we were a few hundred yards away when he ﬁrst

hovered in sight. ‘Oh’, he replied, ‘I knowed yer soon’s I seed yer, I knowed yer

be yer tallness’. How’s that for a piece of classic English.

My father did fencing jobs on the block by day, and went out clearing off thefencing

and

clearing

mallee and gum trees at night, and very soon he gave himself a very bad attack of

pneumonia. He would get so hot feeding the ﬁres of the burning trees, and then

walk three or four hundred yards in bitterly cold weather to his camp. He was

dreadfully ill, and should have taken months to recover but by this time somethingfather ill

seemed to be driving him, and while he was still not much more than a bag of

bones he was in action again, and had cleared about ﬁfty acres and planted a

couple of hundred fruit trees. I remember he got a gross of peach trees, and the

other ones were nectarines and plums—no apples, it was too hot for them.

The orchard had to have a rabbit-proof fence, wire netting sunk into the groundfencing

the orchard about eight of nine inches, then the earth put back. It was a long way around

those two hundred trees with a shovel, so Dad invented a contraption that, when

pulled by old—do you know, I have forgotten the name of that old mare, but I

have not forgotten the size of her rump. Seen from behind she looked like the

after end of a battle ship. Well, he invented this thing, a kind of one-blade plough

that when pulled along would scoop the soil back into the trench. Well, the old

mare’s backside was too wide for her to get close to the trench, and it was a failure.

Nothing daunted, he called up reinforcements—Mum and the kids. The four of

us all took the rope and, walking backwards you know, we were getting along

ﬁne. Then the rope broke, and Dad was the only one who fell over. He was on

his back on the ground, looking like a very bad-tempered beetle, having quite a

long talk to God, and asking some leading questions, for instance ‘Why was a

poor unfortunate blanketty blank blank settler like him stuck with three of the

most useless lazy so-and-so’s’, etc, etc. Mum redeemed herself later by mounting

the same old mare, and guiding her while Dad ploughed between the trees in the

orchard. No saddle was ever made that would ﬁt that old mare, so Mum mounted

the old girl with a cushion, but her back was also so wide that Mum could not

bend her knees very well, and the back view was something, especially as Mum

had bought a job lot of ﬁne cotton stockings that had proved unpopular, and little

wonder why—they were a delicate shade of mauve. But she had got them for

fourpence a pair, and they were good enough for the farm.

We were not there very long when Dad’s health, which had not recovered from

the ﬁrst attack of pneumonia, gave him and Mum great concern, and he had to

come down to Sydney to see a specialist who conﬁrmed our fears—he had TB, ortuberculosis

consumption as it was then called, and he spent some time in the sanatorium at

Waterfall.

Mum took over. She loathed the land and everything about it. She always main-

tained that anywhere west of the GPO in Sydney was too far out for her, and as a

farmer she would have won the booby prize at any show, but she tackled a bigger

job than running a small new farm, and that was feeding and clothing four people,

one a fading man who needed the best of everything. When I think of the lack

of comfort there! The house was adequate, two bedrooms had been added to the

ofﬁce building that was now a living room, a kitchen added at the back and a ve-

randah on the side. From the front it looked so gaunt, but no one ever came to the

front—in the back gate and to the side door of the living room. Mum had seen in

a catalogue the fuel stove that she wanted, so all of the ﬁrst terrible summer she

waited—and cooked in a camp oven.

When my father came home from the sanatorium already looking frail, she took father at

home in

isolation

over, turning the side verandah into a bed-sitting room, and once established there

he never came inside the house again. His crockery and cutlery were there too,

and were washed up in a separate bowl. It took almost all her day to care for him

and do the shopping, milk the cow, and feed the chooks. Then in the evening she

would settle down to the job of earning our living—at the sewing machine. The

girl I had chosen to be my friend on my ﬁrst day in West Wyalong came from a

big family—four girls and two boys—and they would drive out in the evenings

with hampers of sewing—house linen to be mended and plain dresses to be made.

It was a good thing for Mum as she loved company, and these visits meant cups

of tea or coffee and a chat.

My mother was a real mixture—strong heart and weak stomach. One very hot day Marnie and

reptilesshe heard a rumpus in the fowl yard, and a goanna was after the young pullets, so

she hurried in and grabbed the riﬂe, but by the time she was outside again it had

run up into a large branch of a gum tree. She had a shot at it and hit it the stomach

which made it heave up—and it had been eating rabbit. Mum left it far behind

when it came to being sick. Another day she was baking a sponge cake which

needs a hot oven, and the ﬁre was not going to last the distance, so she tore madly

to the woodheap and hastily grabbed some thick bark that was almost a complete

circle as it had been torn from a tree about six inches across. She put the pieces

of bark into her apron, and was heading for the kitchen when a very scared blue

tongued lizard jumped from the centre of the hollow bark and dashed madly for

cover. Mum, with a loud ‘Ooooow’ tried to do the same.

We had only the water that ran off the roof into galvanised iron tanks, so when the water from

the damwater got down to danger level we had to use dam water for everything but cooking

and tea, and eventually we had to use it even for that. We had a wheeled level

platform only eight or ten inches from the ground which took a couple of large

casks, and the job of carting the water usually fell to Bill and me. One stinking

hot day we took this instrument of torture to the dam—or tank as we always called

it, and standing on a plank laid across a corner of the tank we bailed and bailed

bucket after bucket until those two forty gallon containers were pretty full. Then

the trudge home which we managed in ﬁne style, but not so the ‘vehicle’. As we

drew up in triumph at the kitchen door the front axle just gave up, and gallons and

gallons of muddy water spilled over the back yard.

There were two ways of clearing the water of the thick mud. One was to sprinkleclearing

the water a handful of lime on top of the water, and the other was to sieve the little bits

of charcoal from the wood ash (there was no other kind) and sprinkle the ash on

top of the water. We liked the wood ash best as it did a very good job and the

water was left soft, whereas the lime made the water so hard it was impossible

to get a lather if we washed ourselves or our clothes in it, and tea made with the

limey water was like bicycle enamel. Once when the drought was bad Mum and

a neighbour decided to take the mountain to Mohammed. Our dams were bothwashing

clothes at

Duncan’s

tank

empty, so the water had to be carted from Duncan’s tank, the closed up cyanide

works from where we had got our living room. So one morning Mum and her

neighbour set off with tubs, a week’s washing, blue, starch, lines, lunch, a large

boiler and the neighbour’s four young children and in no time the place was a

hive of industry—ﬁre made on a bare patch (there was not much else there), water

brought up from the dam and cleared, clothes boiling in the boiler, lines from tree

to tree, and children doing their best to fall in the dam and get drowned. Laura

(Mum’s friend) then got a pain and retired into the bush, and just then a man drove

up in a buggy to water his horse, and he was a typical bush rubberneck, and began

to question Mum.

He: These kids all yours, missus?

Mum, who was allergic to rubbernecks: Yes, and I have four more at school.

He: Do you have to do this very often?

Mum: Oh, only two or three times a week, but what can a poor widow-woman

do?

and she gave him all the drama he was looking for (with Laura still lurking in the

background). He drove off shaking his head and his next port of call was Crago’s

ﬂour mill, and the ﬁrst person he spoke to was my father (who knew Mum and

Laura were going to the dam). ‘By Gord, I have jist seen the most pathetic sight

a man could see. A long skinny woman with about a dozen kids racing around’,

and he proceeded to tell Dad the whole pathetic story. Dad enjoyed it immensely,

and teased Mum about it when he came home that evening. She was a source of

amusement to him even when she was caught out and any plan misﬁred. Actually

he was so conventional in some things he was mid-Victorian. A nice woman was

never seen without her hat—only at a ball or a concert. One night Mum waswearing

hats to the

pictures

taking me to a show—the picture ‘Quo Vadis’. Regular pictures had not reached

the country towns so when a travelling show turned up it was a big night. We

were ready to leave and went out to say ‘Goodnight’ to Dad, who by this time

was ill and living in his outside quarters on the verandah. ‘Where are your hats?’

Mum brought him up to date on modern fashion but wasn’t convincing him, so I

marched inside, got two hats—real ruins—jammed one on my head and the other

on hers and said ‘Come on, we are going to be late’, so she came along muttering

‘Your father is crazy to expect me to wear a hat but you are worse to expect me to

wear this hat’. I said ‘I only expect you to wear it to the outside gate’, which we

did, then hid them under a clump of mallee. Coming home I crawled under every

bush within a hundred yards and no hats, but they were no loss and we had almost

forgotten the episode when Mum went to milk the cow. It was very tame and came

at Mum’s call. That morning she called ‘Come on, Blackie’ only a couple of times

and up came Blackie with one of the hats perched jauntily on one horn. Dad had

a long look at the ridiculous sight, shook his head and said ‘I wondered why you

gave in last night without a battle.’

Every funny or ridiculous thing she could think of to amuse him she told him, and Joseph’s

deathshe was actually telling him some mad thing, and he was shaking with laughter,

when his laugh turned to a strangled cough and when she had got him comfortable,

as she thought, she realised he was dead.

Joseph Cochrane died on 6 July 1915 aged forty-eight. He was buried in the Church of

England Cemetery at Wyalong. Esther was seventeen.

Joseph Cochrane

On back in Esther Cochrane’s hand: Joseph Cochrane, your grandfather. For Pam; and

in another earlier hand: Mrs E McCourt, August 2nd 1896. Joseph Cochrane was twenty-

nine in 1896. He married Catherine Parker on 8 November 1897. Cabinet 106x165 mm.

Photographer: A Poulsen, Parker Street, Cootamundra, NSW. Pam Macdonald collection.

Catherine Jane Parker

On back in Esther Cochrane’s hand: My mother . . . . On back of another copy: To Uncle

Will / love / from Katie, 1896. Catherine was twenty-two in 1896. She married Joseph

on 8 November 1897. Cabinet 106x165 mm. Photographer: A Poulsen, Parker Street,

Cootamundra, NSW. Pam Macdonald collection.

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane

On back in her hand: Ettie Cochrane, 10 months old, 1899 at Adelong. For Pam. Cabinet

107x165 mm. Photographer: R Pumphrey, Adelong, NSW. Pam Macdonald collection.

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane

Margot Roberts collection.

Mary Jane McGuire

Modern looking matte print 124x174 mm.

Ian Doyle collection.

Elizabeth Jane Cochrane

Affectionately known within the family as ‘Tinribs’.

Print 86x121 mm pasted onto an album page.

Margaret Fisher collection.

William Alfred Joseph Cochrane

Postcard print 136x86 mm.

Margot Roberts collection.

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane

On back in her hand: To Ma and Grandfather with love from Ett, 21.11.16. Detail from

sepia print 86x138 mm mounted on fawn cardboard 164x247 mm. Photographer: Roma

Studios, West Wyalong, NSW. Pam Macdonald collection.

William Alfred Joseph Cochrane and ?

On back: Love from Bill & Jack. Postcard print 83x135 mm. Photographer: Acme Stu-

dios, Enmore. Margot Roberts collection.

Catherine Jane Parker

On back: To Ett Wishing you all a Merry Christmas 1918. Catherine would have been

forty-four. ‘Ett’ here refers to her sister Esther Mary Parker. Print 64x109 mm. Margot

Roberts collection.

Lilian Evelyn McCourt

Print 81x32 mm which has been pasted onto an album page and later removed.

Margaret Fisher collection?

Evelyn Cochrane, Robert Henry Cochrane, Catherine Cochrane

On back in Esther Cochrane’s hand: From Left: Evelyn Cochrane (died in America),

Robert Cochrane, Kitty Cochrane (Mrs George Neil, mother of Rita Bert and Cath. In

another hand: Bob, Ev and Kit Cochrane. Sepia print 144x199 mm. Pam Macdonald

collection.

Back row, l to r:

Catherine Jane Parker

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane

Centre: Catherine Jane Walters

Front row, l to r:

Margaret Narelle Perry

Pamela Mary Perry

Print 92x58 mm pasted onto album page on which is written: Four generations at Adelong.

Margaret Fisher collection.

L to r:

Margaret Narelle Perry

Pamela Mary Perry

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane

In the Blue Mountains, about 1940.

Negative 64x41 mm. Pam Macdonald collection.

Perry – Cochrane wedding

11 June 1921

12 13

Perry – Cochrane wedding

Albert Charles Perry and Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane were married at St Pauls Church, Chats-

wood, NSW on 11 June 1921. The photograph spread over two preceding pages was taken at the

wedding reception at nearby Rotherwood, the residence of the bride’s mother, in what was then

known as Gordon Road. In later years its address was 752 Paciﬁc Highway, Chatswood. The

house has since been demolished. The photograph was taken in front of the house, with the people

facing Gordon Road.

The names in bold below are as written in Esther Cochrane’s hand on the back of the fawn card-

board on which the 198x139 mm print is mounted. The mount has been trimmed to within a

few millimetres of the print and no photographer’s name remains, but other photographs at the

reception were taken by Ida Gwynne. Pam Macdonald collection.

1. Stan Mitchell

2. Tom Campbell

3. Roy MacCourt (Joseph M Roy McCourt)

4. Jess Palmer

5. Anne McGillivray

6. John Sparks

7. & wife

8. Perce Sykes (Percy Wentworth Sykes)

9. Hilda Mitchell (Hilda Anita H Mitchell)

10. Bert Sykes (Albert Ferrier Sykes)

11. Frank Samuelson (Frank Allan Samuelson)

12. & wife (Ivy Anastasia Power)

13. Ella Mitchell

14. Don McKenzie

15. Gwen Davies

16. Mrs John Owens

17. Joe Sykes

18. Joe Bondietti

19. Jack Owens

20. Harry Campbell

21. & his mother (Cecilia Campbell nee Forsyth, nicknames: Cissie, Ma)

22. bridegroom (Albert Charles Perry)

23. bride (Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane)

24. Ivy Sykes (Ivy Maude Darling Sykes)

25. Mr H Campbell (Harry)

26. Ev Vale

27.

28.

29. Mrs McCourt (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane)

30. William Alfred Joseph Cochrane

31. Esther Mary Parker

32. Cecil George Withers? (Esther Parker’s son, born 1915)

33. Catherine Jane Parker

34. George Sykes

35.

36.

Sykes

Joseph Sykes

–

Fanny . . .

–

Benjamin Sykes

1864–65

Charlotte Sykes

1865–

Joseph Sykes

1868–1943

m 1892

Eva E Huxley

–

George Sykes

1871–

m 1895

1. Maud M Percy

–1918

Margaret Sykes

1873–74

Annie Sykes

1874–

Annie Sykes

1875–82

Percy Wentworth

Sykes

1896–1988

m 1923

Ella Mary Shade

–1977

Albert Ferrier Sykes

1898–

m 1928

1. Edith Mary Phillips

–1936

Theodora AF Sykes

1903–04

Ivy Maude Darling

Sykes

1905–1983

m 1935

Percival William Rudd

–1984

Geoﬀrey Wentworth Sykes

(–1988)

Bruce Sykes

Gordon Sykes

Lance Sykes

(c. 1931–)

Norman George Sykes

(c. 1931–1991)

(twins)

Doreen Rudd

Rosemary Rudd

George Sykes

1871–

m 1919

2. Catherine Jane Parker

1874–1940

George Sykes

1871–

m 1941

3. Berta Sybil Southan

–

no children no children

...........................

.......................... ...................................................

Cochrane

Mary Jane McGuire

1840–1923

m 1861

1. William Cochran

1837–

......

.....

William Allen

Cochrane

1862–1906

m 1896

Susan Sophia Willis

1874–

Elizabeth Jane

Cochrane

1864–1944

m 1896

Michael McCourt

–

Robert J Cochrane

1865–66

Joseph Cochrane

1867–1915

m 1897

Catherine Jane Parker

1874–1940

Allan W Cochrane

1897–

Esther Evelyn Maude Cochrane

1898–1969

m 1921

Albert Charles Perry

1890–1971

William Alfred Joseph Cochrane

1903–1980

m 1933

Thelma Adelaide Yard

1911–1997

Lilian Evelyn

McCourt

1897–1978

m 1925

Arthur Bayley Doyle

–

Joseph M Roy

McCourt

1898–

m 1921

Gladys Aileen M Lowe

1903–

Melva McCourt

–

John Sprout

–

Margaret Narelle Perry

1925–2012

m 1952

John Marshall Fisher

1930–

Pamela Mary Perry

1926–

m 1952

Colin Graham

Macdonald

1929–

Carolyn Jan Cochrane

–

1. Colin Davies

2. John King Bowen

–2003

Ian Bayley Doyle

–

Margaret Kirkland

–

Jan Robin Doyle

–

Ronald Mellor

–

Mary Jane McGuire

1840–1923

2. Robert Cochrane

1842–

Mary Isabella

Cochrane

1869–

m 1891

John Samuelson

1856–

Robert Henry Cochrane

1871–

m 1902

Lavinia M Yeo

–

Ellen Cochrane

1877–

Evelyn Jane Cochrane

1879–

m 1897

William J Neil

–

Catherine Cochrane

1881–

m 1902

George A Neil

–

Ellen E Samuelson

1892–

Frank Allan Samuelson

1898–

m 1921

Ivy Anastasia Power

1894–1985

Robert L Samuelson

1903–

Albert George Neil

1905–

Catherine Neil

–

Rita Mary Neil

–

Parker

William Parker

1825–

m 1849

Mary Sullivan

1821–1903

John James Parker

1850–1924

m 1871

Catherine Jane

Walters

1854–1933

William Robert Parker

1852–1914

m 1878

Louisa Adelaide

Davis

1859–1914

Robinson Parker

1857–

m 1880

Agnes Charlotte Sophia

Mildred Perkins

–

Alfred Francis Parker

1859–

m 1880

Angelina Mary

Forestier

–

Elizabeth Alice

Adelong Parker

1863–1941

m 1884

Robert Fuller

1862–1946

Lavinia M Parker

1865–1928

m 1885

Thomas H Chambers

–

William Henry

Parker

1871–97

Catherine Jane Parker

1874–1940

m 1897

Joseph Cochrane

1867–1915

John James Parker

1877–82

Alfred Robinson Parker

1879–1941

m 1906

Annie Robertson

1885–1921

Esther Mary Parker

1882–1970

m 1904

Charles William

Withers

1879–1948

James Talbot Parker

1885–1950

m 1906

Annette Maud Blunden

1890–

George R Parker

1888–1912

m 1909

Alicia Louisa Mary

Darlow

–

Claude AJ Parker

1892–

Reginald Athol John

Parker

1892–

m 1923

Hilda Anita H Mitchell

1894–1988

William Athol Charles

Withers

1905–81

Phyllis Peel

–

John James Withers

1908–81

m 1936

Ruby Batty

1911–80

Reginald Lyle (Slim)

Withers

1911–90

m 1938

Lillian Joyce Young

1922–74

Cecil George Withers

1915–89

m 1938

1. Eileen Anne Laura

Costello

–1967

Velma Parker

1923–

Marjorie Parker

c. 1923–