FAMILY PLACE NAMES IN AUSTRALIA.

Statue of Benjamin Singleton. Singleton.

Various family members were early European settlers in Australia, largely in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Here are some of the place names that bear their names:

Paternal Side

Geary's Gap - Near Canberra. Named after my great, great, great grandfather, Daniel Geary, who used to run a pub there.

Mount Clark - A mountain in North Queensland. Named after my great grandfather, John Clark.

Lornesleigh Street - Townsville. Named after an old family cattle station.

Packer Street - Canberra. Named after a great, great uncle.

Maternal Side

Singleton - A town in the Hunter Valley. Named after Benjamin Singleton, a fifth great uncle.

Kingaroy - Named after two Markwell brothers who first settled the area.

Brisbane - There are six Markwell streets in various suburbs including Hamilton, Daisy Hill, Auchenflower.

Surfers Paradise - Markwell Street  is named after my great grandfather, William Markwell, who was one of the first settlers. Right near the beach.

AUSTRALIAN BUSH CHRISTMAS. CHRISTMAS DAY.

Santa coming to a kid in the Australian bush still seems a novel idea to me, but he did or so I believed. A novelty song in Australia at the time called Six White Boomers, was based around the idea of Santa swapping his reindeers for six white kangaroos.  The reindeers would probably get heat stroke during the delivery run to Oz and were changed for the roos. I always thought that Santa should change out of his Santa suit into something cooler, say, singlet, shorts and flip-flops. All red of course.

CHRISTMAS GUM TREE. 1959. 

My half-sisters ( they’re twelve and thirteen years older than me) and I always were thinking of Santa’s welfare. They had started the tradition of leaving out food and a cool drink for a hot and weary Santa. However, it wasn’t a glass of milk as you would suspect but a glass of beer. Folks, there’s nothing as refreshing as a cool glass of beer on a hot day. Why should Santa miss out? As we found out years later, Dad was the one that played Santa. He was the bloke that delivered the presents, ate the food and drank the beer. 

Christmas morning couldn’t come quick enough. I remember finding it hard to sleep as any kid would. The thought of Santa coming and the heat wasn’t conducive to sleep. I was ready to unwrap those presents at four in the morning but I was always told to go back to bed. I had to hang on until six. It was worth it. The tree had presents piled high around it. I tore at the presents like I was crazed. I think I opened everyone else’s also. I remember getting toy guns, cowboy and Indian ( with headpiece) suits and even a tepee for presents. Bush Santa was the greatest.

CHRISTMAS LUNCH. 1959

By the time Christmas lunch was ready the heat was intense. You didn’t want to go outside. I don’t know how my mother cooked a hot lunch during the hottest time of the year. As a result, she always looked a little tad stressed. It was tradition to have a hot English lunch. Dad always helped. He would bake and glaze a leg of ham, a tradition I still carry on. 

MUM LOOKS STRESSED.

So on a hot day we sat down for a hot English lunch of roast turkey, roast chicken and roast ham with lots of stuffing and vegetables for at least ten to twenty guests. So much that  there was always leftovers. Dessert was a plum pudding with custard and my mother’s triple with a heavy taste of sherry. They were the greatest Christmases and every year I still try to emulate them (minus the cattle station and the gumtree).

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And I hope the weather isn’t too hot wherever you are. 

     

BUSH CHRISTMAS IN AUSTRALIA. THE PREPARATION.

BUSH CHRISTMAS. 1928. MY DAD IS IN THE FRONT ROW. THIRD FROM THE LEFT. Source: personal collection.

 Preparation for Christmas started months before the festive day. If presents or foodstuffs were not picked up during rare trips to town, the mailman brought the rest. My parents liked buying treats like English biscuits, cheeses or marmalade jam from city department store catalogues. The mailman, Mister Riggs, brought most of it on his weekly trips. Unbeknown to me, he even brought most of my presents. Mister Riggs was like a bush Santa.

It was all very English. That's how it was celebrated then, even if the weather was always blazing hot. An English Christmas?  We liked to celebrate as if we are still in the old country; we imagined we were having a white Christmas; snow, pine trees and fireplaces.  Many of us dreamed about having a white Christmas in Europe.

There were not any fans or air conditioners at the homestead. Remember, this is the 1960's. The homestead did have fly screening. Without the screening the homestead would have been swarming with flies. There was refrigeration though; supplied by six kerosene fridges that sat in the kitchen which was the size of a small house. The only cooling agents available were beer and soft drink. A country pub probably did not not carry as much beer stock as Lornesleigh station.

The Lornesleigh homestead was also well stocked with food and good cheer. Mum and Dad loved having guests for Christmas, the more the merrier. The Christmas tree had been put up in the dining room a week before Christmas. The tree was not a pine tree but a heavily decorated gum tree that Dad has cut out of the bush. It was always hard to put a star on the top of a gum tree. Everyone pitched in with the decorations. 

Guests came and went. Some stayed. They were from the next door stations (next door means they are twenty miles away, at least), stockmen without families, uncles and aunts who lived on the other family stations, the mailman and his kids and my two older half-sisters who usually brought their friends from the city. Even strangers were welcomed. My half- sisters had been here for weeks, playing the record player, staying up late, laughing, dancing and swimming in the river.

I tried to join in but I was seen as an annoyance. I’m way too young. That did not stop me of course. If I got sent to bed I’d just get out again. Hey, it’s Christmas. My two half- sisters were accomplished musicians so the piano in the lounge room was given a good work out. More singing and dancing. Mum and Dad don’t care, they would join in.

 They did not complain when the modern music was played ( Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). My parents had their favourite music; Marty Robbins, Tom Jones. It was all played loud and everyone enjoyed themselves.

 To end the long day, Dad always played Christmas carol compilation records into the wee hours.  To be continued.                        

    

THE HOMECOMING

Dad was hoping that Mum would stay in Townsville for a few months, given the state of our home after the flood, and because mine had been a difficult birth. Apparently I had a large head (which I was reminded about every birthday). 

The birth was further complicated by the fact that Mum’s regular doctor had popped off to the racetrack to have a bet. Evidently, he thought that my birth would take longer. Seems I was eager to arrive, and another doctor had to step in at the last minute to fill the breach.

Mum stayed at her parents’ house in Townsville after we were discharged from the Mater Hospital, but after six weeks’ away from the place, she had grown impatient. I was christened in a hurry and soon after we were returning to Lornesleigh Station.

The road to Lornesleigh was still muddy and the usually dry creeks were running, so it was inevitable that Dad’s old soft-top Rover would get bogged crossing a creek. Which, of course, it did. That meant my first night in the bush was spent in the back of a Rover, stuck in a creek in the middle of nowhere, being attacked by mosquitoes. Better get used to it, Little Fella, and welcome home!

View of Lornesleigh homestead.

Maud and the others were still cleaning up when we arrived the following morning. Mum got stuck in, just like everyone else. She was most upset that she’d lost photos and her favourite chinaware. The photos couldn’t be replaced. 

Sometimes, even many years later, Dad would ride back home from mustering cattle with a newly found teacup or a saucer in his saddlebag. A lot of china was found in the paddocks sometimes many miles away.

So, I started life in my new home, surrounded by the smell of decomposing stock and rancid mud, and swarms of mosquitoes. I’m so glad I was too young to remember it.     

***

THE AFTERMATH

ABOVE. DAD'S LIST OF LOST AND DEAD HORSES/ BELOW. THE RIVER RUNNING NORMALLY.
 Source: Personal Collection.

Finally, the floodwaters were completely gone and Dad’s family were able to get into the place. His brothers, Uncles Dick and George, and his sister, Aunty Maud (who, along with her sister Lorna, was educated at an elite girls’ boarding school in Melbourne) were the first ones there. 

Aunty Maud, despite all her airs and graces, rolled up her sleeves, took off her pearls and helped sweep the mud out of the house.

Flood water isn’t really water. It’s a viscous kind of putrid mud that gets into every crevice of every- thing and sticks to it like glue. Every single bit of furniture, every cup and every plate that hadn’t floated out the door had to be scrubbed, washed, rewashed and washed again.  Most of the furniture was sent into Charters Towers for restoration.

 I still own a display cabinet that survived the flood and only recently had the high water mark removed when I had it recently repaired.

While all this was going on, Mum was still in hospital in Townsville. Meanwhile, my uncle Bill and his wife Margaret were sitting cosily in the homestead at Mount McConnell Station, telling everyone that Lornesleigh had sustained little damage.

 “They only lost a few doylies,” were Margaret’s exact words. When she heard, Mum said she would have been happy if Aunt Margaret had choked on that.

The real loss amounted to twenty good horses, five hundred head of cattle, and an awful lot of personal effects. Which were all uninsurable, because the homestead happened to be in a floodplain, like all homesteads were. 

  For the ease of the water supply.  Of course.

Part four coming soon.

TRUE TALES OF THE OUTBACK. THE FLOOD. TWO.

Dad returned to Lornesleigh as soon as he found out about the first flood. By the time he reached the boundary of the property, the Cape River was now in full flood.

 He was met at the top of a ridge near the house by a stockman named Gallagher, and George Riggs, the mailman. The ridge was about a mile or so from the homestead. The water swirled around the ridge, turning it into an island and they knew they’d have to wait there until this second flood subsided, stranded without any food or proper drinking water. 

 Fortunately Dad had his rifle, but only a limited supply of bullets. Not knowing how long they’d be stuck there, they’d have to resort to living off the land.

Dad was a bushman, born and bred. I guess you could say he was Crocodile Dundee and Macgyver rolled into one. Without exaggeration.

 He was equal to any challenge and I never ever saw fear in his eyes. If there was a solution to a problem, he’d find it. Or invent it. There was nothing he couldn’t fix with a length of number eight wire and a set of pliers. He was also a boxer, a show rider and a crack shot with the rifle.

 But back to the flood. With nothing to eat, the livestock either drowned or gone, the kangaroos all on higher ground, all he could find was a Brolga in flight. In case you don’t know, brolgas are birds, a bit like a crane. Anyway, Dad took aim and brought it down with a single shot. They cooked it up and Dad said that it was by far the worst food he had ever tasted.

When the waters finally started to subside a week later, the trio waded into Lornesleigh to survey the damage—and obtain better food supplies. 

Part three coming soon.

TRUE TALES OF THE OUTBACK. PART TWO.

Source: Personal Collection.

Yes, that's me on a horse aged three. My mother is leading the horse but I'm sitting by myself, minus shoes of course.

I grew up on a cattle station called Lornesleigh. It was part of a much bigger holding owned by my family’s company, the Mount McConnell Pastoral Company, that was one thousand square miles in size. 

We were among the first settlers in the north— my family had lived on that same land for nearly one hundred years.

When I was born during a flood (but more about that another time), we carried about ten thousand head of cattle and one hundred horses. 

I lived with three uncles and four aunts, my parents and a cousin who were spread over four homesteads, ninety miles from the nearest town. And not a strip of bitumen in sight. It was pot holed, dusty, rutted and, sometimes, as dry as the proverbial dead dingo. No quick run up to the shop for a cup of sugar. Hell, no.

If we wanted to drive into town, the journey took three hours. The road was roughly a dirt track with lots of creeks to cross and many gates to open. 

My life was far from normal, whatever that means. In what way, you ask?

Well, I had a governess, (that was when Mum wasn’t trying to educate me herself as well as feeding the stockmen and keeping the homestead clean) and I didn’t go to school till I was ten. 

I learned to ride a horse almost before I learned to tie my own shoes. In fact, I never did learn how to tie my shoelaces until much, much later. 

What use were shoes except for a horse?

I learned to shoot and Dad tried to teach me to row a boat and drive a car when I was six. I’d have been fine, except that the boat kept going around in circles and the car kept running off the road. He gave up teaching me after I hit a log on my third attempt (in the car, not the boat).

There’s more to come in my next blog. Stay tuned.               

TRUE TALES OF THE OUTBACK. PART ONE.

Lots of people have asked me whether my first novel, Homecountry, is true. In case you haven’t read it, it’s a thriller set in the Australian outback, in a mythical town called Clarkes Flat. 

I like to call my book gritty because it doesn’t pull any punches.

Clarkes Flat doesn’t exist on a map. 

But maybe there’s a measure of truth in Homecountry, but only a little bit.

Like Peter Clancy, I grew up in the bush in northern Australia. For those of you who are not from here, the bush is what we call rural Australia. I lived on a cattle station as a kid (a cattle ranch, for my American cousins).

 It was a cattle station about the size of Luxembourg and three generations of my family had worked it, brought up their families on it and died for it. I was the fourth and, sadly, the last of a long line.

I loved growing up in the bush surrounded by stockmen, animals, crocodiles, and more things that can kill you than you could ever possibly imagine. That was a normal life to me.

I heard a lot of bush tales and I lived a lot of things most urban people could never imagine. One day, my sister in law, her eyes as big as saucers while listening to the stories said I should write down what I heard and saw.

Now, I’m not fussed on bush poetry. In my mind they don’t say how hard it really was, and they romanticise it far too much.  I feel much the same about the movies that have been made about bush life. What a load of crap.

 Most people wouldn’t last a minute in the Australian bush—it will kill you in a heartbeat if you don’t know what you’re doing. It can also be very isolating. 

My blog, if you stick with it, will uncover the funny, tragic, ugly and beautiful truth about the Australian outback experience, starting first with my own. 

It’s been a love affair that has endured a lifetime.