FACES FROM ACROSS THE AGES

I've finally solved who these people are in the following photographs and also in what time period the photographs were taken. I did this by researching the studios where the photographs were taken. Both photographs were taken in Sydney; one at Robert Stewart photography in Pitt Street and the other at B.C. Boake photography in George Street. Both were taken in the early to mid-1860's as the studios moved after that.
For many years, these photographs had the wrong names attributed to them and the wrong time period. I can now safely say who they were. 
One is of John Clark, my great grandfather and the other is his first wife, Jane Farrell. At the time they were living in Bowen, Queensland and must have been in Sydney visiting family. 

THE SPORT OF KINGS AND FAMILY

My uncle, Jack Bell,as an amateur jockey.  

The Bells and the Clarks were devotees of the sport of kings. Describing them as devotees is too mild; they treated horse racing as a religion. They would have gladly raced horses full time rather than run cattle stations.

I think I’m the only one of my family that never owned a race horse.  Even my father raced a horse and he once told me that the racing fraternity were the lowest form of human life. My father and all of his seven siblings (three females and four males) owned horses.  Then it was my grandparents, Jane Florence and Richard Bell who raced horses, largely in North Queensland. 

My grandfather had an unfortunate incident with one of his purchases from Melbourne.  The stallion had raced in several major races in Melbourne including an unplaced in the Melbourne Cup. On its arrival in Charters Towers from Melbourne, he was showing it off down the main street when it grabbed him by the seat of the pants, lifted him up and dumped him in on the ground.  The resulting injury was enough to put him in hospital.  My grandfather still kept the horse and it lived a long life.

My great grandfather, John Clark, regularly attended the Sydney and Melbourne yearling sales and raced winners in North Queensland.  My grandfather’s brothers and cousins were also heavily involved in the racing industry as owners, jockeys, farriers and stewards.  It even goes down to the present day when my father’s first cousin, Doctor Kevin Bell (Veterinary Science), founded  the Australian Equine Genetic Research Centre in 1986. It is located at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Some of the most notable family horses and racing wins are:

Grosvenor Downs ( owned by Minnie and Cosmo Gordon. Minnie was a sister of my grandmother) owned  My Man who was a grandson of Assyrian. Assyrian won the 1882 Melbourne Cup. They also owned Nonette who was bought as a breeding sire. During his racing career, Nonette won the equivalent of seven million dollars in today’s money.

My grandfather’s brother, John Bell, who owned Cardigan Station, bought Eastcourt as a breeding sire.  During Eastcourt’s career he won the equivalent of five million dollars in today’s money. Some of his wins are the VRC Handicap and the Sydney Tattersalls. Eastcourt also ran second in the Sydney Cup and a third in the VRC Derby and the Australian Cup.

Eastcourt.

A first cousin of my father named Simon Lynch, won the Grand National Steeplechase in Victoria in 1932.

As you can see, horse racing is in the blood.

  

PAY BACK

I recently found this rather gruesome story about a relative I didn’t know anything about. The relative in question was a George Williamson Clark who was a half-brother of my great grandfather, John Henry Clark. My great grandfather’s family were largely unknown to me until now.

The following story about George Clark is fairly indicative of the brutality that occurred on the outback frontier in the nineteenth century. It was a time of European expansion into Aboriginal land with total disregard for Aboriginal traditions and lives.  Of course, Aborigines fought back but the odds were stacked against them. Over the years, massacres of Aborigines occurred frequently, right up until the 1930’s.

In 1892, George was working at a remote outstation at Cresswell Downs in the Northern Territory, a place that is still an isolated part of Australia.  

A visitor by the name of Charles Fox was in the kitchen of the outstation with a Charles Deloitte and two other men. He noticed that George Clark wasn’t there and decided to look for him at the branding yard nearby. The first thing he noticed when he got to the yards was an arm sticking out from under a blanket.  When he peeled back the blanket, George was dead with a smashed in skull as a result of a tomahawk blow.

Fox was then attacked by five Aboriginal men throwing spears. He was able to get away and raise help. When they returned, Deloitte lay dead in the outstation kitchen.  What would follow was the police leading two ‘punitive expeditions’ against the local Aborigines that year. There are no figures on how many Aborigines were massacred.

Years later, local Aborigines told researchers that the reason why Deloitte and Clark were killed was because they were raping the Aboriginal woman. According to Aboriginal law, they had broken a strict taboo and had to be killed. It had been pay back.    

  

John Clark: Forged Steel.

My great, grandfather, John Clark in the centre with grandfather Bell and my grandmother. Circa, 1915.

In this picture, John Clark is an old man; a very old man in those times. Clark was ninety-five when he died in 1917. At this time of his life in 1915, Clark was blind and was cared for by his daughters. I wonder as he poses for the camera, if he is reflecting on his life; a life forged by hardship and heart break but also blessed with huge monetary reward.

From humble and tragic beginnings in Scotland, Clark was placed in the care of a tyrannical uncle at a young age. Unable to bear the harsh treatment any longer, he ran away at the age of twelve to make his own way in life.
 Clark never received a formal education and  he remained illiterate throughout his life. Clark's education instead, came from the school of 'you have to fight for everything'.  From humble beginnings, John Henry Clark would become one of the largest land owners in Australia. His land holdings were so vast that they would have covered nearly seven per cent of his former homeland, Scotland.
But it all came at a huge price; his first wife and their child died tragically of disease as did two of his children by his second marriage.
He was renowned a tough and wily man; he had to be. But when a lot of European settlers were taking Aboriginal land with acts of genocide, Clark worked in with the local Aborigines. I also think, he was a man ahead of his time.
Clark would kill cattle for the local Aborigines to eat and he employed them on the cattle stations. One of Clark's most trusted employees was an Aboriginal man named Roddy Clark. Roddy is apparently buried next to Clark. One of his grandchildren was even delivered by Aboriginal mid-wives at Lornesleigh Station.

 As for vices and dislikes? Clark did like whiskey but he was never a heavy drinker. He did have an immense dislike of Catholics. Why, I do not know. Clark disliked Catholics so much that he refused to attend my grandmother's wedding to my grandfather, Richard Bell.

As John Clark had only two surviving daughters, he left all of his land holdings to them. No son in laws were put in charge which caused friction within the family. I haven't found any other women of that time operating a large pastoral company in Australia. Yes, he was a man ahead of his time.

A mountain is named after him on one of the former family properties but I think John Clark should be memorialised more; after all, if it hadn't have been for people like him busting their guts, Australia would not have become the prosperous country it is today.
 

SUFFER THE LITTLE BUSH CHILDREN

GEORGINA, CONSTANCE, MY GRANDMOTHER.

When I thought about writing this blog I knew it was going to be distressing. The death of children is heart rending for everyone. But just imagine what it was like in the Australian outback one hundred years ago when a child got injured or took ill.

No doctor for a hundred miles; a trip that involved a ride in a buggy over a barely formed road. If you could get to a doctor in time he couldn’t have done anything for infectious diseases that were still around like diphtheria.

 Certainly he could give pain relief (usually opium), set broken bones or do a basic operation. At the turn of the century, one third of the deaths in the vast region of North Queensland (where the family had settled), were children under ten.  Most deaths were from dysentery, scarlet fever and diphtheria.  

John Clark as you can remember had already lost his first wife and their baby girl. Enough was enough you’d think. Unfortunately, tragedy would strike again and it struck twice. Esther and John Clark had had four girls over the years, Jane Florence (my grandmother), Minnie Maud, Georgina and Constance Isabel.

In 1889 Georgina aged five died from a ruptured appendix and in 1892, Constance died from diphtheria. They both died at the Lornesleigh homestead and were buried near the stockyards. Their headstones are still there despite flood waters having passed over them several times. To see your children die is suffering beyond belief and then having to bury them on top of that. How do you keep functioning? I guess, in those days you had to keep going or you gave up and died. For Esther and John, they kept going.

I remember as a kid at Lornesleigh looking at the ornate headstones of the two girls side by side, the graves covered in old seashells. I thought about the two girls and wondered how life would have turned out for them if they had lived. I still think about them occasionally. Probably always will.   

GRAVES OF THE TWO GIRLS.

WARNING: GREAT GRANNIE'S GOT A GUN.

GUN TOTING ESTHER GEARY.

In 1880, John Clark certainly married a woman suited for the rugged Australian outback. My great grandmother, Esther Geary, was no genteel, fainting lady from the city salons. 

She was a true Geary but she was genteel in a way; she didn’t have a police record. In turn, she married a tough man who was creating a cattle empire in one of the most remote and hostile parts of Australia.  During this time, Europeans were encroaching on Aboriginal land and the Aborigines were fighting back.  When she came to Lornesleigh Station in 1880, there was a tribe of Aborigines living at the nearby river.

There was a frontier war going on between Europeans and Aborigines across North Queensland. It was brutal as any war with many thousands of people losing their lives, many been innocently massacred. For the Aborigines, it ultimately meant the loss of their culture and traditional lands. I will speak more about the frontier war in future blogs.

ABORIGINAL FAMILY. Source: janesoceania.

Unlike his contemporaries who were employing savage methods to rid their stations of Aborigines, John Clark wanted to live in harmony with them. I think he thought that this vast land was big enough to support everyone.  A great cause of conflict on cattle stations was the spearing of cattle.  Usually the Aborigines speared the cattle as they were easy targets which in turn resulted in reprisals. At Lornesleigh, John Clark would kill cattle for the Aborigines thus avoiding the savage cascade of events. It was, I guess, frontier diplomacy.

Sometimes, there was a breakdown in communication. My great grandmother was at the homestead by herself one morning when a lone Aboriginal man decided to visit. She was in the kitchen.The stockmen and John Clark were out mustering cattle. The Aboriginal male demanded tobacco. When Esther told him she didn’t have any he became agitated. He was agitated enough that Esther produced a rifle and told him to leave. Unfortunately for him, he laughed and said, “White Mary can’t shoot.”

She fired over his head, the bullet going through the wall of the kitchen. Her last sight of him was him tearing through the bush back to the safety of the Aboriginal camp.

      

THE WILD BUNCH

ESTHER GEARY. 1880's. Source: Personal Collection.

Wanted. Hard-working woman with initiative, required to live in isolated conditions. Local inhabitants could be hostile. Must be able to use firearms.

If John Clark had been advertising for another wife, Esther Geary would have fitted all of those key selection criteria. Esther who would become John Clark’s second wife was well known to the Clark's. She had been working for them as help for Jane Clark. In 1880, John and Esther married in her hometown of Gundaroo, New South Wales. He was forty-six and she was thirty-one. John Clark was marrying into one of the more “colourful” families in Australia.

Her great grandfather, Michael Geary (my great,great, great, great grandfather), had “immigrated” to Australia after stealing a watch in Cork, Ireland in 1793. The sentence was seven years. The ship was one of the first ships to bring Irish convicts to Australia. Most of the convicts, both male and female, were your usual motley crew of thieves but there was a Republican lawyer  named Laurence Davoren ( Davoren was fighting for liberty from England. In a rare gesture of goodwill, he was allowed to bring his wife and children) and three highwaywomen, I repeat women, who would rob travellers dressed as men.

IRISH CONVICTS. Source: lineages.co.uk.

You’d imagine the convicts been starved and flogged but they were well-fed and treated reasonably. There was beef to eat every day and there was oatmeal for breakfast. Of course, there was an ulterior motive behind the good diet; the authorities wanted healthy convicts to be able to do the hard work when they got to the other end. The voyages to Australia took four or five months and when the ship arrived in Sydney there had been only one death. In 1793, Australia’s European settlement was only five years old.

Several of the convicts escaped into the bush soon after arrival and two were speared to death by the Aborigines. Michael Geary was more a lover than an escapee. Soon after arrival he started a de facto relationship with an Eleanor McCarty alias Donovan. De facto relationships were then known as concubines and weren’t uncommon. Eleanor had also received a seven year sentence for stealing. Her journey had been a little more eventful as one of the convicts on the ship had been executed for planning a mutiny. 

Michael was freed in 1801. Eleanor and Michael settled in  Pitts Row ( now Pitt Street, the main street of Sydney) . More about Michael Geary in my next blog.   

EARLY SYDNEY.

            

GOLD, GOLD, GOLD

JOHN CLARK IN HIS NINETIES. MY GRANDFATHER AND GRANDMOTHER BELL ON EITHER SIDE. 1900's. Source: Personal Collection.

When gold was discovered in the region in the 1870s, the canny Scot, John Clark seized an opportunity. Men were flocking from all over the world hungry for gold but also plain hungry. 

These mining men needed to eat, especially meat. John Clark quickly bought his first cattle station, Mount Pleasant, followed by Lornesleigh station, both inland from Bowen. He stocked them with strong and sturdy Shorthorn cattle.

The gold discoveries were happening further north, allowing the port town of Townsville to become busy while Bowen declined. John and Jane sold their carrying business and moved to Mount Pleasant. After the death of Mary Ann, Jane never had another child. It was probably just too painful for her to ever contemplate having another after already losing a child. John and Jane did adopt a baby girl named Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen’s parents had been killed on an outlying station (I’ve never found any records of how they died).

The Clark fortune was expanding; there was money in those hungry miners who lived in the squalid, filthy shanty mining towns in the bush, hoping to strike the mother lode. Most of them ended up with nothing to show for their efforts and they were the lucky ones. Frequently miners died from cholera, mining accidents and occasional fights in the grog shops selling rot gut alcohol. Even the alcohol could be dangerous; there were known instances of sly grog sending men blind.

GOLD MINERS. Source: strangecosmos.com

Mister Clark was now in his forties but he had the energy of a man half his age. He was hitting his stride. Everything was now in John and Jane’s favour when another tragedy struck. Jane took ill in 1877 from fever and quickly died. She was buried next to her young infant daughter, Mary Ann. How would John Clark carry on?   

   

DIARY OF A FIRST WOMAN

JANE CLARK DIARY. 1874. Source: Personal Collection.

The diary is Jane Clark’s from 1874. The picture on the cover is how Australia looked at the time.

 Then it was a loose collection of colonies, each running its own affairs but still overseen by Britain. Australia as a nation would not exist until 1901. The diary is a first- hand account of what it was like to live in primitive conditions on the frontier. Unfortunately, I can barely read it because of her scratchy handwriting style.

However, I did find another one of her diaries in a museum in Brisbane a few years ago written in 1871. I read it carefully waiting for a gem from the past. Unfortunately, most of it is taken up with mundane house duties. As I found out, Jane Clark was a fastidious cleaner (she especially liked cleaning curtains)  who liked to have a bath every second day.

 My great grandfather, John Clark is barely mentioned throughout the diary, probably due to his long absences operating the carrying business. When he is mentioned he is called Mister Clark or Johnny depending on her mood towards him.

At one point, Jane goes on a sea voyage to Sydney to visit her relatives. Most of the entries during the voyage just say, “seasick” or “seasick again.” Not actually riveting but it is a glimpse of the normal life for a woman in the 1870's.

It does get interesting reading in places. There is the mention of the murders of two men named Longfield and Lambton by Aborigines who had tried to recapture an absconding Aboriginal boy who had run away from their station. There is also an entry saying that she “hit Totty for not learning.”

 I don’t know who Totty is but I’m presuming she could be an Aboriginal servant girl. Poor girl. My impression after reading the diary is that the Australian frontier in the 1870's was a lonely and brutal existence.    

DEATH ON THE FRONTIER

A PAINTING OF JANE FARRELL. 1860's. Source: Personal Collection.

Mary Ann Clark, John and Jane Clark’s child was only 3 years 10 months old when she sadly died of scarlet fever in 1865.

 The death of children was an all too frequent an occurrence on the Australian frontier in the nineteenth century. You have to remember that there weren’t many doctors around. If there was a doctor they couldn’t do much for diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid fever anyway.

John and Jane left the station they had been managing and set up a hotel and carrying business closer to Bowen. Thus began the makings of the Clark fortune. If you can’t make money from a pub on the Australian frontier then there’s something wrong with your management style. That or you’re drinking all the profits yourself.

 While Jane ran the Euri Creek Hotel, as it was known, John ventured into the hinterland to carry supplies to the stations and return with bales of wool. At the time many of the early stations had sheep. Growing sheep for wool in the early days in northern Australia turned out to be a disaster. The local Aborigines saw sheep as an easy way to get a meal; a lot easier then chasing down a kangaroo. The sheep were also tended by shepherds who were so frequently speared that it became common for two or three shepherds to be speared every week.  In the end no one wanted to be a shepherd at any price. Homesteads were also attacked so often that many were abandoned. The first settlers savage reaction to the Aborigines will be covered in future blogs.

ABORIGINES ATTACKING A SHEPHERD'S HUT. Source: A History of Aboriginal Sydney.

John Clark would take a bullock wagon full of supplies out two to three times a year inland to the most distant station. A round trip was about 360 miles and a good trip took about three weeks. Yes, I nearly forgot, he also had to go over two mountain ranges. He always took Roddy with him so he could avoid being attacked.

BULLOCK DRAY. Source: ninglun.wordpress.

 A clever ploy that he learnt from the mail man who also travelled the same track, was not to sleep at the camp fire you built but to sleep somewhere else. If the Aborigines saw the campfire they would attack it. 

JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN.

JOHN CLARK WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTERS. LATE 1890'S. Source: Personal Collection.

John, Jane and Mary Ann (their baby daughter) arrived at a staging post on the Queensland border three months after leaving the Hunter Valley minus the police posse.  For those who don’t know geography, Queensland is a state of Australia. It’s our version of Texas.

It was at the staging post that John Clark showed his bravery and canniness when he agreed to drive a mob of cattle (for a good price and the fact that no one else wanted to do it) north to a station near the settlement of Bowen. The town had only been established one year before. Was he crazy? After here, there were barely any settlements or roads for a thousand miles. Most of the land north had only just been explored by Europeans. Bowen was a long way away and the Aborigines whose land he would be passing through were known to be hostile.

ABORIGINES. Source: blueswarmi.com

 John Clark had such an air of confidence about him that several men decided to join his party. But John Clark had a clever idea about dealing with hostile Aborigines. Two local Aborigines, a male and female named Roddy and Billy who he had befriended, agreed to come with him. As the party travelled north, Roddy and Billy were able to negotiate safe passage through the different tribal lands they passed through.

Things did get a little sticky one night when they thought their camp would be attacked. Even Billy and Roddy were worried. Roddy apparently told John Clark to grab, “the stick that goes ha-ha.” (his exact words). Roddy was of course referring to a gun. John Clark fired a shot over the heads of the Aborigines and they quickly dispersed.

After several months on the road everyone arrived in Bowen alive and well.  Impressed by the good  condition of the cattle, John Clark was made manager of the station.

 As for Roddy and Billy? They would remain with John and his family the rest of their lives. Billy delivered several of John Clark’s children at Lornesleigh Station and Roddy is buried next to John Clark.  

TROUBLE WITH THE MOTHER INLAW

1910. JOHN CLARK WITH TWO GRANDDAUGHTERS. LORNESLEIGH STATION. Source: Personal Collection.

All family history seemed to begin with my great grandfather, John Henry Clark.  Of course, you are going to give him a big credit.  He was the man that made the family fortune. (The disappearing fortune? There’s another blog in that).

 I’ve always been surprised that my surname isn’t Clark rather than Bell such is the impact of this man. Yet he remains a little bit of a mystery.

The family tales are that he was born in Australia. His father died when he was a child and he was sent to an uncle. The uncle was a tyrant and John ran away to make his own way in life at the age of thirteen. Never learning to read or write, he soon developed a canny nose for business and became a gifted horseman. At one stage he operated a stage coach company on the Victorian goldfields. Then in the 1860's, he decided to take wife and child put them on a bullock dray and head to greener pastures in northern Australia, all the way from the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. Well, some of it is true. Some isn’t.

Then I read some old newspapers and convict records from the 1850's. Isn’t the internet a great resource? The real John Henry Clark was born in Perthshire, Scotland in the 1820's. His family appeared to be farmers and weavers. Nothing more is heard of him until the 1840's, when he is tried in Glasgow for stealing. A sentence of five years transportation to Australia was the result.  

BALL AND CHAIN. Source: heritagegenealogy.com

The convict system was becoming unpopular in Australia and would end soon. As a result, John didn't do it hard like many earlier convicts. He got assigned to work on a cattle property in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. I guess, this was all useful experience for a man who would later be running a vast cattle empire. He did his time, became an inn operator then a butcher at a place called Murrurundi, New South Wales. He was probably a stage coach driver but never an owner.

In the early 1860's he met and married Jane Farrell, the daughter of the local policeman and the hospital matron. John was moving up the social ladder.  But strangely John, Jane and a baby daughter were heading north to the newly opened lands of north Queensland in 1861; a dangerous journey of nearly two thousand miles that would take months to complete. Not travelling on a train or on a ship but by means of a bullock wagon. Very uncomfortable.

 What I discovered was that the move wasn’t necessarily motivated by a thirst for fortune. It was also motivated by his mother in-law.  John Clark was in trouble again. Again.

Matron Farrell had gone to the police saying that her son in-law had been stealing cattle (one of Australia's oldest occupations). The police were closing in fast. To avoid arrest John grabbed his young family, hitched up the bullock wagon one night and legged it out of town .

The things a man will do to get away from his mother in-law.

AUSTRALIAN ARISTOCRACY

JOHN CLARK.1880. Source: Personal Collection.


I’ve mentioned my great grandfather, John Clark, in previous blogs. I’m going to write about his life over several blogs; an amazing life that ran for ninety-four years. He was an aristocrat of the Australian variety—which is a bit different to the English and European variety.

I have a confession to make—John Clark was a convict, a jail bird. He didn’t kill anyone or do anything particularly evil. He would have been hung for that or any of the other two hundred offences in the nineteenth century that carried the death penalty. It’s mind boggling that people were transported to Australia for seven years just for stealing a handkerchief. Most poor unfortunates committed crimes because of poverty. John Clark was a humble thief who got caught. Confessing this to you is probably going to set prim and proper Aunt Maud rolling in her grave.

Australians call convicts aristocracy because they founded this nation. Where once you never dared admit you were an ex-convict or descended from one, now we say it with pride. It’s no longer an insult. So there, English rugby and cricket fans!

CONVICT SHIP. Source: les-nuits-masquees.blogspot.

CONVICTS. 1860's. Source: blogs.smithsonian.

Australia can thank America for our convicts. Until independence, the British Isles sent their convicts to America. But from 1788 right up until the 1860's, convicts were transported to Australia. Most were male, but there were also female and even child convicts. While some were rebels and trade unionists, London’s East End poor, the rural poor and Irish made up the majority. Technological change was a bad thing for unskilled workers in those days too.

Being a convict could be tolerable if you decided to just get on with it and do your time. At the end of your seven years you got one hundred acres of land that you could call your own. (If you want to learn more, look up Wikipedia).

Not only was John Clark a convict, but his wife, Esther Geary, my great-grandmother, was descended from convicts. The Gearys were a wild, wild bunch. From attempted murderer to policeman, that was my great-great-great grandfather, Daniel Geary. 

More about him next time. So, you see I’m a true Australian aristocrat. You can stop spinning now Aunty Maud. You’ll only make yourself dizzy!

To be continued.