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.

            

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.