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GUNS

NOTE: PISTOL HANGING ON BEDHEAD. READY FOR ACTION.LORNESLEIGH. LATE 1960'S.

I want to say upfront. I’m not a gun enthusiast myself but I can see a place for a firearm. In the Australian bush especially there’s definitely a need to carry a firearm whether it be a pistol or rifle.

 You never know when you’ll have to put down livestock that are in pain or unable to walk. There may be the need to shoot dingoes who attack and kill the cattle. Wild cattle known as shrubbers will also be shot as they can’t be mustered and will definitely kill a human if approached.

It may sound cruel and unnecessary to some, but cattle are your livelihood and they have to be protected. A firearm will be carried these days in four wheel drive ( RV) but in the old days, they were carried on a horse. I remember my dad, carrying a pump action Remington rifle in the car which he called the dingo gun. When riding a horse, my father carried a pistol and my grandfather Bell, had a lever action Winchester in a holster attached to his saddle.

Yes, I almost forgot, a gun may even save your life in the bush. Apart from rampaging shrubbers coming out of the bush at you, there are snakes and just before I was born in the late fifties, the rivers on our cattle stations were full of crocodiles. My dad shot the last one when I was a baby. Apparently. But that’s another blog.  I have to add,native animals such as kangaroos were not considered as animals to shoot by my family.  

Horses, cattle and the land are the building blocks of my family’s dna but my father and his brother were the gun nuts for want of a better term. Between them their gun collection probably could have outfitted a large partisan group who wanted to take on the Nazis. Their collection comprised many types of firearms, ranging from conventional rifles, shotguns and pistols to a World War One machine gun that had once been mounted on an aircraft. I remember that was stored under a bed. As you do.

Yes, there was the Martini Henry that had been used by the English in the Zulu War. It took bullets made of wrapped brass with a lead bullet and when fired, enveloped the area in a white cloud.  You had to look under the cloud to see if you had hit the target. There were many military rifles from several countries; British, American, Italian, Japanese and German.  It’s all worth another blog.              

            

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.

      

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. 

     

GRANDMA BELL'S PLUM PUDDING RECIPE.

GRANDMOTHER BELL. 1940'S.

85g/ 3oz light brown sugar,

115g/ 4oz  butter or margarine,

115g/ 4oz  maple or golden syrup.

115g/ 4oz sultanas,

 2 cups self raising flour,

 1 egg,

 ½ teaspoon bicarb soda dissolved in a little warm water,

½ cup chopped almonds,

2 tablespoons black coffee or coffee essence,

1 tablespoon brandy (if desired)

PLUM PUDDING.

Warm the butter, syrup, and coffee stirring until melted but not hot. Allow to cool. Add the beaten egg, sift in flour, then add sultanas, almonds, brandy, and lastly the soda. Beat quickly and thoroughly. Spoon the mix in to a greased pudding basin or pudding steamer, smooth the mixture gently with the back of a spoon. Cover with a double layer of greaseproof or baking paper, then a layer of aluminium foil and tie securely with string. Set over a saucepan of simmering water and steam the pudding for 2 and 1/2 hours, adding water to the pan if needed.

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.