Annie Lyons
Source: Mudgee Guardian, 18 August 1971, p 4
In 1894, Annie married Alfred J Lyons in Gulgong (NSW BDM 3988/1894). They had 10 children.
In 1971, at the age of 94, Annie Lyons was interviewed about the early days by Frank Halloran of the Mudgee Guardian. This is the resulting article.
1971 - Mrs Annie Lyons, aged 94, recalls tale of the legless ghost
(By Frank Halloran)
Spend an hour talking to Mrs Annie Lyons of Gulgong, and you come away with a piece of birthday cake, all the ingredients for a good novel and … the feeling of inadequacy.
Mrs Lyons is just 94. She had her birthday on July 31, 1971 and all the living members of her family were there to celebrate the occasion with her.
She has always lived in “Goolgong”. That’s the way the old hands still say that name. In fact, as far as most people would think, she has led a very sheltered life – gone to bed early “we had to be in bed by 8 o’clock when we were kids.”
“I had a wonderful husband – very happy, and we had five girls and five boys”.
Some people would think the world had passed her by, she had never been much further than Gulgong. But Mrs Lyons has experienced a very full life, she has that quiet dignity…[missing text]... not only a bush town, where the young Annie Jago grew up.
It was the scene of one of the last big, gold rushes of New South Wales, where people from all nations under the sun came in search of their fortune.
“My father came from Switzerland to the Goldrush: Peter Jago was his name, and my mother came from Campbelltown. In those days, there were no, what you call now, Australians, everyone was a foreigner of some sort. The buildings were made of stringy bark. You know there used to be an old bark school house up there in Mayne Street, where Keith Paul’s office is [103-105 Mayne Street], where my husband Alf went to school.
Further along there was a watch maker. As the children came out of school they pushed their noses up against the windows. He would come out and clear the children away. “Let the watches see the people” he used to say.
11 O’CLOCK AND ALL’S WELL
Mrs. Lyons went to the old public school in Belmore Street sited just opposite the present primary school. Mr. Stokes was the headmaster, there was a Miss Dobbs, a Miss Smith and a Miss Woolley at the school. Near there lived Jack Paradise, they used to call him that or Jack the Watchman. He used to go around and light up the lamps at dusk. I can still hear him going around the town calling out the time. You would hear him calling out through the night. “It’s 11 o’clock and all’s well!”
He never married. He used to have a big gold watch and we used to tease him and call out “What’s the time Jack?”.
PRETTY STONES
You know they’ve got some wrong yarns going about the goldrush. The blacks found the first big lot of gold. There were a lot of black people settled out near Ulan. They used to come in and get blankets the Government gave them. They’d want water, tobacco and things like that. Some of the people said, look Jackie you dig a hole down there on the flat and you’ll get plenty of water. They came back to the business people and said “We never found any water, but you come and see the pretty stones we find.”
Of course, this was a different story. “We’re going to give you plenty of tobacco, we’ll work it for you and you’ll have as much water as you want”. Oh yes, from then on they were very good to the blacks. That’s why they call it Black Lead, the richest lead of them all.
[There could be some truth to the discovery of gold in this area by Aboriginal people as described above. An 1871 paper described the most easterly of block claims on the Black Lead as "locally celebrated as the Darkies' claim".Evening News Sat 4 Feb 1871 Page 4. However, in an 1870 news piece, the name was said to have derived from "the colour of a thick layer of black deposit that overlays the auriferous strata".]
Gold? I’ve seen more gold that anyone here in Gulgong. Pints of it. As a little girl my father used to take me down to Tippin’s Dam. Mr Tippin’s had two big puddling machines. I saw all the gold taken off before it would go up to the bank. He had two horses there shod with gold. No, not really, only the nails in the horse shoe were of gold, they had plated the top of the nails.
My father found a good big lot of gold in Morrissey’s paddock, you know out there along the Canadian road. We went out there to live; my father put a house up out there for a while. He got £300 out of it. Lot of money. With him were Jack Lyons, Frank Egan, Jack Leonard. I remember coming into town with Mrs Jack Lyons in a spring cart with the pannikins filled with gold. They were always frightened of being robbed. Anyone would know we had gold, for they’d see the wash up. You’d hear a lot about hold ups and bushrangers but I never knew any.
The big names I remember hearing about were out at Belinfante. Angel and Thurston were, and shot the shopkeeper. He’s buried down at the cemetery, and the one who shot him are buried there also. It was away from the other graves; anyone who got shot or anything like that, they would bury them in a separate place.
You know the first cemetery was up there opposite, I think, Anzac Park. They built on the old cemetery. I don’t think it was right, do you?
There used to be a lot of talk about ghosts in those days. They reckon the ghost of Stewart, who was shot, was seen around. A girl I know worked at Guntawang. Some of her friends dressed up. She was in the hospital for days. That’s what they used to do in those days. I don’t believe in ghost stories but a lot of people did.
DANCING GHOST WITH NO FEET
That’s what they used to do in those days, frighten people with ghost stories. Do you know about the ghost down there on the Black Lead? Ted Lyons swears he often saw the ghost down there. It is a young girl, dressed in grey, she has no feet but seems to be dancing around. The story is that a young girl coming back from a dance fell into one of the mine shafts and was never found. She might have been pushed down the hole. You don’t know really what happened. Ted Lyons used to tell us how he looked behind him one night and there he saw this ghost, she had no legs.
HOW THEY GOT THEIR BOYFRIENDS
They used to dance down at the flat and play rounders. Oh yes, that's why they call it Happy Valley*. Do you want to know a joke about Gulgong women, how they got their husbands? How did you get married so young, people would say? Father made sure we didn’t go around to the dance halls. Well, I’ll tell you how the girls got their boy friends, down on Happy Valley.
[The name "Happy Valley" was in use in 1871, so this can't be the origin story.]
IT CAME TO A WEDDING
“They would make a clearing, put some sand down and we would play rounders. That’s how we did it! Peter Reddish would want to meet Bertie Glazier. Some of his mates would say, we’ll get Bertie to come over and play rounders. Afterwards, he would say, "Bertie, I will take you home" – and then he was asked for tea … That’s how we all got our husbands. Old Jim Cross and Mary Anne, Jim had to take her home, it came to a wedding.
Besides rounders, there would be the old quadrilles. I can still see Jack Sweeney every Sunday down in front of our place. All the young people would come from the town. We would dance the Jolly Miller, the someone would miss out and be “Oh what a duffer in the ring!”. After the rounders we would have a camp fire and singing and dancing. That’s how all the young people got their husbands and wives. “I got my husband playing rounders,” Mrs Lyons said as she fingered her gold wedding ring.
FOUND GOLD IN TREE
It’s 18 carat gold, my wedding ring. I’m told it came from the Helvetia. Mr McCullock had it made into a wedding ring. I’ve told my family to leave it one me when I go. It came from the ground and back to the ground it will go.
We knew a lot about Henry Lawson but didn’t know him – Tom Saunders, everyone knew him. Oh there was great excitement, when Harry Upham (Tommy Upham’s relative) found gold in the fork of a tree, while he was out ring barking. People didn’t believe him, but he swore he found it there, got about £500 for it. Someone must have planted it. Like the time Peter Reddish found a nugget down just past the railway. He was pretty badly off at the time. It paid all his bills.
The miners used to look a pretty lot when they would come to town. They wore white trousers and red sashes around their waists. Some of the first miners I remember were Long Bill Capewell they use to call him, and Billy Hutton and Mr Lanfranc and Mr Casben.
I only know three people in Gulgong now who went to school with me. Mr Harry Snelson, his sister Martha, Matron Snelson was at the Gulgong Hospital for many years. There’s Mr Harry Gudgeon too. Mr Snelson’s father used to make wine and sell it for only a shilling a bottle. He was with Mr Bucholtz and they were on the Helvetia.
GAVE JIMMY GOVERNOR A SADDLE
The Governors, I remember them well. Jimmy, Joe and their sister who worked for Sgt Steele. I remember Jimmy, he had such a temper. There was a drought on and no water in the tanks at school. We all had to bring bottles of water and the girls used to go and drink theirs.
My father was always good to them. Jimmy was going to get married to a Page girl. Someone lent him a horse, but he couldn’t get a saddle. “I only want it for an hour or so this afternoon”, he said. “Alright, I said and gave him the saddle”.
When everyone around was frightened to death of them after they killed the Mawby family, we never were. There were people who looked down on the Page girl and gave her a terrible time.
“Fancy going and marrying a black fellow” they would say. They had a terrible set on a doctor here who said this about them, but not my father.
After my father came here and the diggings were worked out, he started working on the side roads in the town. He made White Street. At first it was only a raked up bit of dirt, but my father did a good job, charged the right price and had plenty of work.
LET THE TOFFS FIGHT THE WAR
“My father came from a country where they didn’t believe in wars”. Mrs Lyons lost her son in the World War I and cherished pictures of him as a baby in her arms and as a young man. “War is a terrible thing” she said. “Killed all our young men. My father used to say, all wars were put on by the rich man. Let the toffs go and fight it out, not the poor working boys. If the rich man had to go to war, then there wouldn’t be any more wars, they’d be walking hand in hand,” he used to say.
“I remember all the things that used to happen in those days. There’s the quadrilles”. Jimmy the Messer used to have the hall and there’d be Jim on the concertina. Tommy Britt would be the best singer we ever had here. He was wonderful. He sang the sad songs and the jolly ones too. We’d have singalongs and recitations. People used to say about Tom, he should have gone on the stage. He used to sing with all the people who would come here then. He used to sing those Irish songs, some were terrible sad. There was the Luggage Van Ahead … he would make you cry he sang it so well. He would sing the “Wild Colonial Boy” and he could recite and change his voice. I wanted them to play the “Wild Colonial Boy” for my birthday, but they don’t play requests, they say. I used to see him going off on his cart in later days and think what a good singer he was, and people have forgotten all that.
There was Ted Flood – he use to drive the coach and take us out to Belinfante for a picnic…
I remember a man came around once selling photographs for 1/-. One was of Mr Loneragan, the grandfather of the Loneragans now. He bought the first goods up over the mountains on a bullock wagon. There were some wonderful photos. I wanted to keep them but my family were cleaning up and they burned them. I was broken hearted when I found they were burned. They were such a novelty and I would have been able to show them to you.
I could tell you about the shops in the town, about Mr Young, they had Loneragan’s first; the pubs; the Horse and Jockey and Cicognani’s Hotel, Shannons also had a pub, Sharman had a butcher shop – Blanch had another butcher’s shop and how we used to walk up to Billy Goat Hill.
But there was no need for the photographs, all the ghosts of the bygone days were present with Mrs. Lyons--
We had to go. But not before Mrs Lyons called out to her daughter (Mrs Aub Stanton) to cut a piece of one of her four birthday cakes.
“Would you say for me, Mrs Annie Lyons of Lynne Street, (everyone knows me of Lynne Street, I still go over there when I want to) thank all my friends for their cards and wires for my birthday,” she said.
Source: Mudgee Guardian, 18 August 1971, p 4
