THE HAWKINS FAMILY; SOME REMINISCENCES.
Transcript of tape by Reginald Hawkins MBE.
Some time ago I prepared a cassette tape about the distaff
side of my children's ancestors, but made no such record of my own ancestry.
The reason for this was very simple. Whereas the Gormly's were a very ancient
tribe with a highly interesting history, well authenticated, I know very little
of my father's side of the family. The Hawkins' as far as I know have no
history. My grandfather was an Englishman. I knew little about him.
Some time ago my grandson, Kevin Varney, asked me to make a
recording about my family and I am going to do the best that I can. When
grandfather was twelve years of age he ran away from home and joined a sailing
ship as cabin boy. That would be about the middle of the last century. He came
to Australia and landed in Sydney with one shilling in his pocket. That is as
far as I can go in his early history. I examined the record of the registration
of his death from which I ascertained that his father was a tobacco merchant.
That of course conveys little. It is an equivocal description. It may indicate
the status associated with a barber shop or it could mean a merchant in the
wider connotation of the word. He was an Anglican by faith. It is apparent that
he had little education as might, have been expected. He had an inborn love of
horses an I think it likely that in his boyhood days here he earned his
livelihood as a stable boy, but that of course is guesswork. In his twenties in
the catholic church at Windsor he married a currency lass Ellen Smith. The
record shows that he was then a groom. A currency lass was the daughter of a
convict but there was no shame attached to that. Most of the populace here were
convicts and women were deliberately recruited from the streets of the
provincial cities and towns of England and deported here to NSW to provide
wives or female companions for the male section of the community; that is for
the free men as well as for the convicts. These ladies were detained in the convict
barracks, the female barracks, at Parramatta and kept there until such time as some
man applied for her. It was not a noble heritage for the children they begot,
but the results were surprising. In 1832 a census revealed that the currency
lads and lasses were the best behaved people in the community. But more of this
anon. When he married grandmother my paternal grandfather was recorded as a
groom. When I first knew him he was a horse doctor, without any professional
qualifications of course, but very skilled in the treatment of sick and injured
horses. This, before the age of motor cars, was the horse age and his services
were in very wide demand. Incidentally, his love Of horses has run through each
generation of his descendants. He was a very good husband and I think I can claim
that that trait is to be found in all his male descendants. They had thirteen
children in all, twelve boys and a girl. All of these were baptised in the
Catholic faith. When I was a boy I remember an old man telling me this: he said
"I knew your grandparents when they lived at Biragambil seven miles from
Gulgong where there stood the nearest Catholic church. When he was able to do
so your grandfather, in a spring cart, drove his wife and children to Mass in
Gulgong whilst he himself went to the Church of England. When he was not
available I have seen your grandmother walking the seven miles leading one
child in each hand and carrying a third on her back". I think this is a
fair sample of what the currency lasses were like. Of her thirteen children,
three died as the result of accidents and the other ten all died from cancer.
Apparently my grandfather was the seventh son of his family,
for my father Walter Hawkins was a seventh son and it was always said that he
would be singularly lucky because of that fact. But I am afraid that we did not
perceive any sign of that luck except if it meant that he was to be of good
health, sturdy, strong and of good character. For father indeed was a poor man
for the whole of his life. My father left school at twelve and became a station
hand. The Rouses, a very old Australian family who were here from the beginning
were squatters of the Gulgong district. They owned three stations: Guntawang, Biragambil
and Currongoral [sic Cullengoral]. I think my father worked on all those stations, but when I came
on the scene he was employed at Currongoral as a horse breaker and station
hand. My first memory of him is seeing him ride a fierce buck jumper in the
sandy bed of the Cudgegong River.
At the age of twenty-two he married Annie Lyons, aged
eighteen, of Home Rule. She was the daughter of John Lyons and Emma (née)
Gallagher. Like my paternal grandmother, Emma Gallagher was also a currency
lass. John Lyons (and that was the anglicised version of his Dutch name) came
from Holland, and came here as a sailor on a Dutch sailing ship. Hargraves had
just discovered gold at Sofala so John, like so many others of his day, jumped
ship and fled to the gold fields. New strikes were constantly being uncovered
and he like so many more followed them up as they occurred. Thus he came to
Home Rule. Like all other married people of their day they quickly accumulated
a large family who were educated at Home Rule public school, a building still
standing, but today it is occupied as a private residence. Grandfather by
virtue of his miner's right leased a small area upon which he sunk a shaft. And
nearby, also by virtue of his miner's right, he selected a residence area of
two acres, for which he paid no rent or rates, just the ten shilling yearly fee
for the miner's right. On his land he built a neat little cottage and
established a vegetable garden and a flock of geese. Then tragedy fell. This
would be just before the turn of the century, before the advent of old age and
invalid pensions. They did not eventuate until 1904. The tragedy was the
collapse of his mine and he was working in it at the time. The result was that
he was crippled for life and could never work any more. What a dreadful tragedy
for a poor man with a large family. But it was not such a terrible tragedy as
it may seem. His main asset was that big family. His kids left school and went
to work, the boys into rural pursuits like sheep shearing and fruit picking and
so forth whilst the girls went into domestic service. There wages came home as
regularly as clockwork and always on there respective paydays. I remember I was
a little toddler when my grandmother asked me to walk a mile to the shop for
which she promised me the enormous reward of two shillings, a large sum in
those days. I'll never forget this aspect of it. She said I'll pay you tomorrow
when your uncle Dick's money comes in. Next day I received my reward. Uncle
Dick had come up to scratch as expected. And so those youngsters continued to
tow the line with their wages until pensions were established in 1904. After
that they contributed less regularly.
I have always remembered Home Rule and the happy days I
spent there. Every now and again I become very tired Of the rapidly changing
world around me and I try to make a short escape. On one such occasion a couple
of years ago I went to Home Rule. I went to where my Grandfather had built the
cottage and I thought I was seeing it again. The building I saw was exactly the
same, but I was told that it had been rebuilt. Apparently the same design was
adhered to. I spoke to the lady who occupied the place and told her who I was.
I said my grandmother kept geese, and about this time of the day they came up
from the creek croaking as they came and marching in line. She said "Here
they come now ' and sure enough there were the geese marching up and crying
exactly as they had done more than seventy years before. I thought I would
cause her some surprise when I said "You know my grandfather held this
place under a miner's right for which he paid ten shillings a year and he had
no further expense", and she said "Yes I know, I renewed my right yesterday”.
But really it's a bit ironical to be talking about the
absence of change at Home Rule, for I suppose there is no place in existence
that has suffered greater change than has that district. A hundred years ago it
was a rip-roaring gold town with tens of thousands of inhabitants and producing
gold by the ton. It had enormous stores and pubs. Today there is nothing but a
few scattered houses and a plethora of mullock heaps. The Sydney Morning Herald
of the 8th of October 1900 (the day after my birth) reports an impending visit
to Home Rule by the Minister for Mines in an endeavour to discuss the
alleviation of the miner's difficulties due to the exhaustion of the gold
supply.
The first child born to my youthful parents was a boy whom
they called Clyde, who died in his first year of life. The next was a girl
called Irelene who also died under the age of a year. I was my parents next
effort and I suspect because of their previous tragedies I was thoroughly
spoiled. At least that is my excuse for my deficiencies.
After his wife and family, Father's next love was horses and
I'm certain that his first ambition for his little son was that he should be a
horseman. Consequently by the time I was two years old I had a pony, and
although my poor old memory is failing so rapidly that I cannot remember the
name of the man with whom I played bridge yesterday, I can with very great
clarity remember every detail of my first ride on that pony. I was two years
old at the time and whilst my mother held me on the saddle Father folded a bed
sheet which he tied to my left ankle, took it under the horse's belly, and
securely tied me to the seat by tying it round my right ankle. Then away I
went, father leading the horse. These riding lessons continued, but it was not
very long before the sheet was abandoned, but Father still continued to lead
the horse.
He also loved guns. He bought me a toy rifle and so began my
first shooting lessons. I used that gun so often and so roughly that it soon
became shabby and I wanted a new one. When it duly arrived I announced that I
would burn the old one with which suggestion Mother readily agreed, so I threw
it on the house fire but when I saw the flames begin to lick it I cried out
that I wanted my gun back. Mother bent over to retrieve it and our family came
very close to suffering a dreadful tragedy. You see she didn't know that I had
fixed a live pea rifle bullet in the gun and as she stooped over to retrieve it
the bullet exploded. Fortunately it missed her face and went up the chimney.
The gun burned and I yelled not because of the burning of the toy but because
of the burning sensation on my back side resulting from the spanking that it
received.
It was shortly after this that my new brother Gordon
arrived. I was three years and four months old at the time and I really hated
him for stepping into my place, and I think he did that to a certain degree
because, I suppose, he was a far more handsome child than I.
Mother had been doing a bit of domestic work outside the
home; Father was saving, though the Lord knows how, but they managed to save
enough to buy a few milking cows and set up a dairy farm at Wilbertree Flat.
Here my parents proved their calibre. Cows died mysteriously, from snake bites
Father thought, although the most vigorous search failed to reveal any snakes.
Crops failed through drought and there were some losses through the occasional
flooding of the dry creek that ran through our farm. Through all of this father
kept a stiff upper lip. In fact I never heard him complain during the whole of
my life, not even in the closing days of his life when he was dying of a
dreadful cancer. I can still see him coming in and hear him saying
"There's another cow dead this morning. I'll have to drag it away and burn
it I suppose". These bovine funerals and cremations were unforgettable
experiences. As father affixed a swingle bar to the animals hind legs and hitched
it to a horse set off for the site of the funeral pyre the rest of the herd
lined up in funeral style with heads bent to the ground and, following the dead
cow, they mooed in the most melancholy fashion as they followed the procession.
This strange behaviour of the bovine section turns my mind
to the equine section. We had a lot of horses, one of which was called Star. He
was a male horse who had been improperly castrated and consequently he was
forever trying to do that which his operation was designed to prevent. He had
many strange habits. Even on the hottest of days after a hard days work as soon
as he was unharnessed, without waiting to be washed down and fed, he would
gallop off around the farm and only then would he come back for his ablutions
and his tucker. I remember one of the mares had recently foaled. I heard a tremendous
commotion amongst the horses, both geldings and mares, some twenty in number. I
ran out to find out what was the trouble and as I did so I saw Star bucking the
foal. He was holding it up in his teeth firmly fixed to the back of its neck
and he was galloping off with it. All the other horses were in hot pursuit and
whinnying in distressed fashion. When Star eventually dropped the foal the
other horses formed a protecting ring around it and made off as fast as the
baby foal could travel. This time Star was in pursuit, but as he tried to enter
the protecting ring of horses they closed up and kept him out. The chase
continued until I arrived to drive Star off.
Father, a fine horseman and a very good rifle shot was a
soldier at heart, and he was a member of the local light horse troop. He was a
fine figure of a man and had a beautiful seat on a horse. For military purposes
he had a lovely Chestnut mare. he, dressed in his uniform with his highly
polished boots and leggings proceeded on that mare, saddle and reigns shining
to match his clothing it was a sight of which any boy might well be proud. And
our pride knew no bounds in 1908 when Admiral Sperry brought the American White
Fleet to Sydney. Either eight or twelve light horsemen selected from throughout
the state were taken to Sydney to act as an escort for the Admiral. When our
father and his Chestnut Mare were included in that guard our pride and pleasure
knew no bounds.
A strange thought occurs to me about that mare. Every horse,
every cow, every pig, dog and cat, and indeed every chook on the farm had a
name. That is all but the Chestnut Mare. She never was known as anything else
but that. I suppose the real reason was that she was such a beautiful animal
that we could not find a name suitable for her.
While speaking of horses I have indicated that I was
practically born in the saddle and my two brothers, Gordon, and poor old Cliff
(who died the other day), were also taught early horsemanship, but they were
better than I. Cliff first brought his to notice when he rode, in work service,
a bucking steer. He wanted to become a jockey, so Father apprenticed him to a
horse trainer named Papworth, established, if my memory serves me rightly, at
Rose Hill. From time to time Father received promising reports of Cliff's
progress but eventually came the bad news that we must have always expected;
Cliff was going to be too heavy to be a jockey and it were better, in his own
interests, to seek other employment, and so he came home. If Gordon, an equally
good rider, had no ambitions to become a jockey, I believe there was a good
reason for it. I firmly am of the opinion that early happenings in our infant
years can have a lifelong influence. Now when Gordon was a baby none of us had
ever seen a motor car although they had of course been invented by then and
little toys, spring motor cars, were on sale. Come Christmas and Santa Claus
placed such a toy in Gordon's stocking. Even I, three and a quarter years older
than he was, had to be told what it was. In all my life I have never seen a
child so taken with a toy. He has had a long interest in cars. They have been
his pleasure, his livelihood and his life. I believe it all began with that
Christmas toy and I think that is why he did not desire to become involved in a
horsey occupation.
As for me my first ambition had a horsey flavour also. In
those days the pages of the Mudgee Guardian during the equine mating season
were littered with advertisements offering the services of stallions. Each
advertisement was accompanied by a picture of a stallion being led by a man on
a horse. During such a season our school master informed us that the time had
arrived when we, although still young, should be forming ambitions, and he
asked us to spend the weekend thinking that over. On Monday he would ask us at
what conclusions we had arrived. I spent a lot of time over the weekend on the
subject and came to a very firm decision. When my turn arrived to tell him on
the Monday morning I said I wanted to be a stallion [around?]. That appealed to
me much more than dairy farming.
During my boyhood when I was about eight years old I
suffered a very serious accident. Each morning before Father left for the cow
yard he lit the kitchen fire and filled a four and a half gallon tub with
water. One morning Gordon and I entered the kitchen before Mother had got out
of bed but at a stage when the water was boiling, and I dropped a marble under
the stove. I crawled under to retrieve it and at this moment Gordon saw fit to
grab the fountain by the spout and putting some pressure on it brought it down
spilling its contents all over me. My rump and legs were effected. Of course I
received a very severe and extensive scalding. Hearing the commotion Mother
appeared in her night attire, screamed for Father who was in the milking yard.
Being a man of action he raced to his beloved bee hive, upset one and gathering
his contents into his milking bucket he raced down to the house and spread
honey over my scalds. He then jumped onto a horse and raced to see a Doctor in
Mudgee. From the doctor he received advise and prescription and gathering the
necessary medicaments from the chemist he came home and applied them. One might
wonder why the Doctor was not sent for or why I was not taken in to see him. Well,
as to the second point I was too badly injured to travel by horse and sulky and
secondly, this was before the age of cars and Doctors travelled by horse and
sulky and one could not expect a Doctor to so travel seven miles for the
purpose of seeing a scalded child. When he came home Father applied the
prescribed treatment and he and Mother looked after me in the most careful,
kindly fashion for a matter, not of a month I suppose, but at least a number of
weeks. At last the day arrived which I thought would never come. I was told I
could get up. Mother dressed me, but my parents were horrified. When I got out
of the bed not only was I unable to walk but I couldn't even stand upright.
They were greatly distressed but I was completely unconcerned. I was out of bed
and that was all that mattered. For weeks I moved about the house on my back
side propelling myself with my hands and arms. That I did not really care I can
clearly remember because on one occasion, when Mother had taken Father's
morning tea to the ploughing paddock, I had the house to myself. When there was
a knock on the door I called "come in" (I couldn't stand up to open the
door) and thereupon there stepped into the room a Salvation Army lassie. She
noticed my predicament and was clearly upset. She was horrified upon enquiring
when I expected to be able to walk I told her "never". She expressed
so much concern that I said "don't worry about it. I don't mind. I won't
have to go to school". And that is just exactly what I thought about it.
My father and mother were making plans to seek specialist
advice and treatment were very, very worried. But there was always father; he
was not one to give up. He has no degree in psychology, in fact I don't think
he knew what the word meant. But what he did have was a tremendous fund of
common sense. He was not going to see me a cripple for life. His cure included
what might be expected of him. One day he invited me to slide out onto the
front verandah and when I did so there stood a beautiful Chestnut pony with a silver
mane and tail. "That pony" father said "is for you when without
assistance you can walk down and mount it-on your own". That did the
trick. Our verandah was surrounded by a railing and immediately Father had
spoken I slid over till I reached an upright, grabbed hold of it and pulled
myself slowly and painfully to my feet while with both hands I caught hold of
the railing and slid along a few paces. It was painful but it was a start. And
I kept the practice up. Not a great many days had elapsed before I was able to
mount the hand- rail and say to Father "saddle up the pony, I'm going to
bring him into the front yard" and this he did and forthwith I staggered
down the front steps, crossed to the pony and without assistance climbed onto
his back. But not without a great deal of pain, I must admit.
Apart from the initial suffering of the temporary crippling
I was not disadvantaged by the accident, in fact some eight years later I won
the 100 yards sprint open to all schools within 50 miles of Mudgee. For this I
was given a gold medal which I proudly kept until it found its way into a pawn
shop during the great depression of the 1930s.
Although I suffered no permanent damage through the injury I
believe it must have effected my gate because throughout my life on literally
hundreds of occasions people have said to me “I knew you as soon as I spotted
you”. So far as I knew there was nothing strange about my walk; [that] I always
walked perfectly normally. Nevertheless there was something, and recently I
asked Amy about it, and she told me that in fact I did walk with a slight limp.
Eventually the dairy farm folded through the failure of the
milk and butter factory where we sold our products. This was a great blow to
father; not only had his livelihood gone but his stock in trade, his precious
cows had lost their value. But he was not one to throw up his arms in despair.
He went out to look for work. I remember his first job. I recollect this because
I can recall the enormous blisters he had on his hands when he returned home on
the first night. I was a big boy now but I still went into my bedroom and cried
when I realised that those blisters had been raised for me and for the rest of
the family.
Although father sold the cows he could not bring himself to
part with his beloved horses and in due course he bought a wagon and went into
the carrying business. In those days the railway line ended at Gulgong and he
carried on from where the line ended, and carted goods between that town and
Dunedoo. From this source he earned a fair living and was working with the
beloved horses. The trouble was that we saw so little of him, about once a
fortnight if we were lucky. Then the government began the construction of the
railway from Gulgong to Dunedoo and father bought some scoops and started
contracting for the construction of the line. There the remuneration was good
but of course he had to feed his horses and pay the man who worked the scoops.
When the railway work cut out he became for a short while a maintenance man on
the Cudgegong Council. This had one good aspect as far as we were concerned; he
was able to live at home. Meanwhile the Australian Government had introduced a
scheme of compulsory training. It covered all able bodied males from 12-26
years drafted as followed: from 12 - 14 junior cadets, 14 - 16 senior cadets,
and thereafter militiamen. To run this scheme they required military officers as
well as area officers each of whom covered a wide range of territory and one
such was to be appointed to Lithgow. Applications were called for that position
and an examination was held. Father, who was a soldier at heart and a sergeant
in the local light horse militia troop went to night school to improve his
education. He sat for the examination and although I remember he duly passed,
unfortunately the job went to a professional military officer. He was very
disappointed. But he was luckier in his application for the vacancy for overseer
of works on the Cudgegong Council. This meant good pay and no labourious work but
we had to leave Wilbertree Flat and go to live in Mudgee. He held the job down
for many years until the Cudgegong council merged with Merriwa Shire. The shire
had its own Engineer and overseer of works so once again Walter Hawkins was
without a job, although through building societies he had bought three cottages
in Mudgee. On one of these blocks he built a butcher shop and sent up as a
butcher but although he worked very hard he had no business training and
accordingly the business folded. He was forced into bankruptcy and lost
everything. He was now in his fifties. At the time he was supporting Mother and
three daughters, two of whom were quite young, indeed one was a mere baby.
Nothing daunted he came to Sydney and obtained a labouring job on the city
council which he retained until he retired onto the old age pension.
He had been suffering great pain for some time before his
retirement and it was discovered that he had cancer but when it was found it
was too late to operate. Guess what he did with his long service pay; he bought
a couple of horses.
He did not have many years in retirement. As a matter of
fact the doctor gave him six months to live, but at the end of that 6 months he
was organising a gymkhana in aid of the Mater Misericordiae hospital. In the
course of the organisation he was stricken with pneumonia. At this time his
cancer was very far advanced so that we never expected that he would come out
of hospital. He was taken away by ambulance and no-one expected he would come
out, that is except his faithful old dog, who lay down at the front gate and would
not move until Father's return. He had been in hospital about a week when he
sent a message for his writing pad and his books so that he could proceed with
his gymkhana preparations. This included the appointment of officials including
a judge he did not know but whose name he had obtained. The day before the
gymkhana he came home and next day insisted on attending it and taking with him
his saddle horse. The little carnival was quite a success and when the event of
the best gentleman rider came up Father announced that he would be a
contestant. The trouble was that he was too weak to mount the horse and had to
be lifted onto the saddle. But once astride he adopted his usual magnificent
seat and put his mount through its paces. In awarding the first prize to someone
else the judge, not knowing who father was nor of the circumstances, announced "Undoubtedly
the best rider was the old gentleman, but surprisingly, he did not have any idea
how to mount a horse. If he had been able to do this, I would have awarded him
the prize". If this had not been so terribly tragic it would have been
extremely funny; the idea of anyone saying that Father did not know how to
mount a horse.
The end was very near. One night soon after that when my
wife and I went to see him and my brother Gordon was present it was clear that
he was dying. We knelt around his bed and said the rosary in which he joined in
with strong voice. When we had said the final amen he said "I am very
proud of my family". He died the next day and I wept bitterly because the
greatest man in my life had gone out of it.
In the foregoing I have spoken much of my beloved father and
someone might think I had no regard for my mother. Nothing could be further
from the truth. She was his direct opposite. While he was a very big man, she
was a midget. Whereas he had a fine even temper, hers was in inverse ratio to
her bodily measurements. She had an uncontrollable and at times violent temper
and under its influence she lacked father's fine sense of justice. But on the
other hand she had many good qualities, so many that I could not hope to
recount them here. I will do no more than tell of those that come first to
mind. She was extremely charitable as is evidenced by the fact that at a time
when our own fortunes were at their very lowest our neighbours lost a horse
through its being gored by a bull. They too were very poor people. In next to
no time Mother with horse and sulky was travelling far and wide around the
district with a collection list. In spite of the fact that she received as many
rebuffs as donations she stuck to it until she had collected sufficient for the
neighbours to replace the dead horse. No swagman, and they were plentiful in
those days, was ever turned hungry away. Very often the farm houses, as was
ours, were far from the road and the swaggies as a guide to their brethren
would make an appropriate mark on the gates. Since they never missed us
apparently our gate wore no adverse sign. She was an excellent housekeeper,
neat clean and industrious, but where she really excelled was in her cooking. I
have been married twice and on each occasion have been fortunate in my wife was
an excellent cook. Furthermore I have been around the world and have sampled
the cooking of expert Chinese, French, English, Italian and American chefs, and
in spite of this, unless my memory deceives me, I say emphatically, I have
never tasted better cooking than Mothers. Her special genius lay in making a
meal out of nothing. Unexpected visitors [were not embarrassed], did not cause
embarrassment when there was nothing in the house. Mother had sons who could go
out and shoot or otherwise catch a rabbit and at the worst there would be a bit
of flour in the bag. Then she would come up with her famous dough-boys. These
served a double purpose; half went to the rabbit stew and the other half spread
with golden syrup, treacle or honey or as a last resort sugar made a very
palatable sweets course. There were certainly never any leftovers. I think her
specialty was pancakes. We very often had these and were always glad to see them
on the menu. Used for school lunches they had great merit because of their exchange
value. Some of the kids with more well-to-do parents than we had used to bring delectable
lunches of a standard that did not find there way into our home, like ice fairy
cakes, fancy biscuits and things like that. Two lads whose mother kept a shop
in particular used to bring delicious lunches. Each day the exchange market
opened at lunch hour and always in the same way; kids would come to us, never
we to them, and they would say “Have you any pancakes today; we'll give you
three fairy cakes for two pancakes", or “two fig jam sandwiches for two
pancakes" and so forth. Small wonder we always asked for pancakes for
lunch.
She had a very good brain but unfortunately had only
received a meagre primary education. If she had been so trained I'm sure that
she would have been a successful actress. As it was she had an extraordinary
love Of Australian poetry which she use to recite with great clarity and
feeling. On one occasion she won a short story competition. I might say that
was the one and only story she ever wrote. She had in all six children, five of
whom are still living; poor old Cliff, the third son, died the other day. That
should read eight children, when one includes the two who died in early
babyhood.
This reminds me of the birth of my sister Molly. Whilst
mother was still a young woman her father died and my father decided that
Mother should bring her mother to live with us. From the outset the old lady
was a bit of a burden but I think the only one to complain was myself, for once
a week I had to ride seven miles to Mudgee to buy a bottle of patent medicine,
a pain killer, a drug which did in fact perform the function that its name suggests.
Then after we shifted to Mudgee she became a complete invalid, permanently confined
to bed or to a wheel-chair. This necessitated permanent nursing, and involved a
lot of filthy washing, bathing and lifting, an enormous burden for a tiny
housewife already looking after a husband a four children. Eventually mother's
health broke down. She developed asthma and wore away to a shadow, and she
herself ended up in the Mudgee hospital. This meant that Grandma had to be
placed in the old ladies home at Newington. Mother was very desperately ill and
Father asked me to take her to Sydney to consult Doctor Hamilton Marshall, a
noted specialist of the day. It may surprise one to learn that he prescribed
heroine, a drug which is strictly forbidden in these days. It had to be taken intravenously
of course. Father had to provide himself with a syringe and he injected it into
her as prescribed. It used to bring immediate relief. We had a neighbour Jimmy
Baskerville who also suffered from asthma and once [when] he was in the throes
of an attack his family sent for Father asking him to give the sick man a shot
of heroin, which Father did. That afternoon Jimmy Baskerville died. At this
time I was in the Justice Department and had begun to study law. I was
terrified by his death and expected Father to be arrested at any minute. But
kindly the Baskervilles did not report the matter to the police and we never
heard anything more of it.
[Mother had] no child for the last 14 years. But almost
immediately after her return from Sydney she fell pregnant. As the pregnancy
progressed the asthma grew better until finally it disappeared. I firmly am of
the opinion that that pregnancy was part of the prescription of Doctor
Marshall. If it was then poor Molly has paid the price for she has suffered
from asthma all her life. A couple of years later, mother had another child
Grace. She was born about the time that Tutankhamen's grave was being uncovered
and this received great publicity at the time; consequently she has always born
the nickname of Tut.
In mother's final illness I sat by her side and was with her
when she drew her last breath.
Well now Kevin I suppose you'll want to hear something about
me. My primary education was at Munna public school and my secondary education
the Mudgee high school.
The First World War was in progress and there was a shortage
of staff so I was employed in the office Of the Clerk of Petty Sessions in
Mudgee.
Meanwhile in my boyhood when I was about fifteen and a half
I met a girl Ursula Gormly. I fell in love with her, kept company with her for
five years, and when my turn came to leave Mudgee to go to Coonamble I married
her. It was a very happy marriage. We had in all eight children three of whom
died at birth. The others survived until the death of your uncle Tony some
years ago. Your mother Pamela Betty was the fourth of our family. You now know
something of her history and if you want to find out about your father's family
you'll have to ask him.
I occupied positions from Junior Clerk up to Chamber
Magistrate. Finally I was appointed to the office of Clerk of the Peace where I
became Deputy Clerk of the Peace and soon thereafter Clerk of the Peace. I had
been in that position five years when the Attorney General sent for me, told me
that the position of Public Solicitor was vacant and said that he wanted me to
apply for it although he was not promising me the job. I did get the job and
had a happy time there. I was very successful and handled very many cases. The greatest
of these I suppose was the McDermott Royal Commission and after that the Parker
case. This involved an appeal to the privy council and I had a trip around the
world as a result of it. Finally after my retirement I was awarded a medal for
outstanding devotion to the cause of Justice.
Going back to my mention of the currency lasses it is worthy
to note that none of the descendants of either of my grandmothers have ever
been charged with a criminal offence. The worst would be breaches of the Motor
Traffic Act and I myself was once prosecuted for failing to attend a military
parade.
Your body will contain genes from both sides of your family,
mother and father, and perhaps some of the things I have told you will help you
to understand yourself to some extent.
You have asked me to supply you with dates, Kevin. Your
grandmother Ursula Gormly; daughter of David James Gormly and Maria Power was
born at Hilston on the 26th of September 1898. Her father was then the Shire
Engineer. (He married one Maria Power and she incidentally was the daughter of
a currency lad.) She died on the 10th of September 1944. I was born at Home
Rule on the 7th of October, 1900. At the time that I was born Joe and Jimmy
Guvnor the Aboriginal bushrangers were at large and on that very night of my
birth they visited Home Rule. My father and other armed men surrounded the cottage
guarding it from them. But that is part of another story.
There is still a lot of tape on this cassette Kevin but I
think I'll leave that so there'll be room to ask me questions if you so desire.
Source: Kevin Varney
