The Horsekeeper's Daughter

by Jane Gulliford Lowes

  Australia was on its knees.

  In the midst of this chaos, with his dreams of financial security and prosperity in tatters, Sarah’s husband William Campbell made a decision that would shape the course of his family’s lives forever. Unable to find work in the city, William knew that like many other men of his class, he had no alternative but to leave the little house in Logan Street, cross the Brisbane River and head north or west, to the Darling Downs or even beyond, deep into the heart of the Queensland bush to look for work, perhaps as a farmhand or labourer on one of the sheep or cattle stations which lay scattered across the interior of the State. Unlike those other men however, William couldn’t contemplate leaving behind his young wife and their baby James. Torn between financial necessity and grave concern for the welfare of his family, William finally elected upon a course of action which would, indirectly, affect his relationship with Sarah for their rest of their days together.

  On a Spring day, late in 1890, Sarah bundled up her baby in her arms, turned the key in the lock of the house on Logan Street for the last time, and walked down the path onto the street, where William was waiting for her, all their belongings and those items of furniture which could be dismantled and reassembled elsewhere, stacked on the back of a hired wagon, protected by a tarpaulin and secured with rope. Once again, Sarah was leaving behind all that was familiar, for another life, unimagined. This time, however, she was not alone. The little Campbell family were headed for Ghinghinda Station.

  Ghinghinda is still a remote settlement today. Even with the benefit of paved roads and tarmac highways, it lies over five hundred kilometres northwest of the heart of Brisbane, roughly the same distance from Seaton Village to Stavanger or Brussels. Now in the administrative county of Banana Shire, in 1890, Ghinghinda was still part of the old county of Taroom and was as far away from bustling, cosmopolitan Brisbane as was conceivable. By horse and cart, along dirt tracks and drovers’ roads, it would have taken the Campbells at least two weeks travelling to reach the settlement. As they left Brisbane, they passed from town to town, heading towards Toowoomba and out to Jondaryan. Small towns gave way to villages and then to sheep and cattle stations, as the Campbells headed out into the vast, wild, unpopulated expanse of Western Queensland.

  Ghinghinda station lies on small plain near the Dawson River, to the west of Kangaroo and Magician Gully and just south of what is now the Theodore State Forest and the Isla Gorge National Park. A photograph of the station taken in 1899 shows a huddle of low, white buildings set in the lee of a small hill, surrounded by a few stunted trees, and set amid scrubland with tree-covered hills in the distance, criss-crossed with creeks that trickled into the Dawson. To the left of the buildings are the stock fences and pens typical of every station in Australia, to the right of the ‘big house’ occupied by the owner or manager there are a couple of small, squat cottages.

  Subject to extremes of climate, temperatures regularly reach thirty-three degrees centigrade in summer, with accompanying thunderstorms, plummeting to as low as six or seven degrees in winter. The land is washed and fed by heavy rains from November to February. It was, and remains a desolate and lonely spot, miles from the nearest homestead or settlement and a lifetime away from the friends and acquaintances Sarah had only just made upon arrival in Brisbane. Of course, an itinerant lifestyle, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots, was nothing new to her; she had spent her childhood travelling between the colliery villages of County Durham as her father moved from pit to pit, year upon year, seeking better pay and conditions.

  Ghinghinda could not have been more different. This was no close-knit colliery community. In 1871, twenty years before the Campbells arrived, the Queensland census records that there were only fifteen people living on the entire station. There was no network of assorted female relatives and friends to provide advice, gossip and comfort.

  There would have been no more than a handful of women on the station, if any at all – perhaps the station manager’s wife, or the wives of some of the more senior station staff, but class distinctions would have meant it was unlikely that Sarah would have socialised with the manager’s family. There may have been one or two other families at Ghinghinda at most. Other than that, there was no one. Station life could be a desperately lonely existence for a woman. In the famous collection of tales by Steele Rudd, On Our Selection43 the author describes how his mother would sit on a log and cry every day due to the sheer loneliness of life on their remote Queensland farmstead.

  Loneliness, isolation and extremes of climate and landscape weren’t the only dangers the pioneers and station families faced. This was Australian life at its harshest extreme – rough living, in a rough landscape, among rough men. A few years before, one of the Ghinghinda station overseers, a man called Salter, had been murdered by a shepherd after a drunken argument. Just forty miles away, one of the most notorious events in Queensland history had occurred in October 1857, the Hornet Bank massacre.44

  The Fraser family had taken over the running of the Hornet Bank homestead in 1854. Originally from Scotland, John Fraser had moved his entire family – his wife and eleven children, who ranged in age from three years old to early twenties – to this remote farm, miles and miles from civilisation. John died of dysentery a couple of years later and his eldest son William, a particularly vicious individual, took over the running of the farm. Prior to the homesteaders’ arrival, the land was occupied by the indigenous Yeeman population who bitterly and often violently opposed the theft of their land by European settlers. The Yeeman were subject to appalling violence by the Fraser clan, which they repaid in kind. Twelve tribesmen were murdered for allegedly killing cattle on the property; there were even rumours that the Frasers had poisoned a group of tribespeople by feeding them a Christmas pudding laced with strychnine.

  At around two o’clock in the morning on 27th October 1857, a group of Yeeman men crept into the Hornet Bank homestead, apparently intending to kidnap one of the Fraser women. When one of the young men on the property confronted them, he was killed outright. The raiders then attacked the other occupants of the house, killing the older males first, before raping and beating to death Mrs Fraser and her two eldest daughters. They clubbed to death the remaining children and then ran through with spears the two station hands who were just returning to the house. One boy miraculously survived, fourteen-year-old Sylvester. He had been beaten around the head, possibly knocked unconscious, but came to and hid under his bed until the slaughter had ceased. This poor traumatised and injured child then ran to the next sheep station at Cardin some twelve miles away to raise the alarm. Sylvester then rode on to Ipswich three hundred and twenty miles away to fetch his elder brother William.

  Groups of farmhands from the surrounding stations formed a posse and, in conjunction with the Native Mounted Police, embarked upon indiscriminate killing sprees, murdering any Aboriginals they encountered – men, women and children. William Fraser began a murderous vendetta, killing Aborigines wherever he found them; two were found not guilty of taking part in the massacre following a trial at Rockhampton, but were shot dead by William as they left the court house. At no time was William Fraser ever arrested or charged with murder; in fact, he rode with the Native Police, who were both cognisant of and complicit in the hunting down and murder of the Yeeman. Fraser actually took up a commission with the police a few years later, which allowed him to continue with his campaign of what now would be described as ethnic cleansing. It has been estimated by various sources that between one hundred and fifty and three hundred Aborigines were killed; in any event, the Yeeman tribe was effectively wiped out. It says much about social and political context of the time that Queensland considered William Fraser to be a hero; today he would be considered a mass murderer or a war criminal.

  Incidents of violence between the settlers and the local tribespeople gradually petered out over the next few decades, mainly because there were so few of the indigen
ous population left to protest their cause; some of those that remained were employed by the station owners as scouts and shepherds and labourers. However, the cruel and inhumane treatment of the Aborigines by individuals and government agencies alike was to continue for almost another hundred years.

  This was the situation that Sarah now found herself in, an environment far beyond her imagination and comprehension, among people whose way of life she neither knew nor understood. Sarah was clearly a young woman with a steely resolve, unphased by hardship and life’s serendipities – like the typical Durham colliery lass she was, she simply rolled up her sleeves, made the best of her situation, and got on with it. However, even she could not be prepared for what the brutal Queensland backcountry had in store for her.

  11

  The Good Wife

  Life for William and Sarah out at Ghinghinda was hard, unrelenting, back-breaking and governed by the vicissitudes of the climate which veered from drought to flood. One can only imagine how Sarah must have felt upon arriving at the family’s outback home for the first time. How her heart must have sunk as she entered the rustic dwelling that was to be home for herself, William and their beloved little boy James.

  The typical working class accommodation in the Queensland bush was the slab hut, so called as it was constructed from large planks or slabs of whatever wood might be available, with a shingle roof and an earth floor, which was sometimes covered in sand or straw. The roof was usually extended on one side, supported by wooden posts, to provide an overhang for much-needed shade and to ensure that rain ran off away from the wooden sides of the building. Occasionally, the hut might have a tin roof but this would have rendered the dwelling almost uninhabitable in the summer due to the intense heat. Usually divided into two rooms, it was the most basic of dwellings, with no water or sanitation of any kind, and was in reality nothing more than a shack with a fireplace and a chimney. Gaps between the planked walls meant that the hut was usually barely watertight; occupants often covered the walls with layers of newspaper to cover up the spaces and keep out the draughts. In the wet season the hut would have been freezing, damp and potentially ankle deep in mud. Frequently there was no glass for windows, and the window spaces were covered with wooden shutters fastened with pegs. The overcrowded, cramped but solid miners’ cottages of West Rainton, Page Bank and Seaham Colliery, with their kitchen ranges, one or two upstairs bedrooms and backyard privies, must have seemed like palaces in comparison to the situation in which Sarah now found herself.

  The larger sheep and cattle stations were in effect like small villages, complete with a grand house for the manager, cottages for the senior employees, stable blocks, a large woodshed where the shearing and sorting of the wool took place, pens for the sheep, and washing pools where the sheep were cleaned in readiness for shearing. Sometimes there was a school room, a store selling everything from basic household provisions such as flour and jam to saddles and guns (usually at a significant mark up if there was no competition from storekeepers in the nearby settlements), a blacksmiths shop, a joiner, and sometimes even a small church or chapel.

  Some of these stations occupied such enormous swathes of land that it is difficult for modern day readers to comprehend their size. Dunlop Station in New South Wales was one of the largest, at one hundred thousand acres – a single fence on the property was said to stretch forty three miles. The station owners argued that such vast estates were necessary to provide grazing for the huge numbers of animals they supported; some stations were home to hundreds of thousands of sheep. Ghinghinda was tiny in comparison, a mere speck on the landscape, with its small homestead, handful of huts and cottages, and woolshed.

  Australian Merino wool was sought after the world over. Allegedly, Merino sheep became popular after King George III had taken a fancy to a few of the animals belonging to the King of Spain; they had been introduced to Australia in the early days of the convict transports by the unfortunate Captain Cairnes. Having deposited the Merinos safely in the colony, Captain Cairnes was homeward bound when his ship was captured by pirates in the Atlantic Ocean. Tragically, his children were also on board and the entire family were made to walk the plank and drowned.

  No record exists of William Campbell’s occupation at Ghinghinda, but it is unlikely that he was an itinerant shearer or station hand, as these men would generally have been accommodated in the barrack-like conditions of the shearers’ or hands’ huts, which were very basic dormitories and certainly no place for women. The job of the station hand was to assist in mustering the sheep for shearing, and with general labouring duties. Generally, only the more senior or skilled employees would have been afforded the opportunity of bringing their wives and children with them. In all likelihood William Campbell was employed as an overseer or boundary rider, engaged by the station owner to ride around the boundary of the station on horseback, looking after and maintaining the fences and generally keeping an eye on the furthest reaches of his Master’s property. Sarah would have been expected to work too, perhaps as a cook or laundress, or as a domestic servant in the manager’s house, though she would have had to keep James with her at all times, as there would not have been anyone else to care for him.

  Ghinghinda was bleak, isolated and remote. The neighbouring stations of Broadmere, Bungeban, Coorada, Glenhaughton, Gwambagwine, Hornet Bank, Kinnoul, Lilyvale or Palm Tree were all hours away on horseback. Over five hundred kilometres away from bustling industrialised Brisbane, it might as well have been five thousand. In his famous book, On the Wool Track, written in 1910, CEW Bean described the landscape thus: “However far you search for the Outback, there seems to be always an Outback beyond.”45 You could travel for hundreds of miles without coming across as much as a fence, let alone an abandoned homestead or shepherd’s hut. Human habitation of vast swathes of the back country was only possible because of a network of water tanks constructed by the early settlers to water their sheep and cattle. At the same time, however, overgrazing of the land caused untold damage, leading to soil erosion, which in turn contributed to flooding when the rains did eventually arrive.

  Travelling across this landscape was fraught with danger for the unprepared or the simply unlucky. Although a man could reasonably expect to travel from water tank to water tank until he reached a settlement or station, as Bean pointed out, if some accident befell him and he suffered injury or lost his water bottle, “He has as much chance as a polar explorer would have if the same thing happened to him near the South Pole.”46 The discovery of some poor long-dead soul by the wayside was, unfortunately, a regular occurrence.

  For children living in the outback, the hazards were magnified a thousand times over. So many simply succumbed to heat stroke and the burning sun, or became ill with waterborne diseases such as cholera and dysentery, particularly during prolonged spells of very wet weather. Some were bitten by snakes or spiders, others could be attacked or taken by dingoes. A few were trampled by horses or cattle, fell down gullies or off cliffs. It was not unheard of for small children to wander away from their homes, never to be seen again. Bean recalls one 1880s account of two small children from Bourke in New South Wales who wandered off on the way home from school. With the aid of aboriginal trackers, the children were found alive but in a very poor condition a few days later, some thirty eight miles away.47 Queensland is a beautiful but harsh country, treating with contempt the ignorant, the unprepared, the foolhardy and most of all, the careless.

  Every parent is familiar with that sensation of blind panic, that heart-stopping moment when a small child lets go of their hand and in the blink of an eye and a tangle of legs is gone, perhaps in a crowded park beside the swings or in the queue for ice-creams, perhaps in a busy supermarket or in the throngs of people “oohing and ahhing” at fireworks display or the illuminations in the high street at Christmas.

  For a few seconds or minutes all logic and reason disappear and they search frantically, pushing their way past human obs
tacles, all sorts of ridiculous thoughts about the possible ills that could have befallen their child galloping through their minds, constantly repeating the same question to indifferent strangers, “Have you seen my boy?” Inevitably, the small person reappears, having been momentarily distracted by a beach ball, a friendly dog, or a brightly lit glittering display in a shop window, and immediately the parent is overwhelmed with relief. Equally inevitably, the small person is scolded for wandering off, and his mother or father holds his tiny hot hand a little more tightly.

  “Have you seen my boy?”

  On the morning of 23rd May 1891, little James Campbell could not be found. There was no one else around for Sarah to ask. Perhaps James had wandered off back towards the cottage, having caught sight of his father rounding up the livestock in the stock pens in the distance. Perhaps he’d got his eye on a small bird pecking at the grubs and insects in the bushes and had decided to investigate further, or had found a muddy puddle in which to jump and splash or poke about in with a small stick. Maybe this tiny boy had decided to play a game of hide and seek with his mother, and had concealed himself under the washing basket or wrapped himself in the freshly-laundered wet sheets, giggling to himself as his mother called for him, ready to shout “boo!” when he was finally discovered. As every parent knows, small children possess a very unnerving talent for hiding.

  “Have you seen my boy?”

  Sarah called for James over and over. She could not hear any shouts of “Mama!”. She could not be hearing him laughing or chattering away to himself as mischievous two year olds are wont to do. There was no sound of him whimpering or crying, as would be expected if he’d fallen and scraped his knee or caught his shirt on a thorny twig and become stuck fast in the bushes, or stumbled upon the prickly burrs that covered the earth down towards the creek. Sarah’s calls were met with silence.