by Graham Seal
The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas scheme was the culmination of decades of water dreaming. As the early settlers and explorers confirmed the aridity of the vast continent they had colonised, the need for reliable water became a vital concern. In New South Wales, various ideas had been proposed and a Royal Commission recommended large-scale irrigation drawing on the Darling and Murrumbidgee rivers. It was the beginning of the troubles with the Murray-Darling basin waters that beset us still, but at the time it was a revolution given further urgency by the devastating ‘Federation drought’ from the mid-1890s. Construction of the Burrinjuck Dam began in 1906 and five years later the canals began to go in. The new towns of Leeton and Griffith were established and an official ‘Turning on the Water’ ceremony opened the scheme in 1912. The ‘Area’, as it was then known, was only a few years old when Henry’s mates organised him into a cosy sinecure at Yanco, near Leeton.
Henry generally worked hard during his Leeton period. He and Mrs Byers shared a cottage provided by the Commission, probably the only dwelling he could even briefly call ‘home’ since childhood. He caught up with a few old mates from his swag days, all now settlers in the Area, and improved his health by working in the garden of his cottage. As well as his government post, he was receiving income from his other writing, from a successful stage adaptation of In the Days When the World Was Wide, and from several other occasional sources. But being Henry, he soon managed to establish a local supply of the supposedly unobtainable grog and returned to the bad old habits.
Between bouts of inebriation,depression and incapacity—together with many dashes by train back to Sydney for ‘business’—Henry nevertheless managed to carry out a great deal of literary work, including rewriting and editing upcoming publications and composing new material. Some of this material was obedient to his brief of promoting the attractions of irrigation areas to sorely needed new settlers; some was of a more general nature or his response to the usually grim news of the war taking tens of thousands of Australian lives at the other end of the world. His plan was to first publish the poems and yarns in The Bulletin and anywhere else he could and then to write a great book, probably to be called By the Banks of the Murrumbidgee.
But life and the grog got in the way. Soon after his Yanco appointment came to an end his physical and mental condition began to deteriorate. He spent more time in asylums and hospitals and no more was heard of the Yanco book during these last grim years. His literary output drained away with his life force. He was hospitalised with a cerebral haemorrhage and although he recovered, it was to be only a few months before the inevitable.
On 4 September 1922, they sent Henry off in style with a state funeral, one of the largest in Sydney’s history. The streets were so thronged with mourners that many of his old mates were unable to make it to the cemetery and were forced to stop at various pubs along the way to raise a glass or two to his memory. Henry would have been greatly amused by this and might even have spun it into a good yarn.
The Coo-ee Lady
One of the first words early settlers learned from Aboriginal people was ‘cow-wee’. It was used in the Dharuk language around the Port Jackson area as a call to bring the community together. Later, other Aboriginal groups were heard using similar cries for the same purpose. Before very long, the drawn-out ‘coo’, followed by a high leap of the voice register to ‘ee’, rapidly became a widespread way to navigate the bush, find lost settlers and generally let anyone know you were around. By the 1840s it was said that visiting Australians would ‘cooee’ each other along the streets of London, hoping to find their way through the bustle and the fog, much to the bewilderment of the British.
So closely associated with Australia did the call become that it began to be used in popular literature. Even Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes solve a case through the great detective’s knowledge of the call. In Australia, writers and poets featured ‘cooee’ and it became a popular subject for songs in the latter part of the nineteenth century. There was even a book titled Coo-ee: Tales of Australian Life by Australian Ladies. As national consciousness grew around the time of Federation, products of all kinds began to be branded with characteristically Australian names. It was possible to buy ‘Coo-ee’ wine, bacon and galvanised iron, among other items. Visiting or returning dignitaries such as Dame Nellie Melba were often greeted by cooeeing crowds. By the early twentieth century, the cooee was well established as a unique and characteristically Australian sound.
In 1907, an unhappy housewife in the dry dustiness of Kalgoorlie had a light-bulb moment. Maude Wordsworth James was in her early fifties when inspiration struck.
Most of Maude’s childhood had been spent in Victoria with her English parents, Thomas and Alicia Crabbe. She married Charles James, a civil engineer, in 1875 and began a family. Charles took a job in Kalgoorlie in 1896 and the following year Maude and the children joined him but, used to the greener regions of Victoria, Maude was not happy in the west. She describes the country she experienced on her way to the golden city: ‘After leaving Coolgardie, we continued on our journey over the same sort of country, through which we had come—only the farther we went, the redder the dust, and the drearier it all seemed.’ She did come to appreciate the wildflowers and sunsets of the golden west but remained uneasy with her life in the dry and dusty land. Like most housewives of the time, though, she accepted her lot and busied herself with her home, garden and community life.
One night in 1907, her husband Charles, now the town surveyor, came home from work depressed about money. Maude lay awake wondering how she could make a lot of money very quickly. She wrote in her journal: ‘Just as the dawn was breaking, an idea came to me that immediately arrested my attention.’ Her idea—‘entirely my own’—was that ‘Australia has no Souvenir’. She was familiar with Tasmania’s souvenir brooches in the form of gold maps of the state and the various other items produced by other states, all featuring native animals or plants. But Maude wanted a souvenir that would symbolise the whole country, and came up with the intention of ‘making a fortune out of my favourite Australian word, “coo-ee”’.
From that day, Maude became the Coo-ee Lady, singlemindedly pursuing her idea of an all-Australian souvenir. She began designing, manufacturing and distributing a line of jewellery featuring distinctively Australian motifs, including the Aboriginal rainbow serpent, fashioned only from Australian gold, Kangaroo Island tourmaline, Broome pearls and Queensland opals. Her ‘Coo-ee jewellery’ began with brooches, cuff links, tie pins, bracelets and spoons, but Maude didn’t stop there. She registered ‘Coo-ee’ as a trademark and patented her designs not only in Australia but also in New Zealand and in Britain. The Australian Official Journal of Trade Marks for 1907 shows there was little that Maude could not coo-ee-fy. It includes registrations for pendants, hat and scarf pins, earrings, photograph frames, hair combs, trinkets, pen handles, serviette rings, buttons, sleeve links, boxes, paper knives, scent bottles, blotters, bells, knockers, bangles, rings, parasol handles and even ‘wishbones’. She began writing Coo-ee songs, ran Coo-ee competitions and expanded her wares to include chinaware and pottery. There was even a ‘Coo-ee Calendar’.
Maude became completely obsessed with her empire and made a good deal of money, just as she had planned. Her most peculiar enterprise was the ‘Coo-ee Corner’. Every Australian home would have one. It would be crammed with Maude’s creations and would have a specially designed ‘Coo-ee clock’, an Australian version of the cuckoo clock. Every half-hour and hour the figure of an Aboriginal man waving a boomerang would pop out and call—you guessed it.
Maude came to think of the word as her private property. When a Heidelberg soldiers’ welfare group made commemorative cooee medallions in 1916 she tried to claim royalties. But while it was possible to register designs using the word ‘coo-ee’, as Maude had astutely done, it was not legally possible to privately own the word itself because it was considered part of the national language: if you ‘can’t get/come within c
ooee’ of something, then you’re nowhere near or simply cannot hear it. They use the term in much the same way in New Zealand.
Maude left Kalgoorlie behind and moved to South Australia in 1908. During World War I she continued her ‘Coo-ee’ campaigns and even turned out a patriotic song on the theme. She lived in England for two years during the 1920s, then at Mosman in Sydney until 1931. That year she returned to South Australia and her son, Lieutenant Colonel Tristram James, came to live with her. Maude Wordsworth James died a widow at North Adelaide in 1936.
Australia’s first Hollywood star
While most of us probably think of Errol Flynn as our first Hollywood export, he arrived there many years after a number of Australians who went to Hollywood in its very early years, including Louise Lovely (Louise Carbasse), Clyde Cook (The Kangaroo Boy) and the athletic stuntman Snowy Baker. American performers and crew also worked in Australia during the early years of our own industry.
But it was a South Australian railway worker’s son who got there first. John Paterson McGowan (1880–1952) was Australia’s first Hollywood star. In this country he is unknown rather than forgotten, but he is remembered in America as one of the pioneers of the movie industry.
Born in the South Australian railway town of Terowie in 1880, J.P. McGowan, or Jack as he liked to be known, had an average working-class childhood in Adelaide and Sydney. His father worked on the railways, a background that served McGowan so well that he became known in Hollywood as ‘The Railroad Man’.
Before reaching the infant Hollywood of 1913, McGowan had many adventures that made him well suited for the various roles he would play in the cinema. He went to sea at seventeen and later worked as a stockman, becoming an expert horseman and sharpshooter. He won medals in the Boer War and then left Australia for the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis as part of a spectacular recreation of the South African conflict. For the next few years he acted in travelling theatrical troupes until employed by the Hollywood film studio Kalem Company, a buzzing whirl of enthusiastic amateurs keen to see what the developing technology of the silent screen could do. There was no union, no safety standards and no industry organisations; people just went there and made films.
McGowan was over six foot tall and strongly built, was handy with horses and guns, and could act at least as well as anyone else in those early years. His versatility as actor, director, writer, producer and occasional stunt man would result in over 600 productions in which he had one or several hands.
He began, as did just about everyone else in the business, with westerns. At that time the trend was for serials, which were churned out much like modern TV soaps. Some of McGowan’s early titles were The Railroad Raiders of ’62, A Prisoner of Mexico and Captain Rivera’s Reward. As his career progressed he was involved in The Bandit’s Child, Whispering Smith and Medicine Bend, among a slew of other stories about Ireland, ancient Egypt, pirates and espionage.
But it was in films about railroads, as the Americans call them, where he made his most celebrated contributions. He created many films on this theme, including Fast Freight and The Express Car Mystery. He also directed a 25-year-old John Wayne in Hurricane Express, an early role in which Wayne learned the skills that later propelled him to stardom.
Between 1914 and 1915 McGowan was strongly involved in many of the 119 episodes of The Hazards of Helen series, starring Helen Holmes, then McGowan’s wife. Together they have a place in Hollywood history as the creators of the iconic scene in which the wicked villain ties the damsel to the train track; the episode was, of course, titled The Death Train.
The Australian continued his multi-skilled involvement in movie-making as actor, director, producer or writer—frequently more than one of these at a time. He also continued to be strong on westerns, with occasional productions of South Seas adventures, spy flicks and even a dog story. Later he developed a role in Hollywood industrial relations and eventually became Executive Secretary of the Hollywood Screen Directors Guild. The Guild recognised his service to the motion picture industry in 1950 with an Honorary Life Membership, together with such eminent Hollywood pioneers as D.W. Griffith, Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin. No other Australian has attained this film industry acclaim.
A vision splendid
Kingsley Fairbridge was born in South Africa in 1885 and from the age of eleven was brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). During a visit to England in 1903, he was deeply disturbed by the extent and depth of poverty in the industrial cities and especially horrified at the wasted human resources of children born into such poverty. He returned to Rhodesia a year later determined to do something to help these children, developing a vision that would initiate the Child Emigration Society, later the Fairbridge Society, and lead to the establishment of settlements for orphaned and unwanted children in Rhodesia, New Zealand, Canada and Australia. The scheme that Fairbridge and his collaborators constructed was based on what he called his ‘Vision Splendid’:
I saw great Colleges of Agriculture (not workhouses) springing up in every man-hungry corner of the Empire. I saw children shedding the bondage of bitter circumstances and stretching their legs and minds amid the thousand interests of the farm. I saw waste turned to providence, the waste of un-needed humanity converted to the husbandry of unpeopled acres.
To realise this vision, Fairbridge determined that he needed to become a Rhodes Scholar to provide himself with the education and contacts he correctly believed necessary to achieving his aims. After four attempts (his primary and secondary education had been sporadic) he became the first South African to be successful in winning this demanding scholarship and returned to England to study at Oxford University.
On 19 October 1909, Rhodes Scholar Kingsley Fairbridge addressed a meeting of 49 fellow undergraduates at the Colonial Club, Oxford, on the subject of child emigration. The government of Western Australia made an offer of land and in 1912 Kingsley and his wife established the first Farm School (now Fairbridge Village) at a site south of Pinjarra, receiving the first thirteen orphans from Britain in January 1913. In 1920, the school was relocated to its current site north of Pinjarra.
Although Kingsley Fairbridge died in 1924 at the age of 39, his ‘Vision Splendid’ lived on in England, Rhodesia, New Zealand, Canada, elsewhere in Australia and, most persistently, in Western Australia. In 1937, a farm school was founded at Molong, New South Wales, and another at Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. Two smaller schools were also established at Draper’s Hall, Adelaide and Tresca, Tasmania in the 1950s. Canadian schools were established in 1935 and 1938. Today Fairbridge Village in Pinjarra is the last surviving intact Fairbridge operation with an important historical role in regional, state, national and international affairs in relation to migration, welfare and community development.
The schools were generally modelled on similar lines, with a number of cottages or cabins grouped into small settlements within a working farm, catering for children between six and fifteen. Each dwelling had a ‘cottage mother’ and the boys were trained in agricultural work skills while the girls were trained in domestic skills, their labour also producing most of their food. Food, worship, education and health care were communally provided. The scheme also provided preschool care for those under six, who were looked after in England until old enough to emigrate. After children left the schools there was also an after-care operation catering for individuals up to the age of 21.
This arrangement lasted until after World War II when, in response to changing circumstances in the Dominions and in Britain, ongoing administrative and managerial changes were made. Throughout these changes, Fairbridge farm schools continued to send considerable numbers of boys and girls to their various operations. From the 1960s, changing attitudes to welfare and immigration, new arrangements for child welfare and a decreasing demand for agricultural skills increasingly rendered Kingsley Fairbridge’s basic scheme unviable.
At this time the ‘One-Parent’ and ‘Two-Parent’ schemes were introduced to cater for the increasing n
umbers of children still in a parental relationship of some kind. These were effectively family reunion operations in which the Village would take the child or children into care and the single parent, in the case of the One-Parent scheme, would be found employment and accommodation in the same state. The Two-Parent version operated for families of five or more children where both parents were still in the family relationship. In this case the Village looked after the children but took no responsibility for finding employment and accommodation for the parents. The desired result of these arrangements was that families under threat of splitting could be assisted long enough for the parents to establish a home, at which time the child or children could be returned to them.
Despite these innovations, the era of child migration had long ended and the Fairbridge farm schools gradually closed down or were repurposed. In 1981, the last of the operations, Fairbridge Village at Pinjarra, ceased to operate as a farm school. In 1983, the current Fairbridge Western Australia Inc. was established, achieving charitable status in 1996. The Village is now a nonprofit charitable youth organisation and location for the popular Fairbridge music festival, among other activities.
The extensive folklore of Fairbridge farm schools includes parodic ditties made up by the children who resided there over the years. To the tune of the hymn ‘There is a Golden Land’, they sang:
There is a mouldy dump, down Fairbridge way.
Where we get bread and jam, three times a day.
Eggs and bacon we don’t see, we get sawdust in our tea.
That’s why we’re gradually fading away.
Fade away, fade away. Fade away, fade away.
That’s why we’re gradually fading away.
Whimsical ditties like this seem at odds with revelations of widespread abuse within the Fairbridge system and other institutions for lone children. But, like many oral traditions of the disempowered, they satirise poor conditions in such places and are a form of protest veiled in humour.
