I came across this WordPress blog yesterday after years of absence

Just forgot about it; but I’ll wind it up again

I had been ‘put to’ the piano when I was about five.  I don’t remember my early teachers, which is funny really, as in retrospect music was always important in the family and in my life. I do remember that I wasn’t keen on the practice but my parents between them ‘kept me up to it’.

Anyway, after we moved back to Brisbane I had a succession of nuns teach me at the convent, and then, when I was about 13 or 14 a big change occurred-a new nun appeared.  She was known as Sister Aelred, after a saint I had never heard of.  She had been teaching in Innisfail for some years and brought with her several young women whom she had taught there and who moved to Brisbane to be with her.  She was that  sort of person.  A fairly large built and handsome woman in her black and white robes, with a happy, genial face fringed by the stiff white bands which they wore.  She was very enthusiastic about music in general and my music in particular.  I continued the steady progression of the AMEB exams which I had begun earlier and Aelred encouraged me to push on.  One of the young women who had followed her was Enid Hitchcock, from Innisfail.  Enid was 6 or 8 years older than me but she soon became a favourite of my  mother and used to visit us quite regularly.  She also played the violin, but was not nearly so good as she was on the piano, which she was hoping to make a career with.   She taught at the convent and made a very modest living that way.  A  main way into a performer’s career then was the annual ABC National Concerto Competition which attracted hopefuls from all over the country in a bid to get chosen for the State and then the national playoffs, at which  candidates had to play at least one movement of a concerto or similar work.

Also part of the path forward for a young careerist were the eisteddfodau which every large city seemed to have.  Aelred encouraged us to prepare for all opportunities, and Enid being the most   advanced was soon preparing for these competitions apart from completing the diploma exams of the AMEB and Trinity College, London. For the concertos a second piano was required for the orchestral reduction of  the work.  Within a year or so I was performing this second piano role for Enid’s solo, but it was very nerve wracking and it provoked one of my early anxiety attacks.  We were playing,  as I recall, the second and third movements of the Tchaikovsky no 1 in the Brisbane Town Hall.  It is a huge space and very difficult acoustically because it has a large dome into which the sound seemed to disappear.   Whether it was that , or just the weight of the occasion, but I took the tempo much too fast, and since the orchestra led, the soloist had to follow.  The  adjudicator, Lindley Evans, a well known musical figure and composer, was merciless and was very critical of the second piano-me!- and of course Enid didn’t come any where.  I was mortified and I remember it as one of the most dismaying and embarrassing times of my life.

Round about this time I took  the ATCL performer’s diploma and prepared the AMusA diploma too but didn’t take the exam.  Now I was myself playing in the Concerto competition doing the Grieg.

By this time I was in Sub-Senior, what is called in NSW year 11.  I didn’t do any music exams or competitions after that though I still kept going to music lessons.  These days Gregory Terrace has an orchestra, and one or two other bands, but in my day the only music was the choir and I was the only one in the senior school doing an instrument.  I used to sneak out of  class when I had a music lesson and it was all very sissified.  However, although the Brothers took no notice of my music most of the time, they made sure to call upon for the annual concert. That year it was held in the Town Hall and I played the Chopin B flat minor Scherzo.  It begins with a low drum roll and then a huge note in the right hand.  Aelred had arranged for me to have what today would be called a master class with Archie Day a famous teacher and organist who was, in fact, the City organist and a great pianist.  At his home he had two Bechstein grands back to back-he played at one while I was at the other.  He showed me how to hit the big note with my right hand knuckles to produce, of course, a dramatic effect.  Unfortunately on the night I was carried away and hit A flat instead of B flat.  I was mortified, of course, but I think few people noticed and the rest of it went off fine and was received with grand applause.

During these years with Aelred, she became a great friend and support of my mother, and she worked very hard to protect me from Mum’s anxieties.  I have always owed her a great debt of gratitude.  After I went to University I dropped music and rarely saw her.  Many years later, in the late seventies, I found out she was retired at a convent near Hornsby.  I visited her, she had laid out the usual cakes and tea which nuns provided, we had a big talk and it was a very good visit.  That was the last time I saw her.  In the meantime Enid had gone to England in company of Dawn Crowe and became a busy music teacher.  Later she married an Englishman Alan Lane, another academic musician, and they went back to Brisbane where he became the deputy head of what was then the new Queensland Conservatorium.  She continued to teach but we had lost contact and never caught up again.  They had a son, the now famous pianist Piers Lane, who has had a stellar career.  I believe she died some years ago and there is a music prize in her honour.

In January 1949, during the Christmas holiday period, I went to what I believe was the first summer school of music ever held in Queensland,  at Glennie Girls’ School in Toowoomba.  There was a wonderful atmosphere and I had never been to anything so exciting. And there one day, in an otherwise empty room there was a girl, Jennifer Uscinski, together with her friend, Anne Hamilton, and our glances met across the room and that was that for both of us, apparently.  An extraordinary moment.  She had just finished the Senior, though she had only turned sixteen a few weeks before we met, and, though she didn’t tell me, she, indeed both of them, had won Open Scholarships.  These were the only university scholarships available in those days and were awarded to the top 20 in the State.    The following January the summer school was held at BBC College in Brisbane and I saw them again.  In the meantime we had met up at City Hall concerts of the Queensland Symphony orchestra.  Jenny had had a ‘gap year’-a term undreamed of then, of course-because she wasn’t allowed to attend University before she turned 17.  She had worked as a cadet reporter at the ‘Courier Mail’. Both of the girls. I remember, looked very mature and rather superior, full of jokey byplay, because, of course, I was just about to start the daunting  process of the Senior year.

I had been determined to go to University for some years, though I knew that my parents couldn’t afford it, but I had formed no idea of what I wanted to do.  So I started schoolwork that year with a big head of anxiety, since the only way I could see of getting there was by winning an Open Scholarship.  My relations with my mother had become very intense-having lost one son, she was determined not to allow me to ‘grow up’.  The year one entered high school was  when boys first went into long trousers, a tremendously symbolic rite of passage, but Mum insisted that I stick with shorts.  This attitude persisted in other areas of behaviour, especially anything related to girls, a forbidden topic, but one increasingly of interest to me.  I was also very much involved with the eternal issues of religion and faith. I had very little faith, certainly in a   personal god, which our senior and very respected teacher, Brother Campbell, strove mightily to convince us of.  Further, the leftist, even Communist, and union sympathies of my father and my uncles introduced more questions for me into what was an increasingly politicised period.  I was full of religious and philosophical doubt.  Somewhere CS Lewis says that any boy who is going to do any thinking has done a fair bit of it before he is fourteen.  Anyway, in September of that year, with the exams coming up in November, I went to a movie which had a terrible effect upon me. I forget its name now, but its topic was of slums and desolation and it left me profoundly depressed.  I was obsessed with the images I had seen, and with the thoughts and dreads which I had surrounded myself with.  A potent factor in this was the anxiety arising from the long years of the Depression.   We, the family, had largely escaped its worst results because of Dad’s secure job in the railway, protected by union militancy, but the effects had been all around.  I was consumed with the fear of poverty and destitution.

The fact was, I realised years later when I had learned words to describe it, that I was in a deep anxiety and, to a less extent, depressed state.  My concentration went, I was pursuing the worries and questions which obsessed me, my exam preparation went to pieces.  The result was that my marks turned out to be 1A , 1B and 5Cs-my dream of an Open and University was gone.    It has been said that my generation was the lucky generation-we missed the direct suffering of the Depression, we missed the War, and we rode straight into the economic boom of the post war years.  We were also the cautious generation because we had seen the consequences of economic collapse.  The Chifley Labor government had  introduced funding for university scholarships and my year was the first to profit from this enlightened policy.  My pass was good enough to get the prized opportunity.

(Written July 2016)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brian’s loss had a terrible effect on my mother.  She was completely desolated and I don’t think ever had a peaceful moment again.  Because of her condition it was decided that I should stay for some time with Beverley and Norman.  Norm was in the RAAF ground crew and had been posted to Amberley outside Ipswich after they had been married.  They had rented a house in the village the next station after East Ipswich, where we had previously lived, and I went to the same school I had attended before for several months.  It was a lonely time for me although Beverley did her best to make things cheerful, but it was as though you were not allowed to be cheerful, even slightly so, the weight of loss was so heavy on everyone.  I don’t remember much about the period, except for going for walks around the nearby creek.  Here I found what  at first I thought was real gold-globules of golden substance which I couldn’t believe were not real gold-and was very excited. But alas, when I showed it to Norm he pronounced it mica, ‘fool’s gold’.  I felt that somehow I would never be able to handle true gold.  Years later, after I retired, when I was making jewellery for a while, I was totally delighted to be able to go   to a jeweller’s supplies shop, purchase gold, the real thing, and later go through the elaborate process of fashioning it with torch and solder and pliers.

In 1945 I started school at the Christian Brothers’ St Joseph’s College on Gregory Terrace.  Going to school involved the walk to the tram on Enoggera Road and then either getting off at the Normanby and about a two mile walk around Gregory Terrace past the Brisbane Grammar School, or staying on the tram and going through the city to Spring Hill and then another walk down a hill and up a hill to the school on the Terrace.  I don’t remember any particular problems about settling in to the new school but soon I found that things were very different academically from when I had it all to myself at the convent.   Terrace, as it was called, took students from all over the city and suburbs and of course there were other bright boys.  I found myself in a group of about five who continually competed for the top places, and that went on for the next six years.  I had a particular competition with Cedric Hampson who went on to be a Rhodes Scholar and the leading Queensland silk for many years.

The Brothers were a varied lot and I have good memories of all of them really, though it was still the age of punishing students with the feared strap, an instrument of torture custom made for each brother ( and some had, it was said, a two shilling piece slotted into the end to harden the impact).  I managed to escape this except for once or twice, the result of a combination of doing my homework, and lying low in class.

During ‘little lunch’ and lunch the  customary thing was to play handball, a specifically Brothers’ sport which the Christian Brothers had brought with them from Ireland.  Along one  side of most of the school property was a high wall which had been trowelled over with smooth cement.  There were no side walls but on the opposite side of the property there was a proper three wall handball court which was reserved for the senior boys or the Brothers when they played, usually after school.  I found this great fun and though I was never the best I was up there, and it was a good introduction to ball games in general.  Later on I played tennis for the school as well as cricket, where I was the wicket-keeper for the Firsts.  I have a lot of happy memories of our trips around to other schools and the thrill of competition.

I would have loved to play football, which I did only once or twice and never in competition, but I was prevented by Mum’s great anxiety about my becoming involved.  This fear arose from her brothers’ experience, especially Jim and Con.  Jim had been picked to play  Ruby League for Queensland but a few days before the game, when he was working in the  Mt Morgan mine, he was struck in the eye by a flying piece of metal flying off a billet of iron which he was shaping.  He later became an alcoholic and my mother put it down to his disappointment at his football loss.  Con also was a good footballer and also an alcoholic-the Irish disease-and my mother blamed it all on the sport.  So no football for little Gavan.  Another sport I learnt a bit was boxing, from Uncle Jack, Mum’s youngest brother, who had been bantamweight champion of North Queensland.  Whenever he came on holiday to Brisbane-in the years I remember he had a hotel in Mackay-he would take me out into the backyard and teach me the straight left and the right hook, and how to keep up a defence, and other starry moves.

In 1948 I did  the Junior exam-year 10, which in those days was a very important event because most people left school then and went into employment.  I  got 8As and 2Bs, and was one of a very few who won the Thallon medal, a gold medallion which I lost somehow years later.  This was awarded to the top students whose fathers were in the railways-given the size of the QR workforce this was a significant proportion of the population.  Anyway, it was an honour and my parents were delighted.  I was one of the few that then went into the last two years to do the Senior, of which more later.

After about two years in Ipswich, the family moved back to Brisbane but Dad stayed on in the Ipswich job, so he had to commute.  He had to walk from our house in Ashgrove Avenue about a kilometre or more to the tram stop on Enoggera Road, take a 20-30 minute trip to Roma St Station, one of the three main stations in Brisbane city, and then go a half-hour or more by train to Ipswich Station; and then back again in the evening.  Often he had to work overtime.  He kept on doing that for  2 or 3 years during the worst period of the War and the busiest time at Ipswich.  His job was very demanding as he was in charge of all the train operations in and out of this Australia’s busiest centre when there was a huge military effort in northern Queensland which had to be supplied.  It was said that there were over a million troops in the State in those days, most of them American.  The pressure on all the train drivers and guards was intense.  They were working regularly 80 hours a week, and often Dad would have to go to their houses to get them out of bed to take the next shift.  After several years of this his health was affected, but he kept going.  As a result he developed gum disease and, as was the way in those days, they took every one of his teeth out, and he spent months getting used to the new dentures, with all the misery that entailed.

The house at 151 Ashgrove Avenue was a single story bungalow with level front yard with lawn and rose gardens and a downward sloping back yard with a lawn, at the bottom of that a wisteria covered backyard dunny, and beyond that a gravelly chookyard with several orange and mulberry trees.  There was a big view from the kitchen at the back of the house, which because of the slope was quite a long way above the ground, with plenty of space underneath.  I spent many hours playing in that back yard, making up many games and adventure situations, particularly about cowboys and Indians and war games generally.  I had a wooden gun which Dad had shaped for me.and I deployed it to great effect.  I was able to use the branches in the mulberry tree as the  cockpit of an aircraft or a fortress or any number of like situations.  While I  spent a lot of time playing on my own I wasn’t without playmates.  A couple of doors down lived a girl called Ruth Webley who shared a birthday with me.  I didn’t play much with her in the early years-girls??!!, but we used to play pingpong in later years and I was fascinated with her breasts bouncing.  Not far further down the Avenue was a boy-whose name I now forget-Ian Campbell?- with whom I used to play a lot of cricket in his yard which had a long side garden, ideal as a cricket pitch.

The house wasn’t a great distance from Nana’s house across Enoggera Creek so I used to go there quite often to see Nana, also Aunty Mary and Uncle Chas, who by then had settled in Brisbane, especially on a Friday night to play euchre and crib.  Aunty Mary used to spoil me-she was a great cook , particularly of cakes, and her sponges were famous.  The stretches of scattered bush along the Creek were quite wide because the stream, over the years,  had scoured out, across wide areas, a couple of metres or more in depth  and houses could not be built there.  There were some areas of paddock where cattle grazed, but most of it was broken bush land.  Now much of that land has now been developed with  streets and houses. It was a complete fairy land for me because you could make up any number of games and play them out in the bush and along the creek which of course extended for miles.  It made a big curve between us on Ashgrove Avenue and the tramline and at its deepest point was a large concrete bridge, about a hundred metres from Newmarket Road, which was a good place to hide under and use as a fort.

When we first went to Brisbane, Brian was working in a bank which he hated.  He wanted to be a journalist but Mum and Dad jacked up, saying it was much too insecure a profession and that the Bank was much better.  He was very busy with a youth social club which he set up at the Church which was about a mile away-you had to go up to the tramline and turn right and then walk another few hundred yards.  The church, St Ambrose’s, on the corner of Enoggera Road and Davidson St, the street Nana’s house was in, was a very  imposing building in red brick built high above and facing Enoggera Road.  On its right was the presbytery where lived the rather large, spoilt-looking and forbidding Father Brian Bolton and then behind that was the two story convent primary school.  Close by that, on the left, set in gardens, was a grand old Queenslander, the original house, which was the convent. Father Bolton liked Brian because, of course, he was doing something good for the Church, but was wary of Dad and my family generally because he thought they were Communists-and he wasn’t far wrong.  I remember in later years he used to give very political sermons and came very close to naming suspects. Brian had a girlfriend, Dawn Crowe, who came from a well known, by local standards rather wealthy,  family (in pubs, pretty much the only way Catholics made much money in those days).  She was a member and supporter of Brian in the social club and she often used to visit us.  She was very happy with me and was a great favourite of mine, and my parents.  Of which more later.

Of course I went to the convent, first in the classes that were held downstairs and then we   were promoted upstairs.  I did well and before long was always topping the monthly exams which were part of the received pedagogic  wisdom in those days.  A medal on a long cord was the reward (!) and I used to have to wear this jingle-jangling round my neck.  I was pretty vain about it but the whole thing became even too much for me and one month I was recorded as saying to my mother, “Oh why can’t someone else come top and have this dingle dangle instead of me’  Of  course it never occurred to me ‘to throw’ one some month.

In either late 1942 or early 1943 Brian finally got his wish.  He persuaded his parents to let him go for a medical examination to join the Air Force.  They finally agreed because they were sure he would be failed: since he was a small child he had what were referred to as ‘bladder problems’-he regularly wet the bed.  I don’t remember what the actual diagnosis was but anyway that was the fact.  I can long remember the carry-on about changing his sheets.  I really don’t know how he got on at boarding school.  So he went for the examination and was passed.  Mum and Dad were horrified and were certain that the medical had been faked because the government wanted as many recruits as possible.  So he joined the RAAF and went off for training early in 1943; Point Cook was one of the places he trained.

I have to introduce another key character, who in fact had been in and out of my life since I was a baby-Beverley.  Mum’s eldest brother was Lawrence, known as Larry.  I will speak more of him later; he had a married  Anne, who was a distant relative.  From her photos she was very beautiful and was much admired and loved by both my mother and Aunty Mary.  Her first child was Beverley, about 4 years older than Brian, and then a few years later she had Jackie, who, tragically, was what today we would call ‘a hole in the heart baby’. He was beloved by his father who was making a successful career in engineering works, especially the use of the various types of engines that they had at that time.  After much distress and medical attention, Jackie died, aged five.

About a year earlier Brian had been born while Mum and Dad were still in Rocky.  Mum wasn’t well after the birth and was put in the sanatorium in North Rockhampton.  Anne and Aunty Mary used to visit daily, taking the baby to see her.  One day  they were coming back from the sanatorium on one of the  trams, which were steam driven.   Suddenly it gave a terrific snort  and belched out a lot of steam.  Annie thought the vehicle had caught on fire and, panicking, and with the baby in her arms, jumped from the moving  tram.  Holding the baby aloft she hit her head on the pavement and apparently died almost instantaneously.

Larry was devastated-he had lost both his son and wife in about a year.  He left Beverley in the care of Mum and Dad and went north to work in the Normanby area where he had had a gold mine-indeed he had had Annie’s wedding ring made from gold from that mine.  He virtually disappeared and for years was rarely  in touch with Mum and Dad, let alone his daughter.  So Beverley remained with us and was about fourteen when I arrived.  I still feel that I have memories of her walking me in a pram, which she certainly did, and my mother often said how much she had helped her when I was a baby.   She was in fact my ‘little mother’, because, of course, Mum was often unwell.

Somewhere there is a photo of her and Brian and me, when I was about two years old:  Beverley is in her All Hallows uniform-All Hallows was the Sisters of Mercy school in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane which was the leading Catholic girls school;  Brian, then about twelve, is in his Gregory Terrace uniform- the Christian Brothers’ St Joseph’s College on Gregory Terrace was the leading Catholic school in Brisbane city; and me, the original little spoilt boy, in a white, short-sleeved shirt, brown pants and with what my mother used to call ‘golden curls’ down to below my ears and all primped up.  My mother actually had wanted a girl, which she was  going to call Carmel, and she regarded my  curls as a heaven-sent opportunity to have something girlie.

Beverley was a beautiful brunette, in a rather Spanish kind of way, and always in my memory from early years was happy and smiling-and musical.  In addition to the good schooling my parents had arranged for her she was also musically  trained-not to a high degree, but she was good on the piano, playing all the new songs and singing.  By the time I was old enough to remember things she had gone away to train to be a nurse, so I rarely saw her when we were in Roma. She lived part of the time with us when we were in Ipswich and stayed on in Ipswich when we moved to Brisbane

During those war years Brisbane was full of military, especially Americans.  They had plenty of money and an easy  going way and were much admired by the fair girls of Brisbane, which until then had been a very conservative, colonial town.  At that time  the population of Queensland’s capital was only 3-400,000.  Sometime around about 1942 Beverley met a very handsome and courteous US officer, a Southern boy by the name of Sherwood Burgess.  He came home at least once and I remember how impressed I was.  They looked pretty smart and exotic in their beautifully tailored uniforms.  Anyway, nothing came of that, but by early 1943 she was engaged to Norman Robinson.  Norm(an) was the elder son of Proctor and Elizabeth Robinson who owned a 5000 acre property, ‘Walton Downs’, in southwestern Queensland, about 100 miles west of Goondiwindi, on the McIntyre River, which forms the NSW/Queensland border along there.  They had a younger son named Doug(las).The wedding was held at about Easter in 1943.

Brian arranged to get leave for the wedding but, to everyone’s consternation, shortly after he was told that he was to be posted overseas.  He had been trained as a wireless operator/gunner. In about the middle of the year he left and I have clear memories of his letters arriving and the excitement as we read them and passed them around.  He had wanted to be a journalist and his writing was very fluent. (Many years later, when Dad was packing up after Mum had died, he burnt all the letters.   What a pity!).  The last person from the whole family of Breens and McDonells and their friends and connections who had gone overseas was Dad in the First World War.  How different today!

Brian’s travel, which included New York, was part of an Allied air training scheme and he spent some time having final training in Canada.  That completed he went to England and was posted to the Australian squadron, No 10, of Sunderland flying boats in Coastal Command.  I don’t remember exactly how long he was there , no more than a couple of months, during  which time he had his 21st birthday, on September 22-I remember the letter he sent describing the party his mates gave him).  Then, on October 2, his aircraft, ‘M for Mary’, was lost on U-boat patrol over the Bay of Biscay.  It was known that German Junker 88s, which had rockets and greatly outgunned the Sunderlands, which were only equipped with .303 machineguns, were in the area.

The war had a terrible impact on what was then a small Australian population, and at the family level it was intense.  Brian’s cousin, Billy Toohey, son of Aunty Grace, Dad’s eldest sister, was lost in Bomber Command over Europe.  All of Brian’s close friends, about 4 or 5 of them, never came back.  I have the clearest memories of the notices in the Courier Mail every day of those who were missing or lost in action.

 

 

 

After about two or three years in Roma Dad applied for and won a transfer to Ipswich, about half an hour by train to the east of Brisbane.  I realised years later that this was part of a long term strategy for moving up the promotion ladder.  It took years to accomplish and the lesson wasn’t lost on me.  So early on I learnt something about how big organisations work.  He had started off in the Railways in Rockhampton after he came back from the War in the communications branch which he had left when he had enlisted.  In the  late twenties he had transferred to Brisbane, presumably to be closer to the centre of things, where the Railways was run from, as well as to be close to Nana, which Mum would have wanted as she saw her mother getting older.

After some years there he transferred to the traffic branch which gave much better chances for promotion, out of the strictly technical communications branch. Then he took the transfer to Roma, in charge of an important country centre.  This was a promotion but there was another benefit:  he was choosing to leave the big smoke to go to the bush, and thus getting brownie points for being a good public servant, taking the rough with the smooth.  The promotion back to Ipswich  put him in a key position in the busiest centre outside Brisbane and,  soon, as the War in the north gathered pace, it became by far the busiest in the State.  Hundreds of thousands of American and Australian troops, and huge quantities of  military materials, were routed through Ipswich.  Another attraction of Ipswich was that it was not far from Brisbane and to the sources of work and education which Dad was planning towards.

We lived in East Ipswich, just around the corner from one of Mum’s younger  brothers, Uncle Paddy, his wife Aunty Kath and two children-Kevin, about five years older than me, and daughter Connie, a few years older again. Their presence was, of course, another appeal of the new town, especially for Mum, who was very close to all her brothers.  But also, Dad didn’t see much of his own brothers but he got on well with all the Breen, and was much admired by them because of his practical sense.  And it was good for me.  Because of the age gap, I didn’t see a  great deal of brother Brian, who, while we were in Roma and also in Ipswich, attended boarding school in Toowoomba at the De La Salle brothers at the famous Downlands College.  Mainly attended by the sons of squatters, it was really too expensive for my parents but, as on other occasions, Mum apparently was very effective in arguing  a case for reduced fees.

So now I had cousins a few hundred yards away with whom I could spend a lot of time.  By then I was well into learning the piano and Connie was a good pianist too.  Apart from playing in the spacious yards of our homes we also spent a lot of time with music and singing.  Most Saturday or Sunday nights the families would gather at one of the houses-more often at the Breens-and we would have what we  called a singsong, but which I realise now was the translation into a new environment of the traditional Irish ceilidh. Quite often other relatives or friends would come visiting and everyone was expected to do something-sing, play, recite poetry, take a turn at dancing.  I soon learnt to sight-read the music quite a bit and it’s a facility I still retain, while I’m no good at playing by ear.

I used to walk to school up a long street which went past Limestone Hill, one of Ipswich’s main features, to the school.  Several others used to walk that way too, and I remember one of them-Dicky Bird-probably because he was smaller than me and had such a funny name.  I did well at school, the East Ipswich State School, in all subjects and an event occurred which has stayed with me all that time.  One day it was essay writing time-I must have been about 8 or 9-and the teacher, a lady whom I liked, set the class at work, and then took me into another room and gave me a writing book and a table looking out onto the veranda  and told me to write a story about whatever I liked.  I realised that it was a big honour.  I don’t remember much about the story except that it was 24 pages long and was about a family called Mainwaring.  I remember spending a lot of time on the name.  It had an enormous effect on my confidence and I have thought ever since that I could write myself out of any spot.  It was while we were in Ipswich that I started a correspondence with another teacher, Miss (Marge) Pederesen who had taught me in Roma.  That correspondence continued until I left school and I remember she came to visit us when we were back in Brisbane.

One day I decided to wag it from school.  As I remember I was generally happy at school but there must have been something bugging me.  Our house was on stumps about a metre and a half off the ground-not very tall but enough to hide under.  Wasn’t a very imaginative hidey hole but it was the best I could think of.  So I snuck under there on one side of the house and managed to stay unnoticed till about eleven o’clock. But Mum  came down the stairs and saw me.  I don’t remember there was much trouble-she kept me home that day and sent me with some sort of trumped up note for the teacher the next day.

It was about that time that Brian was  wanting to join up.  The  War had been on for about two years and he was nineteen or twenty.   My parents wouldn’t agree. It was a big issue in the family and he was very upset about it, so was my mother.

I don’t remember much else about Ipswich then but it was a happy time, except for Mum’s health which was always poor and I remember there, too, her anxiety stricken face as     she lay on a pillow in her bed, with a vinegar soaked towel wrapped around ice across her forehead.  She liked the social life but it seems she used to screw herself up for an event and after it just collapsed.  There was nothing in those days that could be done, no pills, so she  suffered from it till the day she died.

Another thing I remember from Roma was the announcement of war-on the wireless, of course, it was all the-the only-go then.  We had a big cabinet wireless – the cabinet was made of wooden veneer, very grand, and I’m pretty sure it was a Breville brand.  Of course, I didn’t know what the war was all about, though I was keen to learn, but I remember Dad, very serious, sitting nearby.

I remember from the  radio also listening each weekday to a  famous serial ‘The Search for the Golden Boomerang’, which triggered a big interest in Aborigines.  I suppose there were  some around a country town like Roma but I don’t recall any.  The theme music was from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’, and the sponsor was Hoadley’s Violet Crumble Bar-very delicious and a favourite of mine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I was three or four, Dad  was given a posting to Roma, a medium sized town in Central West Queensland, but an important rail centre.  I think he was traffic officer there in charge of the administration and staffing of the trains that came through.  I have a letter he sent to my brother Brian who was about ten years older than me and at the time was attending Gregory Terrace Christian Brothers school where I later went.  Dad had, of course, gone on ahead to handle all the moving and to save Mum any worry-he was always very caring of her.

The house we lived in was a pretty old one owned by the Railway-part of the attraction of taking a country job in the Railways was getting a free house.  It was made of weatherboards and had big wide verandahs round two sides. It was in York Street,  within cooee of both the Brothers high school and the convent school and was on the west of the town centre. We had a big sand and gravel yard and a large garage and several tall trees, including a shady, sharp-smelling pepperina tree in the front around which I used to ride my tricycle.

We became good friends with our neighbours, the Murphys, on the south-there was nothing  but open plain on the other sides.  The father was the local officer for the Lands Department, an important job where there were so many pastoral properties, and the mother was a very energetic and warm woman who became good friends with my mother. There were three children-Patsy the eldest, a bit younger than my brother, John, a few years younger than her, and Billy who was about my age.  Billy and I played together a lot, despite the fact that the Murphys thought I was a bit of a sissy.  They had been brought up pretty tough, and used to poke fun at me going around in a beautiful dressing gown which my doting mother insisted I wear.

While I was still three or four, I used to ride my tricycle a lot around the yard, particularly in the front in the sand and around the pepperina tree.  It was, of course, some of the worst of the Great Depression and one of the common scenes of the day was men on ‘relief’, or the dole, and known as ‘relief workers’, working on the maintenance of the roads.  Some of them came up York Street, which extended past our place some distance on and disappeared over the top of the slope ( to where?-I often wondered), mending the roads and gutters.  For some time I went out to the front where they used to stop in the shade of a tree to have their lunch.  I remember chatting with them very happily-they seemed big and strong to me and very glad to talk. so I have some good memories.  I was  impressed with them and when sometime later, someone asked me what I’d like to be  when I grew up I answered, “a ‘lief worker’!  Not well received by my mother who even at that stage was looking forward to my becoming a doctor.

One of my clearest memories is of Billy and me lighting a fire in the garage, which was empty, fortunately, because we had no car-Dad used to ride a bike to work.  In no time the fire got out of control.  Luckily, someone from the high school saw the blaze, and the Brothers and some of the neighbours organised a bucket brigade to put out the fire.  Very exciting!  I don’t remember what happened to Billy and me,  probably not too much, but  it was a great event in our lives.

Dad was pretty lenient and he was very proud of my big voice.  It was unusually strong and true and I used to sing a lot. He thought that in the fullness of time he would make his fortune out of me. My mother was very musical and had taught herself to play the piano, not very well but enough, so she used to encourage me.  She used to keep up with all the popular songs on the radio, and the new shows and films.  A very popular one was “Rose Marie” with Nelson Eddy, a great tenor, as a Canadian Mountie in the woods and on the rivers, and Jeanette Mac Donald, a wonderful soprano, as the beautiful lady.  I was very taken with Nelson’s splendid Indian canoe.  So I got out Dad’s ladder as a canoe in the backyard, with a shovel as the paddle, sat down in the middle rowing and sang all the songs.  Another memory I have of that time is being carried on Dad’s shoulders when we went somewhere and thinking how big and strong he was when I heard his shoes making a loud crackling noise as he stepped on the gravel.

Sometime later, at the beginning of the next year, Billy and I had to go to school.  John Murphy was delegated to take us on our first day and I remember him dragging us by our collars along the bush track to school.  The convent was a two storied building and the little kids were taught on the ground floor.  In those days they had two six month courses, Prep 1 and Prep 2, before you went into the first grade.  I remember that, apart from ordinary lessons, for which we used slates and slate pencils to write things down-which made a teeth-grinding scratchy noise-we did things like paper folding, a sort of simple origami.  And there seemed  to be a lot of playing outside.

We had a ‘Miss’ for our teacher, not a nun, a young woman of about nineteen or twenty who was what they called a pupil teacher.  One day, I think  it was somehow in the daily religion class, I asked her where babies came from.  She laughed very gaily, I remember, but she didn’t tell me-much too confronting a question, from a five year old, for Prep I in a convent school.  From that I learned to be careful about what  questions I asked.  As Brian was so much older than me-and later went off to boarding school in Toowoomba-I didn’t ask him much, as I otherwise might have.  I think it contributed to a life-long habit of trying to work things out for myself.

I think  Roma was for Mum and Dad one of the happiest periods in their marriage.  Although Mum suffered badly from ‘nerves’ she took a lot of pleasure in the social life that was associated with the Church in a country town-fundraising events, dinner parties and particularly the annual fancy dress and debutante balls. And then there was the associated social life at people’s homes, including those from other churches.  People used to support each other’s events.   My parents had good friends called the Costains who did a lot of work for the Anglican Church-the father was in one of the banks, Charlotte was the mother (called ‘Shar’) and they had two children, Anne who was my age, and a brother whose name I forget.

When I was about four my parents dressed me up as a pirate for the fancy dress ball, with a bandana round my head, an eyepatch, a sequinned waist  coat, a sash, and a  sword of some kind stuck in it.  I was very nervous about being made different and when they got me to look in the mirror I burst out in tears-I thought I had disappeared and been replaced by this strange looking fellow.  The next year, I think it was, they had the debutantes’ ball when all the  girls coming out were in long white dresses, very pretty, and all the boys were in tie and tails.  My mother made sure that I was in the thick of it and there was  I in a pink , silk Cavalier’s suit with big white buttons and elastic edged pants, and a huge pink Cavalier’s hat with a large white feather.  As each couple came forward I escorted them over to the bishop-who had come up from Toowoomba for the occasion-and bowed  deeply, with a low flourish of the hat, as I presented them to His Grace.  I still have a thing about hats.

I have memories of riding on the frame of Brian’s bike while he went to the shop or rode around and visited people.    We often used to visit the Costains and one memory is particularly sharp.  My brother was then about fourteen or fifteen, and interested in girls of course, and apparently he had asked Anne to take her pants down and show what girls were like.  It was dark, I remember, and we all crowded around to see, but for me all that remains is a big dark shadow.

Another memory, pretty vague but clear enough, was listening to the announcement of the outbreak of war on the big old cabinet wireless we had at the time-I’m pretty sure it was a Breville brand.  Of course, I didn’t know what it was all about, though I was keen to learn,  but I knew it was important and Dad sat nearby and was very serious.   Radio was all-the only-go in those days and we listened to it a lot.  I remember I used to follow a famous serial, “The Search for the Golden Boomerang’, which triggered off a great interest in Aborigines.  It was sponsored by Hoadley’s Violet Crumblebar and the theme music was a piece from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

Although my mother liked Roma and the social life she always collapsed after an event.  It seems that she used to work herself up to be able to handle it and then just gave way.  So although I have happy memories of  various occasions when she was well, and also when she used to play at the piano, my abiding recollection is of her in bed with a worried harassed face, with a cloth, soaked in vinegar and  filled with  ice, on her brow and continuous complaints about what she called her ‘tin head’.  She had what today what would be  called a severe anxiety disorder, which lasted all her life, without relief.  No pills for it in those days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Breens

And, now, what about the Breens, my mother’s family? In many ways, compared with the McDonells, a very different kettle of fish!

The Breen family came from central-western Ireland, from Tipperary County, whence came, indeed, most of the Irish people who migrated to Australia in the 19^th century. Their home district was in South Tipperary, round a place called Donohill, but various members had settled in other, nearby neighbourhoods. I haven’t been able to trace them back past about the 1840s, but, like most devoutly Catholic Irish people, they had been poor after the occupation of Ireland by the English in the 17^th century. Various members seem to have gradually built themselves up a bit, getting leases to land and thereby being able to have their own cattle, the main source of wealth, and being able to do some farming. This not only provided them with food to eat, but also some extras left over which they could sell at market. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a great famine in Ireland. It is still a heavy memory for many Irish people-several million were said to have died, and its causes are still debated. Anyway, as a result, many Irish emigrated over the following decades, especially to the United States and Canada, but also to Australia.

My grandfather, Michael Breen, was one of a large family and seems to have come to Australia about the same time as the Doolans, my grandmother’s family. He was the youngest, and probably because of that had no hope of inheriting anything from his parents, and so life in the new country was his best hope. Although family legend has it that at least one other Breen from this family came to Australia I have no record of any other of those Breens coming to Australia. Of course, there are other Breens-the name is found in several parts of Ireland-but it is not common in Australia.

The Doolans came in the mid 1870s arriving in Rockhampton in the “Scottish Bard’ on 18 August 1976.   Like so many others they were attracted to the district because of the boom, and, IN great grandfather Doolan’s case by the construction of the large Lake’s Creek meatworks, for he was a butcher and soon opened his own butcher shop in Rockhampton.  So, by the standards of the day, he and his family were comfortable and I have heard that he later opened one or more shops and, in particular, stood by Nana when her husband turned out to be pretty hopeless as a provider.

There were two links between the Breens and the Doolans-another Breen cousin married Johanna elder brother John Doolan-so perhaps they knew each other back in Ireland, and perhaps Grandfather Michael and Grandmother Johanna did too. Gold had been discovered north of Rockhampton at Canoona in the 1850s and then large deposits were found at Mt Morgan, just 38 kms south of Rocky, as it used to be called in the family, in 1882. Already Queensland had been growing quickly, with many migrants from the British Isles, and now it became even more popular. This is no doubt why the Breens came there, and the McDonells, too, although they stayed on the land.

Michael Breen, however, had neither money nor special work skills-although I was often told by my mother that he had gone to school ’till he was a man’-that is, about 18 years old, because, she said, the family had a great love of learning. In those days in Ireland such a level of education was rare indeed, and he must have been regarded as smart and also much favoured by his parents and brothers to be able to do that. Also, again, perhaps because he was the youngest, and would not get any of the family land. But in Australia the education wasn’t much use to him and so he went as a labourer into the mines in Mt Morgan. As far as I know he worked there and around Rockhampton all his life. I never heard much about Grandfather Michael although Mum said he was a great singer and dancer, and was often called upon to entertain at weddings and parties: he used to get up on the table and tap dance and sing-it was a great act, apparently-and all of his sons were good dancers, too, and most of them sang or performed poetry. It was, as they used to say, ‘in the blood’. But it seems he used to drink a lot, and no doubt was well ‘plastered’ at all the parties, and he didn’t get enough money to provide well for his family. He died fairly young, when he was 53, in Maryborough and it seems that he had been thrown out by his family. Indeed, I have been told that it was my mother who was instrumental in getting him to leave the family because of all the stress he brought upon Nana.

His wife Johanna, my Nana Breen, was, as I remember from the late 1930s/early 1940s, a handsome, very Irish-looking woman, serious, not very talkative, kind enough to me but not very affectionate, but the dominant figure among her family. By all accounts she had had a pretty tough life and her children idolised her for what she had done for them in just bringing them up. She and Michael had 8 children, as follows, in order of birth:

Mary, Lawrence (Larry), James (Jim), Catherine (Kit, my mum, born in 1895), Patrick (Paddy), Michael (Mick), Cornelius (Con), John (Jack). All of these names were common in the Breen and Doolan families in earlier generations.

During the years in the forties when I knew her, after we had come back from Roma and Ipswich, she was living in a house in Davidson St, Newmarket, Brisbane which the children, but especially Mary, had bought for her. We stayed with her till we were able to move into our Ashgrove Avenue house. My parents had come down to Brisbane in the late 1920s/early 1930s from Roackhampton, where my brother , Brian was born , nearly ten years before me. Dad had got a promotion and got the move to the Queensland capital, the ‘big smoke’, probably because they reckoned that there would be better opportunities, especially in education, and also probably because Mum thought she should be near her mother. (By this time, both of Dad’s parents were long dead.) It was also the beginnings of the Great Depression when all the economies of the world went into a tailspin, and there was a huge amount of unemployment-in Queensland it was 30 or 40%-that is, more than a third of men were out of work and they and their families had to live on the ‘dole’, a very small amount of money which the government paid out each week. (Of course, very few women worked at paying jobs in those days, so that if the man lost his job the whole family was in trouble).

Fortunately for us, the people employed in the Railways were not, because of the strength of the railway unions, affected nearly so much-they had ‘permanent’ jobs and couldn’t be fired. So Dad was never out of work, but other members of both the Breens and the McDonells were unemployed during these years. When we came back to Brisbane from the years we were in Roma and Ipswich years, and I was about seven, this whole area of the stream and its big banks and flood plains, and rough land where there were no houses, with bush all around, was a great place for me to wander and play in. But more of that later.

Because the Breen family needed the money which Michael, the father, didn’t provide, Larry, as the eldest boy, had to leave school before he was ten and so didn’t get much of an education. But he was very keen to learn, and very ambitious. Years later, he told me-and was very proud of the fact-that he was determined to get some education, somehow stole some money, and bought himself ‘table books’, that is, arithmetic books for learning the multiplication and division tables, and other books so he could teach himself. This he did, and then he got himself jobs in the mines and the industrial works around Rockhampton which involved machines. He did trade studies as an apprentice and got certificates which allowed him to operate big machines, like cranes, and large digging machines, and just about any of the many machines which were common in those days, and most of all, motors and electricity generators.

Many years later, when I got to know him when I was about 10, he showed me all his certificates, and it was a very thick pile that he had. I was impressed. So before long, he was licensed to operate just about any sort of machine around. In those days, many factories and places like hospitals and railway yards and tram yards and steel works had their own electricity generation facilities, because the electricity plants that the towns ran were too small to handle anything apart from household and street lighting. Even many towns didn’t have much of that. And, also, in those days, and for many years later, the towns themselves were not connected to other towns in one grid so that they could help each other. It wasn’t until after World War 2 that big transmission grids were built which linked up the whole State, and it wasn’t until after 1995 that the whole of eastern Australia was linked into one grid. Now, there is one electricity grid which stretches from North Queensland to Tasmania to the west of South Australia-the longest in the world, a development which I, in  turn, had something to do with, as I shall retail.

So, Uncle Larry was very proud of the fact that, as still a young man, he was put in charge of installing the electricity machinery for the project which brought electricity to the whole of Rockhampton, which by then was quite a large city-it was a big accomplishment for a boy who had left school at ten, and stole money for tablebooks! During this time he became a member of the Federated Engine Drivers and Firemen’s Association (FEDFA) which was one of the largest and most politically active unions. Of course, its members were powerful because they were the only ones who could run all those machines-just as the members of the Australian Railways Union, like my father, were powerful because they ran the whole railway network and the big telecommunications system which covered the whole State of Queensland. But more of that later.

Grandfather Michael who was born on 20 October 1855-his address is given as Lisheendarby, probably a part of Donohill-was the son of Lawrence Breen (though it is spelt Laurence in the record of the marriage that I got from the Tipperary Family History research group of the Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly in Ireland) who married Winifred Hickey on 9 February 1832. I don’t have a birth record for Greatgrandfather Laurence but Greatgrandmother Winifred was born on 1 December 1811, so probably he was a few years older. The address of both of them is given as Shanadanganon, According to the marriage certificate.Michael had the following siblings, according to the records:

James, born 9.9.1832; Cornelius, 1.9.1834; Mary. 23.3.1840; Ellen 16.3.1843; John 15.8.1844; Patrick 4.3 1847; Laurence 22.6.1851

The address of all of them at birth is given as Lisheendarby

Greatgrandmother Winifred would have been 44 when she had Michael.

Grandfather Michael married my Grandmother Johanna Doolan who was born at Cappamore, not far away in County Limerick, on 9 June 1887 in Rockhampton. He died on 13 August 1914. Johanna was born on 9 November 1865 and her parents were James Doolan and Catherine Deere. So she was ten years younger than Michael.

Michael and Johanna had the following children:

Lawrence born 4 Dec 1887 died 5 December 1887

Mary Winifred born 24 march 1889, died about 1960 in Brisbane

Laurence born 9 June 1890 died about 1954 at ‘Remilton’ Beverly (Larry’s daughter) and Norman Robinson’s property west of Goondiwindi

James born about 1894 died 1942 in Brisbane

Catherine Cecilia born 7 March 1995 died 1966 in Brisbane, my mother

Patrick born 5 April 1900, died about 1950 in Ipswich

Cornelius born 18 March 1902, died about 1975 in Brisbane

John born 7 April 1904 died about 1970

The details of their marriages and children are recorded in the Family Tree file.

The only member of the family in Ireland about whom much is known was Daniel Breen, son of a cousin of Michael, and therefore my mother’s second cousin. During the later years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century there was a great upwelling around the world of desires by the underclasses and the underpriveleged to have a greater say in their lives, to achieve ’emancipation’ or ‘independence’. It was then that the working class movement which developed trade unionism and produced the Labour parties of the world started to mobilise; the first attempts at revolution were made in Russia; and the colonies, such as India and Ireland, started to develop political movements designed to drive off the colonialists (in these two cases the British) and to achieve political independence. In 1901 Australia itself became independent: before that it had been a collection of states which were colonies of Great Britain.

Ireland had been occupied by the British for centuries. It is a long story and there are good histories of it. Not only did it suffer from the oppression of occupation by a foreign army, but there was also religious persecution and discrimination. Roman Catholicism was the deeply held religion of Ireland, or Eire, as it was known in Gaelic, the native language, going back many centuries. Most of northern Europe had been converted to Christianity by Irish missionaries during the Dark Ages from about the 5^th century to about the 10^th. So it was a very long tradition. Anyway, the Irish in general were poor, had little of the good land, had great difficulty in getting education, and were not even registered when they were born-the only records were the baptismal record in the parish church when they were christened. (This continued well into the 19^th century-the records I obtained of my grandfather and his family are all baptismal certificates: there were still no official records kept by the government even at that time.)

In 1916 there was an uprising of nationalist Irish in Dublin, which became known as the Easter Rising. It was defeated by the British Army, and the ringleaders were executed or jailed. This was the first major attempt by the various Irish patriots to organise a major action against the British, though there had been informal movements begun years before. Dan Breen, with his more famous mate, Sean Tracy, were the founding members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood which later became the Irish Republican Army. Its first unit was the 13th Tipperary Brigade. From the beginning it started military training for its members and, in his book, ‘My fight for Irish freedom’, first published in 1924, he describes these early days and how the Brotherhood, many of whom later became the Irish Volunteers, trained and organised. His book is a very good, swaggering, self-promoting read-I have a copy.

Dan and his companions made several raids on police stations and police parties and also tried to assassinate the British Governor of Ireland. Today he would probably be called a terrorist, but of course to many of the Irish people he was a freedom fighter and a hero. Later on there were many military engagements with the British Army. During this period Dan reported directly to Danel O’Connell, the leader of the Irish independence movement. It seems that he was put in charge of ‘flying squads’ which were undercover operations carrying out the assassination of British informers and other enemies of the independence movement.  At this time also the British brought over from England a militia group infamously known as the ‘Black and Tans’, because of the uniforms they wore. These were used to keep order with great brutality among the Irish people.

As a result of the whole political campaign that was going on in Ireland of which Dan Breen was a part, the British finally decided to give Ireland the independence that was sought. It is a long story which Dan Breen gives a lot of detail about in the book, but, anyway, in 1922 Ireland won ‘home rule’ and a few years later became a completely independent Republic. Dan Breen became a member of the Irish Parliament, known as the Dail, (pronounced doil), where he served for many years. He is still regarded as an important historical figure in Ireland.  He was often spoken of with glowing praise by my Breen uncles, but in fact most of them were not very active in the political struggles of the time. The exceptions were Larry and Paddy, while the others, as my father used to say, ‘talk a lot but don’t do much’. He was very opposed to this-for him, a rather silent man, he thought that ‘if you want to know what a man is like, watch what he does, not what he says.’

My aunt Mary was the eldest of the Breens, and being a girl, it wasn’t considered important that she get a good education, especially as the family was poor. So she left school early-I don’t know when-and before long was working in the Railway Refreshment Service, which I described above. She must have been so employed for years, and was moved around various towns that were important in the railway system and so had Railway Refreshment Rooms, as they were called. These were large rooms with a high counter running around one or more sides from behind which the waitresses served the people when they came in from the trains. Usually the stop was for about half an hour, while the train took on water or while some other operation had to be completed, just time enough to get a cup of tea and some sandwiches or cakes or pies; but at the bigger places the train would stop for lunch or dinner for about an hour, and so there would be a big rush to get seats around the large tables. My father always seemed to be a bit of a wizard at being able to get cups of tea and whatever at the refreshment rooms and bringing them back to Mum and me and anyone else we happened to be with.

 

FAMILY FRAGMENTS: THE McDONELLS AND THE BREENS

The McDonells

The McDonells of Glengarry was very well known clan in Scotland. Though small, it was famous for being very vigorous supporters of the Catholic cause during the period hundreds of years ago when religious wars were common. Especially was this so when there was much trouble in England, and therefore in Scotland, at the time the Catholic Stuarts were on the throne, and after the Stuart Charles I was executed in 1649. About a hundred years later, in 1746 the then Stuart pretender to the English kingdom, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, fought a fierce and unsuccessful battle at Culloden, near Inverness in the Highlands. The McDonells were given the place of honour on the right flank of the Stuart forces. The English general in charge of the victorious English forces, the Duke of Cumberland, came to be known as ‘Butcher Cumberland’ because of the ruthlessly brutal way he dealt with the remains of the Stuart forces, and the Highlanders in general. He particularly had it in for the McDonells and twice ‘ethnically cleansed’ Glengarry, as we would say these days, as a result of which nearly all the McDonells left the glen at that time and settled near and far. This is what seems to have happened to our branch of the clan who moved not far from Fort Augustus, on the southern banks of Loch Ness, and also to the area around Inverness. (See Wikipedia for good summaries of the Stuarts, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Culloden and Fort Augustus.)

My McDonell grandparents, with their then living children, arrived in Australia at Melbourne in the ship……. on ? ***. They sailed on to Rockhampton, a busy port at this period of spreading development in Central Queensland. It was then that the railways were being extended in the north, centre and south of the State to the large pastoral and mineral resources in the west. They somehow found, and settled in Alpha, a very tiny settlement, near an almost as tiny settlement called Jericho, not far from Clermont and Cloncurry, where grandfather took up a selection, that is, a small farm, probably poorly endowed, but ‘mine own’. No doubt it was largely for such a slender opportunity that they had left the industrial cities of the north of England. According to my father, his father ran ‘a few’ cattle and other stock on the selection, and added to a meagre income by fettling on the railway.

My grandparents were married in Liverpool on ?? **** 1879. In the marriage certificate, grandfather is shown as a sheep dealer (given the time and the location near the Scottish borderlands , perhaps a change of the ‘d’ to ‘st’ might also have been accurately descriptive). He was ? years of age, was much older than his wife-perhaps he put his age back for his marriage.My grandmother, born in ??, is entered as the spinster daughter of ….., an Irish wharfworker in the Liverpool Port Maritime Service. At that time Liverpool was a very large and historic port. My father often told me that his mother was a teacher back in England, but perhaps at the Catholic schools and so perhaps not listed or formally recognised as such. She taught years later in Alpha in the one teacher school. The teaching aids which she had prepared were still kept on the walls of the school many years later, after her death, my father told me.

My grandfather was born in Fort William, not far to the south from the ancestral lands of Glengarry, and loch Garry, and environ areas, of the McDonells of Glengarry.

We don’t know anything much about their lives at this time nor anything much about their lives before they came to Australia (uncle Duncan, Dad’s elder brother, later burnt all the family papers relating to the period before they came to Australia, on the principle that Scotland was a good place to be from-and also no doubt because of his Communistic appreciation of what had happened to our family and others during the Enclosures). They finally settled, as I said, at the hamlet of Alpha on a selection, and grandfather also became a linksman on the railway-that is, working in the maintenance gangs. Tough though life no doubt was, the idea of having his own land must have seemed almost miraculous.

Grandmother went on to have a total of 10 living children, almost one a year. My mother told me that Grandfather had been very hard on her, and she ‘took to the drink’- confirmed by the medical inscription of cirrhosis of the liver on her death certificate.

Mum told me that she got on well with Grandad; he was known to be stern and hard, but according to her he was dignified of manner and speech, and general behaviour. Dad often told me how he had a very clear, well produced, almost accentless English-which that part of the Highlands and Invernessshire where he came from were known for. He spoke the Gaelic only when a neighbour, who had come from the same part of Scotland, would ride over from his own selection nearly and they’d have a dram together. Was it a dram of whisky, or a beer?

My father was the youngest of the McDonells, preceded by Kitty, with whom he kept closely in touch all his life. In fact he seemed to have been in touch with most of his family, while they lived. He and Kitty were the only ones who (nearly in my father’s case) finished primary school-he left in Scholarship year (the Scholarship was the first public exam in Queensland at that time, taken atabout 12-13 years of age, so it would have been around 1907-08) and I’m not sure about Kitty. I do know that she must have been bright for she won a scholarhip, which she was unable to take up because of the family poverty, to go to secondary school in Rockhampton, and complained about her fate all her life-and why not! The family apparently decided that they needed Dad’s contribution to work on the farm and he was taken out of school in his Scholarhip year. He was too good-natured and modest, and positive in outlook, to spend much time on regrets, but he told me of that several times, and how he had always been ‘top’ of the class, ahead of a local boy from a ‘well-off’ family named Frazer, who went on to become a leading surgeon in Brisbane. Dad always had huge respect for his headmaster, one Mr Hanger, later famous for some reason which I don’t remember, who Dad thought was a strict but very good teacher.

Between 1908-1915 he spent some years helping run the selection (he was a good horseman and cattleman), and then, apparently because he was bright-across the board but particularly at maths-he was headed towards the telegraphy part of the Queensland Railways and got a job there. No doubt older brother Duncan, who was already in the railway, and with whom he always had a close relationship, had something to do with this. There were other brothers in the Railways too. He became a hot-shot operator-this was subsequently made clear to me by him, Duncan and also my Breen uncles, who were also in the railway.

At that time telegraphy was a very advanced technology and the Queensland Railways’ communications system was the most comprehensive in the State, spreading almost all over what was and is a very large area. So he became a specialist in a large, modern State-wide communications system, the largest in the State. The training also involved getting to know something about electricity and radio. It would have been rather equivalent these days to a young man being put to computers and Information Technology very early on. Because it was a State-wide system, the telegraphists were at the heart of the whole show. Besides, these were the days of growing working class action and of unionism, and the communications system would have been of great strategic importance in those developments. This was at a time when there were very active union campaigns for better employment and general conditions, and later on he became very involved in that. But from what he said later, his political consciousness didn’t develop until he had gone to and survived the First World War, and, after returning, came in contact with the Breens.

So far as I can recall, all the other McDonell brothers, except Duncan, went into some sort of rural activity-one or more had farms, one had some sort of transport business, another had a hotel. I didn’t meet many of them but one, Uncle Mick, was a worker on sheep and cattle stations. Many years later, when I was at “Remilton”, Beverly and Norman (Robinson)’s place out past Toobeah, west of Goondiwindi-of which more later-Uncle Mick somehow turned up, and worked on the property for Norman. I was then about 14 and was very interested to pick up some bush ‘pointers’ from this uncle whom I’d never seen, and perhaps hardly heard of. He was a rather famous horsebreaker, and told me some of the tricks about doing it gently-I suppose early versions of ‘horse whispering’-and corrected some of my riding behaviours-length of stirrup, grabbing at the reins, balance. I saw him out there on several visits and my riding skills were much improved as a result. He was drowned a few years later in the 1950s, caught in a flash flood further west at some property he was working on.

Another uncle brought me my first sharp apprehension of death. I’m pretty sure it was while we were still at Roma-that is, after about 1935-6 and before 1938-9-that news came that Dad’s brother Jack had died suddenly of a heart attack. I remember Dad telling Mum one evening that the family had said that he was upstairs getting dressed when they heard a thud on the floor, and I remember hearing the ‘thud’ very clearly in my imagination and then trying to imagine his experience of this arrival of death.

I have a long undated letter from Dad to Brian telling him about Roma, and how he liked ‘the peace and quiet that reigns’, and to tell Mum that he couldn’t find some photos and other things which had become mislaid in the move: he had gone on ahead, of course, being Dad, to handle all the unpacking of the family goods sent from Brisbane, and get everything ready for the family to come to a new life in a new region.

I met Uncle Duncan and his wife Auntie Dorrie (Doris) on numerous occasions. He was a smallish, wiry man, as people of the Highlands often were and are, with a wiry expression and a wiry, sardonic, sense of humour. That is to say, no sense of humour much at all, but he would try to be sociable by making jokes, which turned out to be rather critical or belittling, and not very funny at all Not a particularly charming person, but widely regarded as very ‘genuine’ and honourable. He seemed to be generally in good spirits, articulate, and managed to get on quite well with my mother-not easy for an in-law (although she was very fond of Dorrie). He was quite a few years older than Dad and had a long career in the Railways, which ended badly

He, like Dad, was a longtime member of, and worker for, the ARU (Australian Railways Union). As one of the main railway, and therefore, public sector unions it was one of the most powerful, especially as the railways, everywhere, but particularly in Queensland, was ‘a state within the State’. Queensland was very large and decentralised in population, and so had, and still has, the largest railway system in the country. So the Queensland Railways, and railway doings, were very important. When Dad and Duncan met up the talk was always about politics, especially the latest on the Union and its place in whatever political issue was in the wind at the time.

One of the very dramatic episodes of my family occurred years later as a result of Duncan’s activities. It was, I think, in 1952 and not long after a big railway strike in which,as usual, Duncan (and to a less extent, Dad) had been a well-known and effective organiser. He was charged with stealing 5 pounds, supposed to have been found in the pocket of his coat by one of the Railway’s security guards. It was a plant-someone of ‘the bosses’ had put it there. Duncan was known to be as honest as the day was long, as the saying used to go, scrupulously so in all his dealings. It was a terrible blow to him and the family and he never really recovered from it. Mum, who despite her constant anxieties and worries and headaches, was always very good in a crisis, and she peronally insisted, rather against Dad’s concerns, upon going up to Rockhampton to be there with Duncan and Dorrie when the trial was on, and appeared in court to give him a character witness.

And she would undoubtedly have ‘pulled out all the stops’ in what she had to say in the court-an old expression referring to pulling out the stops on the organs which used to be played in church to give the music full volume and colour. But Duncan was convicted and was fired from the Railway. ‘They’ had got him well and good. Of course, he never complained about it: he was quite well aware that they had been fighting real battles for all those years when they went out on strike, and that ‘the enemy’ would stop at little to get those they thought were ‘troublemakers’. He somehow had some savings, and perhaps got some small amount of superannuation from the Railways, and he and aunty Dorrie bought a tiny corner shop and managed to make enough to live on. I remember visiting them there and him making some wry joke about how life had changed, and that he was a ‘capitalist’ -because he now owned a shop, rather than working for wages as he had in the Railways.

Duncan and Doris had three sons: Noel, the eldest, was a bit older than my brother Brian and he also joined the RAAF-I think he wasn’t posted overseas, and after the War ended he stayed on as a regular in the Air Force. He left when he was in his early 40s, I suppose in the early 1960, and studied law and became a successful solicitor. Terry, the second boy, died in his teens from a tragic illness. And the youngest, Leon (Noel backwards), was closer to my age, took an apprenticeship and became a fitter. Later on he changed his name to Alan (perhaps he didn’t like being his brother backwards) and moved to Sydney. I saw him a few times over the years-I think he left Brisbane because he was gay, and preferred Sydney, much larger and more tolerant. They are both still alive in Brisbane though not in good health

When Dad enlisted in 1915 he would have been 21. So, at three years older than the minimum age of 18, he had certainly not rushed ‘to the colours’ -as joining one of the armed services was called in those days-to go to the Great War which had started in 1914. Many young men had been attracted by the adventure of going overseas to fight. He told me that there was great propaganda and pressure for young men to go and fight; and in retrospect he thought he had been ‘hooked’, that as a country-bred lad he had little idea of what the whole thing was about. As he was a good horseman my memory is that he told me he first joined the Australian Light Horse, but because of his telegraphy skills-which were much rarer that those of horse riding -he was soon transferred as an aircraftsman mechanic to the Australian Flying Corps, the original name of what became the Royal Australian Air Force. I won’t go into the details of all this here, because his diary and other material are in the archives.

He spent about three years in service, almost all of it overseas in the Middle East- in Egypt, Jordan and Palestine. This was a very influential period for him: of course, in those days the opportunity for young working people to travel and ‘see the world’ and live to tell of it was rare. He didn’t speak much of it generally-no doubt on the good grounds that most people weren’t interested-but sometimes he would open up and give me tidbits of his experiences, and of course I was ‘all ears’. In turn, these tales were very influential for me, partly because of the mere facts of which he spoke, but also, more tellingly, because they gave me the understanding that such travels were possible, that the world was a fascinating place with much to show, and that one could and should make efforts to learn more about it, and not too readily settle only for ordinary life in ordinary Australia-isolated, colonial, remote, unreal, second-rate

Of course, times and attitudes were very different then. Australia was very much still a ‘colony’ even though it had been an independent country since 1901. We all still looked elsewhere-to England, Ireland, Scotland, Europe, the United States, Russia and the Soviet Union, to a much less extent, China, Asia-for ‘real’ things, for ‘real experiences’, for ‘real’ history, for ‘real’ literature, ‘real’ art, beauty, exemplars of all kinds…..Now that Australia is a confident, modern nation, Australia and Australians are world figures, world actors, world artists, writers, sportsmen, politicians, business-it is very different, especially, I think, for children. Travel, world experience, the possibilities of world success are now available in ways unheard of even in my childhood, let alone my father’s.

Dad went through some of the most important campaigns of the Middle East. He was generally attached to British regiments, and he and his mate were sent out to occupy hills and mountaines with good observation points from where they could see enemy-mainly Turkish-movements of troops, aircraft and artillery. Then they would report by radio using Morse Code back to their HQ (headquarters) what they had seen. Or sometimes they were in a situation where they could relay information received by radio from other observers. And sometimes they were left in positions on their own for weeks, even months, at a stretch. I remember one story in particular of how he and his colleague, with their radio and personal equipment, no doubt including their rifles, were stationed on a mountain for up to three months. They finally got leave and were allowed to go for a weekend at Heliopolis, which had been a luxury international holiday resort in Egypt before the war. He said they were able to have wonderful hot baths. Australians were, and are famous, for wanting frequent hot baths or showers when in foreign parts, and, of course, they had had hardly enough water to have quick washes, let alone baths, all the time their were at their mountain lookout; In Heliooplis they also got big comfortable beds; and great food. And prehaps other good things that he didn’t go into details about. In fact, it was all so good that they stayed longer than their leave-pass allowed. When they got back they were given a good ‘dressing down’-as he described it- from their commander, and were ‘confined to barracks’ (CB) for being AWL (absent without leave). And I was tickled to find years later that all that is recorded in his service record, which is in the archive.

He was at the second battle of Gaza, one of the most important of the Middle East war, and told hair-raising and funny stories of the attack by the Australian Light Horse across the flat plains in front of the city. He and his mates were trying to keep their heads down, with all the machine gun and artillery fire going overhead, while their unit commander was standing up on the top of the trench with his binoculars, in full sight of the enemy, watching what was happening. Dad was a great believer in the old saying, ‘He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day’-meaning that there is no point in making useless, even if heroic, sacrifices, and that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’.

Because his job required him to he move around a lot, he saw a much of Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, also, I believe, and was in or near many of the great events of the period. On one occasion, for example, the famous British spy and organiser, Lawrence of Arabia, came with his party late one night into the British camp Dad was in at the time. Lawrence, an Englishman, played a big role in the Middle East war, and formed a very important alliance with the desert Arabs against the Turks and the Germans. Many books have been written about him. Lawrence was dressed, as he often was, like an Arab, was accompanied by Arabs, and rode a camel. Dad was called into the meeting which Lawrence’s group had with the unit’s officers, I suppose to give information on enemy positions in the area.

When Dad returned from the War he went back into the Railways, probably got a promotion, and moved to Rockhampton. At that time Rocky was the ‘big smoke’ in Central Queensland-quite a large city for those days, centre of a large pastoral, agricultural and mining region. Life there would have been very different for him, compared with his youth in Alpha and Jericho. Now, of course, he was a travelled man of the world, very handsome, and probably with some savings from his time in the Army. He obviously set about enjoying himself and looking for a wife. There in Rockhampton he met the Breen brothers, who had moved down from nearby Mt Morgan, the large copper and gold mine which was very famous, and one of the largest in the world. I think they came together through sport. And the Breens were all musical performers in some way or another-singing, dancing, playing instruments, reciting poetry and musical monologues-had two sisters, Mary and Kit my Mum, who played piano, many cousins, including the Doolans, and lots of friends, and seem to have had many parties. So they were natural allies for Dad, on his own, and looking around for companions and activities in the new city.

In those days sprinting was very popular, made more so because it was professional-that is, competitors could get cash prizes and there was legal betting. Then, and for many years later, most sport was amateur, people couldn’t earn much money at it: it was only in about the 1980s that sport became so professional and attracted so much money as we see today.

Dad became a sprinter, as were several of the Breens. I don’t know how successful they were, but they seem to have competed regularly for quite a while. Often later, when I was young, I was given, both by Dad and various Breen uncles, the ‘good oil’ on how to keep my body fit, how to train for running, and the proper ways to place and use your body when you were running. I, in turn, became a sprinter, mainly the 100 and 200 metres, as they would be called these days, but only at school.

Apart from sprinting, one of the Breens, Uncle Jack, the youngest, was a boxer, and at one time bantamweight (he was a small guy) champion of North Queensland. He in turn used to teach me how to take guard, how to defend, and how to ‘throw punches’, especially the straight left and the right cross. I never got the opportunity to put any of this into practice-lucky!

Then at least two of the Breens, Uncle Jim and Uncle Con, were good football players. Jim was chosen to represent Queensland in the interstate competitions, but a few days before he was due to play, a piece of steel flew off a billet he was forging while working in the mine and lodged in his eye. It was a terrible blow, and my mother said that that was the reason he took to ‘the drink’. More of this when we get to the story of the Breens. Uncle Con also seems to have played football-League-for years and later on I was also given lessons by various uncles and Dad on all the tips of League. But I didn’t play much football-on the wing when I did-because Mum wouldn’t let me because she blamed it for what happened to her brothers-all of this can be part of the story later.

Dad as I said, was the youngest of the McDonells, the youngest of ten, which didn’t make much difference, I suppose, as far as his brothers were concerned, but he was the ‘pet’ of his sisters. He had three-Grace, the eldest, born in Scotland, as gracious serious lady, who had a large family of her own; Nora, who had contracted TB (tuberculosis, or consumption, a very serious disease of the lungs) which killed many in those days, and left her a cripple with bad health for the rest of her life, so that she never married; and Mary, a very bright, happy person, who married fairly late in life, and was my favourite.

I saw Aunty Grace quite often because she lived in Brisbane with her family, my cousins, the Tooheys. I don’t remember meeting her husband, he seems to have died early-I don’t really know-but three of her sons, and her daughter, became good friends. There were at least two other sons but I don’t recall them-much older. Of course, part of the appeal was that these cousins were all older than me, mature men by my standards, all avalable for a talk, and from whom I could learn a lot.

Alex, the eldest, was also in the Railways like his uncles, and was very intelligent and friendly. I think he had some administrative job. Tom was a hugely strong man, also in the Railways, where he worked as a ‘flying ganger’, and was the head of a flying gang. These were the small groups of specially trained men who were dispatched to wherever there was an accident on the rail lines, or a collapse, due to rock slides, say, or to heavy flooding-common in tropical Queensland where there are monsoonal storms and cyclone. They travelled on small carts which were driven over the rail lines by a sort of pump mounted on top of it which the gangers had to push up and down by hand. They could make them go very fast, and naturally they kept very fit just getting to where they did their work! I was always very impressed by Tom, who was incredibly fit, quietly affectionate and used to talk to me about his latest adventures when we visited. He used to become very concerned about me because he thought I worked and read too much; he was afraid that I would get ‘brain fag’.

The third son I knew well was Billy, the youngest Toohey, about the age of Brian, my brother, ten years older than me, and was at school during the years I am talking about here, in the thirties. He also, like Brian, joined the RAAF in the early 1940s, but he went into a Lancaster Squadron (Lancaster was the name of one of the principal English bomber aircraft) in Bomber Command in England, and was lost over Germany. Like Brian, and others of their friends whom I knew who ‘didn’t come back’, he is commemorated at the impressive Air Force Memorial at Runnymede on the River Thames, near London. My son Dominic and I visited it when he came to London in the 90s to visit-it commemorates all the airmen of England and the other Commonwealth countries like Australia who died in World War 2.

The Toohey daughter was nicknamed Topsy-I don’t remember her proper name. I liked her a lot, she was very nice to me, though I didn’t know her very well. She was a bit older than Billy, red-headed, attractive, talkative (certainly for a McDonell, all of whom tended to be strong, silent types), and quite direct in her manner. She wasn’t rude, but if there were some question which worried her, she’d come right out and say whatever was on her mind. This was unusual for a McDonell, or for that matter a Breen, or, indeed, Queenslanders in general: they would usually express themselves rather obliquely, using some sort of slang or a ‘figure of speech’, and leave it to the person they were addressing to grasp the message and understand the real meaning of what they were saying. Topsy used to come over to our house sometimes when I was in high school and at University, and we’d talk about her life-I think she married a policeman, but I lost track of her, and of the other Toohey cousins, after I grew up and later moved away from Queensland.

All of the McDonells and the Tooheys and the others were brought up Catholics-as I said the clan back in Scotland had been very strong in the Catholic cause during and after the wars and the troubles between the Catholics and the reformed Church, the Anglicans, as we now know it, started up by the English king, Henry VIII, in the sixteenth century, and also the non-conformist church, the Scottish Presbyterians. (The history of religion in the several centuries before the 20^th century was very complicated, and I won’t go into that here.) The Scottish Highlanders, generally, were staunch Catholics-I’m not sure why, perhaps because they were so far away and in such remote wild country, that they weren’t easily attacked, and stuck to their old religious traditions. And the McDonells of Glengarry were regarded as perhaps the most Catholic of them all. One of the McDonell chiefs was named ‘Defender of the Faith’ by the Pope himself, and the clan and its lands were several times ravaged by English armies andtheir agents and heavily dealt with in the great conflicts of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Over the centuries the Highlanders had a close alliance with the French and their Kings who were often the strongest allies of the Church and the Pope in Europe. Of course, all of southern Ireland, not far away by sailing boat in those days, had also remained Catholic, even after it had been occupied by the English leader, Cromwell, and his successors. It so happened that Glen Garry provided the most convenient and one of the shortes routes across Scotland to Europe and France, so it became a regular passage for priests and other Irish wanting to escape or travel to Europe, and back again. And, of course, they were looked after and kept hidden by the McDonells.

The children of the Highland chiefs were often sent to France and Paris to be educated, and it is said that one of the McDonells of Glengarry married a French princess. But in the early 20^th century many people drifted away from religion and, in particular, the Catholic Church, and became attracted to socialist, even Communist ideas, which generally included some form of disbelief in a God, and sometimes complete atheism, ie, the belief that there is no God. My McDonell/Toohey kin were among them. When I was sent to Catholic convents and later to a well-known high school run by the Christian Brothers-St Joseph’s College in Gregory Terrace, Brisbane-they were very polite about it but obviously thought it was a bit of a joke. They knew that my Dad thought much like them, but that my mother was still very loyal to the Church.

Aunty Mary McDonell was a tall, slim, good looking and always well-dressed woman who, like my Aunt Mary Breen, had also worked in the Railways refreshment service. In those days most people travelled by train, the trips could last days, and the stations at the bigger cities and towns, and even some of the small places, had ‘refreshment rooms’ where you could get snacks or a meal when the train stopped there, for fifteen minutes or half and hour or so. Some trains would also stay overnight These were important services for travellers, of course, and also provided jobs for women.

During the late 19^th century and in the first half of the 20^th there were very few jobs women could do. It was the rule then that if a woman married-even teachers-she had to leave her job and become a full-time wife and mother. So people like my Aunts Mary, who wanted to keep working because the savings they could make were needed by their families, didn’t marry until late. Neither of them had children, and, consequently, because they got on well with their brother, Will (as Mum always used to call him) and my mother, I was a big favourite with both them. I was almost like a foster child (and all the better because they only looked after me on holidays sometimes and didn’t have to worry about it for the rest of the time!) I visited Aunt Mary Mac, as she was called, in Sydney several times while I was at school, and it was always a big adventure.

The other McDonell daughter was Aunty Norah, older than Mary. She also lived in Sydney during the years I remember. Because, as I mentioned above, she had had TB and was pretty much crippled, she spent years in a sanatorium-a special sort of hospital, usually in the country, where TB sufferers could live and be looked after. There were many of them around the world in those days. Hers was at Waterfall, in the hills near Heathcote on the southern outskirts of Sydney, and we visited her whenever we came to Sydney on holidays, which was pretty often. She also hadn’t married, and spent much of her time in a wheel chair, but she was usually very cheerful and happy with me, and made funny jokes, though sometimes she would be in pain and we wouldn’t stay long.

The third sister, Kitty, was the one closest to Dad in age-the next one up. She also was clever, and even when she was an old lady, during one of the last visits I had with her, she still regretted that she hadn’t been able to take up the special scholarship which she had won when she was thirteen to go down from central western Queensland to High School in Rockhampton. She married in Sydney a man called Suich-I think he was of Yugoslav extraction- but it wasn’t a success. I never met him and I never got any details, but I knew the children quite well-Ron, the eldest, Max, the youngest, about 5 years younger than me, and Shirley, in between, who was a bit older than me. Ron did science and physics, and was apparently very bright. He started a very successful business in some aspect of physics, but I have since lost track of him, as I also did of Shirley.

I knew Max much better. He lived with and took special care of his mother in Sydney. I would see him when we came to Sydney, and when he left school he became a cadet journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald. He had a very successful career: he and his wife Jenny were in London when we were there in the early 1960s, and shortly after he became the first Australian journalist based in Tokyo. This was when Japan was beginning to build a very large and important economy and its trading with Australia was growing very rapidly. They stayed there a few years, and when he returned to Sydney he became editor of the Financial Review, of another Fiarfax paper, the Independent, and later the chief editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. Later he also was involved in TV and telecommunications, but I lost track of him over the last 10 years or so. I believe he is retired now.

FAMILY FRAGMENTS: THE McDONELLS AND THE BREENS

The McDonells

The McDonells of Glengarry was very well known clan in Scotland. Though small, it was famous for being very vigorous supporters of the Catholic cause during the period hundreds of years ago when religious wars were common. Especially was this so when there was much trouble in England, and therefore in Scotland, at the time the Catholic Stuarts were on the throne, and after the Stuart Charles I was executed in 1649. About a hundred years later, in 1746 the then Stuart pretender to the English kingdom, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, fought a fierce and unsuccessful battle at Culloden, near Inverness in the Highlands. The McDonells were given the place of honour on the right flank of the Stuart forces. The English general in charge of the victorious English forces, the Duke of Cumberland, came to be known as ‘Butcher Cumberland’ because of the ruthlessly brutal way he dealt with the remains of the Stuart forces, and the Highlanders in general. He particularly had it in for the McDonells and twice ‘ethnically cleansed’ Glengarry, as we would say these days, as a result of which nearly all the McDonells left the glen at that time and settled near and far. This is what seems to have happened to our branch of the clan who moved not far from Fort Augustus, on the southern banks of Loch Ness, and also to the area around Inverness. (See Wikipedia for good summaries of the Stuarts, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Culloden and Fort Augustus.)

My McDonell grandparents, with their then living children, arrived in Australia at Melbourne in the ship……. on ? ***. They sailed on to Rockhampton, a busy port at this period of spreading development in Central Queensland. It was then that the railways were being extended in the north, centre and south of the State to the large pastoral and mineral resources in the west. They somehow found, and settled in Alpha, a very tiny settlement, near an almost as tiny settlement called Jericho, not far from Clermont and Cloncurry, where grandfather took up a selection, that is, a small farm, probably poorly endowed, but ‘mine own’. No doubt it was largely for such a slender opportunity that they had left the industrial cities of the north of England. According to my father, his father ran ‘a few’ cattle and other stock on the selection, and added to a meagre income by fettling on the railway.

My grandparents were married in Liverpool on ?? **** 1879. In the marriage certificate, grandfather is shown as a sheep dealer (given the time and the location near the Scottish borderlands , perhaps a change of the ‘d’ to ‘st’ might also have been accurately descriptive). He was ? years of age, was much older than his wife-perhaps he put his age back for his marriage.My grandmother, born in ??, is entered as the spinster daughter of ….., an Irish wharfworker in the Liverpool Port Maritime Service. At that time Liverpool was a very large and historic port. My father often told me that his mother was a teacher back in England, but perhaps at the Catholic schools and so perhaps not listed or formally recognised as such. She taught years later in Alpha in the one teacher school. The teaching aids which she had prepared were still kept on the walls of the school many years later, after her death, my father told me.

My grandfather was born in Fort William, not far to the south from the ancestral lands of Glengarry, and loch Garry, and environ areas, of the McDonells of Glengarry.
We don’t know anything much about their lives at this time nor anything much about their lives before they came to Australia (uncle Duncan, Dad’s elder brother, later burnt all the family papers relating to the period before they came to Australia, on the principle that Scotland was a good place to be from-and also no doubt because of his Communistic appreciation of what had happened to our family and others during the Enclosures). They finally settled, as I said, at the hamlet of Alpha on a selection, and grandfather also became a linksman on the railway-that is, working in the maintenance gangs. Tough though life no doubt was, the idea of having his own land must have seemed almost miraculous.

Grandmother went on to have a total of 10 living children, almost one a year. My mother told me that Grandfather had been very hard on her, and she ‘took to the drink’- confirmed by the medical inscription of cirrhosis of the liver on her death certificate.

Mum told me that she got on well with Grandad; he was known to be stern and hard, but according to her he was dignified of manner and speech, and general behaviour. Dad often told me how he had a very clear, well produced, almost accentless English-which that part of the Highlands and Invernessshire where he came from were known for. He spoke the Gaelic only when a neighbour, who had come from the same part of Scotland, would ride over from his own selection nearly and they’d have a dram together. Was it a dram of whisky, or a beer?

My father was the youngest of the McDonells, preceded by Kitty, with whom he kept closely in touch all his life. In fact he seemed to have been in touch with most of his family, while they lived. He and Kitty were the only ones who (nearly in my father’s case) finished primary school-he left in Scholarship year (the Scholarship was the first public exam in Queensland at that time, taken atabout 12-13 years of age, so it would have been around 1907-08) and I’m not sure about Kitty. I do know that she must have been bright for she won a scholarhip, which she was unable to take up because of the family poverty, to go to secondary school in Rockhampton, and complained about her fate all her life-and why not! The family apparently decided that they needed Dad’s contribution to work on the farm and he was taken out of school in his Scholarhip year. He was too good-natured and modest, and positive in outlook, to spend much time on regrets, but he told me of that several times, and how he had always been ‘top’ of the class, ahead of a local boy from a ‘well-off’ family named Frazer, who went on to become a leading surgeon in Brisbane. Dad always had huge respect for his headmaster, one Mr Hanger, later famous for some reason which I don’t remember, who Dad thought was a strict but very good teacher.

Between 1908-1915 he spent some years helping run the selection (he was a good horseman and cattleman), and then, apparently because he was bright-across the board but particularly at maths-he was headed towards the telegraphy part of the Queensland Railways and got a job there. No doubt older brother Duncan, who was already in the railway, and with whom he always had a close relationship, had something to do with this. There were other brothers in the Railways too. He became a hot-shot operator-this was subsequently made clear to me by him, Duncan and also my Breen uncles, who were also in the railway.
At that time telegraphy was a very advanced technology and the Queensland Railways’ communications system was the most comprehensive in the State, spreading almost all over what was and is a very large area. So he became a specialist in a large, modern State-wide communications system, the largest in the State. The training also involved getting to know something about electricity and radio. It would have been rather equivalent these days to a young man being put to computers and Information Technology very early on. Because it was a State-wide system, the telegraphists were at the heart of the whole show. Besides, these were the days of growing working class action and of unionism, and the communications system would have been of great strategic importance in those developments. This was at a time when there were very active union campaigns for better employment and general conditions, and later on he became very involved in that. But from what he said later, his political consciousness didn’t develop until he had gone to and survived the First World War, and, after returning, came in contact with the Breens.

So far as I can recall, all the other McDonell brothers, except Duncan, went into some sort of rural activity-one or more had farms, one had some sort of transport business, another had a hotel. I didn’t meet many of them but one, Uncle Mick, was a worker on sheep and cattle stations. Many years later, when I was at “Remilton”, Beverly and Norman (Robinson)’s place out past Toobeah, west of Goondiwindi-of which more later-Uncle Mick somehow turned up, and worked on the property for Norman. I was then about 14 and was very interested to pick up some bush ‘pointers’ from this uncle whom I’d never seen, and perhaps hardly heard of. He was a rather famous horsebreaker, and told me some of the tricks about doing it gently-I suppose early versions of ‘horse whispering’-and corrected some of my riding behaviours-length of stirrup, grabbing at the reins, balance. I saw him out there on several visits and my riding skills were much improved as a result. He was drowned a few years later in the 1950s, caught in a flash flood further west at some property he was working on.

Another uncle brought me my first sharp apprehension of death. I’m pretty sure it was while we were still at Roma-that is, after about 1935-6 and before 1938-9-that news came that Dad’s brother Jack had died suddenly of a heart attack. I remember Dad telling Mum one evening that the family had said that he was upstairs getting dressed when they heard a thud on the floor, and I remember hearing the ‘thud’ very clearly in my imagination and then trying to imagine his experience of this arrival of death.

I have a long undated letter from Dad to Brian telling him about Roma, and how he liked ‘the peace and quiet that reigns’, and to tell Mum that he couldn’t find some photos and other things which had become mislaid in the move: he had gone on ahead, of course, being Dad, to handle all the unpacking of the family goods sent from Brisbane, and get everything ready for the family to come to a new life in a new region.

I met Uncle Duncan and his wife Auntie Dorrie (Doris) on numerous occasions. He was a smallish, wiry man, as people of the Highlands often were and are, with a wiry expression and a wiry, sardonic, sense of humour. That is to say, no sense of humour much at all, but he would try to be sociable by making jokes, which turned out to be rather critical or belittling, and not very funny at all Not a particularly charming person, but widely regarded as very ‘genuine’ and honourable. He seemed to be generally in good spirits, articulate, and managed to get on quite well with my mother-not easy for an in-law (although she was very fond of Dorrie). He was quite a few years older than Dad and had a long career in the Railways, which ended badly

He, like Dad, was a longtime member of, and worker for, the ARU (Australian Railways Union). As one of the main railway, and therefore, public sector unions it was one of the most powerful, especially as the railways, everywhere, but particularly in Queensland, was ‘a state within the State’. Queensland was very large and decentralised in population, and so had, and still has, the largest railway system in the country. So the Queensland Railways, and railway doings, were very important. When Dad and Duncan met up the talk was always about politics, especially the latest on the Union and its place in whatever political issue was in the wind at the time.
One of the very dramatic episodes of my family occurred years later as a result of Duncan’s activities. It was, I think, in 1952 and not long after a big railway strike in which,as usual, Duncan (and to a less extent, Dad) had been a well-known and effective organiser. He was charged with stealing 5 pounds, supposed to have been found in the pocket of his coat by one of the Railway’s security guards. It was a plant-someone of ‘the bosses’ had put it there. Duncan was known to be as honest as the day was long, as the saying used to go, scrupulously so in all his dealings. It was a terrible blow to him and the family and he never really recovered from it. Mum, who despite her constant anxieties and worries and headaches, was always very good in a crisis, and she peronally insisted, rather against Dad’s concerns, upon going up to Rockhampton to be there with Duncan and Dorrie when the trial was on, and appeared in court to give him a character witness.

And she would undoubtedly have ‘pulled out all the stops’ in what she had to say in the court-an old expression referring to pulling out the stops on the organs which used to be played in church to give the music full volume and colour. But Duncan was convicted and was fired from the Railway. ‘They’ had got him well and good. Of course, he never complained about it: he was quite well aware that they had been fighting real battles for all those years when they went out on strike, and that ‘the enemy’ would stop at little to get those they thought were ‘troublemakers’. He somehow had some savings, and perhaps got some small amount of superannuation from the Railways, and he and aunty Dorrie bought a tiny corner shop and managed to make enough to live on. I remember visiting them there and him making some wry joke about how life had changed, and that he was a ‘capitalist’ -because he now owned a shop, rather than working for wages as he had in the Railways.

Duncan and Doris had three sons: Noel, the eldest, was a bit older than my brother Brian and he also joined the RAAF-I think he wasn’t posted overseas, and after the War ended he stayed on as a regular in the Air Force. He left when he was in his early 40s, I suppose in the early 1960, and studied law and became a successful solicitor. Terry, the second boy, died in his teens from a tragic illness. And the youngest, Leon (Noel backwards), was closer to my age, took an apprenticeship and became a fitter. Later on he changed his name to Alan (perhaps he didn’t like being his brother backwards) and moved to Sydney. I saw him a few times over the years-I think he left Brisbane because he was gay, and preferred Sydney, much larger and more tolerant. They are both still alive in Brisbane though not in good health

When Dad enlisted in 1915 he would have been 21. So, at three years older than the minimum age of 18, he had certainly not rushed ‘to the colours’ -as joining one of the armed services was called in those days-to go to the Great War which had started in 1914. Many young men had been attracted by the adventure of going overseas to fight. He told me that there was great propaganda and pressure for young men to go and fight; and in retrospect he thought he had been ‘hooked’, that as a country-bred lad he had little idea of what the whole thing was about. As he was a good horseman my memory is that he told me he first joined the Australian Light Horse, but because of his telegraphy skills-which were much rarer that those of horse riding -he was soon transferred as an aircraftsman mechanic to the Australian Flying Corps, the original name of what became the Royal Australian Air Force. I won’t go into the details of all this here, because his diary and other material are in the archives.

He spent about three years in service, almost all of it overseas in the Middle East- in Egypt, Jordan and Palestine. This was a very influential period for him: of course, in those days the opportunity for young working people to travel and ‘see the world’ and live to tell of it was rare. He didn’t speak much of it generally-no doubt on the good grounds that most people weren’t interested-but sometimes he would open up and give me tidbits of his experiences, and of course I was ‘all ears’. In turn, these tales were very influential for me, partly because of the mere facts of which he spoke, but also, more tellingly, because they gave me the understanding that such travels were possible, that the world was a fascinating place with much to show, and that one could and should make efforts to learn more about it, and not too readily settle only for ordinary life in ordinary Australia-isolated, colonial, remote, unreal, second-rate

Of course, times and attitudes were very different then. Australia was very much still a ‘colony’ even though it had been an independent country since 1901. We all still looked elsewhere-to England, Ireland, Scotland, Europe, the United States, Russia and the Soviet Union, to a much less extent, China, Asia-for ‘real’ things, for ‘real experiences’, for ‘real’ history, for ‘real’ literature, ‘real’ art, beauty, exemplars of all kinds…..Now that Australia is a confident, modern nation, Australia and Australians are world figures, world actors, world artists, writers, sportsmen, politicians, business-it is very different, especially, I think, for children. Travel, world experience, the possibilities of world success are now available in ways unheard of even in my childhood, let alone my father’s.

Dad went through some of the most important campaigns of the Middle East. He was generally attached to British regiments, and he and his mate were sent out to occupy hills and mountaines with good observation points from where they could see enemy-mainly Turkish-movements of troops, aircraft and artillery. Then they would report by radio using Morse Code back to their HQ (headquarters) what they had seen. Or sometimes they were in a situation where they could relay information received by radio from other observers. And sometimes they were left in positions on their own for weeks, even months, at a stretch. I remember one story in particular of how he and his colleague, with their radio and personal equipment, no doubt including their rifles, were stationed on a mountain for up to three months. They finally got leave and were allowed to go for a weekend at Heliopolis, which had been a luxury international holiday resort in Egypt before the war. He said they were able to have wonderful hot baths. Australians were, and are famous, for wanting frequent hot baths or showers when in foreign parts, and, of course, they had had hardly enough water to have quick washes, let alone baths, all the time their were at their mountain lookout; In Heliooplis they also got big comfortable beds; and great food. And prehaps other good things that he didn’t go into details about. In fact, it was all so good that they stayed longer than their leave-pass allowed. When they got back they were given a good ‘dressing down’-as he described it- from their commander, and were ‘confined to barracks’ (CB) for being AWL (absent without leave). And I was tickled to find years later that all that is recorded in his service record, which is in the archive.

He was at the second battle of Gaza, one of the most important of the Middle East war, and told hair-raising and funny stories of the attack by the Australian Light Horse across the flat plains in front of the city. He and his mates were trying to keep their heads down, with all the machine gun and artillery fire going overhead, while their unit commander was standing up on the top of the trench with his binoculars, in full sight of the enemy, watching what was happening. Dad was a great believer in the old saying, ‘He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day’-meaning that there is no point in making useless, even if heroic, sacrifices, and that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’.

Because his job required him to he move around a lot, he saw a much of Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, also, I believe, and was in or near many of the great events of the period. On one occasion, for example, the famous British spy and organiser, Lawrence of Arabia, came with his party late one night into the British camp Dad was in at the time. Lawrence, an Englishman, played a big role in the Middle East war, and formed a very important alliance with the desert Arabs against the Turks and the Germans. Many books have been written about him. Lawrence was dressed, as he often was, like an Arab, was accompanied by Arabs, and rode a camel. Dad was called into the meeting which Lawrence’s group had with the unit’s officers, I suppose to give information on enemy positions in the area.

When Dad returned from the War he went back into the Railways, probably got a promotion, and moved to Rockhampton. At that time Rocky was the ‘big smoke’ in Central Queensland-quite a large city for those days, centre of a large pastoral, agricultural and mining region. Life there would have been very different for him, compared with his youth in Alpha and Jericho. Now, of course, he was a travelled man of the world, very handsome, and probably with some savings from his time in the Army. He obviously set about enjoying himself and looking for a wife. There in Rockhampton he met the Breen brothers, who had moved down from nearby Mt Morgan, the large copper and gold mine which was very famous, and one of the largest in the world. I think they came together through sport. And the Breens were all musical performers in some way or another-singing, dancing, playing instruments, reciting poetry and musical monologues-had two sisters, Mary and Kit my Mum, who played piano, many cousins, including the Doolans, and lots of friends, and seem to have had many parties. So they were natural allies for Dad, on his own, and looking around for companions and activities in the new city.

In those days sprinting was very popular, made more so because it was professional-that is, competitors could get cash prizes and there was legal betting. Then, and for many years later, most sport was amateur, people couldn’t earn much money at it: it was only in about the 1980s that sport became so professional and attracted so much money as we see today.
Dad became a sprinter, as were several of the Breens. I don’t know how successful they were, but they seem to have competed regularly for quite a while. Often later, when I was young, I was given, both by Dad and various Breen uncles, the ‘good oil’ on how to keep my body fit, how to train for running, and the proper ways to place and use your body when you were running. I, in turn, became a sprinter, mainly the 100 and 200 metres, as they would be called these days, but only at school.
Apart from sprinting, one of the Breens, Uncle Jack, the youngest, was a boxer, and at one time bantamweight (he was a small guy) champion of North Queensland. He in turn used to teach me how to take guard, how to defend, and how to ‘throw punches’, especially the straight left and the right cross. I never got the opportunity to put any of this into practice-lucky!

Then at least two of the Breens, Uncle Jim and Uncle Con, were good football players. Jim was chosen to represent Queensland in the interstate competitions, but a few days before he was due to play, a piece of steel flew off a billet he was forging while working in the mine and lodged in his eye. It was a terrible blow, and my mother said that that was the reason he took to ‘the drink’. More of this when we get to the story of the Breens. Uncle Con also seems to have played football-League-for years and later on I was also given lessons by various uncles and Dad on all the tips of League. But I didn’t play much football-on the wing when I did-because Mum wouldn’t let me because she blamed it for what happened to her brothers-all of this can be part of the story later.

Dad as I said, was the youngest of the McDonells, the youngest of ten, which didn’t make much difference, I suppose, as far as his brothers were concerned, but he was the ‘pet’ of his sisters. He had three-Grace, the eldest, born in Scotland, as gracious serious lady, who had a large family of her own; Nora, who had contracted TB (tuberculosis, or consumption, a very serious disease of the lungs) which killed many in those days, and left her a cripple with bad health for the rest of her life, so that she never married; and Mary, a very bright, happy person, who married fairly late in life, and was my favourite.

I saw Aunty Grace quite often because she lived in Brisbane with her family, my cousins, the Tooheys. I don’t remember meeting her husband, he seems to have died early-I don’t really know-but three of her sons, and her daughter, became good friends. There were at least two other sons but I don’t recall them-much older. Of course, part of the appeal was that these cousins were all older than me, mature men by my standards, all avalable for a talk, and from whom I could learn a lot.

Alex, the eldest, was also in the Railways like his uncles, and was very intelligent and friendly. I think he had some administrative job. Tom was a hugely strong man, also in the Railways, where he worked as a ‘flying ganger’, and was the head of a flying gang. These were the small groups of specially trained men who were dispatched to wherever there was an accident on the rail lines, or a collapse, due to rock slides, say, or to heavy flooding-common in tropical Queensland where there are monsoonal storms and cyclone. They travelled on small carts which were driven over the rail lines by a sort of pump mounted on top of it which the gangers had to push up and down by hand. They could make them go very fast, and naturally they kept very fit just getting to where they did their work! I was always very impressed by Tom, who was incredibly fit, quietly affectionate and used to talk to me about his latest adventures when we visited. He used to become very concerned about me because he thought I worked and read too much; he was afraid that I would get ‘brain fag’.

The third son I knew well was Billy, the youngest Toohey, about the age of Brian, my brother, ten years older than me, and was at school during the years I am talking about here, in the thirties. He also, like Brian, joined the RAAF in the early 1940s, but he went into a Lancaster Squadron (Lancaster was the name of one of the principal English bomber aircraft) in Bomber Command in England, and was lost over Germany. Like Brian, and others of their friends whom I knew who ‘didn’t come back’, he is commemorated at the impressive Air Force Memorial at Runnymede on the River Thames, near London. My son Dominic and I visited it when he came to London in the 90s to visit-it commemorates all the airmen of England and the other Commonwealth countries like Australia who died in World War 2.

The Toohey daughter was nicknamed Topsy-I don’t remember her proper name. I liked her a lot, she was very nice to me, though I didn’t know her very well. She was a bit older than Billy, red-headed, attractive, talkative (certainly for a McDonell, all of whom tended to be strong, silent types), and quite direct in her manner. She wasn’t rude, but if there were some question which worried her, she’d come right out and say whatever was on her mind. This was unusual for a McDonell, or for that matter a Breen, or, indeed, Queenslanders in general: they would usually express themselves rather obliquely, using some sort of slang or a ‘figure of speech’, and leave it to the person they were addressing to grasp the message and understand the real meaning of what they were saying. Topsy used to come over to our house sometimes when I was in high school and at University, and we’d talk about her life-I think she married a policeman, but I lost track of her, and of the other Toohey cousins, after I grew up and later moved away from Queensland.

All of the McDonells and the Tooheys and the others were brought up Catholics-as I said the clan back in Scotland had been very strong in the Catholic cause during and after the wars and the troubles between the Catholics and the reformed Church, the Anglicans, as we now know it, started up by the English king, Henry VIII, in the sixteenth century, and also the non-conformist church, the Scottish Presbyterians. (The history of religion in the several centuries before the 20th century was very complicated, and I won’t go into that here.) The Scottish Highlanders, generally, were staunch Catholics-I’m not sure why, perhaps because they were so far away and in such remote wild country, that they weren’t easily attacked, and stuck to their old religious traditions. And the McDonells of Glengarry were regarded as perhaps the most Catholic of them all. One of the McDonell chiefs was named ‘Defender of the Faith’ by the Pope himself, and the clan and its lands were several times ravaged by English armies andtheir agents and heavily dealt with in the great conflicts of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Over the centuries the Highlanders had a close alliance with the French and their Kings who were often the strongest allies of the Church and the Pope in Europe. Of course, all of southern Ireland, not far away by sailing boat in those days, had also remained Catholic, even after it had been occupied by the English leader, Cromwell, and his successors. It so happened that Glen Garry provided the most convenient and one of the shortes routes across Scotland to Europe and France, so it became a regular passage for priests and other world in those days. Hers was at Waterfall, in the hills near Heathcote on the

Before I go further, I’ll double back and say something about my forebears.

The McDonells

The McDonells of Glengarry was a very well known clan in Scotland. Though small, it was famous for being a very vigorous supporter of the Catholic cause during the period hundreds of years ago when religious wars were common. Especially was this so when there was much trouble in England, and therefore in Scotland, at the time the Catholic Stuarts were on the throne, and after the Stuart Charles I was executed in 1649. About a hundred years later, in 1746, the then Stuart pretender to the English kingdom, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, fought a fierce and unsuccessful battle at Culloden, near Inverness in the Highlands. The McDonells were given the place of honour on the right flank of the Stuart forces. The English general in charge of the victorious English forces, the Duke of Cumberland, came to be known as ‘Butcher Cumberland’ because of the ruthlessly brutal way he dealt with the remains of the Stuart forces, and the Highlanders in general. He particularly had it in for the McDonells and twice ‘ethnically cleansed’ Glengarry, as we would say these days, as a result of which nearly all the McDonells who remained alive left the glen at that time and settled near and far. This is what seems to have happened to our branch of the clan who moved not far from Fort Augustus, on the southern banks of Loch Ness, and also to the area around Inverness. (See Wikipedia for good summaries of the Stuarts, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Culloden and Fort Augustus.)

My McDonell grandparents, with their then living children, came to Australia in 1982 in the “Camorla’. of 2000 tons.  They left Plymouth on 26 April and the  ship concluded its voyage at Cooktown on 17 June.  The McDonells got off at Rockhampton, the centre then of a big boom.  It was a busy port at this period of spreading development in Central Queensland. The railways were being extended in the north, centre and south of the State to the large pastoral and mineral resources in the west. They somehow found, and settled in, Alpha, a very tiny settlement, near an almost as tiny settlement called Jericho, not far from Clermont and Cloncurry, where grandfather took up a selection, that is, a small farm, probably poorly endowed, but ‘mine own’. No doubt it was largely for such a slender opportunity that they had left the industrial cities of the north of England. According to my father, his father ran ‘a few’ cattle and other stock on the selection, and added to a meagre income by fettling on the railway.

My grandparents were married in Liverpool in 1879. In the marriage certificate, grandfather is shown as a sheep dealer (given the time and the location near the Scottish borderlands , perhaps a change of the ‘d’ to ‘st’ might also have been accurately descriptive). He was in this thirties years,  much older than his wife-perhaps he put his age back for his marriage. My grandmother, is entered in the marriage certificate as the spinster daughter of an Irish wharfworker in the Liverpool Port Maritime Service. At that time Liverpool was a very large and historic port. My father often told me that his mother was a teacher back in England, but perhaps at the Catholic schools and so perhaps not listed or formally recognised as such. She taught years later in Alpha in the one teacher school. The teaching aids which she had prepared were still kept on the walls of the school many years later, after her death, my father told me.

My grandfather was born in Fort William, not far to the south from the ancestral lands of Glengarry, and loch Garry, and environ areas, of the McDonells of Glengarry.

We don’t know anything much about their lives at this time nor anything much about their lives before they came to Australia (uncle Duncan, Dad’s elder brother, later burnt all the family papers relating to the period before they came to Australia, on the principle that Scotland was a good place to be from-and also no doubt because of his Communistic appreciation of what had happened to our family and others during the Enclosures). They finally settled, as I said, at the hamlet of Alpha on a selection, and grandfather also became a linksman on the railway-that is, working in the maintenance gangs. Tough though life no doubt was, the idea of having his own land must have seemed almost miraculous.

Grandmother went on to have a total of 10 living children, almost one a year. My mother told me that Grandfather had been very hard on her, and she ‘took to the drink’- confirmed by the medical inscription of cirrhosis of the liver on her death certificate.

Mum told me that she got on well with Grandad; he was known to be stern and hard, but according to her he was dignified of manner and speech, and general behaviour. Dad often told me how he had a very clear, well produced, almost accentless English-which that part of the Highlands and Invernessshire where he came from were known for. He spoke the Gaelic only when a neighbour, who had come from the same part of Scotland, would ride over from his own selection nearly and they’d have a dram together. Was it a dram of whisky, or a beer?

My father was the youngest of the McDonells, preceded by Kitty, with whom he kept closely in touch all his life. In fact he seemed to have been in touch with most of his family, while they lived. He and Kitty were the only ones who (nearly in my father’s case) finished primary school-he left in Scholarship year (the Scholarship was the first public exam in Queensland at that time, taken atabout 12-13 years of age, so it would have been around 1907-08) and I’m not sure about Kitty. I do know that she must have been bright for she won a scholarhip, which she was unable to take up because of the family poverty, to go to secondary school in Rockhampton, and complained about her fate all her life-and why not! The family apparently decided that they needed Dad’s contribution to work on the farm and he was taken out of school in his Scholarhip year. He was too good-natured and modest, and positive in outlook, to spend much time on regrets, but he told me of that several times, and how he had always been ‘top’ of the class, ahead of a local boy from a ‘well-off’ family named Frazer, who went on to become a leading surgeon in Brisbane. Dad always had huge respect for his headmaster, one Mr Hanger, later famous for some reason which I don’t remember, who Dad thought was a strict but very good teacher.

Between 1908-1915 he spent some years helping run the selection (he was a good horseman and cattleman), and then, apparently because he was bright-across the board but particularly at maths-he was headed towards the telegraphy part of the Queensland Railways and got a job there. No doubt older brother Duncan, who was already in the railway, and with whom he always had a close relationship, had something to do with this. There were other brothers in the Railways too. He became a hot-shot operator-this was subsequently made clear to me by him, Duncan and also my Breen uncles, who were also in the railway.

At that time telegraphy was a very advanced technology and the Queensland Railways’ communications system was the most comprehensive in the State, spreading almost all over what was and is a very large area. So he became a specialist in a large, modern State-wide communications system, the largest in the State. The training also involved getting to know something about electricity and radio. It would have been rather equivalent these days to a young man being put to computers and Information Technology very early on. Because it was a State-wide system, the telegraphists were at the heart of the whole show. Besides, these were the days of growing working class action and of unionism, and the communications system would have been of great strategic importance in those developments. This was at a time when there were very active union campaigns for better employment and general conditions, and later on he became very involved in that. But from what he said later, his political consciousness didn’t develop until he had gone to and survived the First World War, and, after returning, came in contact with the Breens.

So far as I can recall, all the other McDonell brothers, except Duncan, went into some sort of rural activity-one or more had farms, one had some sort of transport business, another had a hotel. I didn’t meet many of them but one, Uncle Mick, was a worker on sheep and cattle stations. Many years later, when I was at “Remilton”, Beverly and Norman (Robinson)’s place out past Toobeah, west of Goondiwindi-of which more later-Uncle Mick somehow turned up, and worked on the property for Norman. I was then about 14 and was very interested to pick up some bush ‘pointers’ from this uncle whom I’d never seen, and perhaps hardly heard of. He was a rather famous horsebreaker, and told me some of the tricks about doing it gently-I suppose early versions of ‘horse whispering’-and corrected some of my riding behaviours-length of stirrup, grabbing at the reins, balance. I saw him out there on several visits and my riding skills were much improved as a result. He was drowned a few years later in the 1950s, caught in a flash flood further west at some property he was working on.

Another uncle brought me my first sharp apprehension of death. I’m pretty sure it was while we were still at Roma-that is, after about 1935-6 and before 1938-9-that news came that Dad’s brother Jack had died suddenly of a heart attack. I remember Dad telling Mum one evening that the family had said that he was upstairs getting dressed when they heard a thud on the floor, and I remember hearing the ‘thud’ very clearly in my imagination and then trying to imagine his experience of this arrival of death.

I have a long undated letter from Dad to Brian telling him about Roma, and how he liked ‘the peace and quiet that reigns’, and to tell Mum that he couldn’t find some photos and other things which had become mislaid in the move: he had gone on ahead, of course, being Dad, to handle all the unpacking of the family goods sent from Brisbane, and get everything ready for the family to come to a new life in a new region.

I met Uncle Duncan and his wife Auntie Dorrie (Doris) on numerous occasions. He was a smallish, wiry man, as people of the Highlands often were and are, with a wiry expression and a wiry, sardonic, sense of humour. That is to say, no sense of humour much at all, but he would try to be sociable by making jokes, which turned out to be rather critical or belittling, and not very funny at all Not a particularly charming person, but widely regarded as very ‘genuine’ and honourable. He seemed to be generally in good spirits, articulate, and managed to get on quite well with my mother-not easy for an in-law (although she was very fond of Dorrie). He was quite a few years older than Dad and had a long career in the Railways, which ended badly

He, like Dad, was a longtime member of, and worker for, the ARU (Australian Railways Union). As one of the main railway, and therefore, public sector unions it was one of the most powerful, especially as the railways, everywhere, but particularly in Queensland, was ‘a state within the State’. Queensland was very large and decentralised in population, and so had, and still has, the largest railway system in the country. So the Queensland Railways, and railway doings, were very important. When Dad and Duncan met up the talk was always about politics, especially the latest on the Union and its place in whatever political issue was in the wind at the time.

One of the very dramatic episodes of my family occurred years later as a result of Duncan’s activities. It was, I think, in 1952 and not long after a big railway strike in which,as usual, Duncan (and to a less extent, Dad) had been a well-known and effective organiser. He was charged with stealing 5 pounds, supposed to have been found in the pocket of his coat by one of the Railway’s security guards. It was a plant-someone of ‘the bosses’ had put it there. Duncan was known to be as honest as the day was long, as the saying used to go, scrupulously so in all his dealings. It was a terrible blow to him and the family and he never really recovered from it. Mum, who despite her constant anxieties and worries and headaches, was always very good in a crisis, and she peronally insisted, rather against Dad’s concerns, upon going up to Rockhampton to be there with Duncan and Dorrie when the trial was on, and appeared in court to give him a character witness.

And she would undoubtedly have ‘pulled out all the stops’ in what she had to say in the court-an old expression referring to pulling out the stops on the organs which used to be played in church to give the music full volume and colour. But Duncan was convicted and was fired from the Railway. ‘They’ had got him well and good. Of course, he never complained about it: he was quite well aware that they had been fighting real battles for all those years when they went out on strike, and that ‘the enemy’ would stop at little to get those they thought were ‘troublemakers’. He somehow had some savings, and perhaps got some small amount of superannuation from the Railways, and he and aunty Dorrie bought a tiny corner shop and managed to make enough to live on. I remember visiting them there and him making some wry joke about how life had changed, and that he was a ‘capitalist’ -because he now owned a shop, rather than working for wages as he had in the Railways.

Duncan and Doris had three sons: Noel, the eldest, was a bit older than my brother Brian and he also joined the RAAF-I think he wasn’t posted overseas, and after the War ended he stayed on as a regular in the Air Force. He left when he was in his early 40s, I suppose in the early 1960, and studied law and became a successful solicitor. Terry, the second boy, died in his teens from a tragic illness. And the youngest, Leon (Noel backwards), was closer to my age, took an apprenticeship and became a fitter. Later on he changed his name to Alan (perhaps he didn’t like being his brother backwards) and moved to Sydney. I saw him a few times over the years-I think he left Brisbane because he was gay, and preferred Sydney, much larger and more tolerant. They are both still alive in Brisbane though not in good health

When Dad enlisted in 1915 he would have been 21. So, at three years older than the minimum age of 18, he had certainly not rushed ‘to the colours’ -as joining one of the armed services was called in those days-to go to the Great War which had started in 1914. Many young men had been attracted by the adventure of going overseas to fight. He told me that there was great propaganda and pressure for young men to go and fight; and in retrospect he thought he had been ‘hooked’, that as a country-bred lad he had little idea of what the whole thing was about. As he was a good horseman my memory is that he told me he first joined the Australian Light Horse, but because of his telegraphy skills-which were much rarer that those of horse riding -he was soon transferred as an aircraftsman mechanic to the Australian Flying Corps, the original name of what became the Royal Australian Air Force. I won’t go into the details of all this here, because his diary and other material are in the archives.

He spent about three years in service, almost all of it overseas in the Middle East- in Egypt, Jordan and Palestine. This was a very influential period for him: of course, in those days the opportunity for young working people to travel and ‘see the world’ and live to tell of it was rare. He didn’t speak much of it generally-no doubt on the good grounds that most people weren’t interested-but sometimes he would open up and give me tidbits of his experiences, and of course I was ‘all ears’. In turn, these tales were very influential for me, partly because of the mere facts of which he spoke, but also, more tellingly, because they gave me the understanding that such travels were possible, that the world was a fascinating place with much to show, and that one could and should make efforts to learn more about it, and not too readily settle only for ordinary life in ordinary Australia-isolated, colonial, remote, unreal, second-rate

Of course, times and attitudes were very different then. Australia was very much still a ‘colony’ even though it had been an independent country since 1901. We all still looked elsewhere-to England, Ireland, Scotland, Europe, the United States, Russia and the Soviet Union, to a much less extent, China, Asia-for ‘real’ things, for ‘real experiences’, for ‘real’ history, for ‘real’ literature, ‘real’ art, beauty, exemplars of all kinds…..Now that Australia is a confident, modern nation, Australia and Australians are world figures, world actors, world artists, writers, sportsmen, politicians, business-it is very different, especially, I think, for children. Travel, world experience, the possibilities of world success are now available in ways unheard of even in my childhood, let alone my father’s.

Dad went through some of the most important campaigns of the Middle East. He was generally attached to British regiments, and he and his mate were sent out to occupy hills and mountaines with good observation points from where they could see enemy-mainly Turkish-movements of troops, aircraft and artillery. Then they would report by radio using Morse Code back to their HQ (headquarters) what they had seen. Or sometimes they were in a situation where they could relay information received by radio from other observers. And sometimes they were left in positions on their own for weeks, even months, at a stretch. I remember one story in particular of how he and his colleague, with their radio and personal equipment, no doubt including their rifles, were stationed on a mountain for up to three months. They finally got leave and were allowed to go for a weekend at Heliopolis, which had been a luxury international holiday resort in Egypt before the war. He said they were able to have wonderful hot baths. Australians were, and are famous, for wanting frequent hot baths or showers when in foreign parts, and, of course, they had had hardly enough water to have quick washes, let alone baths, all the time their were at their mountain lookout; In Heliooplis they also got big comfortable beds; and great food. And prehaps other good things that he didn’t go into details about. In fact, it was all so good that they stayed longer than their leave-pass allowed. When they got back they were given a good ‘dressing down’-as he described it- from their commander, and were ‘confined to barracks’ (CB) for being AWL (absent without leave). And I was tickled to find years later that all that is recorded in his service record, which is in the archive.

He was at the second battle of Gaza, one of the most important of the Middle East war, and told hair-raising and funny stories of the attack by the Australian Light Horse across the flat plains in front of the city. He and his mates were trying to keep their heads down, with all the machine gun and artillery fire going overhead, while their unit commander was standing up on the top of the trench with his binoculars, in full sight of the enemy, watching what was happening. Dad was a great believer in the old saying, ‘He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day’-meaning that there is no point in making useless, even if heroic, sacrifices, and that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’.

Because his job required him to he move around a lot, he saw a much of Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, also, I believe, and was in or near many of the great events of the period. On one occasion, for example, the famous British spy and organiser, Lawrence of Arabia, came with his party late one night into the British camp Dad was in at the time. Lawrence, an Englishman, played a big role in the Middle East war, and formed a very important alliance with the desert Arabs against the Turks and the Germans. Many books have been written about him. Lawrence was dressed, as he often was, like an Arab, was accompanied by Arabs, and rode a camel. Dad was called into the meeting which Lawrence’s group had with the unit’s officers, I suppose to give information on enemy positions in the area.

When Dad returned from the War he went back into the Railways, probably got a promotion, and moved to Rockhampton. At that time Rocky was the ‘big smoke’ in Central Queensland-quite a large city for those days, centre of a large pastoral, agricultural and mining region. Life there would have been very different for him, compared with his youth in Alpha and Jericho. Now, of course, he was a travelled man of the world, very handsome, and probably with some savings from his time in the Army. He obviously set about enjoying himself and looking for a wife. There in Rockhampton he met the Breen brothers, who had moved down from nearby Mt Morgan, the large copper and gold mine which was very famous, and one of the largest in the world. I think they came together through sport. And the Breens were all musical performers in some way or another-singing, dancing, playing instruments, reciting poetry and musical monologues-had two sisters, Mary and Kit my Mum, who played piano, many cousins, including the Doolans, and lots of friends, and seem to have had many parties. So they were natural allies for Dad, on his own, and looking around for companions and activities in the new city.

In those days sprinting was very popular, made more so because it was professional-that is, competitors could get cash prizes and there was legal betting. Then, and for many years later, most sport was amateur, people couldn’t earn much money at it: it was only in about the 1980s that sport became so professional and attracted so much money as we see today.

Dad became a sprinter, as were several of the Breens. I don’t know how successful they were, but they seem to have competed regularly for quite a while. Often later, when I was young, I was given, both by Dad and various Breen uncles, the ‘good oil’ on how to keep my body fit, how to train for running, and the proper ways to place and use your body when you were running. I, in turn, became a sprinter, mainly the 100 and 200 metres, as they would be called these days, but only at school.

Apart from sprinting, one of the Breens, Uncle Jack, the youngest, was a boxer, and at one time bantamweight (he was a small guy) champion of North Queensland. He in turn used to teach me how to take guard, how to defend, and how to ‘throw punches’, especially the straight left and the right cross. I never got the opportunity to put any of this into practice-lucky!

Then at least two of the Breens, Uncle Jim and Uncle Con, were good football players. Jim was chosen to represent Queensland in the interstate competitions, but a few days before he was due to play, a piece of steel flew off a billet he was forging while working in the mine and lodged in his eye. It was a terrible blow, and my mother said that that was the reason he took to ‘the drink’. More of this when we get to the story of the Breens. Uncle Con also seems to have played football-League-for years and later on I was also given lessons by various uncles and Dad on all the tips of League. But I didn’t play much football-on the wing when I did-because Mum wouldn’t let me because she blamed it for what happened to her brothers-all of this can be part of the story later.

Dad as I said, was the youngest of the McDonells, the youngest of ten, which didn’t make much difference, I suppose, as far as his brothers were concerned, but he was the ‘pet’ of his sisters. He had three-Grace, the eldest, born in Scotland, a gracious serious lady, who had a large family of her own; Nora, who had contracted TB (tuberculosis, or consumption, a very serious disease of the lungs) which killed many in those days, and left her a cripple with bad health for the rest of her life, so that she never married; and Mary, a very bright, happy person, who married fairly late in life, and was my favourite.

I saw Aunty Grace quite often because she lived in Brisbane with her family, my cousins, the Tooheys. I don’t remember meeting her husband, he seems to have died early-I don’t really know-but three of her sons, and her daughter, became good friends. There were at least two other sons but I don’t recall them-much older. Of course, part of the appeal was that these cousins were all older than me, mature men by my standards, all avalable for a talk, and from whom I could learn a lot.

Alex, the eldest, was also in the Railways like his uncles, and was very intelligent and friendly. I think he had some administrative job. Tom was a hugely strong man, also in the Railways, where he worked as a ‘flying ganger’, and was the head of a flying gang. These were the small groups of specially trained men who were dispatched to wherever there was an accident on the rail lines, or a collapse, due to rock slides, say, or to heavy flooding-common in tropical Queensland where there are monsoonal storms and cyclone. They travelled on small carts which were driven over the rail lines by a sort of pump mounted on top of it which the gangers had to push up and down by hand. They could make them go very fast, and naturally they kept very fit just getting to where they did their work! I was always very impressed by Tom, who was incredibly fit, quietly affectionate and used to talk to me about his latest adventures when we visited. He used to become very concerned about me because he thought I worked and read too much; he was afraid that I would get ‘brain fag’.

The third son I knew well was Billy, the youngest Toohey, about the age of Brian, my brother, ten years older than me, and was at school during the years I am talking about here, in the thirties. He also, like Brian, joined the RAAF in the early 1940s, but he went into a Lancaster Squadron (Lancaster was the name of one of the principal English bomber aircraft) in Bomber Command in England, and was lost over Germany. Like Brian, and others of their friends whom I knew who ‘didn’t come back’, he is commemorated at the impressive Air Force Memorial at Runnymede on the River Thames, near London. My son Dominic and I visited it when he came to London in the 90s to visit-it commemorates all the airmen of England and the other Commonwealth countries like Australia who died in World War 2.

The Toohey daughter was nicknamed Topsy-I don’t remember her proper name. I liked her a lot, she was very nice to me, though I didn’t know her very well. She was a bit older than Billy, red-headed, attractive, talkative (certainly for a McDonell, all of whom tended to be strong, silent types), and quite direct in her manner. She wasn’t rude, but if there were some question which worried her, she’d come right out and say whatever was on her mind. This was unusual for a McDonell, or for that matter a Breen, or, indeed, Queenslanders in general: they would usually express themselves rather obliquely, using some sort of slang or a ‘figure of speech’, and leave it to the person they were addressing to grasp the message and understand the real meaning of what they were saying. Topsy used to come over to our house sometimes when I was in high school and at University, and we’d talk about her life-I think she married a policeman, but I lost track of her, and of the other Toohey cousins, after I grew up and later moved away from Queensland.

All of the McDonells and the Tooheys and the others were brought up Catholics-as I said the clan back in Scotland had been very strong in the Catholic cause during and after the wars and the troubles between the Catholics and the reformed Church, the Anglicans, as we now know it, started up by the English king, Henry VIII, in the sixteenth century, and also the non-conformist church, the Scottish Presbyterians. (The history of religion in the several centuries before the 20^th century was very complicated, and I won’t go into that here.) The Scottish Highlanders, generally, were staunch Catholics-I’m not sure why, perhaps because they were so far away and in such remote wild country, that they weren’t easily attacked, and stuck to their old religious traditions. And the McDonells of Glengarry were regarded as perhaps the most Catholic of them all. One of the McDonell chiefs was named ‘Defender of the Faith’ by the Pope himself, and the clan and its lands were several times ravaged by English armies and their agents and heavily dealt with in the great conflicts of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Over the centuries the Highlanders had a close alliance with the French and their Kings who were often the strongest allies of the Church and the Pope in Europe. Of course, all of southern Ireland, not far away by sailing boat in those days, had also remained Catholic, even after it had been occupied by the English leader, Cromwell, and his successors. It so happened that Glen Garry provided the most convenient and one of the shortest routes across Scotland to Europe and France, so it became a regular passage for priests and other Irish wanting to escape or travel to Europe, and back again. And, of course, they were looked after and kept hidden by the McDonells.

The children of the Highland chiefs were often sent to France and Paris to be educated, and it is said that one of the McDonells of Glengarry married a French princess. But in the early 20^th century many people drifted away from religion and, in particular, the Catholic Church, and became attracted to socialist, even Communist ideas, which generally included some form of disbelief in a God, and sometimes complete atheism, ie, the belief that there is no God. My McDonell/Toohey kin were among them. When I was sent to Catholic convents and later to a well-known high school run by the Christian Brothers-St Joseph’s College in Gregory Terrace, Brisbane-they were very polite about it but obviously thought it was a bit of a joke. They knew that my Dad thought much like them, but that my mother was still very loyal to the Church.

Aunty Mary McDonell was a tall, slim, good looking and always well-dressed woman who, like my Aunt Mary Breen, had also worked in the Railways refreshment service. In those days most people travelled by train, the trips could last days, and the stations at the bigger cities and towns, and even some of the small places, had ‘refreshment rooms’ where you could get snacks or a meal when the train stopped there, for fifteen minutes or half and hour or so. Some trains would also stay overnight These were important services for travellers, of course, and also provided jobs for women.

During the late 19^th century and in the first half of the 20^th there were very few jobs women could do. It was the rule then that if a woman married-even teachers-she had to leave her job and become a full-time wife and mother. So people like my Aunts Mary, who wanted to keep working because the savings they could make were needed by their families, didn’t marry until late. Neither of them had children, and, consequently, because they got on well with their brother, Will (as Mum always used to call him) and my mother, I was a big favourite with both them. I was almost like a foster child (and all the better because they only looked after me on holidays sometimes and didn’t have to worry about it for the rest of the time!) I visited Aunt Mary Mac, as she was called, in Sydney several times while I was at school, and it was always a big adventure.

The other McDonell daughter was Aunty Norah, older than Mary. She also lived in Sydney during the years I remember. Because, as I mentioned above, she had had TB and was pretty much crippled, she spent years in a sanatorium-a special sort of hospital, usually in the country, where TB sufferers could live and be looked after. There were many of them around the world in those days. Hers was at Waterfall, in the hills near Heathcote on the southern outskirts of Sydney, and we visited her whenever we came to Sydney on holidays, which was pretty often. She also hadn’t married, and spent much of her time in a wheel chair, but she was usually very cheerful and happy with me, and made funny jokes, though sometimes she would be in pain and we wouldn’t stay long.

The third sister, Kitty, was the one closest to Dad in age-the next one up. She also was clever, and even when she was an old lady, during one of the last visits I had with her, she still regretted that she hadn’t been able to take up the special scholarship which she had won when she was thirteen to go down from central western Queensland to High School in Rockhampton. She married in Sydney a man called Suich-I think he was of Yugoslav extraction- but it wasn’t a success. I never met him and I never got any details, but I knew the children quite well-Ron, the eldest, Max, the youngest, about 5 years younger than me, and Shirley, in between, who was a bit older than me. Ron did science and physics, and was apparently very bright. He started a very successful business in some aspect of physics, but I have since lost track of him, as I also did of Shirley.

I knew Max much better. He lived with and took special care of his mother in Sydney. I would see him when we came to Sydney, and when he left school he became a cadet journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald. He had a very successful career: he and his wife Jenny were in London when we were there in the early 1960s, and shortly after he became the first Australian journalist based in Tokyo. This was when Japan was beginning to build a very large and important economy and its trading with Australia was growing very rapidly. They stayed there a few years, and when he returned to Sydney he became editor of the Financial Review, of another Fairfax paper, the Independent, and later the chief editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. Later he also was involved in TV and telecommunications, but I lost track of him over the last 10 years or so. I believe he is retired now.

My first memories are still quite clear. I wonder if that is because I have often remembered them and put them into shape, so to speak.  I was about three, so it was in 1935 or 36 and I had gone out through the back fence to find my cousin Annetta known to me as Netta, or quite often Net Net.  (I have had all these events of the day confirmed  by the lady herself, who recently had her 90th birthday.   She remembers well the drama.)  We were living   at my grandmother’s house in Davidson St Newmarket, Brisbane, apparently waiting for the tenants of the house which  my parents had bought a couple of of kilkometres away in Ashgrove Avenue, across Newmarket Creek which ran through the valley between the two roads.  Across this area was a lot of scrubby bush marked by tall and beautiful trees and, of course, the creek.  It varied in depth from a ford, through which you could walk, to several metres in long stretches of deep, brown, slowly moving water.

Netta’s place was accessible by a path through some low  bush at the back of Nana’s place and it was through there that  I went that morning.  Netta wasn’t around, she was at school I was informed  by my Aunt Florrie, the wife of my mother’s elder brother,  Jim, and she didn’t take much notice of me putting my head around the door.  She was much criticised for her trouble later by the family for not noticing what I was doing.  I have no memory of what happened then but apparently went off to find ‘school’.  This involved walking up the hill and along bitumen streets, past large Queenslander’ houses on their wooden stumps and with wide verandas, and tall trees, some of which are still there.  I got lost, not having the foggiest where ‘school’ was anyway.

It seems that I reached the main road, Kelvin Grove Road, about a mile from the house, where the trams travelled on their journeys to and from the Brisbane CBD, about seven kilometres away, because I have a clear memory of sitting on the gutter crying my eyes out, watching trams go by, totally and  completely lost.  Somehow I must have walked on because my next memory is of being in a shop with two young men, one of whom kept moulding a ball of white putty in his hand, something that fascinated me.  They were, in fact, painter apprentices, and had found me nearby and taken me to the shop to telephone the strange event of the wandering child to the police-no mobiles in those days.  I had walked several miles, up hill-and there were some big hills-and down dale, and was not far from the main General Hospital at Herston.

In the meantime my disappaearance had been noted and a great search was on.  My father raced home from his work at the Roma Street Railway Station, one of the city’s biggest, the neighbours were out, and all the surroundings were being beaten.  Of particular interest and dread was the creek, carrying the fear that I had wandered off and fallen in.  But all was to be well and I was to return in glory.  My last memory of this remarkable day was that, sandwiched between two large policeman in a ‘dicky seat’ car-a one seater under the cab, with the open seat behind, very smart!- I crested the hill at the top of Davidson Street to find all the family and many neighbours out in the street waiting for me to return in triumph.

Many years later my analyst was quite struck by this episode, saying that it was rare for a child that young to venture beyond the family boundaries; and I have speculated that it had something to do with my great desire in my adulthood to travel far.