The Horsekeeper's Daughter

by Jane Gulliford Lowes

  Amongst Aunt Edie’s box of photographs and letters, there is not one photograph of Sarah, nor a single letter written in her hand to her family back home in County Durham. There are no photographs of baby James. There is nothing which might indicate how Sarah looked or spoke or felt, what she believed in or what motivated her, what was important to her or what her opinions might be. Despite this she seems familiar to me, like an old friend. I know Sarah. In the course of my research into her story, I stumbled upon the only record still in existence of her words and thoughts, and the only surviving evidence of her signature. It doesn’t amount to very much. It’s a simple handwritten document consisting of only two pages, which describes the events of the morning of 23rd May 1891.

  “Have you seen my boy?”

  The document isn’t a journal or diary entry, or a long-forgotten letter, which has been languishing in another attaché case on the other side of the world, as one might expect. These two short manuscript pages contain the witness statement which Sarah gave to Mr Robert Alexander, having travelled down from the station at Ghinghinda to the county town of Taroom two days later. Mr Alexander was the local police magistrate and Justice of the Peace.

  These are Sarah’s words.

  “On Saturday this 23rd instant, I was washing at Ghinghinda Creek.

  The child was with me.

  I left him standing on the bank of the creek and went to the line with some clothes.

  When I looked round from the line I could not see him.

  I called him by his name, and got no reply.

  I then ran down to the bank and found him in the water.

  He was on the top of the water, but was not moving.

  His clothes kept him up.

  I took him out and found he was dead.

  I carried him up to his father at the station where he was working.

  The child was a little over 2 years old.”

  Signed – Sarah Campbell

  The death certificate attached to the statement records the cause of death as “drowning, accidental”.

  The panic and terror that must have overcome Sarah as she spotted the little body in the water are almost unimaginable. The statement she gave to the coroner is, as is the very nature of legal documents, brief and to the point, matter of fact, cold and unemotional, with no hint of the grief and shock and sheer anguish she was unquestionably suffering.

  I read the statement over and over again, turning the events over in my mind. One sentence in particular haunted me. “I carried him up to his father at the station where he was working.”

  I imagined William, busy in the stockyards, laughing and joking with the farmhands, giving out orders, perhaps swearing under his breath at a particularly stubborn ewe or repairing the fences, looking up from his work and smiling as he saw his young wife approaching in the middle distance, their son in her arms. I imagined the colour draining from his face as Sarah drew closer and he could see her sobbing hysterically, the soaking wet bundle in her arms, motionless. I imagined William running towards her, taking the child from her, shaking him, and making fruitless efforts to revive him. And worst of all, I imagined William screaming at his wife on account of her negligence, berating her for not looking after the boy properly, and for allowing him to play alone on the bank of the creek, turning her back upon him while she went to peg out the washing.

  James Campbell was dead. The awful, inescapable truth was that Sarah, by virtue of her inattention and carelessness, was to blame.

  Taroom is a small town, about fifty miles south of Ghinghinda, deep in the heart of the Queensland back country. I wondered about Sarah’s journey there to report her boy’s death to the authorities, accompanied by William – perhaps one of the farm hands or another of the station owner Mr Mayne’s staff drove them there in the wagon; maybe William drove them there himself in their horse and cart, the little body in a home-made coffin on the back, the stony silence punctuated only with the noise of the horses’ hooves on the rocky track, with birdsong, and with occasional sobbing. The arrival of the Campbells in Taroom was recorded in the local newspaper:

  “On the morning of the 26th a baggy came into town from Ghinghinda, containing the remains of an infant 18 months old, the son of people of the name of Campbell. In the absence of the mother the little one had strayed away and fallen into a waterhole, and life was extinct before they found him.”48

  How the dread in Sarah’s heart must have increased with each passing mile. Did she worry that she might be held to blame for the child’s death? Would her account be believed by the magistrate? Might he suggest that it was not in fact an accident and that she had intended to harm the child? Shame. Fear. Anxiety. Guilt.

  Reading Sarah’s words for the first time was spine tingling, not least because of the terrible circumstances in which they were recorded. I read her statement over and over again, and imagined her still in shock, sat in front of the magistrate Mr Alexander, attempting to recount the events of that May morning. I read the words aloud, and could hear Sarah’s County Durham accent echoed in my own. I could hear her voice wavering as the words stuck in her throat while she choked back the tears. I could see William, standing behind her, stern-faced and grief-stricken, one hand placed on his wife’s shoulder, the other clutching his dirt-stained and dusty hat, and I wondered if he ever found it within himself to forgive her.

  We can only guess at the impact of James’ death on Sarah and William’s relationship. Did William bring it up again every time they had a disagreement? Or was he warm and supportive and did they share the burden of their grief? Of course, infant mortality was a fact of life in those days, and deaths by drowning (particularly of children) were very common, especially in those areas where the creeks and rivers were swollen by flooding. In 1896, just five years after James’ death, the major causes of death in Queensland were tuberculosis and pneumonia, but drowning accounted for one hundred and fifty-nine deaths in that year alone. Thirty-one per cent of all male deaths in that year were in the under fives, and twenty-six per cent of all deaths were in the first year of life.49 However, to consider any one family’s loss in terms of simple statistics is to negate the pain and anguish they undoubtedly felt.

  How many times did Sarah relive that moment, in her nightmares and in her daydreams? Upon waking each morning, she must have experienced that wave of grief, that knot of angst and guilt in her chest for the rest of her days. How do you live with that? How do you continue to go about your daily life knowing that one brief moment of carelessness, a few seconds of inattention, a momentary distraction has led to the death of your child?

  After burying James in the little cemetery at Taroom, Sarah could not face returning to Ghinghinda. The Campbells left that desolate spot behind at the first opportunity, and headed south-east to the huge sheep station at Jondaryan to look for work.

  Although she did not know it, at the time of James’ death, Sarah was pregnant.

  12

  Jondaryan

  Sarah Campbell gave birth to her second son, named William John (Bill), after his father, on 28th February 1892, almost nine months to the day after little James’ death, at East Prairie on the Darling Downs. At that time, East Prairie was part of the massive Jondaryan sheep station, and the location of two boundary riders’ cottages.50 Whether as the result of a difficult pregnancy that left Sarah unable or unwilling to bear any further children, or as a consequence of the traumatic circumstances of James’ death which may have caused a rift in their marriage, there were no more babies for William and Sarah. Unusually for the time, Bill Campbell was to grow up as an only child.

  Life on the Jondaryan Station could not have been more different to the isolated and lonely existence Sarah had led deep in the outback at Ghinghinda. For a start, since the 1860s, Jondaryan had been connected to Brisbane by rail (via the nearest town of any significant size, Toowoomba) when the railways were extende
d out to the Darling Downs and beyond. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the tendrils of the railways spread ever westwards. Human cargo, however, was not the priority – there was only one reason for the expansion of the railways, and that was to ensure that the prized Australian merino wool was got as quickly to the ports for export around the Empire (but also to France and Germany) as was humanly possible. Prior to this, every conceivable method of transport was utilised to ensure the newly-sheared wool reached its destination quickly and in time for the wool sales in the cities – river boats, wagons and horses, bullock carts and even camels were employed.

  Jondaryan was situated in the heart of the Darling Downs, and was prime grazing country, though very prone to the vagaries of the climate. As in much of Queensland, severe floods were frequently preceded by years of drought. Prior to settlement, the Downs had been covered in wild oats and grasses five to six feet tall, which rendered vast swathes of land almost impenetrable.

  When the interior of Australia began to be opened up for settlement in the 1840s and 1850s, huge areas were grabbed by the so-called “squatters” – generally young men from rich or upper-class British families who saw an incredible opportunity to accumulate even more wealth from grazing sheep and cattle and from the burgeoning wool industry. In return, they paid the New South Wales (as it was then) government a nominal fee per acre. Having made their fortune, many returned “home” to Britain, but a few stayed and became, in effect, the Australian gentry. Eventually much of the land was repurchased by the Queensland and other state governments in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and divided up into small farms or “selections” and sold to famers and homesteaders, known as “selectors”. Hence the title of Steele Rudd’s book, On Our Selection.

  Jondaryan station is described in the 1920 book Fox’s History of Queensland thus:

  “A large station which originally contained 155,000 acres, mostly splendidly-grassed open downs, carrying 140,000 sheep and 2000 head of cattle.”

  By the time that book had been written, the station had been broken up and large parts of it sold off to small farmers and dairymen, however when the Campbells moved there in 1891/1892, Jondaryan was at its peak.

  Like many of the larger stations, Jondaryan was owned by wealthy British investors, William Kent (and after his death by his trustees) and Edward Wienholt. Kent and Wienholt had paid Robert Tooth the huge sum of £108,000 for the property in 1863, the equivalent of around £9,500,000 today.51 Often these wealthy gentlemen didn’t live on their stations, and were absentee landlords, preferring to live nearer to “civilisation” in the cities, or in Wienholt’s case, back in England, in the Lake District. Some barely even visited their properties, leaving them in the hands of trusted managers. Those who did choose to reside on their stations lived the life of an English country squire, often in very grand, lavishly-furnished homes, a far cry from the barrack-like bunk rooms of the shearers or the slab huts of their married employees. Fletcher, in his Colonial Australia Before 1850, written in 1876,52 describes how these station owners lived like English gentry, filled their houses with costly imported furniture, employed servants and governesses for their children, kept stables of thoroughbred horses, and entertained those of their class lavishly.

  A wonderfully detailed account of life on the station, as Sarah Campbell would have encountered it, appears in Jan Walker’s superb social history, Jondaryan Station: The Relationship between Pastoral Capital and Pastoral Labour.53 Walker compares life on the larger stations to the close-knit hierarchical structure of a rural English village. Certainly, some station owners took their part as the “Lord of the Manor” very seriously, with the result that many of the lowest order of their employees were treated little better than serfs or bonded labour. This was particularly true of the shepherds and labourers, who were often Aborigines or Chinese, Melanesian and Indian immigrants; these poor souls had little or no social status, and were very much seen as being at the bottom of the heap, with no prospect of promotion or any increase in their meagre wages. Walker describes how, by 1877, Edward Wienholt and the Trustees of William Kent were the largest owners of freehold land in Queensland, and Jondaryan was the largest freehold run. I prefer to think of the station owners as Australian equivalents of the Londonderrys, the owners of Seaham and the Rainton pits – both had incredible wealth, built on the backs of the poor, the working classes, and the lowest strata of society; both completely controlled and exploited the lives of their employees and their families, treating them as commodities, the means to an end.

  Given its size, Jondaryan soon developed into a large village, with one of the largest and most advanced woodsheds in Queensland; with rows of cottages for those employees who were married or who had dependents, a blacksmith’s shop, a wheelwright, a store, bunk houses for the men, an overseer’s cottage, which would have been set slightly apart from the other cottages, to reflect the social status of the occupant; a schoolhouse, a large and spacious home for the manager and of course the owner’s mansion, the Jondaryan homestead. This luxurious dwelling had a large garden, a swimming hole, and even its own vineyard.

  When Sarah and William Campbell moved to Jondaryan, the station was managed by the formidable William Graham, who ran the property on behalf of the owners for over forty years until his death in 1913. In that time, the population on the station had risen to around two hundred, although during shearing season this could increase to three hundred and fifty, perhaps even four hundred, with the influx of shearers and seasonal workers. Lambing traditionally took place between August and September, washing in mid-September, with shearing in early October until the middle of December, but by the time the Campbells had moved there, such was the number of sheep that the station was actually shearing twice a year, in September and October, and then in March and April. The fact that Bill Campbell was born on the station in February 1892 lends further weight to the argument that his father William was not a shearer – had he been so it is unlikely that Sarah would have accompanied him, nor that he would have been on the station between shearing seasons.

  As the station population expanded, so did the requirement for domestic labour, and more women were recruited to work on the station as domestic servants, seamstresses, nurses, laundry women, kitchen maids and cooks. On Bill Campbell’s birth certificate, Sarah’s profession is once again given as “domestic servant” – like the other station wives, it’s very likely that she would have ended up cooking, working as a washer woman or cleaning and looking after the shearers’ and single men’s bunk houses. Despite all her adventures, it seems that Sarah had never been able to escape her life of drudgery. According to Jan Walker, up to around 1875 any women who worked on Jondaryan were usually employed as cooks; thereafter, up until around 1893 when the station began slowly to decline, they worked as servants, and could have expected to earn perhaps £20 per year if they were lucky. However, it would be wrong to think that there was anything even approaching equality of numbers between the sexes on the station – the average number of women employed between 1866 and 1893 was only ten, and they were outnumbered by the men thirty to one. It was thought that the presence of women on the station had a “civilising” effect on the menfolk, helping to eradicate the “evils of prostitution and homosexuality”.54 The wives of the managers and most senior employees enjoyed a very different lifestyle to the rest of the station women, with constant rounds of visiting each other’s grand houses, parties and entertaining, living the lives of fine English ladies, which is precisely how they behaved and were treated.

  The station owners, through their managers – men like William Graham – exerted a huge level of influence and control over the everyday lives of their employees. Workers could be fined up to five shillings per day for being off sick or for being late, for example if a child was ill; shepherds were frequently fined for the loss of or injury to sheep. Shearers could lose wages for bad shearing if a sheep was cut; sometimes
overseers would refuse to pay the shearers that day’s wages altogether, which was a crafty method of having work done for nothing and lowering the wage bill.

  Life on Jondaryan wasn’t all work and no play however. Entertainments for the workers were often provided, such as concerts, educational lectures, and travelling shows and even circuses would occasionally stop by. A cricket club had been formed in 1877, and there was a church which ran a Sunday school for the children. Jondaryan, like every station, held a shearers’ feast to celebrate the end of the shearing season. All employees and contractors were invited, together with the families of the married men, the managers and guests of rank from neighbouring stations. There would be horse races, a picnic, and dancing in the evening in the woolshed, not dissimilar to kind of parties and picnics the Londonderrys hosted at Seaham Hall for the miners and their families. Jondaryan may have been over ten thousand miles from Seaham but the same social class distinctions and structures prevailed.

  Despite this, all was not well on the station. Sarah and William’s arrival at Jondarayan coincided with the aftermath of the most turbulent period in the station’s short history, and an infamous episode which would ultimately result in the station’s decline in the mid-1890s. Not for the first time, Sarah found herself caught up in bitter industrial unrest.

  Increasing discontent with wages and conditions throughout Queensland and New South Wales during the 1880s had led to the formation of various workers’ associations and the growth of the trade union movement. Conditions at Jondaryan in particular were criticised.