The Queensland government established work projects to attempt to alleviate the chronic unemployment throughout the state, including the building of roads, bridges and railway lines, the creation of public parks, gardens and sports grounds, as well as reforestation projects further north. One of the tourist roads to Tamborine Mountain was constructed via one of these schemes. Wages on the schemes varied hugely – a single man could be paid eleven shillings for a day’s work; a man with a wife and seven or eight children would earn the same amount. Most of the work schemes were provided in and around Brisbane, and the smaller cities and larger towns in Queensland, but there was no nationwide coordination. The availability of work and the amount of pay varied from state to state, even city to city, and coverage was very patchy. In rural areas like Gunalda, there was very little help available, and many families were forced to rely upon charity although some were simply too proud to accept it, however drastic their circumstances.
Families were evicted from their homes and unemployment camps for homeless families were set up in parks and showgrounds. Many found themselves living in appalling squalor and poverty in shanty towns on the fringes of the cities. Women and children suffered the most, as many were simply abandoned as husbands and fathers took off to try to find work elsewhere; a fair few never bothered coming back. In Brisbane and other large centres of population, women resorted to whatever means possible to feed their children – theft, “fortune telling”, pawning any valuables (and when they’d gone, their furniture) and of course prostitution, although there were far fewer men willing or able to pay for their services. It seemed supply exceeded demand, even in the “oldest profession”.85 On Tamborine Mountain, despite the hardships that many of them were enduring, the ladies of the Country Women’s Association knitted and sewed clothes for desperate families, sending them off to charitable organisations for distribution in the city, or delivering them to individual families in need on and around the mountain.86
Children were often employed as cheap labour – many were taken out of school at twelve or thirteen, sometimes younger, but often found themselves out of work by the time they were eighteen when employers could no longer afford to pay them higher rates. There were always more children from desperate families only too glad to step into their shoes.
For five long and difficult years the Campbells persevered at the Gunalda Hotel, but with dwindling trade from the few wagons that passed, and the impoverished locals no longer able to afford to pop in for their customary beer, in 1934, Bill was forced to take on extra work as a wagon driver. Jimmy, the second youngest of the Campbell children, was taken out of school when he was not much more than ten, and sent off to work in a local dairy. He hated it, and eventually ran off and gradually made his way to Sydney where he worked in a factory from age sixteen. Jimmy had little contact with his parents thereafter, and their relationship became a strained one.
By the end of 1934, the Campbells realised that they were fighting a losing battle at the Gunalda Hotel. Unable to make a living and to pay off their numerous creditors, in early 1935, Bill and Topsy surrendered the lease and closed the doors on their dreams for the last time. Every single penny Bill had received from the sale of his parents’ beloved farm at the foot of Tamborine Mountain, his inheritance, was gone. How he must have rued the day he agreed to sell to Sam Bignell.
The Campbells were penniless.
18
Broken Threads
It is easy to look back upon the choices we have made during the course of our lives through the prism of hindsight. Sometimes we rejoice in the decisions and chances we took; perhaps we despair at the mistakes we made, the opportunities we failed to pursue, the risks taken, the words we said and the words we left unsaid. Many will have regrets; a lucky few of us will have none. A life lived in regret is no life at all. Regret distorts the memory of our past and the shape of our future.
Was Bill full of bitterness and regret at what his life had become? Or was he philosophical about his situation? As his life had begun to unravel, so the regular flow of letters to his cousin Edie began to slow down. Edie still wrote to Bill regularly, but without a reply. It is to her credit that she persevered with her correspondence in the absence of any response, particularly as she endured a spell of ill-health in the mid-1930s. She was also caring for her elderly mother, Fanny, who was becoming increasingly frail and frequently bedridden. But that was Edie – the battered old attaché case is full of happy memories of her various friends and relations, spanning decades. She was clearly very well thought of by all who knew her. Edie Threadkell was a dutiful daughter, niece and cousin, and a faithful and valuable friend, as her next door neighbours the Clydes would shortly discover.
By mid-1935, the Campbell family had become dispersed, disjointed and spread far and wide across the state of Queensland. Bill had to resort to using the woodsman’s skills he had learned as a very young man back in Upper Coomera. After travelling around for six months or so, taking jobs for a few weeks here, a few days there, he made his way to the tropical far north, seeking work as a timber cutter in the vast wilderness of the Atherton Tablelands, about a hundred miles south of Cairns. Timber cutting was considered the lowliest of trades – it was poor men’s work – but Bill was desperate, and simply had no choice. It was timber cutting, or starve.
While living in a small logging camp in the midst of the rainforest, miles from anywhere, Bill resumed his correspondence with his cousin. Perhaps he was inspired by loneliness, perhaps by boredom, perhaps by regret. In two small brown envelopes, each with a Queensland postmark but with the stamps carefully cut out and preserved in some long-lost album, are two letters, sent from Bill to Edie in 1936. These two letters are all that remain from almost fifty years of correspondence between the two families, and provide a wonderful insight into the hardships Bill encountered, and his warm, affectionate relationship with the cousin he never met.
The first is dated January 27th, 1936.
“My Dear Cousin Edie,
I got your Xmas present the other day, it had been all over the State after me, thanks very much for remembering me.
I presume the photo is of yourself, if it is, you are looking very well, how is Aunt Fanny, well I hope. It is a long time since I heard of you and Aunty, I am damn well ashamed of myself for not writing to you, but I am a bad correspondent and am always in trouble about writing letters.
Well Edie, I have left the farm at Upper Coomera this last six years and have been wandering around Queensland a bit since and now I am in the north of Queensland, about 100 miles from Cairns, the biggest town in the north, I am right out in the Bush and hardly see a soul. It is very lonely, I can tell you.
Mrs Campbell and two of the girls Kathleen and Mary are in Cairns, Kathleen is working there, she was 18 years of age on Jan 18th last. Mary is the youngest she is 11 years of age. Bill is the oldest boy he will be 22 next March 24th, 1936. Jean is the next oldest, she is 21 years of age. She is married now and has a boy and a girl. She was married about 3 years ago, her name is Balkin. Her husband’s father is a storekeeper at a place called Gunalda near Gympie. Just fancy me being a grandfather. Betty is at Maryborough, she is 16 sixteen years of age, and Jimmy is the other boy, he is 14 years of age, so there is all the family, six of them, and two grandchildren.
Well Edie, how are all the folks in England. I am terribly ashamed of myself for not keeping in touch with you, but there it is, I never seem able to write at all. I am enclosing a snap of myself so you can see what I look like now. I am working in the timber here now, cutting walnut stumps for veneer. It is what they call the Tableland Scrubs, it is a very wet place, nearly always raining, right in the tropics.
…Write and tell me all the news about over there when you get this, and I will try and keep in touch with you after this, that verse on the calendar is a kick in the pants for me alright, but in future I will remember.
Well my dear cou
sin, I will have to close as I am nearly settled on what to write about, so will close with best of love to you and Aunty, and a prosperous and Happy New Year, although it is a little late, but better late than never, with all the best wishes in the world,
I remain, your loving cousin,
W J Campbell”
The letter says nothing about Jimmy’s whereabouts – the truth is Bill probably had no idea where his youngest son was at that point. Enclosed were a number of small photographs, including one of Jean and her husband Jim Balkin, but mostly of Bill, showing him at work in the Tablelands. On the back of each, in Bill’s distinctive handwriting, there is a description of his life and work as a timber cutter. Then in his mid-forties, he looks tired and resigned, perhaps even sad. On one of the photographs he has written, “This is the class of work I do now”, as though he were ashamed. And he was.
The second letter is dated May 10th, 1936.
My dear Aunt Fanny and Cousin Edie,
I received your welcome letter yesterday, and I can assure you both that I was very pleased to hear from you both, and that you were both as well as could be expected. I am sorry Edie that you are not in the best of health, as good health is the greatest blessing of all… Aunty is lucky that…you can help her, and that you are both together. That is the best of all, believe me I know, as my family and I are over 1000 miles apart and after been [sic] together for years it is no joke being separated.
I spent Easter with Topsy and Mary and Kathleen in Cairns, had a fortnight with them then came back to the Bush. They are all fairly well, Kathleen is the head barmaid at the Queens Hotel in Cairns, she gets £3 19s 0d per week, she has been there twelve months now. Topsy has been in Cairns for months now, and is going back down south soon, to visit the others, and I will go down next Xmas if all be well and I have enough cash.
I sold the farm in 1929, sold it fairly well too. Invested the money in a business just as the Depression started and went broke so am now out in the Bush, in North Qld, cutting timber, and trying to make a fresh start.
…You mention the heat, well Cairns in Summer is worse than hell, for Nov. Dec. and Jan. are always around the 100 degrees both night and day, the winter months from April to September are nice and mild, the best in this part of the world, of course where I am on the Atherton Tableland 3000 feet above sea level, and a wonderful climate generally, only a cow of a place for rain. The wet season is generally from February to April, about 30 inches of rain a month for those months, and then occasional showers, about 130-150 inches each year. It is recognised as one of the wettest areas in the world, it is in the Tropics right enough.
Well if I praise the place any more you will think it is wonderful, but all I can say it is a damn shame they ever took it from the Blacks.
I think Topsy was going to write but she is like myself, not keen on writing, I will remind her to write.
Well, Aunt Fanny, I wish you would remember me to Aunt Emma and her family, and any of the others, of course never having seen them makes it hard to remember them, but I wish them all good luck and prosperity. Judging by the snap, Aunt Fanny looks really well, but Edie looks a lot thinner than the photo I got at Xmas, by the look of her on the seat at Redcar, she is in love and the boy has turned her down, never mind Edie, all’s well that ends well, and you will have to come out here and get the Australian sun cure and settle down out here.
…I am enclosing a snap of Kathleen and myself walking down Abbott Street Cairns. It is a good one of both of us. I will try and get some of Topsy and the others and send you.
Well my dears, I think it is about time I close this scribble, hoping this finds both of you in the best of health and wishing you both the best of luck and love
From your loving xxxx Nephew and Cousin, otherwise Bill.
PS Be sure and write soon, don’t do as I do but do as I tell you. I have received 3 bundles of papers from you, interested in days out here.
So long xxxx
Accompanying the letter is a photograph of Bill standing next to some of the timber he had cut. These weren’t the sort of logs with which you or I would be familiar – they were huge, felled trees, some with a diameter of several feet, each one weighing well over a ton. There were massive kauri pines, grey gums, flooded gums, iron barks, bloodwoods, cedar and walnut, and countless other types of eucalyptus, cut using the “springboard method” which enabled a timber cutter to work above the massive thickened bases of the trees. A notch was chopped into the tree, and a board inserted into the notch, upon which the timber cutter stood, sometimes many feet in the air. There were no harnesses and no helmets. It was incredibly dangerous and brutally hard work, and the men endured extremely challenging conditions in the heat and wet of the tropics. Sometimes they lived in huts, but in the more remote locations they lived in tents, cooking their meals over open fires or on camp stoves. Occasional trips were made to the nearest settlement for food and supplies; Bill’s nearest town was Ravenhoe, where he would go every couple of weeks or so, collecting his post from the Kerr Brother’s Bakery and Store in the little main street.
The life of a timber cutter was fraught with danger; deep in the rainforests there were the usual hazards from snakes and spiders, but the very nature of the work itself rendered it one of the most dangerous occupations of the time. Just a few months after the second letter was written, Bill Campbell was involved in a terrible accident. He had been cutting walnut trees, which would be used to make veneers for furniture and pianos, when one of the logs he had cut and was loading onto a wagon rolled off and crushed him. It was a miracle that he was not killed outright, but he suffered severe injuries. He was never the same man. After months in and out of hospital in Cairns, and a spell with his daughter Jean in Gunalda, he eventually returned with Topsy to live in Brisbane, and they moved into a house in Given Terrace in the suburb of Paddington. Several of Bill’s grandchildren remember visiting him there, and recall him as a very gentle soul. Bill’s injuries were such that he was never able to work again, and he was constantly in and out of hospital.
By the time news of Bill’s accident reached his cousin Edie in Seaham Harbour, she was already dealing with a grave situation much closer to home. In the autumn of 1937, just as the old Seaham Colliery streets began to be demolished and the residents rehoused on the new Parkside estate, her dear friend and next-door neighbour Lydia Clyde was taken ill. In early 1938, Lydia was admitted to hospital with chest pains, and a heart problem was diagnosed. Edie did what she could to help John, who was still a miner at Seaham Colliery, with the children – as well as young Lydia and Jack, there was now another little boy, George, who had been born in March 1932. At the end of April 1938, a month or so after little George’s sixth birthday, Lydia died, aged forty-three, from a leaking heart valve, a condition which is so easily treated today. She was buried at Princess Road Cemetery a few days later. Alas, no trace of her grave remains. I spent hours stumbling around the cemetery looking for her, armed with the deeds to the plot John had purchased for them both, to no avail.
Edie and her mother were devastated at the loss of their neighbour. Young Lydia had to leave work to look after her younger brothers, and friends and neighbours rallied round to help, including Jim Groark, Lydia’s boyfriend, whom she’d met at the age of fifteen when he worked as a grocer’s boy at the Meadow Dairies. Jim and Lydia had become secretly engaged on her sixteenth birthday, and eventually married in April 1941 when Jim was home on leave from the Army. Jim Groark was my grandfather.
When Fanny Threadkell finally passed away in January 1940, just after wartime food rationing was introduced, the roles were reversed; young Lydia, Jack and little George were of great comfort to Edie, and she wrote regularly to Jim and Jack when they were called up to serve, Jim in the Royal Engineers and Jack in the Royal Air Force. She was incredibly proud of Jackie, as she called him, when he was presented with the Distinguished Flying Medal by the King in
1943, after completing twenty-four bombing missions with Bomber Command. He was just twenty-one.
It is sometimes difficult for us to grasp the sense of community that existed in colliery towns and villages like Seaham throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and beyond. Your next-door neighbours, the people with whom you shared a back yard, a communal sink and a couple of outside toilets, or the people who lived opposite you across the coal-blackened back lane, criss-crossed with lines of clean washing, these people were your family. There existed a collective memory of shared hardships, poverty, industrial unrest, desperation in bad times, grief and anxiety in times of war. There was also the communal joy of street parties to celebrate a coronation or jubilee, the women of the street getting out their wool and knitting needles as soon as a pregnancy was announced, the traditional throwing of coins for the neighbouring children by a bride departing for church on her wedding day. For colliery folk, blood isn’t always thicker than water. So it was with the Threadkells and the Clydes, and for this reason Edie was always considered by my family to be an “Aunt”. She’d always been there – a friend to my great-grandmother, my grandmother, an auntie to my mother, my brother and me.
There were to be no more letters sent from Bill to Edie.
Bill Campbell finally succumbed to his injuries on 10th November 1942, at the age of just fifty, while his two boys, Willie and Jimmy, were serving with the ANZAC forces thousands of miles away. Jimmy had lied about his age to enlist, and spent his eighteenth birthday in a trench, under heavy fire, at the siege of Tobruk. I don’t know if he ever saw his father again from the time he ran off to Sydney. Jimmy’s wartime experiences (like those of Jim Groark and Jack Clyde) could fill another book.
Bill’s granddaughter, Patsy, vividly recalls sorting sugar into brown paper bags with her mother Jean at the Balkin family store after Jean received the telephone call informing her of her father’s death, tears streaming down her cheeks.
The Horsekeeper's Daughter Page 17