Edie always treasured the letters Bill wrote to her from the isolated logging camp in the Atherton Tablelands – they were the last she ever received from him. Edie never married; she had no children of her own. There was no one to listen to her stories of cousins in faraway places; no one to tell of the misfortunes that had befallen her grandfather, the Horsekeeper Thomas Marshall and his daughters, nor of the journey of the eldest, her aunt Sarah, from Seaton Village to the rainforests of Queensland.
Sarah’s bravery, and the courage of thousands of other young women like her who left Britain under the Single Female Migrant Programme in the second half of the nineteenth century, have largely been forgotten. The uncertainty Sarah had faced when she first arrived in Brisbane, the struggles and tragedy she had endured at Ghinghinda, the industrial unrest she had encountered at Jondaryan, and the happiness she had found on her little farm at the foot of Tamborine Mountain, despite the floods and the droughts – all of this disappeared from the family memory. With Bill’s death, the connection between Edie and the Campbells was broken; the gossamer thread which had connected Seaham and Queensland was cut.
Edie kept Bill’s surviving letters, and all the photographs he and Topsy had sent, in her little box, her old attaché case, carefully placed together in small buff-coloured envelopes, on top of her parent’s death certificates and her father’s will, and amongst the numerous mementoes of her many friends and relatives. There they remained, for decades, occasionally glanced at while she was looking for something else, but nothing more, until a small, curious girl would ask to see the box whenever she visited her Aunt Edie.
It’s a shabby, tattered old thing.
19
Full Circle
A grand passion can sometimes consume us, body and soul. That passion may be for the love of our lives, sometimes reciprocated, sometimes unrequited, sometimes unfulfilled through force of circumstance or a conspiracy of the fates. Perhaps that passion is for a place which inspires or calms us, a place we call home or a place to which we long to escape. Passion can so easily evolve into an obsession which invades every aspect of our existence, controls our thoughts and guides our actions. In some extreme instances, it erodes our free will and renders us incapable of making logical decisions. Common sense goes out of the window, and we are compelled to act upon impulse.
Sarah Marshall was, is, my obsession. I know Sarah. She knows me. She called, and I answered. I have no doubt that she wanted her story to be told, and that she chose me, the girl next door, to narrate it. The coincidences, the dog-eared copies of official documents, the faded family photographs, the fragile, handwritten letters, the snippets from long-obsolete newspapers, all led me in one direction. Driven by my passion for this forgotten woman, my path was fixed.
On a sunny Thursday morning in February 2017, I was awoken by birdsong. For a few moments, I lay listening to the sound of a stiff breeze playing through the leaves and the distant buzz of a wood saw. I arose and made myself a cup of tea, and slid open the glass doors onto the veranda. I paused, my teacup balanced on the rail, and I gazed at my surroundings, blinking in the dappled sunlight. I made my way down the wooden steps and across the lawn, still barefoot, and snuggled into the cushions on the garden swing.
In that moment, as I sipped my tea, I felt an overwhelming sense of calm and fulfilment, pure joy tempered with relief. The scent of freshly-mown grass and eucalyptus carried towards me on the breeze as I peered down through the towering silver-barked trees clinging to the mountain-side, past rolling wooded hills in every shade of green imaginable, shimmering in the heat. In the far distance, I could just make out the hazy turquoise of the Pacific Ocean, and I thought about the young servant girl from Seaton Village who had brought me from half a world away to Tamborine Mountain.
I had arrived in Brisbane in the midst of a forty degree heatwave a few days earlier, one hundred and thirty-one years and forty-two days after Sarah disembarked from the SS Duke of Sutherland. I reflected upon her arrival in the city on 30th December 1886, alone, apprehensive yet excited, bewildered yet determined. Unlike Sarah, I received the warmest of welcomes, from her great-granddaughter, Catherine Marsden. I spent my first morning with Catherine and her brother Gary Campbell Balkin, whose article about the Campbell family I had stumbled upon just twelve months previously, and whose knowledge and kindness have been of such help to me in the writing of this book. I sat with Gary and Catherine in a little cafe in Gary’s apartment building overlooking the Botanic Gardens and I handed to them the small crumpled brown envelope, addressed to “Miss Edith Threadkell, 6 Caroline Street, Seaham Harbour” containing the letters and photographs sent by their grandparents Topsy and Bill Campbell to Edie and her mother a hundred years ago. The friendship between their family and mine, which had begun the day John and Lydia Clyde moved next door to the Threadkells in the turbulent summer of 1921, was rekindled. The threads which had connected the Campbells to Seaham, and which had been broken for over eighty years, were reconnected.
Brisbane shines. It is a city of water, glass, steel and light, carved in two by the Brisbane River which in turn is criss-crossed by ferryboats and footbridges. Little of the city Sarah knew remains, although the street names would be familiar – Charlotte Street, George Street, Roma Street, Kangaroo Point, Fortitude Valley. I was staying in an apartment building, which, by pure coincidence, was located just around the corner from Turbot Street where Sarah had lived and worked when she first arrived in the city and where it is likely that she met and fell in love with William Campbell.
Recovering from jet lag and a particularly nasty virus which had confined me to my bed for my first few days in Australia, I wandered out one evening at sunset and made my way to Turbot Street. Lined with tower blocks and office buildings, and with a stretch of the highway running through it, even at that time of day, it was incredibly busy. Face-painted rugby fans from all over the world – New Zealand, South Africa, Samoa, France and even Japan – were heading back to their hotels with their flags and banners after the Brisbane Tens Tournament.
At the corner of the street, opposite a couple of Seven-Eleven stores which seemed to sell nothing but sun hats, nachos and Gatorade, I spotted the old Dispensary Building, and beyond it the alleyway from where the unfortunate Peter Bertram had been chased by Sammy, the escapee tiger from Higgins’ Menagerie, before being rescued by Mr Higgins and Valentine Spendlove in October 1888.
As darkness fell, the heat was unremitting, stifling, suffocating.
I retraced my steps and followed the bend of the river down the length of William Street, to the site of the William Street Depot where Sarah had registered with the authorities and where she had lodged in the single women’s dormitory for her first few days until she had secured employment. From the outside, the Victorian building is little changed; inside, it now houses office space and an architects’ practice.
From my vantage point in my apartment on the nineteenth floor of Brisbane’s tallest building, with its bird’s eye view of the river and the South Bank, I sat on the floor by the window and watched as the sky darkened and a biblical storm rolled in. It encircled the city with a crown of thunderclouds, adorned with lightning flashes. And then the rain began. I had never witnessed anything like it. I have never seen rain fall in such volume and such force for such a length of time. I watched the rush-hour commuters hundreds of feet below me dash into doorways to avoid the deluge and I thought about the cyclone and the deadly floods that had swept through Brisbane just weeks after Sarah’s arrival. How terrified she must have been.
The following day I left the heat and hustle and bustle of the city behind and headed south on the main highway, past the endless car dealerships, anonymous housing developments and retail outlets, past signposts for towns and villages which seemed almost familiar – Logan, Beenleigh, Gold Coast, Surfer’s Paradise, Coomera. I pulled off the highway just south of Logan and immediately the landscape was transformed
.
In no time at all I was in farming country, surrounded by gentle hills and agricultural land interspersed with eucalyptus forest, yellow diamond-shaped road signs warning me to be on the lookout for koala and wallabies. I saw neither, but suddenly as I rounded a bend, there it was, between the trees. I recognised the downward sweep and the silhouette of Tamborine Mountain immediately, and tears stung my eyes. The narrow road twists and winds steeply upwards, and feels almost perpendicular in places. I found myself in the depths of the rainforest, amongst towering palms and huge, dense ferns, the sky barely visible through the canopy.
Upon reaching the mountain plateau, the landscape changes again, with a sunny, open aspect. Away from the trashy tourist shops and cafes of Gallery Walks at the northern end of the mountain, the main road snakes southwards, past vineyards and discreetly expensive houses, hidden amongst beautifully manicured gardens at the end of long tree-lined drives.
I fell in love with Tamborine Mountain.
I was bewitched by the natural beauty of the place, the restful, quiet atmosphere, and the gentle climate, so different from the heat and the hassle of Brisbane. I felt so at home in the little main street at North Tamborine, with its lovely coffee shops frequented by the locals. Unassuming, friendly, nothing fancy – much like the locals themselves, who extended to me the warmest of welcomes, and could not have been more helpful when they discovered the reason for my visit.
On the eastern side of the mountain, past the golf course, looking towards the Pacific and the distant high rises of Gold Coast, down a very steep and treacherous road, and tucked away at the bottom of a wooded drive, I discovered what I was looking for, the very spot I had travelled ten thousand miles to find. With the help of Ian Hollindale, the grandson of Topsy’s younger sister Ivy Bignell, whose family still own the land next door, I finally stood on the land that Sarah and William had purchased all those years ago.
Beyond the wooden fence at the edge of the property lies a small creek, surrounded by trees, beneath which a handful of sheep were grazing. For a brief moment I closed my eyes, and in that moment, I knew; Sarah had loved this place. She had found peace and happiness here. I wondered just how Bill and Topsy could ever have parted with the farm, and how they must have longed to return here, when all was lost.
I continued down the mountain to Upper Coomera and paused at the little park at river’s edge which commemorates the man who built the jetty there. I stood at the spot where Siganto’s Wharf had once been, where Sarah and William had first arrived on the Coomera. Here they had disembarked from the packet steamer with all their worldly goods; in later years, William visited the busy little wharf every day, collecting deliveries in his horse and cart.
Upper Coomera today is pleasant enough, especially down by the river, but eventually the fields give way to the creeping urbanisation that is Coomera – endless new housing estates and out-of-town shopping outlets, a theme park, and the very exclusive, eye-wateringly expensive waterside residential developments of Sanctuary Cove and Hope Island.
In the baking stillness of a late February day, I said goodbye to Tamborine Mountain and made my way up the Bruce Highway which runs down the eastern coast of Queensland, connecting Brisbane with tropical Cairns in the far north. The highway is, for much of its one thousand and twenty-six mile length, single carriageway, and winds its way over creeks and rivers, past mountain ranges and through towns and villages of various sizes including Maryborough, Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville.
One thousand and twenty-six mile miles. If I was to travel that far from Seaton Village I would be on the Poland-Belarus border. The Bruce Highway is notorious as one of the world’s most dangerous highways, allegedly responsible for a huge seventeen per cent of all of Australia’s road fatalities, mainly due to aggressive overtaking but also poor maintenance and frequent flooding. Stretches of the road are poker straight, for mile after monotonous mile, testing the powers of concentration of even the most conscientious driver, who may all too easily drift into the path of one of the huge logging trucks that thunder southward.
With this cheery thought in mind, I left the very upmarket seaside resort of Noosa where I’d decided to stay for a few days, and joined the highway just west of the market town of Eumundi. I headed north-west, past the pyramid-like Mount Cooroy and the picturesque rolling farmlands of the Mary Valley, and the numerous agricultural machinery suppliers on the outskirts of the old-fashioned town of Gympie. I continued my journey northwards, towards my destination, the small town of Gunalda, and in particular, the Gunalda Hotel. Amazingly, it’s still there, and still serving customers, eighty-three years after Bill and Topsy Campbell were forced to surrender the lease, penniless, their hopes and dreams in tatters.
I turned off the Bruce Highway towards Gunalda, which the signposts indicated was just a short distance away. Tasteful roadside advertisements for the hotel appeared at regular intervals. Gunalda isn’t a one-horse town. It’s not even a half-horse town. This was the back of the back of beyond. Once a thriving little place that served the surrounding rural communities and the wagon drivers on main north–south route, there is very little of note left now. When the Bruce Highway was built, the traffic no longer passed so close to the town, and slowly it began to die.
Today, Gunalda principally consists of two streets set at a right angle, a bakery, a second-hand store, an estate agents, a shop which doubles as a post office, and beyond that, the hotel. I called into the post office as I needed to send a parcel to Jimmy Campbell’s son Bob in Toowoomba. It sold everything from vegetables to table lamps to flip flops to wooden chickens to condoms to saws to ACDC t-shirts to flags, and reminded me a lot of the shop in Seaton Village, Seaton Supply Stores, as it was when I was growing up.
I left the post office and walked the few yards to the Gunalda Hotel. The very name conjures up images of genteel accommodation in the colonial style, potted palms swaying in the breeze on the veranda, guests sporting panama hats and expensive shoes sipping daiquiris on the lawn. A sort of Queensland version of the “Raffles Hotel” in Singapore.
“Hotel” was stretching it. A great deal. The establishment in which I now found myself was straight out of a television advert for Australian beer. It was a low, one storey building, attached to an older construction with a wrap-around porch (which I assumed housed the letting rooms), with a large sign bearing the words “Great Northern Brewing Co – Gunalda Hotel”.
The interior was strangely modern but dark and incongruous, totally devoid of character, the original fixtures and fittings having been removed long since. At the bar sat a couple of bearded locals. Both were covered in tattoos and sported double denim and sunglasses, and glared at me as I ordered my lunch. Neither spoke. I tried to imagine the hotel back in the early 1930s, busy, noisy, crammed with locals, a band playing in the corner, Topsy holding court in the bar and Bill avoiding the limelight as always, changing the barrels out back.
I ate my lunch under the sometimes curious, sometimes hostile gaze of the locals. Still no one spoke. Still they continued staring. This was the one and only occasion I felt uncomfortable on my entire trip, and I beat a hasty retreat.
Sadly, I did not have time to drive the hundreds of miles into the outback to see Ghinghinda, the place where James Campbell had drowned and where Sarah’s heart had been broken. Nor had I been able to visit Jondaryan where Bill Campbell had been born, nor the Atherton Tablelands where he had laboured as a logger, an occupation that had ultimately cost him his life. Nothing can prepare you for the sheer vastness of Australia; I could have travelled around Queensland for a year and still not have seen all the places where the members of the Campbell family had lived, worked and died.
Before returning to Seaton Village, there was one last place I was compelled to visit. I couldn’t contemplate going back home without seeing it, and yet the prospect of doing so filled me with an odd mixture of dread and anticipation. Even as I pulled my
car into the small car park, the gravel crunching and spitting beneath the wheels, I felt a growing knot of apprehension in the pit of my stomach. I walked through the gates and across the neatly-manicured lawns, past the shrubbery and the gardener with his grass cutter, who nodded a “good morning”.
It was exactly how I had imagined it.
I paused for a moment, before kneeling down by the low wrought-iron railings, now rusted and shabby, the white paint long since peeled away. I leant forward and brushed my fingertips against the rough edges of the weather-worn headstone, which had broken off from its plinth, and was resting back against the railings. Despite the passage of a century and several lifetimes, the inscription remained clearly legible. I smiled and whispered, one County Durham girl to another,
“Hello Sarah. I’m here.”
Bibliography
Books
Bean, CEW On The Wool Track (Angus & Robertson) Great Britain 1910
Bryson, B Down Under (Transworld Publishers) Great Britain 2000
Curtis, E The Turning Years – A Tamborine Mountain History (Privately Published) North Tamborine 1988
Devries, S & J Historic Brisbane – Convict Settlement to River City (Boolarang Press) Brisbane 2013
Elliot & Derrick – Letters to Boondall 1872-1879, and Lena Cooper’s Manuscript (Boolarang Publications) Southport 1993
Fox, M J Fox’s History of Queensland 1919 -1923 (States Publishing Co.) Brisbane 1923
Fuerbringer, W FIPS Alarm! Tauchen!(: U-Boot in Kampf und Sturm (Ullstein) (Berlin) 1933
(translated by G Brooks, 2000)
Gothard, J Blue China (Melbourne University Press) Melbourne 2001
Government of Queensland Queensland Past and Present: 100 years of statistics 1896-1996 Ch. 8 Section 5 pp 263-270 (Government Statistician’s Office) Brisbane 1998
The Horsekeeper's Daughter Page 18