When Isabella Campbell and her three young children disembarked
at the port of Cardwell on Tuesday November 1, 1870 they had arrived at the
frontier of European settlement in the northern tropics. Her travelling
companions and employers, the Mackenzie family, were in the process of
establishing a sugar plantation, Gairloch.
Isabella was one of only a handful of intrepid white women who ventured
north to the Herbert River district in the early 1870s accompanying the male
sugar planters and small selectors.
Isabella was born in 1825 in Comrie, Scotland to John
Morrison and Catherine Drummond. In 1854
she married Alexander Campbell. They went on to have six children, of which
only three survived into adulthood. When Alexander died in 1868 Isabella was
pregnant with her last child, Isabella Alexandrina.
Moving back to Comrie with her children she went to work for
the Mackenzie family consisting of parents Elizabeth and William (a retired
Presbyterian Minister) and ten adult children. Together with this family she
and her three children, Alexander (14), Murdoch Donald (7) and Isabella
Alexandrina (5), travelled to Australia aboard a three-masted sailing ship the Hawksbury.
The journey onwards from Sydney to Cardwell was made by the cutter, the Mary
Jane. On their arrival in Cardwell a number of the Mackenzie family took up
residence. James Mackenzie was the driver of the family’s move to Australia. He
started the plantation era on the Herbert when he secured land for a plantation
which he named Gairloch after the family home in Scotland. He was assisted in
this venture by his siblings, Alfred and Isabella.
Isabella and her children travelled in the height of
tropical summer from Cardwell, over the Seaview Range, to the Herbert River
district by horse-drawn dray. The journey took seven days. After a night at
Henry Stone’s Stone Hut on Trebonne Creek they proceeded to Gairloch where she was
to continue her role as companion and housekeeper living alongside Isabella
Mackenzie in the large thatch-roof log huts abandoned by a first small group of
hopeful sugar planters.
In the press reports of when the Marquis of Normandy and his
cavalcade came to officiate at the first crushing at Gairloch Mill on October
7, 1872 women were invisible. It was recorded that the official party was
served a luncheon, no doubt organized by Isabella Mackenzie assisted by
Isabella while the property was described as owned by Messrs Mackenzie Brothers
even though their sister also owned plantation land. It was only Isabella Campbell’s daughter who
recalled her mother as having produced the first sugar in a kitchen saucepan
from cane crushed by the new mill. This milestone event is not mentioned in
contemporary men’s accounts.
Two men assisted the Mackenzies, Scotsman William Stewart
and Nova Scotian George Wickham (not be confused with Henry Wickham, the
tobacco planter who also lived on the Herbert for a while). Only two months
after arriving in Cardwell Isabella Campbell married 35 year-old George Wickham in a
ceremony conducted by William Mackenzie at the Mackenzie’s Cardwell house. By
1881 the marriage was ostensibly over with Wickham leaving the district and his
whereabouts afterwards unknown. Isabella Mackenzie married hot-headed drunkard,
William Stewart. That these women entered into ill-conceived and even hasty
marriages was not unusual for women arriving on the frontier. In Isabella
Campbell’s case she may have even used a little deception to catch her man for
she was recorded as 32 years old on her marriage certificate rather than her
actual age of 46.
Marriage offered economic and sexual protection, and on the
frontier where women were few and employment opportunities for women scarce, they
were impelled to find a new husband as soon as possible. Being widowed or
accompanied by children was no impediment. While Isabella was not to know that
Elizabeth Mackenzie would die so soon after arrival nor Isabella Mackenzie
marry, she would have suspected that her role as companion was not one that
would continue indefinitely. It is not surprising that she married as soon as
the opportunity arose.
Wickham secured an 80-acre selection in 1872 naming it Cowden
and built their home there. Isabella’s daughter recalled that there was no
township in the vicinity, and that her mother waited desperately for goods to
arrive from Cardwell so she could feed them. In the meantime, the only
vegetables were pig weed boiled for greens, and young white palm leaf.
In 1875 Wickham built a hotel, called the Planter’s
Retreat — a two-storey building with a distinctive shingle roof—located
halfway between the Camping Reserve (the main settlement) and Gairloch
Plantation. It had river frontage and a wharf where passengers alighted for the
road journey to the Camping Reserve. Hotels were often the first buildings to
be erected because they could be easily constructed, conducted by a few people
and were provided essential services: food, drink, company, lodging, stabling
and fodder for horses and bullocks, entertainment and meeting rooms before the
construction of shire halls or community or church halls. Reverend Mackenzie
held the first religious service conducted on the Herbert at the Planter’s
Retreat while it was there that prominent citizens met for an historic
meeting to decide on the name ‘Ingham’ for the former Camping Reserve. Eliza Jane Ah Bow, resident of the Chinatown
located at Cowden, married Lee Look Hop at the Planter’s Retreat.
Isabella’s own grandson to her son Alexander and his wife Mary was born at the
hotel.
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| Planter's Retreat, Gairloch. (Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Council Library Photograph Collection |
Hotels were often conducted by women in Australia as hotelkeeping was one occupation where their role as businesswomen took precedence over their sexuality. Under her stewardship as hotelkeeper’s wife, and then as sole licensee from 1882 to 1892, the hotel gained reputation for “good pure spirits and delicious Scotch scones” and the Scotch gatherings and balls were long remembered.
Isabella died on July 15, 1902 and was buried in the Old
Ingham cemetery. The hotel closed in 1909. Her daughter recounted that Isabella
provided her children with a wholesome life and opportunities. Isabella’s sons
moved away from the district, Murdoch to the Cairns district, and Alexander to
the Pialba Shire. Today, descendants of daughter Isabella still live in the
Herbert River district.
Isabella Campbell’s story gives a rare insight into the life
of a female publican living and working on the frontier of tropical north
Queensland in the late nineteenth century. Her story illustrates the means
women took to survive and thrive in a predominantly male environment.
