The mysterious Caterina Cordelia

 

As an historian with a particular interest in sugar and migration history I find myself immersed in predominately primary and secondary sources written by men. Fleshing out the lives of women from the few women’s memoirs and the men’s insubstantial recordings of women’s lives on the north Queensland frontier is no easy task. 

The invisibility of women in the history of the Herbert is typified by the mysterious Caterina Cordelia and begins with the land upon which she walked. White men named the geomorphological features they observed, in complete ignorance of the names already given those features by the Indigenous landowners. The features were given names according to physical attributes, for example Valley of Lagoons, Stoney Creek or Waterfall Creek, or named after prominent male identities. Hence the Herbert (named Bagirr by the Warrgamay) was named after colonial secretary and later Queensland’s first premier, Robert G Herbert while Stone River was named after the aforementioned Henry Stone, Ingham after the failed planter William Bairstow Ingham, Halifax after George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Halifax Secretary of State in England from 1763 to 1765, and so on.  Disproportionately few to the European male appellations were Indigenous names. Examples though, are Jourama Falls (singing or murmuring waters), or Toobanna (plenty of big rushes near water).[i] The same was for European female place names. The latter include: Francis Creek named after Mrs Francis Allingham of Waterview Station, Helen’s Hill and Mount Helen named after a daughter of William Ewan of Waterview (its Indigenous name of Mandabin or Mandalin was ignored) and Mount Cordelia, Mount Catherina, Cordelia Creek and Catherina/Catterina Creek named after the enigmatic Caterina Cordelia — the spelling of whose christian name is disputed, while it is not known whether Cordelia was her surname or a second christian name.[ii]

Cordelia Vale homestead 1883 along the Lower Herbert River. The old McKenzie house from the Gairloch.
Source: Flickr Hinchinbrook

According to local lore an Italian woman, Caterina Cordelia, arrived on the Herbert as the housekeeper for a Maurice O’Connell.[iii] The honour of the first plantings of sugar in the Herbert River Valley is awarded to licenced surveyor, Maurice Geoffrey O’Connell, his brother John Geoffrey O’Connell and William McDowall (McDowell).[iv] By 1869 the O’Connell’s had abandoned their venture and forfeited their lands. McDowall, who actually come to the Herbert looking for pastoral land, left in1870 to pursue a pastoralist’s life. That Caterina should be with the party in 1868 was a remarkable example of fearlessness and sense of adventure. At the time, on the lower Herbert, there were no public facilities as the European population numbered little more than 12 people, while clearly the party had not considered what they would do with any crop they produced for there was no mill to crush their cane, nor did they have the resources to build one of their own. The blunt reality was that their enterprise had no possibility of expanding and their cane had no market.[v] And why or how Maurice inveigled Caterina to accompany him will forever remain a mystery. Housekeeper could be a euphemism for a more intimate relationship and some infatuation on the part of O’Connell is indicated by several landscape features being named after her. What happened to the O’Connells and McDowall can be tracked through newspaper reports and documents, but Caterina Cordelia remains an enigma

SOURCES:

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[i] Family history of the district: Landmarks, streets, parks or buildings named after local ancestors, Herbert River Express, Ingham, n.d., p.20.

[ii] Queensland place names search, https://www.dnrm.qld.gov.au/qld/environment/land/place-names/search#/search=Catherina%20Creek&types=0&place=Catherina_Creek6521; and Map. Parish of Cordelia, County of Cardwell, Survey Office, Department of Public Lands, Brisbane, October 1922.Variously spelt also Caterina, and Catterina.

[iii] Alec S Kemp, The Kemp Report, Second instalment of History of the Herbert River: The dawn of sugar, unpublished text, n.d., p. 5.

[iv] Queensland Government, Queensland Government Gazette vol. X, 1 January to 31 December 1869, p. 361; Douglas R. Barrie, Minding My Business: The History of Bemerside and the Lower Herbert River District of North Queensland Australia, Douglas R. Barrie, Ingham, 2003; and Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui, The Herbert River Story, Hinchinbrook Shire Council, Ingham, 2011.

[v]  ‘Cardwell and the Vale of Herbert’, Queenslander, 23 September 1871, p. 10. 

Isabella WICKHAM (formerly Campbell) - publican

 

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

WOMEN IN UNEXPECTED PLACES: HARRIETT BRIMS AND THE BRITANNIA STUDIO, INGHAM

Leading the expansion into the tropical north were young single men with adventurous spirits who were willing to risk money, spirit and health. However at the forefront of the frontier march there were always a few intrepid women, some even widows with children sheltering in the folds of their skirts. Despite being few in number they were there and often in the most unexpected places.

Archival material relating to the history of the Herbert River Valley is, not unexpectedly, predominantly written from the pioneering man’s perspective for at first the new European community was dominated by males. The prevailing belief was that white people could not physically work in the tropics and the effects of the climate on white women and children would be even more detrimental to their health.  Fortunately there are photographs that tell a different story, and they were taken by a woman who earned her living at the forefront of frontier tropical north Queensland.

The woman is pioneering photographer HARRIETT BRIMS who regrettably has received no local recognition. Fortunately she has been recognized nationally.  D. Byrne writes in a work entitled Heritage, The National Women’s Art Book: 500 works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955 that Harriett Brims “occupies a unique place in the history of the profession largely because of the environment in which she worked and the manner in which she carried out her activities.”

Harriett Pettifore Brims (1864-1939) was married to Donald Brims and had five children when in about 1894, the family moved to Ingham. There, near the mouth of the Seymour River, Donald constructed a homestead with an adjoining sawmill and wharf. In the township of Ingham Harriett Brims established herself professionally as a photographer. Pugh’s Trade Directories of 1902 lists her as proprietor of the ‘Britannia Studios’. In 1903 they moved north to Mareeba.

Far from being the stereotyped woman photographer of the era, never venturing from the safety of the studio, she rather did much of her work outside travelling between isolated farm houses, townships and settlements. She would live in a rough tent if necessary and would be assisted by Indigenous Aboriginal helpers.

Her glass plate negatives have survived. She used dry-plate cameras manufactured by her husband. They were made from local woods, while the shutters were made from the opium tins thrown away by the Chinese plantations workers. Her subject matter ranged from the standard studio photographs to landscapes including views of Wallaman Falls, to South Sea Islander (Kanaka) workers in their traditional dress, to views of the mills, including Gairloch and Macknade to more personal ones as the one of her husband building the steamboat ‘Emilie.’

Her photographs reveal a growing Ingham town and district, a family happy and enjoying life and “the physical grandeur of the North at a time when the region was searching for its political and social identity.”

Sources: Byrne, D. Heritage, The National Women’s Art Book: 500 works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955 edited by Joan Kerr. 117-118, 320. Roseville East: Craftsman House, 1995 and

Descriptive information and to see a selection of her photographs:State Library of Queensland website http://hdl.handle.net/10462/eadarc/7397

On location in the bush. (State Library of Queensland)

Self portrait (State Library of Queensland)

Britannia Studio, Ingham (State Library of Queensland)

Boating on the Seymour River (State Library of Queensland)

From mining field to cane field, the great migration of houses

Dotted around the Herbert River district are a few houses that are architectural gems. As each year passes another one or two disappear. They are architectural gems because they are constructed in what has come to be recognized as a typically north Queensland style, a style whose suitability to the humid, tropical conditions in which we live is now no longer appreciated, except by a few. However, what is a noteworthy and consistent feature of houses in the Herbert River district is that many of them are the result of earlier removal and reconstruction over relatively short distances, for example: Gairloch to Cordelia as in the case of Brooklands or down a flooded river from Abergowrie to Cordelia as in the case of the former Oakleigh.

The most remarkable of these removal and reconstruction feats are the houses, of which there are several, that were transported over the great distance from Charters Towers. While the mining fields boomed, substantial houses were built, but as the fields dried up and the population moved on, houses too migrated from the mining towns to the coast. This was particularly prevalent in the 1920s when most of the examples in the Herbert River district arrived. Disassembled and brought in sections on bullock train, tram line, horse line and portable line on cane trucks they were there reassembled. Where they may have been formerly sited on low stilts, in the Herbert River district, because of the threat of flood they were often reassembled on high stilts. Key examples, still lived in, are Evandale, the former Rowe home, on Stone River Road, and the Russo farm house at Hawkins Creek which was originally a presbytery in Charters Towers.

Surrounded by picturesque and well kept gardens, and cane fields, these houses could sometimes maintain three or four families, and be vibrant with visitors and guests who might come for a few days and stay on indefinitely!

On Saturday March 26, the Russo family of Hawkins Creek celebrated the centenary of their sugar farm. This celebration was a tribute to the tenacity and vision of an immigrant Italian family which has withstood one hundred years of the highs and lows and battles with nature that is sugar farming. Determined to keep the farm a viable entity has seen the farm reinvent itself in recent times with the planting of a rice crop that will be alternated with the sugar assignment. The story of this remarkable immigrant Italian family and its achievement of over 100 years of sugar farming in the Herbert River district is one that it would be hoped the family will record in detail, in time, for the family to treasure and for a wider audience to enjoy. The celebrations, held on the farm, were back dropped by their farm house and its story is as fascinating as the lives of the families that have lived in it.

Source: Kerry Russo and family, Hawkins Creek

Tea party at Evandale, 1914

Evandale House with Rowe family, 1920

Source: Hinchinbrook Shire Library