Potatoes to Gold

Potatoes to Gold

  By Kylie Taylor

  Copyright 2014 Kylie Taylor

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Acknowledgements

  This book was inspired by my great great-grandmother, Bridget Mary Bannon, who was sent to Australia from Ireland in 1857 at the age of twelve. She died in Cue, Western Australia on 1898 and is buried in the Cue-Day Dawn Pioneer Cemetery.

  I am grateful to my dear mum, Rona Lenegan, for teaching me the importance of faith and family and for telling me all those wonderful stories about growing up in a remote gold-mining town. Thank you to Mamie Hughes for her instruction on Irish dialect and the delightful Irish anecdotes that went with it. I am always grateful to my ‘old English teacher’, Patricia McCarthy, for her honesty and encouragement and for her love of words. To my patient family who have to put up with my bouts of being absent-though-present whilst writing and my technological-triggered meltdowns, thank you and I love you!

  I am also grateful to the librarians and volunteer genealogists at the Battye Library in Western Australia for their knowledge, time and interest. Readers who wish to know more about the facts of this story, might also be interested in the sources I found useful: ‘A Decent Set of Girls’ by Richard Reid and Cheryl Morgan; ‘A History of Convicts and Transportation’ by W.J. Edgar; ‘Gold on the Murchison’ by P.R. Heydon (O.A.M.) and ‘The Murchison Times and Day Dawn Gazette’ from August 1898 on microfilm #4.

  PART I

  Kangaroo Skins and Pickle Jars

  Granny reckons there’s nothing green at all about this place. ‘It’s old and shrewd and the colour of rust. Even the trees are grey and crippled,’ she says. But I love the place and I never want to leave.

  It’s the only thing me and Granny disagree on but her eyes are getting old and Mother says that sometimes people get so blinded by grief they forget how to look for nice things. So I find her pretty rocks from the creek-bed and when the everlastings are out, I pick her bunches of pink and white and yellow and tie them together with pussy willow.

  ‘Some colours of the bush to brighten your day, Granny,’ I say.

  And they do. She puts them in a pickle jar on the crate between our two beds. Father made our beds out of mulga branches and chaff bags stitched together and he tanned kangaroo skins for the cold nights. The beds are soft enough–not itchy like you’d imagine they might be–and it’s good to be up off the ground in case a snake sneaks in. We did see some tracks on the dirt floor one morning and that scared the living daylights out of my brothers and me, Granny and Mother too! Even Father was rattled and told us all off.

  ‘Stinking hot or not, the door stays closed! Better that than having a snake slide up ya, and if he takes a bite, not even Doc Roberts could save ya.’

  A few weeks ago, when Edward was collecting the eggs, he found a fat snake–the colour of copper–coiled in the corner of the chook house. Edward’s only eight, but he grabbed the shovel and chopped its nasty head clean off, quick as lightning. Mother gave him a shilling for bravery.

  Edward is the eldest of my three brothers. They were all born here but I was born in Victoria, like my father. Then, in 1892, Father decided that Western Australia was the place to be–for those not faint-hearted–and so we sailed to the West, caught a train to the desert, and joined the rush for gold.

  Poor Granny didn’t know what had struck her. She had grown up in Ireland, where it’s all green and rainy and where ‘men dig for potatoes, not gold, to survive,’ she says. She didn’t want to leave Melbourne in the first place and Mother thought it was because her daughters are buried there. When we were boarding the SS Nemesis for Albany, Granny stopped still as a post and held up the line while she and Father fought like us kids.

  ‘I vowed to m’self I’d never set foot on another sea-faring vessel as long as I live.’

  ‘Well if ya don’t get up that ramp, there won’t be much more livin’!’ Shall I leave ya here alone, without us? Without your Cathleen Sophia?’

  It went quiet then and the queue of passengers began moving again and I knew that day just how much Granny loves me.

  She loves me the most because I’m the only girl in the family and Granny says I remind her of Rachael, who died when she was nine. Mother says that’s why Granny fusses over me like she does.

  ‘She is frightened that you are going to leave and never return ... disappear forever! And then I remember why I was feeling sad in the first place.

  ‘Why the face so long Cathleen? You know you’ll be home for the holidays. Perth will be so exciting and you’ll learn how to behave like a lady at Boarding School. Miss Lefroy said you are the smartest student she has ever taught and here you have this God-given opportunity for a proper education. That’s something your poor grandmother never had.’

  ‘And look how smart Granny is!’

  ‘No need to raise your voice, Cathleen Sophia.’

  ‘Well, Granny is fretting for nothing because I’m never leaving Cue!’

  And with that, I took off running to the creek-bed, in a manner most unlady-like.