TICKET  TO  OZ

  

   The excitement had been mounting for some time, even though I awoke each morning with a feeling that it wasn't all quite real. But the day I sat at the laptop, brought up the page for Qantas internal flights in Western Australia and booked a seat on the plane from Perth up to Newman for Sunday 2 September 2007, I'd crossed my Rubicon. Final stage completed. 

   Not that Newman was any tourist trap, far from it. In the heart of the Pilbara region up north from Perth, WA's capital city, and originating as a closed town built for workers at the nearby iron mines, its attraction for me was as the starting point of an almost unbelievable adventure within what I knew would be a great holiday.

   This journey across the world was sparked off by the growing intense need to see the land to which my late mother's eldest brother had emigrated in 1912. Looking through her papers after her death in 1989 I had discovered several letters from Mundiwindi and Perth addressed to my mother, the envelopes date-stamped up to 1926, and also carefully wrapped in thin brown tissue paper there was uncle Will's log of his journey from Tilbury, London as far as Cape Town, with the final destination Fremantle, Western Australia. His writings captivated me. Suddenly he came alive and that feeling brought a longing to find his descendants.

   Once retired and having acquired my first computer, I set about trawling the Net in efforts to try and find details of any of his family. He and his wife already had two children when they emigrated and from the letters I had learnt that a third was born in Perth. My search seemed hopeless and finally, in the late 90's, I had left a note on a genealogical website giving details of uncle Will Bowden and his family - birthdates and such - and the ship in which they had sailed from Tilbury. I also mentioned that he was thought to have had "a small farm in Mundiwindi". How little I knew then that the inclusion of this latter piece of information was to be the springboard for such an adventure several years later.   

   Meanwhile I took an Aussie monthly genealogical magazine and in it one day found the URL of the WA Cemeteries Board. Will and his family had landed at Fremantle and obviously remained in WA for some time - as the dates of his letters showed - but in later years they could have moved anywhere. However, Perth and Mundiwindi were all I had to go on. I brought up the cemeteries' website and discovered that my uncle, his wife and son were all cremated in Perth and there were memorials in Karrakatta Cemetery there. Hopes rose of tracing descendants, but were soon dashed.

   After about five years an Australian, researching the history of sheep and cattle stations in WA, mailed to ask about my Mundiwindi reference as this was a station that interested him. I could not help him in his enquiry but, learning the reason for my forlorn posting, he took it upon himself to see what he could discover about Will for me. Three months on and I had an email from John in Australia saying "I have spoken to Elsie". 

    I stared - read it again, and again. Elsie - Will's third child born in Australia - she was there in Perth! It was not long before the UK-Oz phone line was sagging under very excited chatter. Elsie had a married granddaughter and we were also soon in contact. Several years later I am still thinking I'll wake up any minute.

   My new-found Aussie friend suggested we add a page to his website detailing all that could be discovered about Will and including the latter's part log on the s.s. Australind plus two of his later letters to my mother back in England. Will's writings give extremely comprehensive descriptions both of life on board the steamer and the wildlife in this new country of his. They make good reading and can be seen at John's website. (see link at the left). There is still much to be added. The Battye Library, which is the WA State Library situated in Perth and one of whose aims is to "collect and preserve the social and documentary heritage for current and future generations", have expressed interest in acquiring the originals for their archives, but they are sitting here in my desk drawer and I cannot bear to relinquish them just yet.

   Soon, it was not enough to build a webpage about this uncle of mine. I had to get out there and see for myself something of this country where he had lived and worked.

   And now..... I was on my way.

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   On my way..... but, as it turned out, not only to stay in Perth with my relations.

   Australia had been in great need of immigrants from the UK during the depression at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly those who were prepared to work on the land. The year my uncle had gone out had seen the largest number in any single year from the beginning of the 1900's up to WW2, although Western Australia's share was very low. On the passenger list for the s.s. Australind Will was described as agricultural. However, as in England he seemed to have worked only in the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, London, I doubt that he got any nearer to that occupation than digging the back garden. This did not seem to have deterred him, for John found that on arrival he took advantage of a scheme offering small parcels of land for sale at Belmont, near Perth. But this did not last very long and soon the family moved into Perth.  After a while Will started work in the Postmaster General's Office. Gradually, with my cousin Elsie's help we pieced together much of his movements around WA in his job as a lineman on the telegraph system, then still in its early days in Australia.

   So the "small farm at Mundiwindi" that my mother had spoken of was a mistaken running together of these two bits of information - the Belmont land venture and the eventual job as a lineman which took him to Mundiwindi, amongst other places, and from where Will had written some of his letters to my mother.

 

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   I set to work planning my holiday and meanwhile John and his wife Ruth were busy organising trips north into the bush for members of Birds Australia to conduct surveys on bird populations. This they did during the winter months each year. I am also a bird enthusiast and was interested when he had once mentioned that his favourite bird - the Black Necked Stork - was to be seen at Marble Bar in the northern part of the Pilbara.

 

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   It all started with a joke. One day I had said "OK, take me to Marble Bar to see your stork and we'll call at Mundiwindi on the way back", just as you might suggest an outing one sunny afternoon. Now this was some joke as Perth to Marble Bar is, say, 780 miles/1255 kilometres as the crow flies - or, as they would say - as the cocky flies.

   My astonishment at his response - and he was dead serious - was something I'll never forget. "Just working on the logistics of going to Mundiwindi, Marble Bar" and in a later mail "I have a sort of vision..." and here he listed several places after Marble Bar and going down the coast back to Perth. I rushed for the atlas and could only gasp at the thought of such a great trip. It would take place after a bird survey that John and Ruth were doing in late August 2007 and which would finish at a reasonable distance (by Australian standards) from somewhere like Newman. I was to get up there to meet them.  

 

 

  

   And we would be camping out in the bush wherever a suitable piece of ground could be found. I'd never camped in my life but all that I could think of was "Wa-hey!" Then my thoughts raced - I would need some cheap clothing, light but protective against biting insects and sun, I would need sunblock, anti-bug cream, I would need a bag to put my gear in, and a tent and sleeping bag and some sort of groundsheet, perhaps.

 

 

 

     

   On top of this I would need my ordinary clothes for the rest of the holiday as the camping trip was expected to take only about a week out of the four I was going to spend down under. Oh boy, this needed planning!

   And it followed, with lists of things to take, things to do, things not to forget under any circumstances, much hunting in shops, much anxious thought on how to get it all together with the many security requirements then in force for luggage.

   One overnight bag was not going to be enough to put my camping things in, I would need a second, but how was I going to get it all on the plane with the then current restrictions on one case for the hold and one cabin bag? Women's handbags were, at that time, definitely not allowed as an extra. One cabin bag meant one cabin bag. In the end I flattened an empty canvas flight bag inside my overnight case, added a few oddments for the journey, pushed the camera and small binoculars into a corner and at the last minute before going through the various checks crammed my handbag in as well. It must have looked most odd under the x-ray machine.

   And the tent - what to do about that? John checked out a few for me and then suggested a store in Perth. I searched its website, finally finding and buying a suitable one. Then - how to get it on the Newman plane with my other bags and under the same restrictions? In the end John collected it before they went off on their bird trip and managed to find storage space for it on the Toyota as well as a sleeping bag and blow-up mattress which they kindly lent me.

   Excitedly I bought a map of WA, large scale, and one of the Pilbara from a Perth website, while further plans and maps were emailed from Australia showing the areas we were going to explore. For the first thing was to try and find the old telegraph station at Mundiwindi at which Will had worked for a while. The site was somewhere deep in the heart of a cattle station near Jigalong. It was this area that featured in the book Rabbit Proof Fence, which was also made into a film. John mailed my copy of the permit allowing the three of us to traverse the aboriginal reserve in our hunt for old Mundiwindi.

  

   It was really going to happen, wasn't it!

 

 

 

 

  Key

 

  Red       N         Newman

  Red       M         Mundiwindi

  Orange   N         Nullagine

       "      B         Marble Bar

       "      P         Port Hedland

       "      I          Indee

       "      C         Carmathen

       "      H         Hamelin Pool

       "      G         Geraldton

       "      M         Moora

  Yellow    P         Perth

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

                Stopping places on the camping trip

 

 

   

  Copyright Ivy Collins 2009                                                                                 Go to Part 2: Perth