Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 11
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[Page 11]
5
to "Dunlop" and "Tralee" via Bourke, the main pastoral centre on the Darling river. With some savings and a promise of a modicum of financial backing by their employer McCaughey, they were planning to apply for selections from available Crown Lands and begin farming and grazing on their own account in the not too distant future. But unfortunately Robert caught Typhoid fever, then very prevalent, and died quickly in hospital at Gunnedah, where he is buried in the local cemetery.
Shocked and desolated by this calamity, alone in a strange new wild country, Father sought companionship and security by enlisting in the N.S.W. Mounted Police, a fine body of men, who though they never basked in the same glamour as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, nevertheless did just as good a job in maintaining law and order in the sparsely populated outback, and just as surely "got their man". Dad was first stationed at the little settlement at Alectown and was transferred to Peak Hill about 1892, where he first met my Mother and married her the next year: she and her parents had only recently moved up from Victoria. Because of his good education, Dad was mostly used as a Court Assistant to the visiting Mining Wardens and Magistrates. He was rarely in uniform or engaged in performing the usual police duties.
In 1893 a ruinous, widespread, and prolonged drought was persisting in N.S.W. It caused an economic crisis and finally a "run" on the Banks. All but two closed their doors temporarily. The Australian Joint Stock Bank failed and later was reconstructed as the Australian Bank of Commerce. My parents were on their honeymoon in Sydney at the time of the crisis, and some of the banknotes they had obtained before leaving Peak Hill became temporarily valueless, and unacceptable in hotels and shop: a very embarassing experience for a newly married couple of no great influence or affluence in a strange city of nearly a third of a million population. There were no Governmental banknotes in those days, only those issued by the private Banks.
At the time of my birth the aged Queen Victoria - the "Widow