Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 5
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[Page 5]
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A young Italian doctor and his wife and the local Postmaster and his spouse were close friends of my parents. Spiritualism was a new exhilaration in which they became interested and seances were held in one of their houses. Years afterwards my Mother told me that one night (by table rapping) they contacted a murderer who had been hanged. They asked him if he had any special request."Yes", was the reply, "I'd like to hear a song, but no bloody Moody & Sankey" (a popular hymn book). Another close friend was a scholarly old agnostic (John E. Kelly). He contracted a fatal illness and was lying in a coma as a Parson from Dubbo was intoning that passage in "Revelation" that describes Heaven with its pearly gates and streets of gold when his mind suddenly cleared for a moment. "What damn prospectus of what crooked mining company is that you are reading?", he demanded, and lapsed back into unconsciousness. In the past he had lost much money in many dud mining companies and syndicates.
Boosted by the discovery of further rich goldfields, the population of New South Wales had just passed the million mark in 1890, and for the first time became self-supporting, as regards food, and was on the verge of big economic development: in 1898 the first wheat surplus was exported.
I was the first child and only son of Andrew Stewart and his wife Agnes Cardiff (nee Mead). Father was born on a small farm at Rosedernate, two miles north of Clough in the Country of Antrim, Northern Ireland. Mother was born of a London father and a Welsh-Irish mother at Mortlake, Victoria.
There were five girls and five boys in Father's family, rather a crowd for the small dairy and linen-flax farm of about seventy acres. None of the girls ever married, probably because most of the young men were leaving the small farms for better prospects in distant fields overseas.
My father had had a good grounding in the three "Rs" at the small primary school at Clough, one of the so-called National Schools that were established all over the British Isles, even in the South of Ireland before it became a republic. In English spelling and pronounciation he was near-perfect, in fact he was