Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 9
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 9]
4
"talkie" film describing this historic event in a lovely little theatre on the site. I was also shown around the campus of the Princeton University.
When my Grandfather died he left the farm at Rosedernate to his eldest son, my Uncle William John, who rented it to his five maiden sisters. They worked it industriously and died there one by one until only Aunt Margaret (Maggie) was left, and went to spend her last years living with her kinsfolk Sam and Jane Crawford (unmarried brother and sister) at "Ballybogie", a neighbouring farm.
My Father and his brother landed at Melbourne after an uneventful voyage of nearly six months in a sailing ship from Belfast, via the Cape of Good Hope. They then travelled across Victoria by Cobb & Coy coach to Yanco station on the Murrumbidgee river, to take up prearranged jobs with its owner Samuel (later Sir Samuel) McCaughey, a very distant kinsman by marriage through the Hugh Stewart family of Tullybane. Samuel McCaughey owned two other big sheep stations in the north-west corner of N.S.W., "Tralee" and "Dunlop". He became a millionaire and remained a bachelor throughout his long life, despite the grand house-parties he sometimes organised for friends and city socialites, in the magnificent homestead at Yanco. There is a story that on one of these occasions he was showing a designing widow around his beautiful rose gardens; suddenly he turned to his companion, "Madam", he murmured regretfully, "there is only one thing this place needs". "And what is that Sir Samuel?", she questioned, looking soulfully into his eyes. "Water madam, more water", he retorted abruptly. He eventually became a millionaire realised his greatest ambition, which was to shear a million sheep, and he did it more than once.
Irrigation was almost an obsession with this wealthy Ulsterman. My Father was an expert in using a single-furrow plough, and began his colonial experience ploughing extensions of the existing irrigation area at Yanco. This was the nucleus of the vast Murrumbidgee system of to-day.
Later, the two brothers were employed in droving cattle and sheep