Irish Gold

By Robert Lehane

One route to wealth during the 1850s and '60s gold rushes was uncovering a nugget or glittering seam. A much more certain alternative was owning inns on roads to the goldfields. Irish Gold tells the story of two enterprising Irish settlers, Jeremiah Lehane and Miles Murphy, who adopted the second course and, with their families, led action-packed l

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Mar 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781740279147

Book preview

1

Leaving Ireland

‘The finest country on the face of the earth.’ That’s how the Kerry Evening Post described New South Wales in a July 1839 article encouraging young Irish men and women to emigrate. No matter that the colony, half a world away, was established just fifty years earlier as a place of banishment for English, Scottish and Irish felons, or that convicts were still being sent there. We can be certain that the paper did not send a reporter out to check what the place was really like.

The Post not only promoted emigration in its columns but also provided office space for Charles Eager, an official appointed to select emigrants for New South Wales. The paper’s efforts reflected the widely held Anglo-Irish view that the country was overpopulated and that a reduction in numbers through emigration might quell the agitation for reform among Catholic tenant farmers on the great Protestant-owned estates. Wrote the Post,

There can be no question between enlightened men on the subject of the necessity of emigration, as a means towards providing for the superfluous population of Ireland, and the establishment of peace, comfort, and happiness in this long-neglected and long-afflicted island.

Across the county border, the Cork Standard was also keen to see people leave. It carried an article in July 1839 praising the work of John Besnard, an emigration agent for the colony, based in Cork City. His job was to recruit candidates for assisted emigration under schemes introduced in the 1830s to increase the supply of non-convict labour in the colony and begin correcting the severe population imbalance – about 79,000 males to 40,000 females according to the 1841 census. ‘The colonists of New South Wales should feel themselves greatly indebted to Mr Besnard for his strenuous exertions in promoting the emigration of useful and virtuous persons,’ wrote the Standard. ‘The charge of selecting proper individuals as free emigrants could not be entrusted to one more capable of efficiently discharging so responsible a trust.’

With Ireland pushing and New South Wales pulling, it’s not surprising that emigration – mainly from Cork and the surrounding southern counties – took off in the late 1830s. North America was, of course, an attractive alternative destination; those who chose Australia perhaps had a particularly adventurous streak. According to historian Patrick O’Farrell, the ‘overwhelming weight of testimony sent back to Ireland’ showed they were thankful for the decision they had made and ‘full of enterprise and excitement’. No doubt, that thankfulness multiplied manyfold when they learned of the famine, caused by potato blight, that struck Ireland in 1845 and left around a million men, women and children dead and many more destitute. Some of the emigrants were able to assist relatives left behind, sending them money or sponsoring their passage to New South Wales.

Of course it was not just government propaganda that led people to emigrate – to leave their families and homeland almost certainly forever. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had severe repercussions in Ireland. Irish farms had helped feed the British army but, when this market for agricultural produce disappeared, prices fell and landlords increasingly turned their land over to cattle and sheep grazing. Fewer hands were required; as a result, tenant farmers were forced off estates and work for farm labourers dried up. Rapid population growth, combined with the return of demobilised soldiers, exacerbated the problems.

For many families, the question became: who should set off in search of a better life abroad and who should stay behind? An historian who studied letters sent between emigrants in Australia and their relatives at home was struck by the evidence of careful negotiation within families on emigration, which ‘ranked with marriage as the most important decision in most Irish lives.’ Contrasting with this rational consideration of options were the emotion-charged farewells. Some descriptions survive, including this one of the departure from the Cork City dock in the late 1830s of a shipload of emigrants bound for New South Wales:

Mothers hung upon the necks of their athletic sons; young girls clung to elder sisters; fathers – old white headed men – fell upon their knees, with arms uplifted to heaven, imploring the protecting care of the Almighty on their departing children… It is impossible to describe the final parting. Shrieks and prayers, blessings and lamentations mingled in one great cry from those on the quay, and those on shipboard…

One young man who set out for Sydney in 1839 was Jeremiah Lehane, a farm labourer from Newmarket, northern County Cork. We’ll never know whether the decision to go was his alone or a collective decision of the family – parents William and Ellen, brothers Pierce and Daniel, sisters Honora and Margaret and perhaps others unknown – and whether there was a dockside farewell. Daniel emigrated later, sponsored by Jeremiah, as did various other relatives, including sons of Pierce, Honora and Margaret. Pierce, who was about ten years older than Jeremiah, remained on the family farm at Newmarket up to his death in 1886.

The Lehanes were a Catholic family with roots in Ireland’s long-vanished Celtic past. Ruins stand near Rathcormack, north-east of Cork City, of Castlelyons – originally called Castle Lehane or Castle O’Lehan. Up to late in the twelfth century, this was the seat of the Lehan sept or clan, chiefs of the surrounding locality of Hy-Lehan. The inscription recorded from a stone at the site – LEHAN O’CVLLANE HOC FECIT [built this] MCIIII [1104] – is the sole remnant of their building works; the ruins that can be visited today are from a later period.

The Norman invasion of 1170 ended Irish rule of Ireland, and saw the Lehanes soon ejected from their castle. King John granted the site to William de Barry, who erected his own castle there in 1204; his descendants were long known as the Lords Barry of Castle Lehane. The invasion ushered in more than seven centuries of increasingly resented British occupation. Gone were the fabled Irish kings who held court in the ancient castle on the sacred hill of Tara near what is now Dublin. Gone also the renowned monastic culture that arose after St Patrick’s conversion of the Irish to Christianity in the fifth century.

Various decrees from London helped ensure a tense relationship between the Irish and the invaders from England. Native Irish were excluded from the first parliament of Ireland formed late in the thirteenth century. Laws that took effect in the mid-fourteenth century made it illegal for the English and Irish to intermarry, and even for Englishmen to admit Irish musicians and storytellers to their households. Things became much worse two centuries later when Henry VIII and his Protestant successors tried to impose the practices of the new Church of England on Catholic Ireland. A series of savage Protestant–Catholic wars culminated in 1690 in the Battle of the Boyne, at which the Protestant William of Orange triumphed over the Catholic James II.

The winners introduced the infamous Penal Laws, which stripped Irish Catholics of most of their remaining rights and remained in force for more than a century; the last of them were finally repealed in 1829 following the success of the Catholic Association movement led by the charismatic Daniel O’Connell, ‘the Liberator’. The Penal Laws denied the vote to Catholics and barred them from the military, the civil service, the legal profession and teaching. No Catholic schools were permitted. Religious rights were severely restricted. If a Catholic owned land, he was prohibited from leaving it to one son; it had to be divided equally between all. This meant small farms had to be divided into tracts incapable of supporting a family.

The ruins of Castlelyons, known earlier as Castle Lehane.

The ruins of Castlelyons, known earlier as Castle Lehane.

At Castlelyons, the Catholic Barrys transmogrified into the Protestant Barrymores. The castle was rebuilt and became a fashionable mansion of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ until fire destroyed it in 1771. One tale has it that the Earl of Barrymore of the time was a gambler. Before heading to town for a session, he left instructions that, if he was not home by six a.m., the castle should be burned to keep it out of the hands of creditors, his non-return signifying that he had lost. He won handsomely, but celebrated too well and forgot his instructions. When he returned late, the castle was burning merrily.

Newmarket in Jerry’s day – a painting in Newmarket Court.

Newmarket in Jerry’s day – a painting in Newmarket Court.

Thirty-five miles to the west, at Newmarket, the Aldworth family from England built a handsome mansion, Newmarket Court, on land that the Protestant King James I had granted them in 1615. The branch of the Lehane family into which Jeremiah was born became tenants on the Aldworths’ 32,000-acre estate. In another connection with Australia, the mansion, built in about 1725, served as a convent of the Sisters of St Joseph for four decades after the Aldworths finally departed in the 1920s. The Melbourne-born Mother Mary MacKillop, who has been credited with one of the two miracles necessary for canonisation and is expected to be declared Australia’s first saint, founded this order.

The same part of Newmarket today – many of the old buildings still stand.

Newmarket in Jerry’s day – a painting in Newmarket Court.

According to a topographical dictionary published in 1837, Newmarket Court was ‘handsomely built of hewn limestone and situated in a demesne richly embellished with timber of luxuriant growth; an avenue of ash trees is said to have been planted in the reign of Elizabeth.’ Suggesting the Aldworths were mindful of the needs of their farmers, the dictionary records that they donated the site for a spacious Roman Catholic chapel and helped fund its construction. A school and Sunday school were run in connection with the chapel. Interest from various Aldworth bequests was divided annually among the poor of Newmarket, and the town – population 1,437 – contained a fever hospital and dispensary.

Newmarket Court then.

Newmarket Court then.

Newmarket Court now.

Newmarket Court now.

Contemporary evidence indicates that the Aldworths were among the more compassionate landlords during the famine and in 1843, just before the start of that catastrophe, a local Catholic clergyman described the then head of the family, Richard Oliver Aldworth, to an inquiry as ‘a kind and considerate man I must admit’. Nevertheless, the following passage from the topographical dictionary indicates that there had been major discontent among the local farmers:

At Scarteen, a village a little to the north of the town, about 1000 of the peasantry assembled in 1822 anticipating evacuation of the military, but were repulsed by Captain Kippock and Lieutenant Green…who marched with 30 to attack the assailants, whom they dispersed with the loss of about 20 that were killed in the conflict. The gentry of the surrounding district, upon this occasion, presented to each of those officers a handsome piece of plate.

The land farmed by the Lehanes was in an area known as ‘The Island’, bounded by the wall of the Newmarket Court ‘demesne’ and a curve of the River Dalua, a tributary of the Blackwater. Its location and extent – apparently nearly 100 acres – lead one to wonder whether the family may have had a role on the estate that set them apart from most of the tenants.

The shipping documents say Jerry, as Jeremiah was known from his early days in Australia, was twenty-six years old when he boarded the 618-ton migrant sailing ship Mary at Plymouth in early August 1839 after crossing over by steamer from Cork. He was probably actually a bit older; counting back from the age of sixty-three recorded at his death on New Year’s Day 1874 makes him twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His steerage companions on the 116-day journey round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean and the Great Australian Bight in the roaring forties, and up the east coast to Sydney were 104 men, seventy-six women and forty-seven children.

Jerry was fortunate in finding himself on what appears to have been a relatively well-managed and healthy ship. Heavy loss of life was not unusual on migrant voyages to New South Wales; for example, in the twelve months from early 1837 one child in every eight died out of a total of about 1,800 heading for Sydney. Whooping cough and measles were big killers, and there was always the risk of shipwreck. On this voyage of the Mary, though, the death toll was only one adult and three children.

Jerry and most of his fellow passengers were assisted emigrants – coming to Australia under a scheme that involved payment of £18 per head government ‘bounties’ to people or companies bringing out useful people. Governor Richard Bourke initiated the bounty scheme in 1835. The idea was that colonists wanting people to work for them should choose suitable candidates in England, Scotland or Ireland, bring them to the colony and receive a payment from the colonial government covering all or most of the costs of the passage. The intended result was a better match between new arrivals and the colony’s needs for tradesmen, labourers and servants than the existing government-run assisted immigration scheme gave.

Not surprisingly, reality did not fully match the good intentions. An obvious problem was the inability of colonists half a world away to select emigrants. According to the historian R.B. Madgwick, the system degenerated into a commercial speculation controlled by British shipowners, the most important of whom was John Marshall. He had a dubious reputation, being accused of malpractices including helping fill his ships by making false statements about inducements offered by the colony to poor emigrants. Marshall owned the Mary, and received the bounties due when Jerry and his shipmates arrived in Sydney on 24 November 1839.

Regulations required that a ship’s surgeon travel on each migrant vessel to try to keep deadly diseases at bay. This was in the interests of shipowners as well as the passengers, because the total bounty paid depended on the number of employable people landed. The surgeon on the Mary, W.E. Grove, noted in his report that the general state of health on board was good on arrival, although some people had suffered from whooping cough, diarrhoea and dysentery. To help preserve cleanliness and health, six people had been paid a salary of £3 to keep the steerage area in proper order. All passengers had been sent on deck at nine-thirty each morning while the cleaners went about their task, and when the weather permitted their bedding was aired on deck. To promote their spiritual welfare, prayers had been read every night and divine service performed morning and evening on Sundays if the weather allowed.

Sydney’s Australian newspaper praised John Marshall when it reported the Mary’s arrival, saying his vessels had a record of delivering migrants in good health. In the same vein, the Sydney Herald said,

great credit is due to the captain, officers and surgeon for the cleanliness of the vessel and general good discipline on board – in fact the whole of the passengers speak very highly of the officers and of their gentlemanly conduct during the whole voyage.

Sydneysiders who read this on 25 November may have been surprised to learn from the Australian five days later that the whole crew of the Mary had been brought before magistrates Charles Windeyer and H.H. Brown, charged with either refusing duty or desertion. The men complained of harsh treatment during the voyage; ‘among other matters, the cook complained that the first officer forced hot coffee down his throat,’ the paper reported. The first officer claimed the incident began when the cook served coffee made with salt water at the cabin table, and ‘as a punishment, the doctor, second officer, and himself, insisted on his drinking it, which he refusing, they held him and poured it down his throat but it was not so hot as to scald him.’ The magistrates saw no problem with this form of retribution. In fact, they considered it insufficient punishment and sentenced nine of the crew ‘to be mulcted in four days’ pay each’.

On arrival in Sydney, Jerry was declared an acceptable immigrant, making Marshall eligible for his £18. Those who filled in the official form noted that two Irish ministers (Rev. A. Donovan and Rev. J. Beechinor) had certified that he had been baptised in the Catholic Church, while Richard Oliver Aldworth of Newmarket Court had attested that his character was ‘very good’. He could read and write, and his ‘state of bodily health, strength and probable usefulness’ was judged good.

Other single men on the Mary included bakers, carpenters, coopers, grooms, house servants, painters, shepherds and shopkeepers as well as farm and general labourers. Single women were expected to find employment as domestic servants. The Sydney Herald report of the Mary’s arrival said great numbers of the passengers were of a very respectable appearance, and they would remain on the ship, lying off Walker’s Wharf, to be engaged. ‘Therefore it is requested of those people who wish to obtain servants to make early application,’ the paper advised.

2

A job at Yarralumla

Following his arrival in Sydney, the first reference we have to Jerry is in July 1840 as an employee of Terence Aubrey Murray on his Yarralumla sheep run where part of Canberra now stands. If he was recruited on board the Mary, it may not have been by Murray personally. Murray was in Sydney during November 1839, but a letter he wrote at the time indicates he had set out for Yarralumla by 22 November, two days before the ship docked. Murray was back in Sydney in the autumn of 1840, so maybe he employed Jerry then.

The Sydney Jerry landed in was still the gateway to a vast bush prison; convict transportation to New South Wales finally came to an end in mid-1840. It was also a boom town, with census figures showing population growth from just under 20,000 in 1836 to nearly 30,000 in 1841.

The emigrants’ landing place, Walker’s Wharf, was on the western edge of Dawes Point – near the present site of the Pier One ParkRoyal Hotel beside the Harbour Bridge. Their first impressions should have been good; James Maclehose’s Picture of Sydney published in 1839 described the area as ‘probably one of the best neighbourhoods in Sydney’. It noted that some respectable dwelling houses had been built there recently, ‘mostly occupied by opulent persons’.

Sydney’s streets were still dirt tracks – except for a short section of George Street that had been coated with granite – and the polluted Tank Stream discharged into mud flats at the edge of Sydney Cove. Nevertheless, Maclehose was not the only one impressed by the town. Charles Darwin was, too, when he called in on the Beagle in 1836. He noted gigs, phaetons and carriages with liveried servants driving about, houses of a good size and well furnished shops. He thought the town must contain much wealth; it appeared that a man of business could hardly fail to make a large fortune. The whole scene was a most magnificent testimony to the power of the British nation, he wrote. ‘My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’

Another side of the picture that would have greeted the new arrivals was chain gangs of convicts working on roads and public buildings. Floggings of miscreant convicts were commonplace, prisoners were held in stocks as a form of public humiliation and every now and then there was a public hanging. The governor, George Gipps, was the local representative of the government in Britain and the legislative council that advised him was an appointed body; the first hint of democracy came in 1843 when voting, limited to men of wealth, was introduced to fill most legislative council seats.

Terence Aubrey Murray.

Terence Aubrey Murray.

Terence Aubrey Murray, who took Jerry on as an overseer, became one of the first elected legislative councillors. He was about the same age as his new employee, and had made his mark in the colony quickly after arriving from Ireland with his father and sister in 1827. Both father and son obtained land grants near Lake George, south of Goulburn, and expanded their holdings there by purchase. Then, in 1837, Terence and a partner bought the 2,560-acre Yarralumla run from Francis Mowatt, who had acquired it four years earlier. The homestead Mowatt built, using convict labour, on the site of the present governor-general’s residence, served initially as a hunting lodge. He had a pack of hounds and, with his guests, on their occasional visits from Sydney, hunted dingoes and kangaroos.

The old homestead at Yarralumla. The sketch is from 1876, thirty years after Jerry’s time there.

The old homestead at Yarralumla. The sketch is from 1876, thirty years after Jerry’s time there.

Murray bought Yarralumla in the early stages of a drought that was so severe that Lake George dried out completely, a rare event. He wasted no time in setting the property up; his friend Stewart Mowle recorded that around 25,000 sheep were running on Yarralumla in 1838, and fifty or sixty men, mostly convicts, were employed there. Murray was more than fully occupied, retaining his properties near Lake George and serving as a district magistrate from 1833 to 1840. A large part of the magisterial task involved passing judgement on errant convicts; floggings were a common punishment, although Murray was said to be among the more humane dispensers of justice.

Although Yarralumla was his home base, Murray was frequently away. Stewart Mowle usually then took charge. In 1836, when he was just thirteen, Mowle’s parents decided his prospects would be brighter in New South Wales, where his uncle was prospering, than at home in England, so they sent him to Sydney. A friendship made at Sydney College, predecessor of Sydney Grammar School, led to him becoming a frequent visitor to the home of the collector of customs, Colonel Gibbes, where in mid-1838 he met Terence Murray. Murray was there on business; five years later he married Gibbes’ daughter Mary.

Murray invited Mowle to ride back to Yarralumla with him; so ended Mowle’s schooling. Soon afterwards, Murray left the sixteen-year-old in charge for the first of many times. Although younger than everybody else on the station, he apparently was not daunted by the responsibility. ‘I readily fell into my duties,’ he recalled in old age. This was despite the fact that, because of the drought, ‘water, feed and every necessary for stock had disappeared and nothing would grow’. Mowle’s admiration for Murray knew no bounds; he was his ‘best loved friend’ and ‘the most chivalrous, noble and refined man on earth’.

One of Murray’s responses to the drought was to look for high-country pasture where he could take his sheep. He, Mowle, an overseer and two Aborigines set off in late 1838 up the bed of the Cotter River into the mountains, finding lush grazing land on the Cooleman Plain. Early the following year, Murray and his men drove their flocks and bullock drays up the same route and established a new station on the site. In subsequent years, Jerry almost certainly would have spent time up there.

Temporary relief from the drought came in late 1839. Mowle was visiting his ailing uncle at the time, and Murray wrote to him in January 1840, ‘The plains are covered with grass, the river is running beautifully, we have plenty of hay and corn and the horses are all in fine condition, fit for any work.’ Perhaps that was the scene that greeted Jerry when he started work at Yarralumla.

Murray’s letters to Mowle when he was away from the property, and his young friend was in charge, make it clear that Jerry and the other overseers were to be treated strictly as the manager’s servants. References in them to Jerry are mostly of the nature ‘tell Lehane (or Jerry) to…’ Mowle wrote in his reminiscences that he did not associate with the overseers. He recalled that in his early days at Yarralumla, before his marriage in 1845, he had only one companion when Murray was absent: ‘a native black Tommy Murray, who I used to get to sleep on the floor in my room’.

Activities at Yarralumla included cropping as well as sheep grazing. Managing sheep was a much more labour-intensive activity than it is today. Runs were unfenced – this largely remained the case up to the 1870s – so shepherds were needed to look after the flocks. Typically, groups of three men were responsible for 1,500 to 2,000 sheep. At night they were brought into a fold; one of the men, the watchman, had the job of stopping them straying and protecting them from attack by dingoes. Soon after sunrise, the other two set off in different directions with half the sheep each, slowly moving them along as they grazed, before returning to the fold at sunset. The whole group moved to fresh pasture every few days.

Usual practice was to wash the sheep before summer shearing. On Yarralumla they were first washed with hot water and soap, then driven into the Molonglo River, where water pouring from a sluice in a dam wall finished the job. They were shorn as soon as they were dry. In his January 1840 letter to Mowle describing conditions after the rain, Murray, clearly pleased with the way things were going, wrote,

For the last 2 months we have all, men, bullocks, horses, dogs etc, been busy haymaking, and now we are, except the bullocks and horses, equally busy sheep washing and shearing. We are in the water morning till night just as if we were amphibious.

Jerry first appeared in the Murray correspondence in July 1840. Mowle was away at the time, looking after St Omer, the property – near Braidwood, fifty miles east of Yarralumla – of his uncle, who had just died. Terence Murray was also away. His brother, Dr James Murray, who had bought a nearby station, Woden, in 1837, was at Yarralumla.

Apparently, James had sent a messenger to Mowle asking him to send farm produce from St Omer to stock the Yarralumla larder, and Mowle had despatched potatoes, four cases of pork and thirty-four hams. We learn from James’ letter of thanks that Jerry received the load. ‘Lehane detained your men in order to send back some seed-oats,’ he wrote, ‘which he now finds he cannot spare in consequence of having only a sufficiency for Yarrowlumla (the original spelling used in all the correspondence).’ This suggests that Jerry had moved straight into a position of responsibility on the station.

The next reference to him is in a letter from Terence Murray to Mowle, who was again supervising operations at Yarralumla, in May 1841. Murray wrote from Goulburn on his way to Sydney to give evidence to a commission of inquiry into immigration; he was concerned about a shortage of people willing to work as shepherds and the wages they were demanding, and favoured importing coolies from India. The return from Yarralumla for the March 1841 census – a total of 108 people, comprising eighty-seven Catholics, seventeen Episcopalians, three Presbyterians and one Jew – shows Murray had greatly expanded its labour force from the ‘fifty or sixty’ Mowle encountered when he arrived less than three years earlier.

Murray told Mowle, among much else related to the running of the property, that ‘I wish you to make it part of your daily business to see that Jerry has at least six ploughs at work.’ He wanted to put sufficient grain in store to last a few years. ‘You are aware of the great additional expense to which I am put this year by maintaining so large an agricultural establishment,’ he wrote. He thought ‘the central part of the old paddock where the heavy crop of hay was last year’ should produce good wheat. ‘Will you go over there and see how it looks, and take Jerry with you. If it be not too foul tell him to sow it with wheat. The horse team which I wish to see ploughing might be employed at it.’

In a letter from Sydney the following August, Murray advised Mowle on lines of command on his properties. ‘You must make Lee [William Lee, an overseer based at Lake George] more attentive in reporting matters to you,’ he wrote.

It is his duty to do so and you should insist on his having no communication with Maurice [presumably another overseer] or Lehane, or only through you. It is better that you should do that than that I should interfere.

Murray wrote again from Sydney in early September. He told Mowle to insist that ‘due attention’ was paid to lambing and remarked that he was glad to hear ‘that affairs have prospered with you in love’. This related to Mowle’s courting of his future wife Mary, daughter of Dr Thomas Wilson of Braidwood Farm, not far from St Omer. ‘We shall discuss this subject over a jovial bottle when I go home and I would give a great deal to be with you now. I want Lehane to ride with you to Braidwood.’

In another letter twelve days later, Murray told Mowle he was glad to see arrangements for the lambing were successful: ‘I highly approve of your making Jerry as useful as possible in attending to the sheep.’ Less pleasing news must have arrived shortly afterwards because Murray wrote again five days later on the same subject:

I am sorry that the lambing is not going all well – pray on no account let it be neglected but everything else give place to it. The splitters, fencers, carpenters and blacksmith should all become shepherds and watchmen while it lasts. Let all hands on the establishment be turned out for that purpose and this alone. Tell this to Lee and Jerry, and let each of them have a certain number of flocks to attend to.

He added that wages should be withheld from anyone who was negligent concerning the lambing.

Murray returned to Yarralumla in late September 1841 and spent most of his time there for the next year and a half. Mowle’s recollections from old age were again rosy:

The years 1841–42 and the major part of 1843 were passed with the usual routine farm and pastoral occupations, that was travelling to the mountains, sleeping out at times in the snow, or finding shelter in a hut through which it and rain found their way – riding round to stations to see the sheep and counting them out from the folds, giving out rations, in the water washing or looking after the men washing sheep – at the shed folding fleeces, galloping after cattle and horses – riding or driving tandem or four-in-hand with my best loved friend…

As Murray and Mowle were in the same place, there is a long gap in their correspondence and so, unfortunately, in references to Jerry. He must have taken some leave from