Farm, fire, frogs

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks (2020)

Week 15 | Fire

Stewart, Lilian, Jack, Bob and Jean McKinlay

Over the past summer, nearly every part of Australia was impacted by extreme bushfires, which indiscriminately took lives and destroyed homes, livelihoods, and tens of thousands of acres of farmland and native forests.   Fire has been an ever-present threat in Australia, and throughout the period of European settlement lives have been altered and fortunes changed as a result of fire, including those of my great-grand-uncle Stewart McKinlay (1887-1959).

Stewart,  grew up in Rockhampton and Emu Park in Central Queensland and commenced his working life first as a teacher and then in a series of Queensland public service positions in Brisbane and Mt Morgan.  His role as the Clerk of Petty Sessions in Mt Morgan was multi-faceted and extremely busy and placed him under a lot of pressure.  He was advised to give it up and purchase a farm to reduce stress.

So, in 1921 he purchased a farm in Tanawha, near Buderim, on the Sunshine Coast and moved with wife Lillian (nee Bowser), and children Bob, Jack and Jean. His daughter Jean was three years old at the time but in her late eighties had very clear memories of the property.  She told of five acres of pineapples, bananas and strawberries and one cow.  She described a creek running through the bottom of the property that had a wooden bridge across it and opened out into Palm Grove, an area of lots of palm trees where the creek spread out across a sandy base, only about 6 inches deep and crystal clear.  She recalled the stump of a large gum tree that she would sit on while her father milked the cow.  There was a packing shed where the bananas were boxed for market.  And a house high on stumps nearer to the road, with one or two bedrooms, a kitchen where Jean and her older brothers Bob and Jack bathed in a galvanised tub, and a veranda along the front.  Much of the property consisted of thick forest – “absolutely thick forest, jam packed together” (Jean McKinlay 2009).

Unfortunately, the family’s life in this idyllic locale and Stewart’s time as a farmer was to be short-lived.  In March 1923, the family set off for Brisbane (60 miles to the south) in the horse and sulky, possibly for the birthday of grandma or an aunt.  Upon their return, they were greeted with devastation.  A bushfire had been through destroying everything except the packing shed.  Despite the property having been insured, the family walked away from the farm.  They lived in a corrugated iron shed belonging to friends in Nudgee until Stewart found a job and was able to build a new home for the family on Scott Street in Northgate, which they moved into in 1924.

Stewart, as a husband and father, would likely have borne the weight of responsibility for overcoming this blow and creating another new life for his family, but perhaps also feeling thankful that the family had been away at the time of the fire and only possessions, not lives, were lost.  For Jean, who was only a toddler at the time, she remembered the fire as the reason she lived in a tin shed with a dirt floor and frogs that created music in the kitchen jumping between the saucepans that hung from nails on the wall and the explanation for why there are no baby photos of her.

[Story based on memories of Jean Mitchell (nee McKinlay) and newspaper reports.]