My Pioneering Family

History was my favourite subject at school. Explorers, wars, the English Empire, how I soaked it up. I learned of squatters, bush rangers, pioneers, the Eureka stockade and selector farmers. There was, in Maclean, a monument (it may have been a bridge but memory fails) to the pioneers. But there was a connection I never made till many years later. I would have been in my late forties, if not fifties, before it dawned on me that my own forbears were part of this history.

John Marsh and Mary Anne Parkinson were married in Gedney Marsh, Lincolnshire, before immigrating to Australia. In the early 1860s they took up a selection of land at Palmers Channel. The area, I believe, was originally known as Townsend. The town of Maclean was laid out and officially named in 1862, the site being known as Rocky Mouth in the 1850s.

I have often wondered how hard it must have been to clear the land and plant those early crops, but it may not as been as hard as I have thought. The Lower Clarence was opened up in the 1830s by cedar cutters, so the trees at least may have been removed before the land was available for selection. Not that that would have made life easy as the stumps would have remained and there would have been some regrowth. All that clearing done with hand tools, burning, and the use of horses – and possibly oxen.

My forebears were mainly Anglo-Celtic. Life in this country would have been vastly different to what they had left behind. I remember my Aunty Alma, maiden name McLennan, telling me that her grandmother broke down and cried one day, asking her husband how he could have brought her to such a God-forsaken place as Grafton.

My great-grandmother, Ellen Searle (Mum’s side) was the first white child born on Esk Island on the Lower Clarence, close to Iluka. Here the family had to clear the bush to eke out a living on their selection.

Sugar cane came to the Clarence River around 1862. In those early days there a number of small mills on the River. John Marsh operated the first sugar mill on Palmers Channel. I don’t know how long the mill operated as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company Limited (CSR) began operating on the Clarence in the early 1870s. Despite some early opposition from small mill operators if eventually became to sole mill operator on the Clarence, Richmond and Tweed rivers. Harwood sugar mill remains the oldest continuous operating sugar mill in Australia since it commenced in 1874.

In 1974 CSR decided to close the three mills on the Northern Rivers. This would have had a devastating effect on the economy of the region. Don Day, who married Dad’s cousin Marie Davis, was at the time the local Member of Parliament in the NSW Legislative Assembly and Minister for Decentralisation in the Wran Labor Government. Don worked hard to save the sugar industry and, largely as a result of his efforts, the farmers on the three rivers established a cooperative that kept the mills in business.

There was a dark side to the sugar industry, the use of what were known as Kanaka labourers. The term today is largely seen as pejorative. The original Kanakas were Hawaiian and therefore Polynesian. Most Australian Kanakas were Melanesian from places such as the Solomon Islands, Tonga, the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and other South Sea Islands. Although legally classed as indentured labourers they were little more than slaves, with some being kidnapped and brought to Australia. They provided a cheap source of labour for the Australian sugar industry at a time it was struggling to compete with overseas producers. While they may have been used more extensively in Queensland than Northern NSW, Mum recalls South Sea Islander cane cutters on Harwood Island. These were more than likely descendants of the original South Sea Island labourers and therefore paid a better wage as the practice ceased in the early 1900s, well before Mum was born.

My great-great grandfather, William Orr, had arrived on the Clarence from Toronto, Canada, before October 1867 when he married Sarah Avis Hutchins. He was, according to family history, an engineer on the first steam ship to enter Sydney Harbour, though I doubt the veracity of the claim. In 1882 the Orr family moved to Fiji for a few years where William managed a sugar plantation. On their return to Australia William purchased a farm on Palmers Island. Dad told me once that William was the first to take horses to Fiji, but again, that may have been an embellishment of the fact that he did take two draught horses with him.

Some years back I visited the Maclean Historical Society’s museum. In one display Albert Marsh, my great-grandfather, was named as a pioneer of the millet industry on the Clarence. Joe Marsh, my grandfather, had a reputation for supplying the best brooms in the district and I had known that he had worked in a broom factory operated by his father on the Channel. I had always assumed that this was a skill that had been brought to Australia by John Marsh, but my Dad’s cousin Alvin told me one day this was not the case. It was a skill Albert and his sons had learnt in this country.

There was a real skill in broom production. Pa always had a paddock dedicated to the growing of broom millet. The millet was harvested and it had to be dried. I remember the millet hanging in the barn to dry when it was not possible to dry it outside. It was then a matter of sorting the millet, carefully selecting the right piece for the right place in the broom.

In reality millet was terrible stuff. I didn’t have to work with it for long before I began to itch like crazy.

Pa would soak the millet selected for the broom in water before shaping it around the handle in a press. There he would sew it together before painting the handle. This was a relatively simple task. He had a piece of tyre rubber which he dipped in paint and then ran the rubber up the length of the handle as it was slowly rotated. Simple but effective, leaving a pleasing design on the handle.

Joe was once approached to set up a broom factory in Lismore but he declined the offer. Instead, he recommended his brother Bertie who, at the time, was living in a dirt floored hut. Bertie took the offer and never looked back.

Bertie once spent a night or two in gaol for a matter of civil disobedience. The government insisted that cattle be dipped in a solution of arsenic to kill cattle ticks. Many of the farmers objected to the practice as they considered it cruel. The solution burnt the cow’s udders. Tick inspectors were appointed to examine the cattle for ticks and ensure compliance with the law. The farmers accused the inspectors of carrying ticks in match boxes, then claiming to find these on the cattle as a precursor to forcing the farmers to dip them. Bertie refused to comply.

Years later, when the community became more environmentally aware, these cattle dip sites were declared contaminated owing to the level of chemicals in the soil. The farmers, who had been forced to build the dips, were then left to meet the cost of decontamination.

All my great-grandparents were born in Australia as it has become known. I have but glimpses of their stories, some recorded by others, others recollections of stories told by my parents and grandparents. As time passes I may learn more. I may never know why they came to these shores but I am thankful that they did. And I am thankful for the hardship they endured, their ingenuity and hard work that helped build the nation we have inherited.