Marooned By An Inland Sea

PART 2 of the  Saga of Henrietta Foott
Henrietta and James Foott must have begun 1864 full of optimism. Assisted by Aboriginal people, they had hewn out a station just south of Bourke that was a far cry from their early life half a world away. In Ireland, James had dined on Queen Anne plates imported from China, using silverware etched with his family crest. Henrietta’s distinguished family in Scotland had guaranteed her a good education.
 
James had squandered his inheritance and sailed to Australia with Henrietta in 1853 looking for a fresh start. Their great grand-daughter Bethia pictured James’ pioneering toil. “ … he dug with his spade, and cut with his axe. His land cleared, his saplings split, his bark stripped, his homestead built, it was not enough that he bought and bred and fed and watered his sheep. He worked hard, and thought that his hands had brought a life of security for his wife and for his children.”
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The  Darling in flood, sketch by Henrietta Foott

 There was cause for his optimism. In 1864, paddle steamers had turned the Darling into a 1500 km super-highway connecting the inland wool port of Bourke to Murray River ports Echuca in Victoria and Morgan in South Australia and beyond that, to the woollen mills of Europe. Banks scented great commercial interest as energetic land sales followed the surveying of the town and along the river frontages.
 
In Melbourne, the Bogan River Company had a spectacular launch promising massive returns from 2 million acres of stations with 443 miles of river frontages along the Darling, Warrego and Cuttaburra. They estimated the wool clip from 750,000 sheep shipped down river from Bourke to Port Victor and away to England would return over a hundred thousand pounds ($2M today) after one year. (Bendigo Advertiser Thu Nov 24 1864)
 
But in February, news that a deluge had filled upstream tributaries sent a wave of fear across the floodplains of the Darling. When the eastern mail route was cut off, earth levees were thrown up round buildings and townspeople evacuated to Mt Oxley.  By early March, three feet of water filled the town.
 
Downriver, Henrietta tracked the flood’s progress. “Still our noble river rose and became bank high, the creeks filled and access to and from the station was very difficult. The sheep were sent off … with shepherds to the back country.” The Footts realised they were in serious danger when the nearby aboriginal community packed up their piccaninnies, dogs, opossum rugs, and war weapons for a retreat to Mt Gundabooka.
 
When the Foott’s cookhouse was cut off from the homestead, their Aboriginal worker Combo ferried the eight adults and four children to a sandhill 500m away, skilfully manoeuvring the boat through the torrent flowing swiftly through trees and over fences. Only then, he set off with his wife in his canoe for the gidgee country.
 
By contrast, two young workers took the Foott’s boat promising to return with supplies, but instead, they abandoned the family, robbed the station and headed away to dry country. Henrietta shamed them by telling the story of a German shepherd who took refuge in a tree barely a mile from them, where he remained without food for days until he was rescued by an Aboriginal passing in his canoe. “When brought in he was weak in the extreme; but with care, soon recovered.”
 
The water continued to rise as the family pitched tents on separate islands connected by planks. The twelve refugees watched anxiously for the missing men and were relieved to hear the splash of oars signalling the arrival of a concerned neighbour in a skiff who had come searching for them, bringing rations.
 
The marooned family were not alone in the seven weeks on their island, surrounded by turbulent flood waters. A swarm of reptiles joined them and one morning the cook dispatched a large brown snake that wrapped itself around the lid of the teapot. They lived on a dwindling supply of flour and sugar plus the pigeons knocked down by a little Aboriginal boy with a throwing stick.
 
Henrietta described warfare with the ferocious mosquitos, whose onslaught at sunset made life unbearable. “We lit large fires every night at the entrance of our tents, and the smoke stunned those troublesome little insects, enabling us to have an hour or two of respite; but the weather was warm and damp and the fires so near us made the air very oppressive.”
 
But as ever, Henrietta helped her family pass their exile, “not altogether unpleasantly. The young people had some of their favourite books with them and reading and needlework formed the chief occupations of the day.” The stout clan mother recorded their return home as being “a gala day.”
 
Nevertheless, the sight of the ravaged homestead they had laboured so hard to carve from the bush, was devastating. Their garden was washed away, mud thick through the cottage, debris everywhere, fences gone. The magnitude of the flood can be judged by the report that the Ngemba and Barkindji tribes said they had never seen the river so high. Somewhere between 50-60,000 sheep were lost, half the houses and three of the five hotels in town were wrecked.
 
Henrietta recalled later, “From our memories the flood of 1864 can never be erased. Many a strange adventure could we relate, many a hairbreadth escape, many a daring act of bravery and endurance on the part of those we love.” No doubt her husband James was in her mind, because as his grand- daughter said cryptically, “ … the elements beat him. That flood ruined him. He lost his land. He became ill. He died.”
 
Following the flood, the Footts moved into the growing port of Bourke where Henrietta’s pastoral spirit found fresh impetus. Having watched her dying neighbour struggle to forgive her alcoholic husband she wrote, “How much trouble and grief would be saved by women cultivating a gentle, quiet spirit, slow to anger, patient, and womanly. It may sometimes prove very difficult, but in the end must bring its own reward; and it would be well for us all to have the 13th chapter of the Ist Corinthians - that beautiful one on charity - engraved on our hearts.”
 
She did.
 
The energetic Scotswoman began a Sunday School for children and greeted the arriving ministers with a wide vision. “Now their field for labour is extensive; the district is large, and, as valuable copper mines have been recently discovered in the neighbourhood, the population must increase. Missionaries, too, are much wanted for the distant parts of the country where settlers, and those employed by them, seldom hear the Gospel preached.”
 
As she moved to Sydney after her much-loved James had died in 1873, she urged families in distant Europe not to neglect loved ones struggling on the frontier, but to write assuring them of love and prayers. In the city she conducted a school. Poet Mary Gilmore recalled her as one of Australia’s earliest women authors and an accomplished artist who made an extensive study of Australian flora.
 
Henrietta passed away at 94 in September 1916 at Woollahra in Sydney and was buried quietly in Waverley Cemetery. A few years later in the same ground, alcoholic Henry Lawson was buried with all the pomp of a full state funeral. He’d become famous writing brilliantly about the grim hardships of the bush, particularly of his eight-month experience around Bourke.
 
Henrietta, veteran of ten years of testing times in the same district, humbly closed her 1873 memoir Sketches of Life in the Bush on a different note. “If these imperfect sketches should prove of use to a few individuals and teach them the lesson of gratefulness to the Giver of all goodness, and contentment with the lot He has chosen for them, then shall the writer feel glad that her mite (ed. small coin) has not been offered in vain.”
 
 
The Women of the West.
 
They left the vine-wreathed cottage and the mansion on the hill,
The houses in the busy streets where life is never still,
The pleasures of the city, and the friends they cherished best:
For love they faced the wilderness - the Women of the West.
 
The wide bush holds the secrets of their longing and desires,
When the white stars in reverence light their holy altar fires,
And silence, like the touch of God, sinks deep into the breast
Perchance He hears and understands the Women of the West.
.
                                                                              George Essex Evans