The £10 pom - great adventures of great aunt
Patricia Fowles has a life story that begs to fill the pages of a book. After a very English childhood in the years either side of World War II, she sailed solo to Australia, to work on a stark sheep station miles from civilization...
Overcoming huge hurdles, she eventually built a new life, only to lose it all in a devastating fire. This coming January, she will blow out eighty candles, surrounded by four children, ten grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. I thought this milestone an appropriate time to look back on her life, and the legacy she has given to her adopted homeland. Aside from the main character in this, her (highly condensed) life story, she is also my Great-Aunt.
Tricia's Australian father, Dudley, was born in Gayndah, the citrus capital of Queensland, Australia, in 1894. He joined the 13th Light Horse Infantry in 1914 and sailed first to Egypt and then onto France for the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Her English mother, Winifred Edith Gwyn, known to everyone as Freda, met Dudley at the height of World War I.
They met through friends on one of his leave breaks from Northern France, and, when he returned to Australia in 1919, Freda accompanied him to see if she liked Australia enough to stay. She declared most definitely not, and Dudley followed her back to England. They were married at St. Marks Church in Surrey in the bitter February of 1923. Freda's father Harry Gwyn had purchased Cray Hall, a white Georgian manor house set in 22 acres in Kent, as a wedding present for £3000. Dudley set up a successful poultry farm.
Tricia was born on January 4th 1928, in the midst of a swirling snowstorm. She joined three-year-old Peter, my grandfather, and a full quota of staff. Eva, the much loved, long serving housemaid, stayed at Cray Hall for 46 years. Baby Nurse Floorie Watson was charged with looking after Peter and newborn Tricia. Nursemaid Rose Balcom had a short tenure when the children were older, until her departure one morning after a raging Tricia declared her a fool as she tried to tame her wild blonde curls. There was also a gardener and a chauffeur, Mr Papper. Tricia was christened on St. Valentines Day of 1928, and was such a chubby baby that the milk company Cow & Gate wanted her photo to appear on their advertising, but Freda refused.
When World War II hit in 1939, bringing with it the Battle of Britain, Tricia was evacuated to boarding school in Devon, where she stayed for five years until the War ended in 1945. She returned to a severely damaged Cray Hall, and went on to Art school in Bromley, Kent, working there for a time after she had finished studying.
With all the optimism and new opportunities the post War years brought, 24 year old Tricia decided to go to Australia on a working holiday in 1952, exactly as I did, at the same age, last year. As day rolled into night onboard my £700 Qantas flight, 36,000 feet above sea level, I thought of Tricia and how different her journey to the same destination must have been.
She sailed aboard HMS Otranto via the Suez Canal, a six-week voyage that cost around £10. What a different country Australia has become in the fifty-four years between our visits. Now, the other side of the world is only a day away. I was venturing on a well-trodden post university pilgrimage to a developed land much like my own in amenities and opportunities. Tricia was venturing into the unknown.
She arrived on the shores of Perth in Western Australia, then travelling onto Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and finally Brisbane. Tricia was desperate to see the real outback that her father had talked about with so much fondness. She was introduced to a young couple, Bill and Barb Page, and went to work for them as a nanny to their baby daughter, on their remote sheep station in Western Queensland. More than 100 miles from the nearest big town of Cunnamulla, the station was isolated and primitive, with 26 bolted gates between the farm and freedom, to prevent the livestock escaping.
Once a week a truck would come to deliver letters and groceries. There was only a radiotelephone and an airstrip for the flying doctor. New Year's Eve dawned, and Bill and Barb drove to a party some distance away, leaving Tricia alone with the small baby. She did not know how to operate the radiophone, wood stove, kerosene fridge or electricity generator, and, when the rain started lashing against the windows, the Page's were unable to navigate the dirt tracks to return home. The roads remained impassable for 3 days until the rain stopped.
The bright spots were the frequent parties held in Cunnamulla. People would come from miles around to attend one of the Batchelor and Spinsters Balls, and Tricia met her future husband at one in 1953. Peter Fowles was working on a neighbouring sheep property as a Jackaroo, a trainee stockman. Peter stayed in constant contact with Tricia for the remainder of her stay in Queensland. She returned briefly to England in 1954, but feeling bereft, boarded the maiden voyage of The Southern Cross the following year, sailing via the West Indies and then through the Panama Canal, Fiji, New Zealand and into Brisbane.
The trip took one month, and on reaching Australia, she married her Jackaroo at St. Augustine's Church in Hamilton, Brisbane. Ten days later the newlyweds travelled by train to Longreach in Queensland, where Peter had a job arranged as an overseer on Daar River Downs, a sheep property. They lived in a lovely old stone cottage in the grounds of the main homestead, and their daughter Jennifer was born in August 1956. Dudley and Freda arrived from England to visit the young family. Life was sweet.
Peter soon took another job, managing a 56,000-acre property in Ashling, Queensland, again 100 miles from the nearest big town. The 5000 sheep and 700 cattle roamed the arid land, tramping for miles in search of water when a severe drought meant not a drop of rain for 18 months. The only connection Tricia had with the outside world was a party line, a shared phone line with the neighbouring property.
She was pregnant with her second child, and the nearest doctor and nurse were over fifty miles away, so she flew to Brisbane with Jennifer to give birth to Duncan over Christmas 1959, whilst Peter stayed behind to manage the land. Third child Anne was born following a move to Ashgrove in Brisbane, in October 1961.
By this time, Tricia had not been back to the UK for nine years, so, in 1962, whilst pregnant with her fourth child, she took her three young children back to her homeland for a short holiday. Peter stayed in Australia.
On their return from England, Peter's father Doctor Fowles bought them a partnership in the Massey Ferguson Farm Machinery business in Boonah, a one hours drive from Brisbane. Tricia was thrilled at the thought of civilization at last. Her last child, Christopher, was born in February 1963. Tricia felt at home in Boonah, and truly settled in Australia for the first time. They worked hard to make the house into a family home, and they made friends, something Tricia had not been able to do on the remote sheep stations. One morning in 1968, Tricia was at a friend's house with the children and saw flames and smoke rising in the distance. It was their home, burnt to the ground, and nothing was salvageable. They had to start all over again.
1971 did its best to break Tricia's spirit. Freda died, and Dudley suffered a stroke three months later. Husband Peter disappeared over Christmas and did not return home, rarely to be heard from again, so Tricia was left with four children to bring up single-handedly. She saw her father for the last time, on a trip to England in September 1979, and he died in November of that same year. When moving so far from home, visits tend to focus around births, deaths and weddings. Tricia's next trip home was for the wedding of my parents, Alison and Kim, in a Kent country church on a rainy May day in 1981.
Tricia became a naturalized Australian citizen in 1996. Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister, decreed that all people with foreign passports must become Australian citizens. Tricia had a dual Passport, as her father was Australian. Despite much hardship and crippling homesickness, there have been many wonderful times too, and, looking back over her life, she has no regrets about making the move.
She carved out a life for her family, and believed the opportunities Australia could offer were greater than in England. She still lives in Boonah today, but has travelled around much of Europe, India, New Zealand, and Fiji.
She has been an active Red Cross worker for 43 years, and has received two long service medals, and has a large network of friends. Today, Australia is a world apart from what it was in 1952. The world is so much smaller, and Australia is no longer so isolated. The dawn of the Internet has made contacting distant family and friends a wholly different proposition.
In every girl is the woman she will become, and in every woman is the girl she used to be. There is still that girl chasing chickens around Cray Hall, and there is still that young woman setting sail for the biggest adventure of her life.
There is still that mother who lost everything, and gained so much more, and there is still a piece of Tricia that is forever England.
Picture of HMS Otranto