John Williamson

Story

I don’t know if it is true or not, but Dad used to say our family came to Australia on the toss of a coin: ‘heads’ we go to Australia, ‘tails’ we go to Canada. And to Australia we went – in July 1926 on the ship ‘Euripedes’.

At the time we were living in the small Scottish mining town of Douglas Water, where my father Robert Williamson worked in the coal mines, like his father before him. My mother Anne had married Dad on 10 July 1914 when she was 18 and he was 23 years old. Mum’s family lived around Douglas Water and were farmers.

1926 was a bad year in Scotland because of the General Strike which resulted in much poverty and suffering, so Mum and Dad decided to immigreate to give us a better chance of life. We sold our house in Douglas Water and made preparations to sail for Australia, spending two weeks in Lanark with our grandparents prior to our departure. Dad’s cousin Peter Ferguson had nominated us out to Australia and we came out as assisted migrants.

Finally our departure day arrived and we caught a train to Liverpool to board the ship ‘Euripedes’. We were quite a large family with seven children (Babs, myself, Joyce, Bill, Matthew, Nan and Moira) and Mum got to share a cabin with all of us while Dad was at the other end of the ship sharing a cabin with three men. Apparently Dad had a great time socialising with the other men on board and we children had much adventure, but I doubt that Mum did!

I had my ninth birthday on the ship and the crew dressed me up as an Aussie swagman for a fancy dress party. I had no idea what an Aussie swagman was, but there I was in my hat with corks hanging from the brim, bowyangs on my trousers and a swag on my back. I won first prize. Little did I realise that by the time I was 18, unemployment would be so bad that I would nearly become a swaggie!

We arrived in Albany, Western Australia, in August 1926 and journeyed to Perth by train. After reaching Perth we had another day-long train journey to Collie, then we were all transported by horse and buggy to Peter and Sarah Ferguson’s home at Collie-Cardiff, near the Cardiff coal mine. We stayed there for awhile, although it was a bit of a crush and quite primitive living, certainly not what we were used to in Scotland.

Poor Mum, it was a far cry from the cool, green landscapes of Scotland. The little dusty coal town in the middle of the Australian bush had little in common with the Scottish forests and misty highlands. There were never-ending acres of bushland, with the jarrah, redgum, whitegum and blackboy trees and the hot, dry Australian climate to contend with.

We did not stay at Cardiff long as Dad started work at Lyall’s Mill, a timber mill seven miles from Collie, and we lived in a little timber cottage in a row of similar cottages provided for the mill workers. Later we left Lyall’s Mill when Dad got work at the newly opened Stockton coal mine in the late 1920s, near Shotts which was about eight miles from Collie. We moved to an area called Five Acres, situated between Shotts and Cardiff, then later moved into the Shotts township into the former school master’s house, which meant we were right next to the school.

Mum kept on having children: Bob 1928, Harry 1929, Rose 1931 and Don 1933, making us a family of 11 children, I was heartily sick of having babies around all the time, but I never gave a thought for poor Mum who seemed either eternally pregnant or with a baby on her knee. It must have been hell for her and, of course, a lot of the work fell on the older girls which was not very fair. Because there were so many of us we had two sittings for meals, the little ones were fed first and then the older ones. Mum did a great deal of cooking on a wood stove, great trays of scones, bread and piles of Scottish potato cakes made on top of the stove.

Our playground was the bush surrounding Shotts. We would shoot rabbits and kangaroos and sell their skins. I also made money from selling honey from the bee hives I robbed. Wild horses (brumbies) were present in big mobs so we caught them and broke them in. Water was always a problem and in the summer, when our tanks ran dry, I had to carry water from Ryan’s Well with a yoke across my shoulders and a bucket either side. The river was about three miles from our home, even on the hottest days we would walk through the bush and cut across the paddocks to swim in the pools, often staying there all day.

< Back to the Stories