A TASMANIAN GIRLHOOD - A MEMOIR BY ELEANORA LELLO DANIEL

Long before anyone else in the Lello family began to take an interest in family history, Eleanora, the oldest daughter of Bessie and Harry Lello, began to note down her recollections of the stories her parents had told her. She was uniquely placed to be able to do this, as the oldest daughter, and often at home sharing household duties with her mother. This memoir represents the flowering of that interest. She had the foresight to recognise that her descendants would want to know how she and her family lived.

The following memoir was part written down by Eleanora herself, and part dictated to her daughter Deirdre Baker, who was living close by in Melbourne. Deirdre then transcribed it, edited it and sent it to her sister Gwyneth in England. There it was produced as a slim perfect-bound volume. Three hundred copies were printed and published at Gwyneth's expense. Although sales were sluggish, none now remain.

The section on Eleanora's ancestry reflects both her parents' reluctance to talk about their families' ancestry and their own ignorance. For the most complete and validated ancestry currently available of the Lello family, and of Eleanora's maternal free settler and convict ancestry (Johnston, Brown and Baker), see other pages on this web site. The story will change – there are at least two others researching the Lello ancestry who will be recording their own findings.

I was born just within the life-time of Queen Victoria, on 12 February 1901, three years after my brother Tom. I was named Eleanora after my father's mother, Eleanora Armstrong-Crockett, but was called Nell at home. My mother said I nearly cost her life, as I was jaundiced and we both barely survived, since nothing much was known about blood and its various qualities. My mother's first child had died in infancy and a second was stillborn. I was the second of seven children born to my parents, Thomas Henry Lello from a Shropshire family and Elizabeth Johnstone of Scottish Tasmanian stock.

My father, who was always called Harry by the family, had first known Mother when she was a "slip of a girl" aged seventeen and eleven years his junior. She said she would have preferred a redheaded youth but had to marry Dad to get rid of him! They were married in the little church at Sidmouth in the Beaconsfield area, where they both lived at the time. This was a gold area and no doubt Father was hoping to make his fortune, but he never did! I am not sure how Father came out to remote Tasmania from the lovely mountain town of Ludlow, where his family lived. I often wonder too why he did not go back there, where no doubt he would have had an easier life, but I think he was probably too proud and stubborn to admit failure earlier in his life. Later, the rain forest area had a fascination for him and he was held by his family obligations.

I believe that my father came out to Australia at the age of fifteen, as a lad small for his age. He mentioned climbing the rigging on his "beloved Antiope", but we cannot find any record of his name on the passenger lists of the time (around 1881) so I suspect he may have stowed away on the boat for the six-month trip. He also talked to me about the ship calling in at Capetown and showed me a snapshot of the Table Mountain, saying he would have liked to have been a sheep farmer in South Africa. He had come to join three of his young uncles, George, John and Charles Lello, who had already come out to Australia - perhaps as part of that band of "remittance men" sent 'Down under' because they had caused embarrassment to their families, or perhaps just for the adventure or to make their fortunes from gold! Many of these young men were scions of gentry or aristocratic families and were paid a good allowance to stay out here, where they congregated sociably and formed orchestras, generally having a good time.

Dad's brother George also came out at the age of fifteen to join his male relatives in the Frankford area of Tasmania, where they took up land grants. My father's parents generously sent him musical instruments of various types, and he was quite musical, as well as artistic and intelligent. Dad may have been intended to be a musician or artist, for I remember him often playing the violin, cello. double bass and piano. We listened with special delight to him playing the banjo - until hard work had coarsened and stiffened his hands, so he gradually stopped playing.

One of Father's pleasures was to play in local musical groups and I remember him trotting off in high good humour, with his instrument strapped to his back, to walk the mile or so to the practice in the Queenstown concert hall. Sometimes we went to the concerts, but found the effort of listening too hard.

I always felt that my father was more distant and strict with me, because he was not at home when I was born. In fact, he did not come home until I was about three months old, as he was looking for work at that time.

When I was quite tiny, a mere baby, I would ask Father what he was doing. It was usually some building job, extending the house as his family grew larger. As he was aware that I well knew what he was doing and was only asking questions to be sociable, he often said, "I'm making a wingwong for a goose's bridle." I of course didn't know what a goose was like, and a bridle was also a mystery! As for a "wingwong"!

Father was bearded and had a handsome moustache. He was not a tall man and when Edie and I were older, Mum often said to us, "Dress yourselves up and go up the street with your father. He loves showing off his daughters." By this time I was about 5 ft. 8 inches tall and Edie was much shorter, nearer Dad's height.

My mother Elizabeth was known as Bess. I have never met anyone like my mother. She had had only six months' schooling, as she was considered too delicate when young. I remember some of her stories of her childhood in Flowery Gully. She said she used to creep under her father's bed to hide and to drink his cod liver oil! When married she weighed only six or seven stone but after years of married life, she followed the Johnstone family style of 13 to 16 stone in weight!

Mother was a clever woman, and had the biggest store of axioms and proverbs ever heard. She was also very practical and had brought many of the Queenstown babies into the world, being known locally as a nurse, a wonderful cook and a needle woman.

My mother had very good health and was never known to have a day's illness or even to have lain on her bed. One day however she succumbed to a bad attack of measles. When the twins, Jess and Jean, came home from school, after the usual "Where's Mummy?” they walked into her bedroom, looked all around and even under the bed, before finally asking "Where's the baby?" Like many children, I thought at first that babies were brought by the doctor in his black bag. Of course they could not grow under a gooseberry bush or a cabbage plant! That thought was too silly to entertain. Gradually I came to realise that babies grew in mothers' tummies, but how did they get out? My next thought was that they must come out through a hole in mother's tummy and that was why she had to stay in bed for two weeks, to let the hole heal up. For a long while that idea satisfied me and settled my curiosity. At last when we were about ten years old, we were told the truth, but we still thought that fathers apparently had no part to play in all this. We even thought for a time that just to kiss a boy could give you a baby!

Mother's fourth baby was stillborn. Then it was the custom to bury such babies in a special part of the cemetery. Six small children were chosen to carry the wee coffin, harnessed by lengths of ribbon around their shoulders. Females did not attend funerals at any time and of course being a sister I wasn't allowed to be one of the children to carry the coffin. This was a great disappointment to me.

When I was about three, I saw to my amazement my mother was crying. She was scrubbing socks on a wooden washboard, over a tub of hot water, with her tears falling into the water beneath. She told me that she had received a letter, with the news that her mother had died. This surprised me greatly. I wondered how my mother could have a mother herself!

Mother once attended a difficult delivery, when a friend had at last conceived after a wait of ten or twelve years. The baby appeared to have been born dead, so the doctor turned his attention to the mother. Mum picked up the child, did mouth to mouth resuscitation and heard him let out a hearty bellow. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun, as my mother applied modern ideas eighty years ago! The mother of young Douglas often referred to him as "Mrs. Lello's baby"! Another time, there was a young woman who had contracted VD and was also pregnant. Her old adoptive mother begged Mum to help but mother was reluctant, knowing it would damage her reputation for future cases. Anyway, she finally went to the cottage and delivered the baby, which though frail and hardly alive survived. The child lived on for several years before it mercifully died. It was true that Mum lost several cases after that event, but later she was just as busy again.

My father moved from the Beaconsfield area to Queenstown to find work, around the time I was born. My mother was probably staying with her parents, in Flowery Gully near Beaconsfield, where they farmed and had dairy cattle. Father did not see me until I was about three months old; we moved to join him in a two-roomed shack in South Queenstown. At first there was not even a door and Dad fastened an old sack over the gap. Strangely, I remembered that sack, although I was so young and in my mind's eye, I could see it flapping in the wind.

Queenstown, as is well known, was primarily a copper mining town. The hills around were bare of trees, due to felling, and were extremely high and steep. Most of them were never climbed, because the whole slope could be set in motion to engulf the climber. The hills had a covering of blackish peat - ashes from previous bush fires, I think. Two or three times during my life there, bush fires set this peaty deposit on fire, making it glow throughout the night, until the next rainfall damped it down. Queenstown is well and truly within the rain forest area of western Tasmania and it could rain for forty days and nights. We survived! It was said that we had ducks' feet and indeed we had to ignore the rain. Fortunately there was no mud, as the ground had been washed free of soil by the rain and floods and we walked around on gravel.

Queenstown was at first just an ugly valley - a scarred place of dead black tree stumps, where no trace of greenery existed. The poisonous sulphur fumes from the smelters at the Mt.Lyell copper mine killed all growth; the trees were felled for the mine, the furnaces, for fuel and building the town.

We lived in a wooden house in South Queenstown, near the banks of the Queen River. As our family grew, my father built an extra bedroom for the boys, next to the wash-house. The small road along the back of the house was used by the night-soil carts and also by the Chinamen's carts as they came round regularly with fruit and vegetables. This was before the "White Australia" policy and the Chinese came and grew vegetables, using the night-soil, I heard, as was their wont in China. Some made their fortunes and returned to China. I was afraid of the men, because they always asked my mother if she would sell me to them!

After moving into the house, the first thing my father did was to put a fence around his land, which he had chosen because it was well down the valley away from the mine. He then dug up any tree stumps in the garden and set to work meticulously, as that was his nature, to make rectangular raised beds, built up with large round stones from the river bed, which made for perfect drainage. These beds were about four feet wide and allowed him to attend to the plants without treading on the soil.

When the wind blew from the northwest, the thick yellow fumes from the works came down and killed every blade of grass and tender growing thing. Dad would come in and say, "Sulphur's coming down, Bess. We must cover the seedlings." Often it was so bad that every young plant curled up and died, but there was one crop that did thrive. He had a row of scarlet runner beans growing practically down the length of the garden, against the fence. They flowered, if the sulphur didn't come down just at that particular time, and they fruited - to the admiration of all who passed by. Father composted every bit of waste and when we had "chooks", their droppings enriched the compost. People may say that there's no such thing as green fingers, but I'm not so sure! Often Dad would plant one row of peas and Mum would finish the bed. Her row thrived and grew more quickly than his, which had been planted with the greatest care and precision! She used to say that her seeds were just chucked in. Our contribution was to thin out the radishes, peas, beans and turnips secretly, at opportune moments, and Dad would turn a blind eye to our depredations, if they weren't too obvious!

We had no modern sanitary conveniences; our so-called toilet was the dunny or dunekin, consisting of a wooden seat with a nicely smoothed hole, set over a well-tarred pan provided by the weekly "night man". He collected the night soil from a small door placed at the back of the "dunny", replacing the pan with a clean well-tarred one. When coming home from a party or show, with an admirer or 'beau', we were sure to be embarrassed by meeting one of the night-carts rumbling along. And the odour! There was no toilet paper as such, so Dad carefully cut into squares the old "Daily Mail", sent regularly out from England, and hung the pieces with string through the corners. Someone had to accompany the younger children down the yard to the toilet, especially Donald who indulged in nightmares. Going outside in the pouring rain was a nuisance, so we used the old-fashioned enamel chamber pots, and the better-off folk used the pretty china ones which nowadays we see sold as ornaments or filled with flowers. We used to call these "po's", which I think was the French word and was therefore considered more polite!

In hot weather, we had no cool cellar in which to keep butter and milk or to set the jellies, so our inventive father dug a well into which seeped two or three feet of water. This water Dad considered would be from the nearby river and so would be contaminated, but it was quite cold. The well itself was about eight to ten feet deep, so it was necessary to keep it covered from the children and there was a system of ropes with which we let the food down to the water level. To store the food we used the universal kerosene tin, which was used for many purposes. The tins probably contained about six gallons of kerosene and after being well scrubbed, were used for holding honey which my mother bought from people who lived way out in the forest.

In the larger towns like Hobart and Launceston there was ice-making and firms delivered an ice block weekly. This was placed in the compartment at the top of the icebox and lasted for about a week. However in our far-west town there was no ice.

Despite the amount of rain that fell in Queenstown, most houses had no running water. In Queenstown only the better-off people had proper bedroom suites, with a washstand consisting of a marble top with jug and basin - often very beautiful china. We had to make do with plain enamel! In the kitchen and bathroom, only the "top brass" could afford piped water and flushing toilets. For most people, the house had its water tank, which collected water from the roof, channelled by a spout from the gutters. However, due to the sulphur deposits from the furnaces at Mt. Lyell, we could only allow water to run into the tank when the roof was clean. After heavy sulphur fogs and when the roof had had its periodical coating of thick black tar - necessary to prevent rusting of the corrugated iron - the down pipe was removed from the tank. Dad had a long-handled tar brush which helped him to paint the roof.

On the occasions when we ran out of water, Dad had to carry all our water from a spring on the mountainside which was about half a mile away. My father had devised a means of carrying two full buckets of water at a time from the spring which gave pure sweet water. He made a yoke, rather like the one oxen would carry when harnessed to a cart. It was carefully carved from a long piece of wood and fitted to go across the shoulders. With a cord holding the buckets, one from each end, Dad skilfully balanced the buckets using a kind of jog-trot such as he had seen the Chinamen use. He could easily carry the water without spilling a drop, but when I tried to copy him, the buckets joggled higgledy-piggledy, splashing water all over my feet! Needless to say we had to use this hard-gained water with the utmost care.

We had one bath a week in the wash-house, where the water was heated in the copper, the fire being fed by long straps of wood, which mother pushed in as they burned. On the weekly washing day, our clothing was laboriously scrubbed on a washboard or boiled in the copper.

When the useful Primus stove became known, of course we had to have one! This wonderful little invention saved my father hours of hard work in finding wood to burn in the kitchen stove. It was about ten inches across and fifteen inches high. The stove stood on the kitchen table and we could boil a kettle of water in no time, as well as heat irons for ironing clothes, two at a time, cleanly and quickly. Where there was no electricity, the Primus was a great boon. Only the homes of the Company staff had electricity for many years.

Lighting was done with candles and kerosene lamps. As time went on the lighting improved and we used more modern style lamps with paraffin or kerosene. We had to clean the wick mad polish well the "chimney", which was a plain glass cylinder to keep draughts out from the flame. Then there was a more or less beautiful lampshade. The candle sticks were old-fashioned ones, like saucers with handles and a cup-shape in the centre to hold the candle. Once while going to bed, I touched the curtain with the flame and up went the curtain in a blaze. Another time, I carried my comb and accidentally touched the flame with the celluloid, which melted and caught alight. Great was the rumpus thereof! Celluloid was the only plastic material available at that time and even men's shirt collars were made of this stiff material, detachable and fixed by a collar stud.

One of the essentials in our cool climate was a plentiful supply of wood for fires and cooking. My father had a long two-handled saw, which he periodically "set". To do this, he made two brackets and fixed them on the fence. The saw was secured on to these brackets. Then he moved along sharpening the teeth with a file and setting them, by twisting one to the left, the next to the right. Tom and I used to put logs on the wooden horse and do some sawing. I being shorter used to wobble the saw as I pushed it and my brother's complaints were frequent. "Keep the saw steady, Biddy. Don't make it bend!" Once the pieces of wood were sawn, I delighted in standing them on end and splitting them into usable lengths for our wood burning stove.

When Dad had a "long shift off" and it was fine, he used to take all the family up one of the least steep hills to get wood. We'd take a billy can of tea and sandwiches, and set off very excited, chattering like a crowd of magpies. There were my parents, Don, Allan, Tom, Edie and me. After a short walk to the bottom of the hill, we could see the "aerial" (the wire on which the cut wood was sent down to the valley) running up to the hilltop where it was very firmly fixed. Dad went up the hill first, carrying a hammer, six-inch nails and some sticks of explosive - gelignite I think. We all followed and had our lunch, before the exciting part of the day began! Dad would look for a great tree stump which would yield large roots and plenty of wood. He chose one of a tremendous size, sent us all packing to a safe distance away and then he bored holes into the stump. Next he packed in the explosive, motioned to us to get down into shelter and made a fuse long enough to allow him and Mum to get away to safety. Last, he lit the fuse and then - great fun - came the big bang! After-wards, when the smoke had cleared, we were told to come and help. Dad's part was to saw the larger roots and our job was to gather the splintered roots and wood, and carry them to the overhead wire, on which they would be sent down to the valley below. Dad would drive six-inch nails into each end of the timber, hook the bent nails over the wire, give a good push and away went the log, gathering tremendous momentum as it sped down. Once Tommy said he would like to hang on to a log and go down with it, but he was quickly reprimanded and disillusioned of such ideas! As a result of the need for wood-collecting, the hills of Queenstown were not beautiful. Ugly stumps of felled trees stuck up out of bare ground, until the fuel-hungry local people had used them all up.

How Mt. Lyell, in that remote bush spot of Van Dieman's Land, began its life exercised my curious young mind. At first some wandering miner must have recognized gold, copper and silver in quantity. When first discovered, there must have been a rush of explorers to the spot. They would have come via Hell's Gates, the rocky narrow entrance to Macquarie Harbour, early in the 1800's. Firstly there were wharves built at Strahan to enable the heavy equipment for mining to be brought through to Queenstown. This would have been carried by horse-drawn vehicles. And what an enormous job that would have been, with so much mud and slush after heavy rain and the steep slopes of that mountainous terrain! The task seems impossible but the explorers must have carved a way uphill and downhill, through all weathers, spurred on by the promise of riches to come.

Once the mine was established, with those massive furnaces built, the general manager Mr. Robert Sticht knew he would have to make a railway through to Strahan, and this was the only way to bring the necessities for the mine and the town, in the days before the road to Hobart was built. This gentleman was an American-trained German who had built a lovely house on a small hill overlooking the main part of the town. His workmen liked him because he was so polite; he always doffed his hat whenever he met anyone. The building of the Strahan to Queenstown railway track meant laying metal rails and wooden sleepers; the rails had to be imported unless they were forged locally, but the wood was easily available locally. The task of building that line amazed me and I wondered how the old British Baldwin engine got into Mt. Lyell. Surely, I thought, horses could not have dragged it there, but I was told that sleds pulled by teams of mules got it to Queenstown.

The little train, when I first saw it, used to carry important people to and from Strahan. It had first-class accommodation, which was beautifully painted and quite luxurious, for the Company officers and for visitors. The rolling stock had to be short because of the sharp curves in the track.

The Mt. Lyell Company was generous in its treatment of the ordinary people, as far as was possible. There was a modern medical system, whereby the worker had a small amount deducted from his weekly pay and medical treatment by doctor or hospital was covered. When my father became unfit to do heavy work, he was asked to take the job of cleaning the little railway cars. He delighted in polishing and cleaning these carriages, so they shone and glittered like new. When his health deteriorated, he was retired and died of silicosis of the lungs. One lung was completely solid and the other was partially affected.

When he began at the mine, my father worked in the smelters, feeding ore from the mines into a grinding machine. The ore was pushed by a machine in great swathing movement, into the furnace below. The real sight was the converters works next door, where the ore was liquefied in huge cauldrons heated up to red-hot temperatures. To see (from a safe distance!) the great cauldrons slowly tipping down, to allow the fiery red liquid metal to run into the prepared moulds, was quite a spectacle. Then there was the "open cut" which was a huge hole cut into the mountainside in terraces. Looking down into this great chasm, striped with all colours of rock, we used to marvel at the men working at the bottom. They looked the size of ants!

The mine cut into the mountainside was another source of ore. There were several levels called "stopes", so the men and the ore had to be carried up and down in lifts. These levels were supported by timber, so small wonder all the trees were cut down within miles of the town. Once, when I was small, there was a shocking accident, and dozens of men were imprisoned. One of our neighbours lost his life.

On every good photograph of Queenstown, there is a long blue-black mound near the smelters. This is the dark, glassy substance which is waste from the furnaces. Some of the small, very sharp needles of slag escaped into the Queen River, so when we played on the river bank - usually bare-footed - we constantly had to stop and pick that vicious needle-sharp stuff out of our hands and feet. We became very adept at this.

There came a time when the Company built a few houses at Letts Bay, an inland part of Macquarie Harbour. These were rented out to any worker and each house accommodated two families. The menfolk came down at weekends, though I don't remember my father ever coming. We fished for rock cod or tiddlers from the little jetty and how delicious was that fish, straight from the water to the pan! My mother amused me by taking her own precious pillow wherever she went. Pillows were of no account to us!

I was a thoughtful child and used to wonder how the machinery was carried to the works in Queenstown. I have recently read a book about the Abt railway which describes the system in detail and gives a fascinating account of how it was built and used. The railway stops were given pretty native names, like Rowana, Rinadina, Teepookarma, Dubbil-Barril and so on. Sadly, hundreds of square miles of forest were stripped of everything that would burn. The railway line, with the Abt rack system used on all the steep slopes, was the only way in or out of that town. There, in the Queenstown mines, hundreds of lives were lost and countless men's health ruined. My father was one of them. During recent years, since the iniquitous sulphur fumes have ceased, the valley has begun to grow green once more, but I think the scars are too deep for it ever to be as nature made it.

When I was three and Tommy was five, he called me to come and hold a worm on the wooden block, while he chopped it up with my father's very sharp axe. This I obligingly did, holding the worm on the flattened tree stump. Result - one baby finger tip on my left hand was severed almost entirely. It hung by a slip of skin, cut right through the first knuckle joint. My mother promptly put back the tiny tip, tied it securely on and put my arm into one of Dad's Paisley silk hankies for a sling. There was no doctor in the town at the time and when one did make his periodical visit to Queenstown, I was trotted up to see him. He examined the finger without moving the dressing, sniffed at it and finding no evidence of poisoning, said to my mother, "You’ve made a good job of this, mother. Leave it untouched for a few weeks yet and bring her in on my next visit here." Today I have a crooked finger with a short ugly joint, but it is at least a whole finger! Quite a miracle!

Outside our house was a small spot where some hardy wattle trees grew. When Tom and I had been naughty, Mum used to send us out to cut ourselves a nice stick each to be used to punish us. Really this was probably to get us away from around her feet! Tom used to say, "Pick a nice thick stick, Biddy, because she won't dare hit you hard. It may do some damage." But I wasn't old enough to accept the truth of this and he would say, "Your little slip of green will sting more, Biddy!" Then we would go inside with our offering and there ensued a scuffle, in which Tom usually succeeded in wresting his stick from her hand and she'd forget little me, waiting to get a token dab with my stinging twitch! I see now that all this was just a bit of fun to her.

Tom and I spent more and more time out on the river banks when the water was low, though the stream was really filthy, with slag from the blast furnaces. We often amused our-selves lighting small tussocks of the reedy plants which grew along the banks. We would throw all sorts of things into the burning centres. One day Tom came in with his hair and eyelashes frizzled and bleached by the flames. He was then forbidden to light any more tussock fires, but that was no hardship for plenty of other kids did! One day a boy put closed syrup tin on to a burning tussock and was scalded badly when the tin burst.

We also spent hours washing for gold. We had found or borrowed a dish which the gold diggers used, and learned how to rock the dish from wide to side to separate the grains of sand and gold from the river water. I collected a lemon essence bottle nearly full of fine grains of gold. I also had one of quartz which when broken sometimes contained flecks of gold and lovely coloured pieces of rock. I treasured those bottles and sometimes wonder what happened to them!

As we grew older, we had running and jumping contests. I was doing quite well in the high jump and enjoyed it greatly, until my mother told me I was not to play with the boys so much, as I was going to grow up and be a young lady! So I acquired my own "cronies", as Edie was five years younger and Tommy had his hobbies, such as pigeon racing.

My sister Edie was born before the batch of boys. She was my dad's golden-haired girl, with the loveliest hair and a good healthy pair of lungs, which she used to good effect if any punishment was threatened. By contrast I was self-contained and never cried; I don't think I could make tears! Although I felt keenly, I thought it was babyish to cry.

My two younger brothers were born after Edie, first Allan and then Donald. Red-headed Donald was meant to have been registered as Ronald, but my father got the name wrong! I think I did my share of spoiling Don and I loved to sing him to sleep every night To the tune of "Now the day is over", I'd chant "moo moo, gee gee, chook chook, baa baa" etcetera until he fell asleep.

Allan was a darling little quiet boy, who seized on a hard word and used it correctly too. For example once he used the word "prodigious". The others sneered at him, saying, "You don't know the meaning of that!" He looked around and seeing Mum said, "Yes, I do. Mum's prodigious!" She was eight months pregnant then with the twins Jessie and Jean. Another time, Allan sat looking at the children around the meal table and said, "I know why we are all alike. It's because we were all mixed in the same basin, with the same spoon." I wondered then why my parents laughed so much. Usually we weren't allowed to talk at the table, but sometimes when the meal was over and we had not yet asked permission to leave, we could get in a word or two.

Jessie and Jean were my twin sisters, born when I was fifteen. They were named after Dad's twin aunts in Scotland, who wrote back with congratulations and added that their names were actually Margaret and Jean! I did a lot to help rear the twins, as I was still at home, and so was very fond of them both.

As there was for a time no school in South Queenstown, Tommy was sent once a week to have private lessons given in a hotel room. I was only three years old but I wanted to go too. I did accompany him once, but being too small for my feet to reach the floor, I was not able to keep my balance on the slippery bentwood chairs. I fell off and was sent home, with instructions that I was not to go again.

At about the age of four, I was given my first Saturday job - dusting the iron work of the sewing machine stand. Next I had to learn to wipe the dresser shelf, and also to take out and clean the inside shelves. By the time I was tall enough to stand at the kitchen table, I was promoted to washing the dishes in a bowl of water and standing them on a tray. Mum dried them and put them away. Later I had to do the whole job myself - and how I hated washing-up! My whole being revolted against it and I cried inwardly, wishing I could die before I grew up.

When I reached five years of age, I had to walk over a mile to the central school. On the way home one day, another girl and I ventured into the railway station toilet. We knew we had to pull a cord to make the water flow, but it made such a racket that we fled in fright to halfway home. There we stopped in a fit of giggling and wet our pants. Of course someone was to see this and tell my mother a few days later and there was the inevitable lecture! I was overcome by shame, but now I'm sure that my mother's lectures were given "tongue in cheek", as were most of her denunciations.

Eventually there was a new school built in South Queenstown, with two classrooms and a large porch. It meant the little ones no longer had to walk the distance to the main school in all weathers. I was in the first class then and our teachers were a Mr. Goodwin and his sister. He was a good man, very serious but he used to make me feel sorry for him. His efforts to teach us music consisted of picking out notes on a mandolin (from which we learnt the tonic scale), while he made grimaces with the great effort he put into this activity. Miss Goodwin filled us with wonder. She wore mutton-chop sleeves, very full at the shoulders and tapering off to slender cuffs at the wrist. Her skirts literally swept the floor - a fashion not then adopted by the working men's wives in Queenstown. Little did I think that one day I should be in charge of that same school, with a junior teacher in the infants' room! I worked hard there and achieved good results as a teacher.

Mr. Goodwin tried to teach us "Morals" For this he made charts which he hung on the blackboard, containing such precepts as "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again", "A friend in need is a friend indeed", "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive", or "A white lie is ever the blackest of lies". Every week we repeated these and they constituted our morality lesson. I loved school though and when I was kept at home on washing days to mind the babies, I would stand outside the house watching the other children marching into school, with such envy in my heart I felt it was nearly breaking! At one time Mr Goodwin, our teacher, was absent and a young red-headed male teacher took charge. I fell in love with him! He taught us part songs and rounds. One of the songs was "Oh who will o'er the downs so free, Oh who will with me ride, to win a charming bride?" I knew then that when I was grown up I would sing and teach singing. I was also a very fine writer and tried to teach my five children the old copperplate or cursive style, when it was no longer taught at school.

As I have said, my father was very musical and we grew up in that atmosphere. Dad had kept his ties and white collars and cuffs from earlier days as spotless as ever. He wore these when he went to the musical society rehearsals each week. In a box under the bed, he kept a very good violin (marked with the year 1788) which was played with by a succession of children. There was always music in my home and Father had one of the earliest gramophones of the old bell-trumpet variety, His Master's Voice, with cylindrical records. There was one record, a classical requiem type of music, that I loved. I sat and listened, thinking about a picture I had once seen which showed a man lost in a desert, no longer able to walk and dragging himself on his elbows through the sand. Near him there was a vulture, waiting for the end. I found my thoughts almost unbearable though I must have been no older than five or six.

When I was about twelve years old, a gentleman named Ponsonby came to Queenstown, from the Launceston area. He had known my dad in the good old days, when they had formed orchestral groups and played around the town. His hands were long and thin and fine; they had never held a pick or fork or axe. Mr. Ponsonby came to find some piano pupils and as my parents found the wherewithal, I entered into a new world. Sadly after only six months I had to drop the lessons, as there was a strike in Queenstown and the works closed down, even though he offered to teach me for 1/- instead of 2/- shillings a lesson. Also, I used to practise at Mrs. Vincent's house but she had a brood of five or six children of her own, so we felt I could not impose on her any longer. Years later, I was grateful for what I had learned, as I was then able to accompany my own young family when they were singing their own little songs and dancing. Wherever I was posted as a teacher, I was called on to take the singing and music classes which I enjoyed.

One day, on reaching home, I was very surprised to find my father playing a small piano he had somehow acquired - I did not ask how. He was enjoying some Strauss waltzes and this bore out my suspicion that he had been a promising musician. I must have inherited some of his musical ability and love of music. When I was a teacher at the South Queenstown School, we persuaded my father to come to a school concert which I had prepared with the children. I felt quite proud when he said, "The singing was lovely, Nellie. Just lovely!" That was indeed high praise.

Later on, after leaving teacher college, I was the one teacher in a small bush school. I enjoyed teaching the children a part song and a little boy went home to his mother saying, "The teacher is learning us to sing. Half the school sings one tune and the others sing another one - all out of tune and it sounds so beautiful!"

Queenstown itself was not without musical events. The first Gilbert and Sullivan opera ever put on early in the century was performed by the local Dramatic Group. I think they performed "The Mikado" - always a popular choice.

My mother was a clever dressmaker. I recall her being cross with me once, because my smart red velvet dress with guipure lace trimming would not hang properly from my rounded stomach. She used to say I was like a sack tied around the middle and would grumble at me for walking pigeon-toed. Later on, however, I was considered the most light-footed of the girls on the dance floor! Once a week a stout lady, Miss Hughes, came to our school to teach the girls sewing. I made, under her instruction, a white muslin tunic for Edie, who was then three or four, for which I won a prize. We did all kinds of samplers and learned how to sew on buttons and to do every known stitch for our embroidery book. That year I won the prize. How different from today, when sewing often does not seem to be taught!

Once when I was small, my mother was given the skin of a wild animal, occasionally found in the bush. I remember it clearly - it was so pretty, a warm fawn colour with dark brown spots. My mother made it into a muff for my little hands. However a young child, any child, uses the hands and arms to balance with when walking, so I didn't use my muff much. I thought that this animal was extinct but recently I saw a picture of the Tasmanian quoll and recognized my fur.

The Lello family had the reputation of being well educated and certainly I was very fond of reading, even the labels on tins of syrup! We received lovely books every Christmas from the Lello grandparents and read these voraciously. My father's books were put up out of reach of small destructive hands, but I found them: "The Three Musketeers" by Alexander Dumas which I devoured first, followed by "From Log Cabin to White House", which depicted the rise from poverty of a president of the USA; "Hereward, the Wake" which was a tale of adventure in the fens of East Anglia.

Last of the group was my favourite book, a fabulous story much too old for my years, "The Cloister and the Hearth". To me this book was magic and the four books formed my taste for reading. (I have ever since had no time for the sloppy love tales of later years.)

Today's children have all kinds of amusements - video, television and electronic games, but our long winter evenings were spent in playing cards, starting with the simple game of euchre and moving on to whist, five hundred, and games like drafts, Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. There were also "surprise parties". Whenever it was known that someone had a birthday, a gaggle of teenagers would invade a home armed with cakes and gifts, to the surprise of a poor tired father and mother, who had to join in with a good grace. If someone owned a piano, there were musical evenings arranged.

As children we were always singing and skipping, when the weather allowed. We knew dozens of nursery rhymes and jingles, Oranges and Lemons, Humpty Dumpty, There was an Old Woman who lived in a shoe, Goosey Goosey Gander and all the old favourites, many of them politically inspired and some quite sadistic! We sang these and skipped in our backyard with short or long ropes, we played hopscotch and were constantly active. Life was full of fun and discoveries. In the backyard, we made "house" - that is the outlines of houses formed from pebbles, where we "lived". We used bits of broken crockery for utensils. We also played marbles and one girl had a perpetually cracked thumb nail, worn down by aiming her "alleys" (short for alabaster) with great accuracy. I used to lose all my alleys to her. We had plain ones obtained from lemonade bottles (they were used as stoppers inside the neck of the bottle), and coloured ones with beautiful fancy centres. These were worth ten of the plain ones. Some were called agates and were considered even more valuable.

After this, we took to wandering around in quite dangerous places. Near our house there was a short branch railway line, for an old British Baldwin engine which puffed its way along to pick up logs. All furnaces and machines then were stoked with wood, as there was no coal or coke. This old engine carried the wood sent down water chutes from away up the mountainside. We used to walk up the hills - bare-footed of course - and climb into these chutes on Sundays, when there was no work done. If by chance work had commenced suddenly, we would have found ourselves swept by the running water down the chutes with the logs. This would have put us in great danger, for often the chutes bridged ravines. However, we evidently led charmed lives. The water was provided by a stream we often played in called the Roaring Meg, which flowed down the side of Mount Owen.

Christmas was one of the special events of the year. Before the great day, a huge parcel from England would arrive, securely sewn in linen by my grandmother Lello. Never was this bulky package opened by duty Customs and there could not be anything perishable, as its journey would take three to six months. There were always small books, beautifully bound, and today very much valued as antiques. These books fell into tatters as they were read and read by successive children. Also we sent lots of Christmas cards to friends. Dad stood over us until we older ones had composed - with no errors - a thank-you letter to our grandparents.

We hung up our socks and our neighbours hung up their pillow-cases! Old Santa always left us much the same things - a few nuts, sweets and a soft toy (made by Mother). It puzzled me greatly how the dolls always had clothes made of the same materials as Mum's petticoat, pants and trousers of grey flannel, crocheted around with red silk. The children next door had many fascinating toys to fill a pillow-case. Besides, we always left Santa a bottle of home-made beer, which was empty in the morning! We could not understand Santa's different treatment of us and our neighbours.

Our Christmas cakes and puddings were made well ahead, and the pudding was the traditional round shape in a cloth. None of the basin-shaped ones of today! It was made with proper suet, fresh from the butcher's and finely chopped. The raising agent was added and lots of fruit followed. Then it was put into a floured cloth and securely tied, plunged into a rapidly boiling pan of water, enough to cover it, and kept boiling for what seemed hours and hours to me. Woe betide anyone who let the fire go down and the water cease boiling for even a moment!

Christmas Eve was an occasion when we all dressed up or went "up the street", that is to the shops. Somehow green leaves and sprigs came to the town and veranda posts were decorated with greenery. I don't remember if they had electric lights; I think there were no such things at that time. The shops made most of their own decorations. When we walked along the street with mother, it used to amuse me greatly to hear my mother's reply to such neighbourly remarks as, "I wish you a happy Christmas, Mrs. Lello." "The compliments of the season to you, Mrs Brown," she would reply. My mother wasn't always so sedate, I am afraid!

There was a quaint local rite of sending a slice of pudding to each of mother's cronies, about five in all, who each sent a slice of their pudding to us. Then we sat and solemnly tasted all these slices. Our dad enjoyed this ceremony and of course mother's pudding was always pronounced as being the best, though there was little difference between them!

Boxing Day was looked forward to with great excitement. On that day the Mt. Lyell Company had the railway trucks cleaned out and tarpaulins raised up over the trucks. We sat on uncomfortable wooden bench seats, but we didn't mind that! Mothers prepared hampers of luscious goodies and drinks, but if the day was wet we couldn't go and the disappointment was great. The cost of the treat was just a shilling each and it only happened once a year, for there was no other outing except a trip on New Year's Day at two shillings and sixpence! That was too much, we couldn't afford it. If alas the weather was bad, we missed our ride and had to wait for two years till the next one! The trains took us to Strahan beach, where there was a coppice of pine trees for shelter from the hot sun, if any. This was heavenly to us - so exciting was it for little Queenstowners to paddle in the sea!

Eating is an important part of childhood memories! It could not have been easy for my parents with seven children to feed on my father's pay. Our family table was a queer mixture of poverty and affluence. The dining table, of white scrubbed pine, was laid with a snowy cloth and place settings of silver-plated English cutlery. We also had English china willow pattern plates, which we could not appreciate until we were much older. On the table we often had a jar of rich dripping, home-made bread and a tin of Lyle's golden syrup. The knives were heavy and of traditional pattern and they had to be cleaned after meals, as the silver blades blackened.

My mother made fine Christmas puddings, as I have said. Another favourite pudding was roly-poly. Mum always made two; one was of suet and flour rolled into a square with jam spread over it; the other was similar but had golden syrup spread on it. Each square was rolled into a sausage shape and tied at each end, then plunged into the oval shaped boiler to cook.

For breakfast, we had porridge made of oats, big tough rolled oats, not like the partly cooked ones of today. They required long cooking and we always soaked them in water overnight. I hated having to wash the heavy iron porridge saucepan, to which the oats stubbornly stuck.

Mother made our own bread; she grew her own yeast from potatoes boiled, skin and all. Then they were mashed into the first batch of bread, a slow process but the yeast in the skins served to raise the bread. Many a time we (accidentally?) sat on a basin of rising bread, which stood - well-covered - near the wood-burning stove. Butter was a luxury at that time; Mum's stock joke was that the only way we could afford butter was to put it in a bottle and rub our bread on the outside! Still we found dripping quite as good. Tommy was sent over to the hotel, which was noted for its fine Sunday roast dinners, with a basin and a shilling in his hand. This dripping was luscious, with rich meat jelly underneath. We often had lard, with salt and pepper on our bread, when there was no dripping. Later, during the war, I used to give my own children dripping to spread with Marmite on their bread. They also used to love that, as a change from margarine.

Mother made hop beer at home. Most of our friends made ginger beer, which seemed easier to make but Dad preferred hop beer, which was next best to the real thing, so our back patch was usually full of bottles. The filled bottles were corked and securely tied down but many a night we'd hear a pop and find that the maturing beer had forced the cork out. Sometimes we heard an escaping cork hit against the iron roofing and found the beer shooting out of the bottle. Once I found a partly drunk bottle of beer on the sideboard and had a good swig of it. Afterwards I felt quite faint - I was a little drunk!

Sometimes we had moments of great excitement to break our routine lives. One of these was the appearance in 1910 of Halley's Comet. It was much brighter and longer than the one we saw in the 1970's. We also once saw the Aurora Borealis, or Southern Lights - bright curtains of rippling red and yellow light shimmering across the night sky.

Our house was close to the railway line and one morning, when I was twelve or thirteen, I watched the eight o'clock train go by, in a thick fog. Then I heard an unusual clicking noise coming from the direction of the station which the train had just left. The next station down the hill was Lynchford, about three and a half miles distant. While I stood there, wondering about the noise, a large and heavy railway truck loomed out of the fog, rushing down the slope at an ever-increasing speed. I stood watching in horror as it disappeared into the mist. The truck had apparently got loose somehow in the station yard. I heard later that the station master telegraphed the Lynchford station, shouting to the guard to get the train moving at full speed, but it was too late. The truck struck the train, wrecking it and injuring several passengers.

One great time of enjoyment for me was a stay in Strahan. The contrast with Queenstown was memorable for me. In 1906 there was a measles epidemic in Queenstown, and as my sister Edie was considered to be a delicate baby, my father and a friend, a Mr. Vincent, packed their families off to stay in a furnished cottage at the top of the hill in Strahan. Tom aged eight, Edie, the small Vincent child and I enjoyed our stay there very much. The house was behind the banks and Hamer's Hotel, overlooking the lovely harbour. We had a wonderful time, playing around on the rather wet boggy area of mossy land. Once I was sent to buy bread with a shilling. I loved small flowers and was looking for clover blossom in a patch by the roadside, when I lost the coin. Never before or since was a patch of ground searched so thoroughly - and to no avail! Once I thought I saw a snake, but in all my years in Australia I have never seen another.

One night my brother Tommy, aged eight, was missing at bed-time. My mother was quite distracted and walked miles looking for him, searching the waterfront and the few streets that then existed in Strahan. No Tommy to be found! She thought she would never see him again. However, he turned up at last at ten o'clock, quite well and excited.

It seems there was a pilot boat at the wharf, and the pilot had taken him out to the Heads when he had to bring a boat into Strahan harbour.

Life was not always carefree. It is often said that childhood is the happiest time of one's life, but to me that is not so. All our homes were built of wood, lined and papered over inside. When young, I had witnessed more than once a home go up in flames. To see a roof fall into the flames at night and the shower of sparks rising was a fairly common sight. At night when our kitchen stove was cooling down, it made sudden cracking noises. I would get out of bed and creep out to make sure that there was no fire starting.

Floods were also a constant fear. At night, when there was a high wind roaring, I was sure it was flood water sweeping down the valley. That was always possible in our harsh climate, and indeed it did happen when Tommy and I were small.

At the back of our house ran the Queen River, about forty yards distant. At times there would be a mere dirty dribble but after heavy rain it became a raging flood. At one time when I was small, it had rained heavily for several days and the water crept into our garden. Tommy and I were taken from our beds and dressed warmly, as some men had come along to warn us that we might have to leave and take refuge on the railway embankment. So there we waited, full of excitement, but alas word came that the flood had subsided and we could go back to bed! Meanwhile old Mrs. Bearns, who lived on the lower part of the road, had been pulled from her house, where she stood up to her waist in water, and was drawn to safety with a rope. The Christmas pudding she had cooking on the fire went floating merrily away - boiler and all!

That river has a poignant memory for us. My younger twin sister Jessie lived there for many years. After I had left home, her baby boy had wandered out when the river was up past the banks. He fell in and was swept away; his poor little body was found when the water had subsided, caught up against the bridge supports.

I had one particular horror and that was of blood! This arose because at the age of six I had to have my tonsils removed, without any anaesthetic. I can still see the doctor's face, fat and coarse, as he used the instrument. I can remember clearly his big red nose, all speckled with blood from my throat, close up to my face as I was held down, struggling and choking, by several nurses. I watched him flip a piece of skin off his instrument at the sink. However I was ashamed of myself for making such a fuss. Mother was shocked when I was led out and, as for my father; I had never seen him so angry. He went straight to the surgery, intending to punch the doctor on his nose - but I never heard the outcome!

Earlier than this, I had gone to the same doctor's surgery to have a tooth pulled out. The pain seemed to me stupendous but I didn't make a sound. Because I had not carried on as expected, the doctor did not reward me for my unusually quiet behaviour by giving me a sweet. I had been told that he always gave a sweet to anyone having a tooth out. I think my quiet behaviour was why he did not give me any anaesthetic for my tonsils.

When we were too young to go to Sunday school, we used to sit on the post-and-rail fence outside our house to watch the passers-by. We laughed at the awkward antics of our modern young women, during that hobble skirt era - which did not last long. On their Sunday walks, smart young ladies tottered along in skirts that were almost as tight as their slim ankles. It was the practice in those days to be given religious instruction once a week in school. The RC children were separated from the rest of us and given half an hour of talk, while the rest of us were considered the “C of E" children. We were given instruction by a minister in ordinary clothes. Later on, we all went to Sunday school at the little corrugated iron Methodist chapel nearby. It was run by a Mr. Crick, who fascinated me because as he sang a small dot of spittle appeared in the corner of his mouth. We were sent to his classes from the age of two or three, clutching our penny in our hot little hands. Each year, anniversary week was celebrated at our little tin Sunday School and if it was fine weather, Edie and I were fashionably smart, in our lovely Leghorn straw hats, their brims lined with gathered cream chiffon, and our best boots. Oh, those tight high boots, with buttons which had hasps on the back. Each one dug into our flesh, and I am sure we suffered for years from weak ankles due to those high-legged boots! Yet we endured them, because we knew we looked so smart.

When I was about thirteen, I went through a very religious phase, which led to my taking the tinies' class. I heard them repeat the text on the weekly stamps they were given, which had a pretty picture and were stuck into a booklet. As we grew older, we elected to go to the Presbyterian Church, as my father had at one time belonged to that church. On Sunday evening, this meant walking right up through the town to the church. On the way we passed the Church of England and hurried by with averted eyes, as we occasionally saw the men in long white or coloured gowns, engaged in strange practices we knew nothing about! We also passed the Roman Catholic Church, which was considered "beyond the pale" - absolutely.

As there was no television or similar entertainments in our town, everybody used to attend whatever was going on. As a little girl I was sitting with the family in a religious meeting, probably a temperance lecture. My father always enjoyed his beer, so when the speaker reached for a glass of water and raised it to his lips, my little voice rang out in the hall, "Beer - good beer!" I think my parents were embarrassed but amused, as it became a family story!

We called her Bingie but her real name was Mrs. Vincent. While on the topic of religion, it is time I brought her into my narrative because she proved to be an influence on my life that I have always felt. Bingie was tall and dark, with a mop of black hair, dressed in a bun on the back of her head. She was a very good woman and very 'religious'. Her house was always spotless although she was never well. (Mum used to say of her, "The creaking door hangs longest!") Bingie's house was adorned with huge texts, most of which I still remember, such as: "Oh taste and see that the Lord is good!" Others filled me with horror, due to my fear of blood after having my tonsils out at six years of age. These texts were ones like: "Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?" and "Oh, the Lamb - the bleeding Lamb!"

Now Bingie had four or five children and at one of her frequent birthday parties, I received my first and last (I hoped) lessons on good manners. I was eating a scone when I said, loudly and conversationally, "Aren't these scones tough!" After we had gone home, Mother delivered her lesson on good manners. "But Mum, they were tough!" I replied. As I have said, Mum was a fabulous cook and was often called on to cook for parties and celebrations, but we were never given parties - because she was always too busy at other people's!

Although Queenstown was so barren, the mountains around were covered with forest, some of it almost impenetrable and quite dangerous to walk in. When I was growing up, a young man decided to do the walk between Zeehan and Queenstown by the shorter direct route through the "horizontal" bush. He planned to return in a few days, but was quite unequipped for such a journey and the track had not been used for years. When he did not return, a search party was sent out for him, but by then a heavy period of rain had begun. The searchers could not tell at what point he had entered the forest, so they cut a clearance in the closely packed undergrowth, lit a fire of brushwood and slept around it in a circle, feet towards the fire. The 'horizontal scrub' was where the trees sent out side growths, making an interlaced mass of growth. A path through this could only be made with a strong arm and blows of an axe. They finally found the poor young man's body, lying in a stream which he had attempted to cross. I heard it said that not one of the searchers had suffered any ill effects from their long nights and days of exposure. During this time, instead of hearing the comfortable sounds of rain pounding down on the corrugated roof as I usually did, I hardly slept at all.

I remember the beauty of the forest and those wonderful trees. There grew tall myrtles, magnificent trees with beautiful leaf sprays the same shape as hair fern but tougher of course. In the spring the new growth appeared at the top of the trees, at first flaming red. There were laurel trees, of medium height, with bright green foliage and lovely white waxen flowers. Then there were the leatherwood trees, of dusty-looking foliage and white flowers. Friends of ours kept bees (not in the town but out in the forest) among the leatherwood trees, so the honey had a very strong, distinctive flavour - too strong for many tastes, but we liked this honey and mother bought it in bulk. Then there were berries of all shapes and sizes, which grew along small streams. I was always on the lookout for berries and loved plants. I have never seen those I knew in Tasmania anywhere else.

There was one tree which was very special to us. When I was about twelve years old, I used to play with my friends on "One Tree Hill" - a conical hill on the top of which one single gum tree had survived the Queenstown "holocaust" of furnace fumes. This solitary tree, in all its great height, dominated the valley. It was idolised by the Queenstown people, because it was the only one left growing.

If the river was fordable, we would climb up the hill to look for berries, which grew in low clinging vines - small heart-shaped fruit seen nowhere else.

Our parents didn't know that we ate those sweet and juicy berries, but we often took a mug and collected enough to squeeze through a not very clean hanky to give us a small drink. Then we would climb to the top and lie flat under the huge tree, looking up into its branches and through to the sky above. We felt like explorers then. One night some despicable types came and cut down our tree and the whole town went into mourning. Our "One Tree" had gone!

As we grew up, I and my friends thought we would lead healthier lives if we rose early in the morning and went for a walk before breakfast. This was during the school holidays, so we walked up Mt. Owen. I as usual had my nose to ground looking for orchids. There were occasionally to be found a pretty little red orchid with yellow linings to the petals. On this particular day I found an orchid with all yellow petals, the only one I had ever seen, so I dug the bulb out and carried it carefully home. It was a Blandfordia. When we got home, breakfast time was long over and I just could not understand why my mother was so upset. If she had said she was nearly mad with anxiety about me, I would have understood but to me it seemed like unreasonable crossness. Anyway, she planted my yellow- flowered orchid and kept it going for many years.

Another marvel of nature which I came across years later was the platypus. I was teaching at Gunn's Plains when the farmhand brought one of those silky furred mammals in for us to see. He had found it on the bank of a stream nearby, where it had its home in a hole in the river bank. Claud handled it carefully and set it down on the floor. It immediately made for the open doorway and then headed for the river. Claud picked it up and carried it gently back to where he had found it. We were fascinated by its webbed feet and broad yellow duck-like bill. Surely this is one of Nature's funny tricks - to have a mammal with fur, which lays eggs and scoops its food from the river bed with a bill like a duck!

When I had finished my elementary schooling, I sat for the Qualifying Examination for high school and was one of the two children offered a bursary. However my parents could not afford to send me to Hobart to the only high school available, so I was obliged to mark time at the local school until I was fourteen. This time of compulsory attendance was spent helping. I remember heaving tables into the school porch, where I took groups of children, to hear them say their tables or do some spelling.

My mother wanted me to do nursing, but that I could not bear! I had set my heart on being a teacher. There were no professional openings for girls, so I tried cleaning and housework for a time, until my mother decided I'd be better minding the children while she pursued the work of nursing and seeing babies into the world. Soon she herself was pregnant and produced lovely twin girls, Jean and Jessie. More than ever I was needed at home.

When I reached sixteen, Mr. Hughes, the headmaster of the big school, offered to take me as a monitor to prepare for entrance to the Teacher Training College in Hobart. My main job then was to study, while keeping an eye on the pupils who were quite big children. Thus I prepared for entrance to a crash course at Hobart Teacher Training College. I enjoyed the course immensely, doing well at my subjects which were mainly English and Education. It must have been around this time that I was being courted by a rather small young man. One day he asked me to go to the pictures with me. It seems he had had to ask his mother to lend him a shilling, as it cost sixpence to get in. I remember the occasion well, because when I refused (feeling embarrassed because I was taller than him) he said to me, "Oh Nell, don't be a pig!" My mother laughed heartily when I told her about this.

There was a place in the bare mountains of Queenstown which I particularly liked. It was called the Linda Valley. In Spanish the word "linda" means pretty. Whether the view appealed to the man who named it, as it did to me, or it was named after a girl, I do not know. The valley was circular in shape, perfectly void of any trace of any green tree or plant. But above it reared the most beautiful mountain I had ever seen - a mighty, rounded mountain, which on a clear day made such a contrast to the jagged peaks of all our other mountains. This great dome changed its colour, like a rainbow, according to the brightness of the day. The Linda area seemed to me like the end of the world, with the only access through the small settlement of Gormanston on the side of the mountain. People had established themselves in this isolated spot and were reluctant to move, but there was a school, to which I was appointed.

Later, at the age of 89, I discovered the reason why Linda was settled, from the book by Lou Rae on the Abt Railway. When planning the route for the railway from Macquarie Harbour to Queenstown, it was considered that an easier gradient would be obtained via the King River valley and Linda.

I found lodgings at Gormanston, a mile or so up the hill from Linda school, presided over by a Scotsman, Mr. Gillespie. He later became Headmaster of the South Queenstown School, which my young brother Donald attended. I stayed with a family consisting of a couple and three children, one of whom was Lyell, aged twenty. He was the finest violinist I have ever heard, a real genius. Ten years later, while in New South Wales, I was crossing on the Manly ferry when I was attracted by the sound of a violin. It was Lyell playing; he remembered me and when I asked why he had not joined an orchestra, he pointed to the coins in his cap and said, "There's a better living this way!"

Once qualified, I was appointed to a bush school at the small town of Birralee, about seven miles from the nearest railway station of Westbury and not far "as the crow flies" from where I was born. I loved my little school and the country life in that part of Tasmania. Birralee was near the hill my father knew as Black Sugar Loaf. Here, only just eighteen years old and very impressionable, I was struck by the difference between this beautiful area and the stark bare hills of Queenstown.

I was soon befriended by Dinah Sturzaker and her family, who were German settlers. Dinah had three or four children, Daphne and Cliff being the eldest. Dinah, who was then about 35, took me to every bush dance within twenty miles. She harnessed up her old horse to a trap or jinker and her husband Con, who provided the music with his accordion, followed on horseback. To me of course they appeared middle-aged. The dances were usually held in someone's empty barn. We had waltzes, sets of several kinds unknown to today's young people. My favourite was the Waltz Cotillions. During these sets, the young men used to swing their partners off their feet and I remember one young man who got excited and swung his partner round and round. The girl's pants elastic broke and the garment fell down, catching on her shoes. Before anyone realised, her bloomers were ballooning out over her shoes. Much laughing for us but very embarrassing for her! After such hilarious country dances, I climbed the hilly road up to my lodgings at dawn, with the birds warbling and the dewy wet branches and gum blossoms brushing my face and arms. Sometimes I stayed the night at Dinah's house, sleeping soundly on a comfy sweet-smelling mattress filled with grains of wheat.

Over 50 years later, my twin daughter and her husband visited Birralee by car and stopped at a little cottage to ask the way. They were welcomed by a small grey-haired old couple, who turned out to be Dinah's daughter Daphne and her husband Ted, both of whom I had known while living there. My daughter told me that in the little lounge room, they were shown a photograph of six generations of the family, from the latest baby back to the great great great grandmother!

My next posting was to Gunn's Plains for a year or so. This area was very near to the block of land which my father had acquired, known as Lello's Land¹. It was the custom in that day to levy taxes on land so my father had to make payments for his 18 acres or so. Finally the payments lapsed but were later paid off by his namesake nephew, Tom Lello. On a short visit to Tasmania in 1973, I saw the land again - now covered with tall forest trees.

When I was about 20, Father went home to England to see his old father in Ludlow and brought back some solid silver jewellery given to me by my namesake, Grandmother Eleanora Lello. There were two solid silver bracelets with intricate carving, which were no use really as I had great bony wrists. Finest of all was an exquisite silver necklace, composed of jointed silver work in a band one and a half inches wide. It was very beautiful and I could have worn it today but alas, shortly after I received the jewellery, a thief broke into the house where I was boarding in Sydney, stealing everything, even my underwear. All I possessed then was what I stood up in. To this event, my dear offspring, you owe your existence, for my landlady Molly then decided to take in a male lodger, who eventually became your father!

I turned twenty-one there but was disappointed not to receive a letter or a card on that day. There were only two deliveries of mail weekly! The school was held in a little chapel, where there was an organ; I had to clear our desks to one side and place seats in rows ready for the Sunday services. I enjoyed playing on the organ, pumping away o the pedals until I found my legs were too painful to continue. I had not realized that the unaccustomed exercise was causing the pain! On my way to the school, I had to pass a field in which, behind a wire fence, there was kept a fierce bull. Every day it would accompany me, charging at the fence, usually with fragments of newspapers stuck to its horns and I dying of fear lest the fence should break. My poor aching legs were useless and there was no shelter anywhere! Shakespeare wrote, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once." I died many times at Gunn's Plains!

At school I had a huge boy pupil of thirteen. He was taller and bigger than I and at times quite belligerent. To tell the truth, I was afraid of him and was glad when he left school. At Gunn's Plains, we went to every footie match in the nearby country villages. Once I was standing behind the goal posts talking when a well-aimed football caught me behind my knees. As I was not watching the match, I crumpled up. All eyes were on me and you can imagine my embarrassment.

Here I learned to saddle and harness a horse and to ride one. I had friends who took me to every country show. Wood-chopping was a usual feature and the competitors honed their axe blades to razor-sharp edges and carried them carefully in padded covers. Logs of equal girth were set up for the competition and great was the excitement when the chips began to fly! I asked the wife of one of the competitors if her husband cut the wood for her at home. Her reply was typical: "Goodness me, no! I do it all."

When I was 21 years old, I was appointed to teach at the Strahan School, with Mr. McPhail as Headmaster. Phoebe Tabart was the infants' teacher and the junior teacher was Rhyllis Andrews ("Mick" she was usually called). Her family occupied the rooms over the Bank, where I stayed with the family after spending a time at Hamer's Hotel. There I was very comfortable and enjoyed many happy hours in the company of the Andrews girls, who were very capable with boats and could swim like fish.

Mick and I used to go out in a canoe, weather permitting, and often followed in the wake of a steamer. Old men sitting on the wharf would shake their heads and say we would overturn the canoe, but we never did! Cray-fishing off the rocks at Trial Harbour was an interesting occupation for us. We took for bait some bones with a little meat still clinging to them. One of us had to let the bone down into the water while the other one held out a net, like the old butterfly nets, on a long strong handle. When the crayfish saw or smelt the bone, it would immediately rise and cling to it. Then came the critical moment: you gently raised the bait, taking care not to allow it to reach the top of the water because, if you did so, the creature would immediately let go and sink back to the bottom once more. The other person had to pop the net under the fish and hey presto! You had a lovely crayfish. They were a dull colour and only turned to a bright shade of red after being cooked. I did not like the cruel operation of boiling live crayfish!

I sometimes went home to Queenstown for a weekend. My train came into Regatta Point station at nine o'clock and I had to run a mile and a half to the school. My Headmaster never reproached me, though it must have been a nuisance.

At Strahan one of my great joys was to organise the girls' baseball team. On one memorable occasion, Mr. McPhail and I took my team and his football team around several west coast small towns and as far as Burnie on the north coast, staying in the homes of the rival team members. As for the adults, a couple of hockey teams were formed. To this my bumpy shins usually bore witness! At that time there were about 250 children attending the school. The lighthouse at the Heads was manned by a Swedish family named Amundsen, with children who were taught by correspondence course. Later the two daughters were sent to Strahan to further their education; we found them excellent students and a credit to their parents' teaching.

In Strahan opposite the school was the lovely mansion of Mr. F.O Henry, who owned a beautiful yacht called the Valkyrie. In this boat I enjoyed several trips around the harbour. A particularly exciting memory was when Mr. Luttrell, an elderly gentleman, took a party of us on a two-day boat trip in his launch. We intended to visit Shelly Beach and the old convict settlement island, but unhappily a big storm blew up. We had to spend the first night on Settlement Island, the men on the island and the women and the McPhails' little girl Gwenny on the boat. The skipper then decided to make for the mouth of the Gordon River, where we found some flour left in a wooden shack by lumber cutters. We made some welcome "dampers" to allay our hunger a little, but any other food we kept for Gwenny McPhail. We were kept there for several days by the bad weather and finally a boat sent out from Strahan came to our rescue, guiding us back home. Meanwhile the school was kept open by a quick-minded gentleman - I think it was Councillor Kemp, who had two bright sons in my class. When we finally reached Strahan, it was after dark but most of the townsfolk were there to greet us and we were none the worse for the adventure! However, we did have two days' pay docked for our absence!

Much later, when I was living in England with my husband and five children, Mr. and Mrs McPhail came and stayed with us in Norwich, on their long-service leave. It was so good to see them again, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Hughes from Queenstown. It was Mr. Hughes of Queenstown who was responsible for my becoming a teacher. In 1973, while visiting my married daughter in Melbourne, my husband and I travelled around Tasmania and called in at the Strahan School. Rummaging around in the musty old registers, the young headmaster found to his amazement my name E. Lello.

He also saw that many of the children's names were the same as those of today's families. The school recently celebrated its centenary, publishing an interesting book on its history. In a newspaper cutting reproduced in the book there is mention of an E. Lello, who was in fact my sister Edie who followed me to Strahan School.

After Strahan, I was made the "teacher in charge" at South Queenstown School, the very school which I had attended as a small child. Once my supervisor, the Headmaster of the main school, paid me a surprise visit. He found the children all working silently. Looking around the room for me and finally finding me in the garden, he asked, "How do you do it? I even looked in the cupboards for you!" I enjoyed teaching there and particularly music, as I have mentioned before.

In the latter part of the twenties, a friend of mine decided to go to the Sydney area and encouraged me to join her there. For a change, in 1927 I decided to go to New South Wales, only to find that my Tasmanian qualifications did not count for much, so I had to study for the NSW examinations. I taught at Arncliffe, Randwick and later at Mudgee². It was in NSW that I met Trevor, my future husband and we were married in Sydney in 1932. Soon we sailed for England, the Old Country, and a new phase of my life began. However, Trevor had been in Australia long enough to feel a close bond with Australia and it was only the outbreak of the Second World War and the fact that we had four children that prevented us from returning to Australia. My skills as a teacher were well used in rearing five children - four daughters (two of them being twin girls) and a son. Teaching has borne fruit in the next generation too, as our daughters have all taught at some time in their lives!

My father once told me that one of his ancestors, a Paul Lello of Ludlow in Shropshire, had fought in Oliver Cromwell's republican army. He was made the Quartermaster of General Fairfax's army and later was awarded the quartering of the Lello coat of arms and crest. Dad also told me that his brother George had once visited the Melbourne library and found this information in a copy of Burke's Peerage. I believe that there is a brass memorial to one of my Lello forebears in the old church at Ludlow. After he had died, I found in my father's papers a drawing of the family shield; it has a coil of snakes around the crest. My brother Tom had a rug my grandfather Thomas Henry Lello had got made, depicting the coat of arms and crest - a beautiful piece of work which I was upset to hear was destroyed by embers from the fire falling on to it. Dad's brother George Lello became a war correspondent and was killed in the 1914-18 war. I have a circular photo of George, which was sent out to me from the family in England. My father, just before he died, wrote an outline of some of George's fascinating travels around the world.

In the 1930's, I stayed with my grandmother for a few days with my husband and baby daughter. A tiny lady, she gave me a pound to buy a present for the child, and she wrote to us occasionally until her death. By then, the Lello affluence had disappeared but I have old faded photographs of the Gables, the house in Ludlow, with lovely gardens and lawns sloping away down the hillside. It seems that my grandfather, like others in the family, was the wandering type. He had worked in Liverpool, where he married Eleanora Crockett. She came from a Dumfries family, so I had Scottish blood on both sides of the family.

Like all families, we grew up, found jobs, married and left home. My elder brother Tom persuaded Father to let him go the war, and we have one of our few family photographs of him in his uniform. Afterwards, when he returned and was awarded the Military Medal for conspicuous bravery in a battle in 1917, he refused to go and collect it at the ceremony in Hobart. He would never discuss anything about the war, though he had been badly wounded in the right hand. When I went to England, the family was very disappointed that Tom had never called to see them. He married Thirza Hyland and they had one child, Dennis. Tom also had an alliance with a very nice person, Betty, who visited us in Norwich, but his wife would not release him. Dennis, who has since died, settled in Queensland with his family, though some have since come south to Melbourne. One son called Christopher is married to a teacher.

Many years later, when the Second World War broke out and I was in England with my husband and five children, Tom offered to take some of the children. We thought about it and had almost decided to send the older ones, when a ship full of families with children, was sunk by German submarines, so we agreed to stay together whatever happened.

As Edie was five years my junior, she was in a different age group during my growing-up years. Later on Edie showed her artistic gifts and painted the most lovely water colours. Like me, she became a teacher, training at Hobart Teachers' College and taking up posts at Strahan and Queenstown after me. Later she married and had a boy and a girl, who now have their own families in Hobart.

My brother Allan had a rather tragic life; he developed a cancer behind the eyes and had to have one eye removed. This meant trips to Melbourne for surgery. My two brothers, Don and Allan both went into practical careers. Allen went to Hobart to be apprenticed to a cabinet maker and Don followed metallurgy, going to Western Australia to act as manager to a small gold mine, Meekatharra. Later he came back to Tasmania and served during the war in New Guinea. There he contracted malaria, which ruined his life. Allan's wife Blanche, who had to wear a colostomy bag after suffering bowel trouble, spent her active life travelling all over Tasmania teaching other similar sufferers how to cope. Don and his wife Bess visited us once in England. The various children of my brothers and sisters form quite a numerous group of Lello descendants in Tasmania, though some live in Melbourne or Queensland. As far as I know, the Lellos are usually able to trace their family line back to the Shropshire Lellos and my nephew Tom in Tasmania has done much research into the family's genealogy.

My twin sister Jean married in her early twenties and went to live in the then isolated west coast town of Rosebery, where her husband had found a job. The house was damp and small, and must have contained the TB bacillus, as the former resident had died of that disease. She was lonely there and homesick, with no near neighbours and often had only her baby daughter for company. The poor darling contracted tuberculosis, in that wild rain forest climate, and was taken to hospital in Hobart where she died in a few months. She used to write to me quite often and I was heartbroken about her early death. Jean was dark with brown eyes and hair; Jessie was just the opposite, fair with curly hair, and she died in her forties. Jessie also married and had a family.

Of all my brothers and sisters, only Edie and I are still alive. However, the next generation of Lellos and Lello descendants are spread throughout Australia, England and no doubt many other countries!

Eleanora Daniel died at the age of 90 on 23 March l99l, in the Harvey Memorial Home, Hawthorn, Victoria. She had suffered a fall, dislocating an artificial hip joint, and spent five weeks in Box Hill Hospital. After several mild strokes, she was not able to walk. Her diary was written over several months and has been edited as carefully as possible to provide a narrative of her memories.

College of Arms, Queen Victoria St, London EC4V 4BT. tel. 01- 248 1850, will do a search for the Lello armorial Bearings for a fee (30 pounds in 1973).

Burke's Peerage showed a Hereford county arms of a "Erm on a canton gu, a cross moline or - a gem ring or. entwined and freeted with a serpent PPr."

Paul Lelloe was quartermaster general to Oliver Cromwell's army in 1642. He was awarded the above quartering of the Lello coat of arms for his services.

In Buckinghamshire, the Lellow family had arms: Ar two bars gu, in chief three wolves' heads erased of the second.

T.H. Lello (Mother's brother Tom) was awarded the Military Medal at the Battle of Messines on 8th June, 1919, for his exceptional bravery. "Coolness and courage". The MM was rarely awarded to privates. He was 18 and 3 quarters.

"Here lyeth the body of Frances the wife of Henry Llello, of the towne of Ludlow gent. who depted this life Februry 18 an Domi. 1640 aetatis suae 26"

1In fact, Eleanora confused Gunn's Plains with Biralee. The block of Lello land, which is still in family hands, lies a few miles from Biralee, almost due south of Frankford village post office. Gunn's Plains is a considerable distance from Frankford, west along the north coast.

2Eleanora first taught at Marrickville, but maybe lodged at Randwick – they are close by. She then moved to Mudgee, and finally taught at Rockdale Girls, lodging one train-stop up the line at Arncliffe.