Amy Josephine Solly 1912 -1999
“Pulvis et umbra sumus.” Horace.
with thanks to Yvonne Solly for this wonderful story:
Our Nanna – Amy Josephine Solly – was a dust collector. Not that she knew it or intended to become such, yet nevertheless she was. Her dust collection began about 1890 before she was born.
Amy’s first shaving of dust was provided by her father, Alfred Edward Wallace, who apart from being grandchild to Christopher Armstrong – credited as being the first white child to step foot in Western Australia – was one of the brown-armed, human-engines felling hardwood trees in the Ravenswood district. Amy’s dad published poems about his life as an axeman beset by spiders up his shirt sleeves and snakes in his boots. Saw–dust was from her father.
In Meekatharra, where Amy was born, her dad became a ‘dusted miner’, sentenced to spend his last years in Woolaroo Sanatorium. ‘
Dust-on-the-lungs’ as it was known.
So supporting the family became Amy’s mother’s lot. In those days, housework in the better-off homes was the only work for women. Amy’s mother endured back-breaking toil washing and ironing for the local gentry. She soon paled and slipped away. So tearful teenager Amy forsook her beloved teacher training to look after her family. During the Great Depression, Amy’s brothers delivered bread and shoes. Amy kept house and took in lodgers. One-by-one the lodgers left on their own fruitless search for work. Amy’s family split. One married and cared for the youngest. Another worked for ‘keep’ in a lean-to/humpy. Amy trudged to Perth. She suffered dermatitis in her hands and crammed away the memory of dust mites from housework.
Amy Josephine Solly 1912 -1999
Turning 21, Amy became a teaching assistant in a Wheatbelt town halfway between Perth and Kalgoorlie. It was a grand time! She had her hair cut into a bob and later a ‘shingle’. She played in a band that performed at balls across the district. Amy also formed a theatrical group in Merredin. How her heart sank on hearing she had a new posting to Gwalia School, in a mining settlement in the desert, managed by a 23-year-old American named Herbert Clark Hoover (later to be the 31st President of America). Turned out, that Amy had the time of her life there! Balls, beaus, tennis, fashion. She stayed three years in the first Government built and-run hotel in Australia. She loved the students and they loved her. Amy kept the chalk dust close to her heart.
In Gwalia she met her husband Keith Harold SOLLY, who, with his brothers, had gold mines around Leonora and Murrin-Murrin. Their corrugated-iron home was lined with white-washed hessian. There was no electricity. No glass windows, but shutters that could be popped right open to catch any breeze. Their furniture was made from kerosene crates, dandied-up with fancy fabric. The shower was a kerosene tin with a pull chain. Outside, was a shed made from old train sleepers with branches atop. Food, pickled or salted, came by train every three months. Their Coolgardie safe was cool enough to set jelly if there was a good breeze, and butter kept firm in a crock down one of the mine shafts. Amy and the family never lost the excitement of gold crushing. The old-timers called it ‘gold fever’ once bitten never leaving the blood. Amy had gold dust in her veins.
When war broke out Amy stayed on a farm with her cantankerous sister-in-law but was forced to share a piece of her mind and make a midnight escape. Amy didn’t take any bull-dust.
Although afraid of animals, Amy and Keith bought a farm where she raised sheep, gathered mallee- roots, fed shearers, and established a garden. She put her back into farm in-dust-ry.
So this is how Amy was the ‘exactionum coactore pulvis’ (the collector of dust).
Moya Sharp
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