Cue Cemetery and Help Arrives

THE MINISTERING ANGELS &
A MOVING TRIBUTE

Rough food and hard living and not always having the best of water were responsible, some forty years ago, for a good deal of sickness, fever and deaths among the prospectors who flocked to the Murchison in the rush and scramble for the rapid acquisition of wealth on this new field. Death occurred through the ravages of fever and lack of attention in the early days, and the lot of any man becoming sick was an unenviable one until the time came when Sister May of the Sisters of the People, a nursing organisation started in Perth in 1894, arrived from Melbourne in April 1896, and travelled up to Cue to take charge of the nursing mission which the Rev. O. K. Rowe had established a few months previously.

Solid practical support was shown by the diggers, businessmen, and residents, and a field hospital was quickly established. Typhoid fever cases came first for attention, and there were many men with pneumonia, dysentery. influenza and other ailments as well as injuries to be looked after. Sister May’s own description of her first case gives a graphic picture of the conditions she found. She said: —

“Soon after my arrival I was asked to go and see a young man living in a camp close to one of the mines. I found the poor fellow suffering from fever and in a very bad way. The tent he was in was so small that there was hardly room to move around. Two old jam cases and a stretcher which consisted of four wooden forks stuck into the ground, two rails on which bagging was tacked, and two bush rugs comprised the bed upon which the poor fellow was lying. The sides of the tent were rolled up to allow the sultry air to go through. He had no one to attend him but a kindly mate.”

During the fever epidemic. Sister May and Sister Florence, who was sent to assist her for a month, at the height of the outbreak, worked constantly for many hours a day. Visiting lonely camps to tend to their numerous patients. Prior to the establishment of this first nusing scheme, from which the hospital later grew, many men died through lack of attention and the resuits of the very primitive conditions under which they were living. Cue has had more than its share of cemeteries, most of which were filled to overflowing in the days of early epidemics.

There is an early cemetery on the east side of the hill northeast of the town. There was another somewhere about where the crossing over the railway, south of where the Cue station is situated: a third, near Milly Soak, and -fourth south of the State Battery, the latter being the most recent, and still in use. What is believed to have been the first cemetery of the lot was situated under the Kintore quartz blow, near which stands the Cue Fire Station, within a stone’s throw of Austin Street.

The following tale is told of an early Cue burial service. A digger had died and was about to be interred in the  then town cemetery. He had received every attention from his mourning mates, even to the extent of being enclosed in a coffin carefully constructed of beer and gin cases — the only timber available — with texts inscribed around the sides and lid. such as

‘Wolff’s Schnapps.and Usher’s Special Reserve.”

Someone of social importance was in the absence of a clergyman, required to read the service over the departed so the services of the nearest publican were requisitioned. There was prayer book within about 100 miles, and the publican had never learned the words of the burial service. He was not. however, dismayed by the apparent difficulty, but produced a copy of the dry blowers bible, the ‘Goldfields Act land Regulations’, and solemnly read a whole page of the regulations, the bystanders being visibly affected.