The Kalgoorlie Miner – Weekend Edition – 5 Oct 1991
Marjorie Frances Minson was born in Northam WA in 1912 to Charles Henry MINSON and Elizabeth JEFFREY. This is a story she told about her early life in the Goldfields, first with her family and then as a married woman. She married Richard Alfred LANCASTER in Northam in 1935 when she was 23 years old. She passed away in Victoria in 1996 five years after telling her story to the Kalgoorlie Miner Newspaper.
Marjorie’s husband, Richard Alfred Lancaster, was born in Coolgardie on the 6th October 1908 to Charles Alfred LANCASTER and Sarah WILKES. His father was from South Australia and his mother from NSW. He was one of seven children, three of whom were born in Coolgardie. One of his sisters, Doreen May Lancaster, died aged 17 months from Bronchitis in 1910 and is buried in the Coolgardie Cemetery.
Mrs Marjorie Lancaster’s adolescence and young married life coincided with difficult times, but they were full of happy memories. Among those recollections is a story of a chance meeting in 1921 with the then Prince of Wales, later to become King Edward the VII. At that time, her family, the Minsons, lived at Mungarrie Station, a holding property for cattle this side of Coolgardie. Four weekdays out of five, with five of her eight brothers and sisters and three neighbouring children, she caught the Kalgoorlie bound train from Mungarrie to Kurrawang where they all went to school. Kurrawang was about 4 ½ miles away and it took about 15 minutes by train, she recalled. On this particular day we got on the train, we knew nothing about the Prince of Wales being on it. He had several people with him and came into our carriage and wanted to know who we were and where we were going.
In those days, the Woodline extended to Kurrawang, so there was a school for the woodcutter’s families. We’d catch another train home, arriving at about 6:00 at night. In winter it would be dark, and Dad had to bring the lantern down to the station to light our way home. One day each week we had to walk because the train didn’t go until the afternoon. The girls and I would set off wearing laced boots, but it was a different story when we got home at night. The boot laces would be tied together and the boots thrown over our shoulders.
Kurrawang School Children 1934 – Photo SLWA
After school, when their chores were completed, the children would go to play. I suppose I was about 9 or 10 at the time and I was a real tomboy. We would catch rabbits and skin and boil them up out in the bush in billy cans made of Trufood dried milk tins. We’d pinch potatoes and onions from the house and other vegetables from the garden and make a rabbit stew. Sometimes I’d help myself to some flour and make a damper. Dad was out checking fences one day and came upon us. We gave him some stew and he told Mum later that she needn’t worry that we’d ever starve.
Sometimes they dug for yams, as the Aboriginals had taught them. One cooking episode was not so successful. Not far from us was a hut belonging to two sandalwood cutters. I remember that we pinched two rashers of bacon from them and some eggs from home and cooked up bacon and eggs in an oval pan we made out of a herring tin and wire. Dad didn’t find that funny at all, and we got a good hiding. I know we never pinched anything again so the hiding didn’t do me any harm. Mrs Lancaster remembers that almost everything in those days was homemade and said her mother, who she described as a wonderful seamstress, sometimes made the girl’s dresses out of hessian bags. She edged them with red binding.
In 1924 the family moved to Kalgoorlie where Marjorie went to Kalgoorlie Central School, leaving at the age of fourteen to work in the home of Jack Hocking, the Kalgoorlie Miner editor. However, in 1929, the Depression saw the family again seeking station work when their father was retrenched. With only two teenagers in the big family working and bringing in just a few pounds per week, most of them had moved to Southern Hill Station, 120 kilometres east of Norseman.
Mrs Lancaster was eighteen by then and recalls life at Southern Hills clearly. I had three younger sisters doing schooling by correspondence. Mother taught them and to give her time for this, I did a lot of the work. The house was made of mud brick with wide verandahs all around. Inside the floors were white pine. We had to scrub them on our hands and knees. They had to be scrubbed evenly, otherwise they look dirty. My father sewed together layers and layers of hessian and laid them in the passage. The kitchen had a huge wooden range with two ovens. Next to it was an open fire. At shearing time when there were up to 20 to cook for, both would be lit, with camp ovens used on the open fire. At night kerosene lamps were used for lighting. It was in those days that
Mrs Lancaster perfected a skill she is kept and cherished all her life – cooking.
Southern Hills was a calling-in point on the dirt road between Balladonia and Norseman and Mrs Lancaster earned money by selling fresh bread and morning and afternoon teas to travellers, many of whom were going east for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Most days she made bread, getting up at 4:00 am to bake it for breakfast. She recounts as if it was yesterday how yeast was made from boiled hops juice, sultanas, sugar, flour and mashed potatoes. This was left to ferment in a large earthenware jar. Soap was made at home in a kerosene tin. Mother made soap using rosen, caustic soda, water and of course camel fat. The fat came from the camel’s hump. It was white and fine, like suet. My brother had to shoot wild bull camels that attacked the domesticated ones. We’d got the camel fat from them. Soap for washing was unperfumed but had lavender added for personal use.
We were self-supporting in most ways with a vegetable garden. We killed our own meat which was salted and kept in the meat house. A couple of times a year we got bulk provisions from a big supply store in Perth. Before we bought a Model T Ford, supplies came in by camel teams. The wool was taken by camel teams to the railway at Norseman.
Children in a bough shed attached to their home – Photo Phil Bianchi
Mrs Lancaster’s next move was to Northam, where she married. By then the depression was biting deep and she and her husband joined scores of others living in tent camps along the Perth Kalgoorlie pipeline and working for the Government Sustenance pay. At first, my husband worked six weeks on and three weeks off. I think he earned something like £3 a week and we had to save for the weeks that he didn’t work. After the couple’s children arrived between 1935 and 1940, they had three sons, one of whom died at birth. Mr Lancaster was given six weeks on and one week off.
I went to Northam to have the babies, but at the camp, we lived in two tents. One was the kitchen and the other a bedroom. We paid the government 12 d rent a week for each tent. The men worked on the pipeline, scraping it out and replacing sections of it, and gradually the camp moved east from Northern to Kalgoorlie. There were about thirty families in the camp. Married couples and families lived in one camp and single men in another. Bringing up toddlers in a tent was difficult, but Mrs Lancaster was never one to magnify hardships. Instead, she recalls the good times and how friendships were forged with other women, one of whom had seven children.
There was always plenty to do, baby clothes to be lovingly hand-sewn and smocked, bread to be baked, clothes to be washed and ironed in what now could be regarded as very primitive conditions. She remembered being grateful for practical things like a bush fence around the tent to prevent the toddlers from wandering off, and a bower shed laundry where the clothes were boiled in the ever-useful kerosene tins. After a stint on the pipeline, Mr Lancaster became a fettler and then a truck and carriage examiner for the railways, jobs that took the family to Malcolm, Albany, Collie, Narrogin, Geraldton, Cue Lake Grace and Norseman.
When ill health forced Mr Lancaster to retire in 1970, they lived for several years in Norseman, where Mrs Lancaster’s skills as a cook again came to the fore. Cooking has been my life, she said. I’ve always loved it. In Norseman, I catered for weddings and cooked at the hotel where the miners had their meals. When her husband died in 1980, Mrs Lancaster retired to Wagin but ill health and a desire to be near her son Ron in his family in Kalgoorlie brought her back to the goldfields. She now lives in a comfortable modern unit in the Masonic Village, and she still loves to bake at home. She has been a CWA stalwart since 1952 and regularly attends meetings. She plays carpet bowls and attends the Salvation Army Church service each Sunday.
We had a wonderful life, and I look back on lots of happy times.
REF: Marjorie Lancaster (Dec) – Myrtle Eccles – The Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper.
Moya Sharp
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