Meat For the Fields – the Rowell Boys

WESTRALIANA
Meat for the Fields
by E. ROWELL

A Butcher who was a heavyweight athlete and successful prospector, too, will be remembered by some who were on the Eastern Goldfields in 1894. My elder brother Bill went to Coolgardie some months after Bayley and Ford found the rich Bayley’s Reward. Getting a bit of gold, he sent my fare over and came down to the coast to meet me. The fare by the Cintra was £4 to Fremantle and it was a full ship with nearly all men on board making for the Goldfields. Conditions were very rough.

At Northam we got on the contractor’s train and eventually left it at the head of the line and walked into Southern Cross, 22 miles, with a pack on our back and full waterbag. As it was February and the temperature about 100 deg. in the shade, we were pleased to make Southern Cross with empty waterbags. I was barely seventeen years old at that time and my brother, 14 years older. As a youth he had a good deal of experience of mining with my father, who came out from England in the fifties and was engaged in alluvial mining near Castlemaine.

Bill had also learnt the butchering trade in Victoria. He left me at Southern Cross and went back to York and bought a mob of sheep. They were trucked to the head of the goldfields line. With the help of two new arrivals we started the mob for Coolgardie. My job was driving the horse with a springcart to carry provisions and a water tank.

Some of the stages I remember were Reen’s Soak, Hunt’s Dam, Boorabbin, Woolgangie and Gnarlbine Rocks. We lost a number of sheep on the sandplains between Hunt’s Dam and, Boorabbin, where there there was quite a lot of poison weed. There was not a great deal of water on the way for the sheep but they travelled surprisingly well and we got most of them to Coolgardie.

We built a bough shed for a shop in Bayley street. Bill did the killing some distance out from the township and supplied the hotelkeepers, two of whom I remember were Bill Faahan and Wisdom, with fresh meat, and the public also. Later Bill did a lot of prospecting and I was with him at the Wealth of Nation’s find, Bardoc, Broad Arrow, White Feather (later Kanowna), IOU (later Bulong), and Kurnalpi and then back to Hannans.

Bill was a big man and very powerful, with a 45-inch chest and fifteen stone in weight. With it all he was very active and could hold his own for a 75 yards sprint with most ordinary men. Neil McLeod, with his partner Syd Ward, had the licence at the then primitive Exchange Hotel, a galvanised iron structure at the corner of Hannan and Maritana streets, Kalgoorlie. Talk might turn to athletics and one of the party who fancied he could run would be “chivvied” by Neil McLeod. McLeod would say “I don’t think you can run at all, and to prove it I’ll back burly Bill Rowell to run you 75 yards off the same mark. If you beat Bill, I’ll run you myself!”

The challenge accepted, the race took place on the follow-ing Sunday morning in the wide, rather dusty Hannan street. Bill usually made it a one act affair, showing a surprising turn of speed for such a big man. There would be quite a celebration at the Exchange after the event as there were lots of spectators and a good deal of golddust changed hands on the result. “At this time I was dry-blowing with Neil McLeod’s brother Peter in one of the gullies east of Maritana Hill and camped with him in a tent within a short distance of the present Olympic Pool.

We had Christmas dinner of 1894 at the Exchange Hotel,

My brother, with another brother of Neil McLeod’s, Donald, and Jack Cook discovered and pegged the Camelia Mine, 24 miles north-east of Kanowna, which they worked for several years. They were offered a substantial sum for it but refused as they thought it had a big future. They were rather disappointed however, and eventually sold for about £5,000, in 1900, a considerably less sum than that originally offered.

Another brother of mine, Charley, was also on the fields and was lucky in pegging a claim on the Fitzroy lead and although it was not one of the richest, a considerable amount of gold was got from it. I worked with him at that claim in 1897-1898.