We are in Richmond, an hour or so north of Sydney, on the Hawkesbury River. We’ve – that’s my cousin Libby, my 95 year old aunt’s daughter, who lives in Canberra (Libby that is) and I – to investigate our family roots.
It is here in 1802 that my great great great great grandmother Mary Pitt and her son Thomas were first granted 100 acres each of land, thanks to the auspices of Lord Horatio Nelson. We weren’t expecting to find anything very much here, other than the odd gravestone – a whole bunch of our ancestors were buried in Richmond – but we thought we’d come and soak in the atmosphere and if possible check out the site where our ancestors had first tilled the soil, expecting it to be buried beneath a multi-storey car park, or now part of somebody’s back garden.
This morning we stopped off at the Hawkesbury Library in Windsor, where the local librarian is also the local historian and has published several books on the district. She knew about our family. She also told us quite peremptorily that the original site of ‘Bronte farm’ as it came to be known as (Bronte was the title given to Lord Nelson, as in Duke of Bronte) was still there but in ‘private ownership’. In other words don’t go there.
Anyway we were driving along and came upon a sign ‘Historic Bronte 1809’ on the side of the main road, and the gate was open so we drove up the driveway to the farmhouse. We realised we were trespassing and that it was quite likely the owner, if she was there, might produce a shotgun and tell us to ‘piss off out of it’.
The owner was there, a middle-aged woman whose name, fortunately, I just remembered from a newspaper article I read this morning – Margaret Betts. But she didn’t produce a shotgun. When she heard what we were there for she invited us in, showed us the thick file containing documents all relating to the Pitt family – of which she knew more than we did – compiled from visitors, several sets of them, who have over the years made the pilgrimage before us. She showed us round the house, which she was in the process of restoring, lovingly, then after she had jumped on her quad bike and driven down the hill to move the cattle from one paddock to another, she sat us down, made us a cup of a tea and told us her story.
Remarkable fact number one: the 100 acre site we were on, which was once the property of Thomas Pitt, Mary’s son, was almost intact. Previous owners had sold off 25 acres of it but the rest remained exactly as and where it originally was. Remarkable because every other plot of land in the district, this being extremely desirable farming country, has been divided up and sold off.
Remarkable fact two: Margaret had inherited the place from her parents, who had farmed it since the mid 1950s (she showed us pictures of her mother on a quad bike, still working the farm in her 90s), and she worked the land single-handedly. This was not the original farmhouse, there had been two before it, but it dates back to the 1840s and it’s a classic of its time – single-storey, sloping metal roof and wide verandahs. The inside was a bit of a museum piece and the bathroom had been added only recently – added mind you, not renovated – and was accessible only by going outside. (And it gets cold in New South Wales in winter, at night.)
‘I will die here,’ said Margaret. Despite disputes with the local council, the drought, the problems of farming a property that size single-handedly, she was determined to carry on until she dropped, for the sake she said of her parents.
Ah, Margaret Betts. Modern pioneer woman. Tough, resourceful, resilient, argumentative, generous, warm-hearted, Australian. It seems fitting, and flattering, to know that such a woman now inhabits the very same patch of ground our pioneering ancestors first sat on over two hundred years ago.
Oh, and a PS: when we arrived the reason Margaret was standing gazing at what looked like the middle distance is because she was watching a cow she believed was about to give birth. The same cow’s last calf over a year ago was stillborn. While we were inside the farmhouse chatting about families that same cow was giving birth to a healthy calf, who hadn’t yet quite got to its feet by the time we left. It was a lucky omen, said Margaret.
