This book gives us unique views of the life and struggles of an Australian woman in surmounting unbelievable hardships in remote and isolated parts of Queensland. We are taken into the small town of Gatton in rural Queensland in the early 1900's before the days of electricity and then to the city of Ipswich where my mother studied a college course in dress-making, millinery and cooking. We have views of the remote township of Burketown in the 1940's during the latter stages of World War II, and its connection to the outside world by a barely passable dirt track. Though this book covers the period of my mother's lifetime, it also includes her perception of Australia's origins from the time of Cook's voyage of 1768-1770, and her place, and that of other Australians of her generation, in historical developments that followed. The meticulous preparations for an expedition of 11 ships and hundreds of mistreated convicts to a largely unknown land in the South Seas have few parallels in history. Columbus commanded three ships and the Mayflower was a single ship. My mother shows sympathy for the plight of the brutally treated convicts of the penal colony but is proud of the new nation they helped create. She is saddened by the loss of 100,000 Australians in wars, in particular such conflicts as the Boer War and the Vietnam War, which were entirely unnecessary. While living at Burleigh Heads, Queensland she enjoyed the pristine landscape and could understand how sad it must have been for Aborigines forced out of that beautiful coastline. My mother was the daughter of Australian born parents of English, German and Welsh origins. Having family members with German surnames was a problem which she and many other Australians had to confront during and after World Wars I and II. After marrying my father whose family had empire loyalist sympathies, she skilfully avoided tensions which could have arisen. After living through hard times in rural Queensland at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and during the Great Depression of the 1920's and 1930's, she looked with amazement at recently-built expensive hotels, apartments, penthouses and casinos on the Gold Coast and in other parts of Queensland. She continually lists them and their prices, wondering who could afford to live there. With the increased prosperity of the 1970's she and my father toured Australia and many parts of Europe, Asia and America. Eventually owning their own house, my parents enjoyed retirement on the Gold Coast but my mother never forgot the hard times she went through earlier in her life. She wanted to leave a record for future generations and other Australians to read, and hence commenced writing this book in the 1980's, adding some additional information up to about 1998. John Oxenham Goodman, Sydney, Australia
About the Author: My mother was the daughter of John Clement Wiggins who was the Australian born son of Clement Batstone Wiggins, formerly of London, and his Welsh wife Elizabeth Minton. My mother's mother was Agnes Bertha Hohenhaus an Australian born daughter of German immigrants Friedrich Hohenhaus of Deutsch Krone, West Prussia (now renamed Walcz and located in Poland) and his wife Caroline Arndt of Berlin. When I went to school my mother told me never to mention the name or origin of her mother, "No one will speak to us if they know". My father Eric Oxenham Goodman arrived in Australia with his parents from Devonshire, England as a one-year-old. His father Frank Adolphus Goodman had worked as a civil engineer in South Africa before returning to England and marrying Edith Jane Lampshire whose family was of French origin. Several generations earlier their surname Lampere had been Anglicised to Lampshire. My mother skilfully avoided conflicts in a family which by Australian standards then was or mixed origins. My mother spent her early years in the small town of Gatton in the southeast of Queensland where her grandfather Clement owned a grocery store and farm. Her descriptions of life there, before the days of electricity, are of historical interest. On finishing school and college, she started work as a telephonist with the Postal Service after getting high marks in entry examinations and a dictation test. This led to her meeting my father who worked as a postal clerk with the Post Office. After they married, he applied for transfers to remote, undesirable locations in order to gain promotions which provided a meagre increase in salary. When he became Postmaster in the far northern town of Burketown, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, during the 1940's, my mother followed him. Her descriptions of the hardships and loneliness of life in the outback are unique and provide valuable historical insights into the stoic perseverance of Australian women of her generation. John Oxenham Goodman, Sydney, Australia