Summary

THE ESSAYS: GROWING UP IN THE BUSH

Nearly one-and-a-half centuries ago a young boy, more at home on a horse than behind a desk, dutifully sat down each week to write an essay for his tutor. As he wrestled with spelling, handwriting and composition, his eyes must surely have strayed to the world outside on his family's property of Adelaide Park, on the central Queensland coast.

The year was 1876, the boy was 11-year-old Arthur Atherton, whose grandfather Edmund Atherton had brought his growing family from England's Lancashire to New South Wales three decades earlier. They settled first in Armidale but, long before Arthur was born, the family had pushed north into Queensland acquiring several properties in the Rockhampton district. Adelaide Park was just a few kilometres north of present-day Yeppoon.

Life on these properties was all young Arthur knew and consequently was what he wrote about for his sometimes demanding tutor. Riding out with his 'Papa', brothers or uncles to select a beast for slaughter or hunt dingoes and kangaroos, were regular tasks. Along with horse-breaking, cattle mustering and drafting, this would have been hard work for a youngster but the days would often finish with a 'bogey' (a swim) in one of the dams, or a spot of fishing in Limestone Creek. There were trips to Rockhampton for the show or to visit the botanic gardens. One essay describes a weekend spent at the family's beachside cottage. Each week's cycle closed with Sunday school, church, and the traditional family dinner.

A decade after these essays were written, tragedy struck the family with the death of Arthur's elder brother, James Edmund, in a mustering accident. It might have been expected that Arthur, now the eldest son, would remain at Adelaide Park but in 1888 he followed his Uncle John to the Tablelands west of Cairns, more than 1000 kilometres from his boyhood home. It was here in the far north that he was to build his life and family.

The iconic image of an Australia characterised by large pastoral or grazing properties where children learned to ride almost before they could walk and whose playground was the bush around them, achieved almost mythic status in the century that followed. But in these carefully preserved essays we hear the youthful but undeniably authentic voice of one for whom that life was a reality. As he laboured over their composition on ink-smudged pages, Arthur would have been unaware that he was gifting later generations a rare treasure: a glimpse into a childhood now long vanished.

Liz Downes
2024