Summary

This item is one of our 50 Treasures: Celebrating 50 years of James Cook University.

Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui answers the question 'Why is this significant?'

What is the significance of this small, stained and frayed notebook with its broken lock? Ostensibly it is a diary written by pastoralist James Cassady for his son Francis, spanning the years 1864 to 1879. However, not all of the notebook is in his hand. A segment is written by his wife Maria, to whom he was married for three short years. The faded ink and pencil written notebook is significant in that it provides a rare and intimate glimpse into life lived on the frontier of European settlement in north Queensland in the nineteenth century. Within its covers is condensed all of the travails besetting those who braved that frontier.

James was an Irish immigrant who migrated as a teenager to Australia with his family in 1849. When he married Sydney girl Maria Cecilia Kelly, in 1864, he began keeping the notebook. A year after the birth of their first child Francis in 1865, in Bowen, they travelled by schooner to Burketown. Unfortunately, the schooner carried fever and on arrival most of the passengers and crew were struck down and died, as did most of Burketown's population. The little Cassady family survived and travelled on to James's property where Maria's younger sister Nora joined them. Within a year Maria was pregnant again and they returned to Sydney. Maria kept the notebook with her when James returned to the Gulf. In mid-1867, in James's absence, Maria, their baby Magdalene, and Nora would all die within weeks of each other evidently from fever contracted on the fateful Burketown journey.

James never remarried. He relocated to the Herbert River district around 1873, dying at his property, Mungalla, in 1902. In his years on the Herbert he actively campaigned on behalf of the Indigenous people to whom he gave safe haven on Mungalla. His notebook includes diary entries and a dictionary of Indigenous words. He writes quaintly, referring to himself in the third person as Papa, Maria as Mama and Francis as I. Though he lapses occasionally such as when he writes of his birthday as 'my Birthday.' Maria's portion includes accounts, shopping lists and diary entries as she negotiates rentals in Sydney, the illness of her sister Nora, her own declining health and her missing of James: 'I was I think never so disappointed as I was this mail not hearing from James.' While most of the entries are prosaic, what is clearly evident nevertheless, in both James and Maria's entries, is the depth of family love and fortitude in the face of relentless death and loss.