Labour women and the White Australia policy

 Patricia Clarke

Abstract

This paper discusses the influences that led Annie Christie Massy, a North Queensland newspaper proprietor, to support the Labour Party at the first Federal election in 1901.  Her support was not only strident but surprising because of her background as the daughter of a squatter and the wife of a grazier. An analysis of her support reveals that it was based partly on the Labour Party’s identification with the White Australia policy. The paper will speculate on other factors that may have influenced Annie Christie Massy to support the rights of workers and the socialist aims of the Labour Party. These include her education in Scotland and on the Continent and the effects of the pastoral depression of the 1890s. It will compare Annie Christie Massy’s support for the White Australia policy with the views expressed by Mary Gilmore in her columns in the Australian Worker. 

(Dr) Patricia Clarke is a writer, editor, historian and former journalist who has written extensively on Australian historical and literary subjects. Several of her eleven books are biographies of women writers and others explore the role of letters and diaries in the lives of women. She edited poet Judith Wright’s autobiography and is joint editor of two books of Judith Wright’s letters. She has written widely on the history of the Australian media particularly the role of women journalists. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Fellow of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies and was founding honorary secretary of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia.

This paper discusses the influences that led Annie Christie Massy, a North Queensland newspaper proprietor, to support the Labour Party at the first federal election in 1901. Her support was not only strident but surprising because of her background as the daughter of a squatter and the wife of a grazier. An analysis of her support reveals that it was based partly on the Labour Party’s identification with the White Australia policy. The paper will speculate on other factors that may have influenced Annie Christie Massy to support the rights of workers and the socialist aims of the Labour Party. These include her education in Scotland and on the Continent and the effects of the pastoral depression of the 1890s. It will compare Annie Christie Massy’s support for the White Australia policy with the views expressed by Mary Gilmore in her columns in the Australian Worker.

In 1899 Annie Christie Massy, then a 35-­year-­old mother of two who had been running a private school in Bowen, grasped the opportunity to buy the plant of a short-­lived newspaper, the Bowen Mirror, at a bargain price and from the press launched a new paper, the Bowen Advocate. Surprisingly for a woman from a squatter background, she proclaimed her politics to be socialist and Labour. The following year, after the death in June 1900 of Frederick Rayner, the proprietor of another Bowen paper, the twice-­weekly conservative Port Denison Times and Kennedy District Advertiser, she also bought that paper cheaply, with financial help from her brother, Adam John Hall Scott.¹  On 1 September 1900 she combined the two papers under the new name of Port Denison Times and Bowen Advocate, stating that in the amalgamation the progressive policies of the Bowen Advocate would not be submerged under the Tory policies of the Port Denison Times. A progressive party ‘is indispensible to the prosperity of this district,’ she wrote.²

Annie Christie Massy seized these opportunities to own a newspaper where she could publicise a political message at an optimum time. The first federal election to follow the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia at the beginning of 1901, made the turn of the century a time of heightened political significance. She linked this to the rationale for her ownership of two papers which, she pointed out, she was selling to readers at a similar price paid previously for one paper, to ‘get such a grip of you, the workers of Bowen, that Labor must win the day’.³

In between these stirring calls Massy wrote editorials on particular grievances affecting Bowen. These included the need for a benevolent asylum in the north of the state (older people needing care and accommodation had to go to Brisbane), a better water supply, the need for a cadet corps and the threat of plague.

Recurring bubonic plague epidemics, which caused the deaths of nearly half of those affected, were widely blamed as much on ‘Asiatic people and merchandise’ as on bad municipal sanitation. Many other editorials on local issues concentrated on the completion of the railway west from Bowen. Known originally as Port Denison, Bowen was the first port to be opened in North Queensland and had the best harbour, but it had missed the opportunity to be the port for the rich Charters Towers gold fields when the line west from Townsville became the focus for railway development. When a railway was built part of the way up the coast from Bowen towards Home Hill and Ayr, Bowen agitated for a link from this northern line to join the Townsville line to Charters Towers over the Haughton Range at Reid River so that traffic could choose to connect to Bowen or Townsville. This was already close to a lost cause when Annie Christie Massy was campaigning for it.⁶

Massy exhorted Bowen residents to ‘united cooperation and public spirit’, which she believed had been lacking for the past ten years allowing the government to ignore Bowen’s ‘legal prior claims’ for the completion of ‘our railway to the Reid River’.⁷ She linked the failure to obtain a railway connection to Charters Towers to the failure of the local member, Robert H. Smith, who had represented Bowen in the colonial Queensland Parliament since 1888, to fight for the railway and other pressing needs of the district. Behind the evidence for the neglect of Bowen she saw the denigration of parliamentary processes by the ruling conservative Philp ministry which had taken over from the short-­lived Labour government of Anderson Dawson in December 1899. She mentioned frequently ‘the humiliation of parliament’ carried out by the ‘Continuous Ministry’ supported by the Brisbane press (‘The Queensland “Thunderer”’ alias ‘the Courier’).⁸ The government of Premier Sir Robert Philp, who represented the rival port of Townsville north of Bowen, was widely regarded as legislating ‘for the benefit of capitalists’.⁹ But with no election due for the Queensland Parliament for another two years, Annie Massy concentrated on the new federal sphere.

In an editorial in December 1900, she wrote that she was confident a candidate would be found for the seat of Herbert, for the first elections for the new federal parliament, who would ‘fearlessly uphold the Labour Platform and eventually secure fair play for Bowen’.¹⁰ (Only men were eligible to vote and stand for parliament until one of the first acts of the new Commonwealth Parliament in 1902 gave the franchise and the right to stand for parliament to women.) The federal election, she believed, held out hope for North Queenslanders of securing ‘something approaching a decent Government’.¹¹

Her stirring editorials continued through most of January 1901. They included ‘The Coming Contest’ in which she wrote:

If the Great Majority intend to fight for their rights, there is only one road to success. Every Democrat must be prepared to be a man, not a machine, and to operate simultaneously … to make the Federal Government victorious over despotic unprincipled Wealth, known as Capitalistic Government. Ere long we will be favoured with the views of the Government Candidate for the Herbert electorate, Mr Villers Brown, a prominent influential Townville citizen, who has ever proven himself to be a staunch supporter of the Continuous Ministry. The question now arises, are we going to vote for a Candidate representing not only Townsville interests, but who is unable to subscribe frankly and fully to the fighting Federal Labor Planks?

What has the Continuous Ministry done for Adult Suffrage? Where will its avowed partiality for colored Alien Labor land White Australia? What has our Boodle Syndicate Government done to secure Old Age Pensions? If we are ever to have a Federal Franchise, Federal Courts of Conciliation and Arbitration, Federal Old Age Pensions, and before and above all a Federal White Australia then we must work to carry the Federal Labor colours to the front.

She followed up with a quote from another newspaper with similar views in which the State government was accused of championing the cause of ‘the Chow gardener and the miscellaneous Asiatic’ and of widespread ‘shameless corruption’.¹²

Overall, her editorials indicate support for socially progressive aims and the rights of workers against capitalistic employers, as well as strong support for the White Australia policy. Just how deeply she felt on the latter issue became apparent when the White Australia policy provoked a crisis at the Port Denison Times and Bowen Advocate. Early in January 1901 Annie Massy, at the height of her campaign supporting the election of a Labour member for the Federal seat of Herbert, found she had a lump in her side. At first she did not regard this as serious but her husband insisted that she see Bowen doctor, Dr Brown, who recommended surgery for the removal of a tumour by the resident surgeon at Townsville Hospital, Dr Bacot. Before she left late in January to travel with her husband by ship to Townsville, she appointed J. A. Thuman, an employee on the paper, acting editor.

Apparently oblivious to the ardent and frequently expressed views of the proprietor in support of the White Australia policy – or perhaps seizing the opportunity to put a more balanced view before readers – Thuman published an editorial supporting the importance of and justifying the use of Kanaka labour in North Queensland, mainly on the grounds that the sugar industry would collapse if it could not get cheap labour. He also challenged the racist view that coloured races were immoral. ‘As regards vice’, he wrote, ‘have the white race learnt any from the Kanakas. We very much doubt it.’¹³

When she heard of this editorial, so diametrically opposed to her views, Annie Massy, whose operation was delayed as she had contracted dengue fever in Townsville Hospital, became increasingly furious. From her hospital bed, she dismissed the acting editor and issued a statement to be printed in the Port Denison Times and Bowen Advocate. Under the heading ‘The policy of this paper’, she wrote:

The Ministerial stand lately taken by the P. D. Times and Bowen Advocate, owing to the unexpected illness of the Editor, necessitating a sojourn in the Townsville Hospital, and compelling hurried steps to be taken to fill up the vacancy, has made the proprietor decide this Labor organ shall either uphold political principles in keeping with the People’s Party or close. … As a result of this the services of Mr J. A. Thuman, who has occupied the Editorial chair for the past three weeks, have been dispensed with.¹⁴

Her statement on the federal election that followed, published ‘under special orders from the proprietor’, made it clear that Labour’s White Australia policy was one of the major reasons for her support for the party. She wrote:

…Labor must sweep victoriously to the front if workers decide to fight for the welfare of the masses on the principle of ‘No Surrender’. The hour has arrived for all in sympathy with the mighty socialistic approval of the world to stand together. If we value the purity of the nation above capitalistic interest, human souls above the sugar industry as it is carried on by the companies, let Australians vote solidly against the Asiatic Coloured Curse and the Kanaka, with their vile contaminating influences, and their unmentionable vices. Let us as men and women, for our own safety and the protection of our children, realise if a White Australia is to be a reality, not a dream, Labor must first organise, then fight. Remember we must finally win the day if the cry goes ringing down the ranks of Democracy: ‘Australia for Australians, and Australians for Australia’. ¹⁵

The importation of Kanakas was a divisive issue between landholders who wanted labour for their plantations and workers who wanted to keep out cheap labour and preserve hard-­won working conditions and pay. To some citizens it was a simple labour issue, to others it often had racist and genetic overtones. These were perhaps more strongly held by women and were certainly expressed by them, as Annie Massy’s impassioned tirade indicates. Similar views were held widely. Mary Gilmore in her columns in the Australian Worker expressed opposition to Chinese immigrants and the importation of Kanaka labour. She often appealed to her readers as ‘mothers of the White Race’ and she expressed racist disgust at mixed race children.¹⁶ Even the spectre of women working for Chinese she described as ‘one of the saddest, most pitiable spectacles ever presented … Just think, in our White Australia, our young girls, mothers and wives having to work for the Chinese!’¹⁷ She believed ‘only the lowest kind of women associated with other races’ (particularly Asian Ones): ‘the whole world over, purity of race is its own greatest bulwark’ while the consequences of miscegenation were intolerable to females.¹⁸ Very few White Australians challenged these views. They ‘took for granted the superiority of their race and the makers of the new society [in the Labour Party] saw no place in it for coloured races’. This applied particularly to workers in North Queensland ‘where sugar capitalists trimmed their wages bill by using Pacific Islanders known as Kanakas’.¹⁹

Despite these widespread views of the White Australia policy promoted by the Labour Party and accepted widely in the general community, it is surprising that Annie Christie Massy’s stand was so vehement. She had grown up in a family in which her father, James Hall Scott, often expressed eloquent support for the use of Kanaka labour. In 1871 in a wide-­ranging letter published in the Brisbane Courier, he attributed the abandonment of sheep runs to the shortage of agricultural labourers and he saw the same thing happening to the sugar, cotton and tobacco industries. He believed North Queensland would succeed only if it accepted coloured labour and he advocated that the government send immigration agents to India, China and Polynesia to recruit all the labour needed for agricultural industries.²⁰ Even as early as 1863, when he was already a leading figure in Bowen, he prepared a memorial to the government on behalf of landowners stressing their need for ‘our legitimate proportion of immigration’.²¹

James Hall Scott, who had arrived in Australia from Scotland as a young man late in 1852 on the Windsor,²² came from a family that had been sheep farmers at Tullick in Ross Shire in the Scottish Highlands for generations. In 1859 he married his recently arrived Scottish fiancée, Sarah Ross, whose family were farmers at Kinnahaird in the same area of Ross Shire. By then he had established himself on cattle stations at Tooloom on the Upper Clarence in northern New South Wales and at the Retreat, Callandoon on the Western Downs of Queensland, where he was already a magistrate.²³

Within a few years of his marriage he was among the first wave of pastoralists to follow the explorers into the Burdekin River district of north Queensland to claim promising new land in the Bowen Basin and along the Burdekin and its numerous tributaries. In 1862, Robert Christison, later a well-­ known, major landholder at Lammermoor in central Queensland, worked for Hall Scott as a shepherd to gain colonial experience in ‘the Belyando scrubs’, a southern tributary of the Burdekin. ‘White men were scarce, and the blacks were hostile …’, Christison wrote.²⁴

By 1863 Hall Scott was licensed to occupy many runs in the Bowen/Burdekin valley, including Strathbogie on the Bogie River, Dalbeg and Kirknie further north on the Burdekin, Drynook  and Woodhouse to the west, Northcote, Blackheath, Baratta and others. As he overlanded cattle from his stations further south and established his runs in the Bowen basin, he left his wife Sarah at Tooloom near the New South Wales/Queensland border ranges. Within a few weeks in 1863, she lost her first two children, Henry Ross, born on 3 November 1859, and Jessie, born on 16 September 1861, to diphtheria. A few days later the only man on the station also died of the disease leaving only Sarah and her maid to bury his body.²⁵

Soon after, Sarah moved to the imposing home James Hall Scott built on a hill near the centre of Bowen, which he named Ross Hall, and which became known as a home of affluence, grace and style.²⁶ Three girls were born at Ross Hall, including the Hall Scotts’ eldest surviving child, Annie Christie (Christy on her birth certificate), born on 15 April 1864. In 1867 James Hall Scott moved his family to one of his stations, Strathbogie, south-­west of Bowen on the Bogie River, a tributary of the Burdekin, where he attempted to establish a sheep station. Several shepherds were wounded at Strathbogie and another Hall Scott property, Kirknie, and in 1871 the managers of stations in the same district, Strathallyn and Eton Hall, were killed by Aborigines. On one occasion, Sarah fought off attacking Aborigines while her husband was away from the homestead.²⁷ The spearing of stock and stockmen was common in the Bowen basin as Aboriginal people fought the appropriation of their land and it became difficult to obtain and keep shepherds particularly in rugged and broken country. The Port Denison Times recorded ‘with grim surprise’ in 1865 that a week had gone by without ‘report of a white man speared’.²⁸

The hostility of Aborigines and the difficulty of obtaining and keeping shepherds, as well as the problems with spear grass that made sheep-­farming uneconomic, led many stations to be abandoned. Hall Scott moved to his property, Inverdon, nearer to Bowen and more central to his other properties, including Kaili Valley. With no schools nearby, however, Sarah Hall Scott in 1874 decided to take her family, which by then consisted of five daughters and one son,²⁹ back to Scotland to be educated. Annie Christie was then aged 10 and she was to be about 20 before she returned to Bowen.³⁰

This decade was a decisive period of Annie Christie’s life during which she appears to have been exposed to economic and social theories that influenced her to adopt political ideas opposed to the family and social attitudes that had been part of her background from birth. These progressive ideas were reinforced by her later experience in the financial and economic crisis of the 1890s. There are no records regarding the education of the Hall Scott children in Scotland or in Germany, where Annie and probably some of the other children spent three years. Scottish education had a formidable reputation and it was generally regarded as more widely available to children of all classes than elsewhere. Sarah Hall Scott’s family connections suggest she was able to give her children an education of a relatively high and exclusive standard. She had several distinguished relatives: her sister, Mary Ross, was married to the prominent Edinburgh architect, Robert Rowand Anderson, later knighted. His work included Edinburgh school-­board schools, the restoration of several iconic Scottish abbeys, the National Portrait Gallery and Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, and several buildings at Edinburgh University including the medical school.³¹ By the time Annie Christie returned to Bowen, her ability at teaching music and languages was a matter of note but her subsequent career suggests she received an education that went beyond the ladylike accomplishments that were a feature of the education of many middle-­ and upper-­class girls. She appears to have been exposed to emerging political ideas and discussions and to have developed a social outlook that led her to become a socialist and a campaigner for the rights of workers.

In 1880 her father, James Hall Scott, died from a brain tumour while in his mid-­fifties.³²  In 1884 Sarah Hall Scott returned to Bowen with five of her children, arriving a few days after a cyclone had demolished most of Bowen, including Ross Hall. While they lived in tents, bush carpenters built a new home, called Murroona, at Queens Beach. Annie Christie who had stayed teaching in Constantinople rejoined the family soon after and opened a boarding school for girls at Sea View House, Bowen.³³

On 7 April 1890 when she was 25, Annie Christie Hall Scott married John Eyre Massy, a son of Charles Alphonse Massy, an early landholder at Gundaroo on the Limestone Plains north of Canberra, who was originally a manager of (Sir) Terence Murray’s property Ajamatong, on Lake George. In the late 1870s Charles Alphonse Massy acquired several properties in Queensland including Sonoma on the Bowen River, south of what is now the mining town of Collinsville, in the name of Massy Brothers. John Eyre Massy, the youngest of his six sons, took over the running of Sonoma as a cattle property. Annie had two children while living at Sonoma, Charles Bute, born on 13 February 1891, and Jean Eyre on 16 September 1892.

In 1895 John Eyre Massy was severely injured in a fall from a horse requiring extensive medical treatment in Townsville and Brisbane and making it impractical for him to continue station work.³⁴ This tragedy occurred at a time when many station properties were failing in the financial collapses of the 1890s and when widespread attacks by cattle ticks, followed by tick fever, were decimating cattle herds.³⁵ The Massys had to abandon Sonoma. While some of his brothers went to other Massy properties, including Rokeby on the Coen River on Cape York, John Eyre Massy went to the Gulf of Carpentaria, where he was employed for a time at the Burketown Meatworks where presumably he was exposed to the radical views of fellow workers.

Annie Christie Massy, with little or no income, opened a school named ‘Rocklea’ in Bowen where she prepared students for Sydney University entrance examinations. A photograph taken in the later 1890s shows nineteen pupils ranging from young women aged probably about 18 to younger children including her own children, Charles and Jean. The photo included the two teachers, Mrs Massy and Miss Alice, described as governess.³⁶ The school, however, struggled to survive. The combined experiences of her husband, fallen from station owner to labourer, and her struggling school venture, appear to have influenced her political views. Her school appears to have closed by the time Annie Christie Massy began her tumultuous career as a newspaper proprietor and editor in 1900.

This career, tragically, was cut short after she was admitted to Townsville Hospital. As she lay waiting for Dr Bacot to operate, she wrote on 13 February 1901 to her children explaining that although dangerous and life-­threatening the operation was necessary as if left the tumour would grow until she was unable to eat, rest or sleep and she would die after a year of ‘torture and anguish’. She expressed great faith in Dr Bacot, who had ‘saved’ her father’s life. In her letter she told her son to learn well as knowledge was power and ‘some day’ he ‘might be chosen to stand up as a Democratic Labor member to fight and uphold the rights of the People, who labor and work for their living, toiling to make ends meet under unjust laws, made by rich men, using their power to crush the people down to the lowest possible wage, so that they may live in wealth and luxury …’ She asked that the compositor on the paper, Mr Field, set her letter up ‘carefully in good clear print’ so that her children could read it easily and keep a copy each.³⁷ On 15 February, two days after writing this letter and on the same day as the sacking of the temporary editor and her statement on the policy of the paper appeared in the Port Denison Times, she died in Townsville Hospital at the age of 36. Her body was brought back to Bowen by steamer and she was buried near her father in the Bowen cemetery.³⁸

After his wife’s death, John Eyre Massy continued to run the Port Denison Times and Bowen Advocate. In the weeks before the federal election, which was held in Queensland on 30 March 1901, the paper strongly supported the Labour candidate for the seat of Herbert, Bert Bamford, against the conservative candidate, W. V. Brown, who was described damningly as a ‘nominee of the Philp Government’ and ‘a Townsville man’.³⁹ Bamford, who campaigned against Kanaka labour on the northern sugar fields, won the seat narrowly. In Parliament he spoke frequently in support of the White Australia policy and for subsidies and protection for the sugar industry. He remained the Labour member for Herbert until he was expelled from the ALP in 1916 in the split on conscription.⁴⁰

The long time conservative member, Robert H. Smith, continued in the Queensland State seat of Bowen until the election of 1902 when the seat was won by the Labour candidate, Francis Kenna. A journalist and poet, Kenna would have won a striking endorsement from Annie Christie Massy, as he had edited the Brisbane Worker in 1899 and then the Brisbane Sun and the Charters Towers Telegraph. After Kenna lost his seat in 1909 he edited the Port Denison Times for a few months, followed by several other short-­term editors, until the paper closed in December 1910. During the years he had the Port Denison Times John Eyre Massy was in and out of the Bankruptcy Court. Later he became a long-­serving secretary of the Bowen Hospital and a substantial citizen in the town. In 1907 he married Florence Cheffins, a close friend of his first wife.

Annie Christie and John Eyre Massy’s son, Charles Bute Massy, enlisted in the AIF in 1914. He was killed in action while serving with a machine-­gun section of the 2nd Lighthorse in the Suez Canal Zone on 5 August 1916 and has no known grave. He is commemorated in the Jerusalem Memorial in Israel and in Bowen, Queensland. Their daughter, Jean Eyre Massy, married Patrick Donnelly, who came from the Gundaroo area near Canberra, where members of the Massy family still lived. She returned to Bowen in later life and died there in the 1980s. In spite of her short life Annie Christie Massy is a striking example of a woman who made great efforts to support herself and her family at a time when only a vanguard of women worked outside the home. In the extremely limited time during which she had the opportunity to express her political views, she emerged from a conservative background to advocate the rights of workers against capitalist employers, a socialist society and a White Australia. Many aspects of Annie Christie Massy’s background make her adoption of these views remarkable particularly in the semi-­isolation of north Queensland, remote from the feminist and socialist ideas finding expression at the turn of the century in urban societies.

1   Port Denison Times and Bowen Advocate (PDT), 16 February 1901? Rod Kirkpatrick, Sworn to No Master (Toowoomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1984), 169-­70? James Manion, ‘History of newspapers in North Queensland’, Journal of RHSQ, Vol.11 No.4 (1983); Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 123-­5.
2   PDT, 1 September 1900.
3   PDT, 22 October 1900.
4   PDT, 22 October 1900.
5   PDT, 3 November 1900.
6   John Kerr, Triumph of Narrow Gauge: A History of Queensland Railways (Brisbane: Boolarong Press,1998), 55? Joseph M. Janecek, ‘The 1878 elections that saved Townsville’, Queensland History Journal, vol.21, no.5 (May 2001), 340.
7   PDT, 13, 20 November 1900.
8   PDT, 6 November 1900.
9   Raymond Evans, History of Queensland (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143.10   PDT, 8 December 1900.
11   PDT, 8, 12 January 1901.
12   PDT, 8 January 1901.
13   PDT, 9 February 1901.
14   PDT, 5 February 1901? Clarke, Pen Portraits, 123-­5.
15   PDT, 5 February 1901.
16   Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, race and nation in Australian women’s writing 1880s 1930s (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 17, 138.
17   ‘White women and Chinese Employers’, Australian Worker, 12 November 1908, quoted in Sharyn Pearce, Shameless Scribblers (Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998), 50-­1.
18   ‘The Revenge of Time and a Question of Colour’, Australian Worker, 9 April 1908, quoted in Sharyn Pearce, ‘Fishing for Women : Mary Gilmore’s journalism in the Worker’, in Kay Ferris, The Time to Write, (Melbourne: Penguin, 1993), 88-­107.
19   Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The ALP 1891-­1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 27.
20   Brisbane Courier, 2 December 1871.
21   Brisbane Courier, 4 May 1863.
22   ‘An Early Migrant’s Story: James Hall Scott’s voyage to Australia’, Bowen Independent, 5 February 1960.
23   Moreton Bay Courier, 6 April 1859, 4.
24   M. M. Bennett, Christison of Lammermoor (London: Alston Rivers, 1927, 47.
25   J. Black, North Queensland Pioneers (Townsville: CWA, 1932), 84-­5.
26   Short History on life of Annie Christie Massy (nee Hall-­Scott), Bowen Historical Society, 2010, 2.
27   Black, North Queensland Pioneers, 84.
28   G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A history of North Queensland to 1920 (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1963), 37-­8.
29   The Massy children were: Annie b. 1864; Ada b. 1865? Maggie b. 1866? Adam b. 1868? Mary b.1870, d. 1873; Marion b. 1872 and Jessie b. 1874.
30   Annie Christie Massy, 2.
31   ‘Sir Robert Rowand Anderson’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 2004, Vol. 2, 72-­3.
32   PDT, 4 September 1880.
33   Annie Christie Massy, 2;? PDT, 26 February 1901.
34   ‘John Eyre Massy’, obituary died 31 March 1944, copy from Bowen Historical Society.
35   ‘The Pastoral Industry’, Queenslander, 23 June 1906.
36   Photograph, B98, Bowen Historical Museum, reproduced in Annie Christie Massy, 17.
37   Annie Christie Massy, 7-­12.
38   PDT, 16 February 1901; Annie Christy Massy, 5.
39   PDT, 26 March 1901.
40   D. W. Hunt, ‘Bamford, Frederick William (1849-­1934)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 7,(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979), 162-­3.