An autobiography or Tales and legends of Canberra pioneers Samuel Shumack This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991. This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press. This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to a global audience under its open-access policy. Samuel Shumack, 1938 An Autobiography or TALES AND LEGENDS OF CANBERRA PIONEERS by Samuel Shumack o f Springvale, Weetangerra Edited by J. E. and Samuel Shumack Australian National University Press CANBERRA First published in Australia 1967. First paperback edition 1977. Printed in Hong Kong for the Australian National University Press, Canberra © J.E. and Samuel Shumack, for the text, 1967 Gray Smith for the paintings, 1967 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Shumack, Samuel, 1850-1940. An autobiography or tales and legends of Canberra pioneers. (Canberra companions series). Index. First published, Canberra : Australian National University Press, 1967. ISBN 0 7081 0725 7. 1. Pioneers — Canberra district, Australian Capital Territory — History. I. Shumack, John Everest, ed. II. Shumack, Samuel jr., joint ed. III. Title. (Series). 994.7 Southeast Asia; Angus & Robertson (S.E. Asia) Pty Ltd, Singapore Japan: United Publishers Services Ltd, Tokyo Contents Foreword by L.F. Fitzhardinge ix I We come to Canberra 1 II Duntroon Identities 11 III Village Institutions 19 IV Emu Bank 27 V First Years at Springvale 45 VI A Saga of Pioneers and Old Identities 61 VII More about the Old Pioneers 83 VIII Chronicles of Springvale, 1870-1895 103 IX Premonitions and Tragedies 117 X Teamsters and Farmers 127 XI Bushrangers, Aborigines, and Pests 143 XII Chronicles of Springvale, 1896-1912 155 Postscript 165 Index to Persons 171 General Index 175 Illustrations Samuel Shumack frontispiece Alan Cunningham facing48 Stockyards at Acton facing 4p The Galloping Parson, the Rev. Thomas Hassall facing 64 The Shepherds’ Rations facing 65 William Farrer’s Experiments facing 128 St John’s Struck by Lightning facmg 12p The New Recruit facing 144 The Flooding of ‘The Harp of Erin’ facing 145 All the illustrations are reproduced from the original Gray Smith series, Ganberry Paintings—The First Hundred Years Foreword Sam uel Shumack. came to Canberra with his family as a boy of six in 1856. The Shumacks had long been established as small tradesmen at Mallow, Co. Cork. According to family tradition their ancestor had come to Ireland with a Viking band in the ninth century and the name was derived from the Ukrainian ‘Chumak’, meaning a merchant warrior. A more prosaic derivation is suggested by the fact that the first two recorded Shumacks in Mallow, in the early eighteenth century, were shoemakers. At the age of fifteen Samuel Shumack took up, with his father, a selection at Weetangerra, fust north of the present federal capital— the first selection in the district under Sir John Robertson’s Land Act of 1861— and farmed it until his land was resumed by the Commonwealth in 1915, when he moved to Ravensworth in the Hunter Valley. He died in 1940. Shumack had a strong interest in the history of the district and in its people, and he was gifted with an exceptionally retentive memory. In those days, when there were few amusements and plenty of leisure, he became the recognized custodian of the oral history of the community. It was a compact little world of small farmers, many of them inter-related by blood or marriage and all intensely interested in one another’s affairs; a world as different from that of the great stations as from that of the ‘nomad tribe’ of pastoral workers. Shumack’s anecdotes, which at first seem rambling, fall together as one reads on to make up an unusually complete and detailed picture of the life of such a community through the second half of last century. We are given precise details of yields of wheat in good years and bad, of the building of fences and haystacks, of plagues of native companions, possums and rabbits, of storms and droughts. But it is above all the people in all their variety, in their hard and often primitive life, who are brought before us in Shumack’s yarns. The day he was leaving Canberra, Shumack jumped from a waggon and pierced his foot with a hay-fork. This accident ended his active farming, and though he remained a keen gardener time sometimes hung heavily on his hands. Fortunately for us, he was persuaded to write down his stories of old Canberra, interspersed with his reflections on many other topics suggested by his reading or by events around him. These writings fill a large manuscript volume of 488 pages, the margins filled with elabora­ tions or corrections of the text. Though it starts off formally enough as an autobiography, the book soon loses all semblance of order, recollections and stories being written down just as they came into the ix SHU MACK : An Autobiography author’s mind. Inevitably there is much repetition and much irrelevance, and while the writing is often vivid, it is often marked by the garrulity of old age. The existence of this ‘big book’, generally but erroneously referred to as a diary, has long been known to students of Canberra history, but except for a few extracts in John Gale’s Canberra: its History and Legends, published in 1927, it has not been generally available. It was, however, carefully preserved by the Shumack family, and two of his sons, John Shumack of Ravensworth and Samuel Shumack, now of Sydney, devoted great care and thought over many years to the selection and arrange­ ment of the material of historical value in a form suitable for publication. This, owing to the nature of the manuscript, was no light task, and the typescript prepared by them is the basis of the present book. Even in this form, the work was still too long for economic publication. It has accordingly been furthed edited, mainly in the interests of brevity but partly also to present the material in a more readable form. Certain whole sections have, reluctantly, been omitted. These include some stories of the original discovery and settlement of Canberra, which cannot be reconciled to the facts as now known and which can have reached Shumack only years later at second hand, a number of life-histories of ex-convicts, particularly Irish, which, however interesting in themselves, had only indirect relation to the Canberra district, and a long chapter on cricket, a subject in which Shumack was much interested and which played a large part in the recreational life of the community. In addition, a number of smaller excisions have been made and the style has been tidied up where this seemed necessary, but it is hoped that no fact of significance has been omitted and that the flavour of the original has not been lost. So far as possible, the material used has been collated with the original manuscript. The ‘big book’ itself, together with a number of newspaper articles by Shumack, has very generously been presented to the National Library by the Shumack family, and may be consulted there. The present publication is an attempt to present in readable and more or less consecutive form the material preserved by Shumack on the history of the Canberra district. Obviously, the book is a source of great importance for the early history of Canberra, but it has also a much wider relevance as a document filling a major gap in the record of our social history. I know of no other source where the life and world of the small farmers and selectors are described in this way: the nearest parallel, Skemp’s Memories of Myrtle Bank, dealing with north-western Tasmania, while having some of the same authenticity, is much less full, and Skemp was an educated man who always remained a little detached from the life of which he wrote. Shumack, as he tells us, had little formal schooling, but was always an omnivorous reader who, by the end of his life, had built up a library of some thousands of volumes. Of what passed under his own observation, he was a keen and accurate observer. Where he deals with matters within his own observa­ tion his evidence is, wherever it can be checked, exceptionally reliable, while his style is essentially the style of the storyteller, flowing from one year to another by a process of free association. L.F. Fitzhardinge Canberra November 1966 An Autobiography or TALES AND LEGENDS OF CANBERRA PIONEERS Chapter I We come to Canberra We come to Australia Journey to Duntroon The Glebe farm The Shumacks at Canberra Early Canberra and the Campbells George Campbell of Duntroon Life at Duntroon I first saw the light in Mallow, County Cork, Ireland, in the year 1850, and my memory of some of the scenes there is at the present moment clear and vivid. In the year 1837 three of my uncles emigrated to Australia, William, George and Samuel, and settled in the Bathurst district. At that time a great depression prevailed all over the old land, and when they landed in New South Wales a great drought prevailed. Wages were low, and on landing all three were quickly hired at the wage of £15 per year with rations.