FARRELL - Sarah Glenmire

Hillgrove, near Armidale, in the 1890s where Sarah and her new husband David Davidson started their family life.

Sarah Glenmire Farrell (1866-1901)

Sarah, the youngest of eight children born to an Irish couple working on a pioneering sheep and beef station in the New England area of New South Wales, was fortunate that unlike some of her older brothers and sisters, she was able to go to school. The family lived and worked on Ollera station, near Guyra which was described in Wikipedia in 2009 as:

.....essentially a semi-autonomous village with its own bakery, post office, store, bank, school and church. Masons, journeymen, farriers, shepherds jobbers, stockmen, sheep shearers, carpenters and their families were all resident employees with their own houses. There was a medical fund and an amateur theatrical group.

The school for children of workers at Ollera was started in 1862, the year of Sarah's birth and that year, her father Garrett, a legendary bullock-driver at the station, paid £4.2s.6d for his children's education, a contribution which would have continued while ever the family had school age children.

The Ollera school, date unknown but probably the 1890s, a decade or so after Sarah would have attended - but it's unlikely the building had changed at all!

Although several of her brothers and sisters stayed on at Ollera station for several decades, by 1890 Sarah had left home and moved to Armidale a major town 60kilometres away, where she earned a living as a dressmaker. Armidale was only a relatively short distances away from the gold mining settlement of Hillgrove, where her husband-to-be was a blacksmith. David Johnstone Davidson came from a Scottish family, who settled in the New England area in the 1860s, and while many of the Davidsons farmed the land, others set themselves up as tradesman serving gold-rush communities.

Sarah and David had three sons, the first, William, born at Hillgrove in 1892. Another, James Henry, known as "Harry" was born in Hillgrove three years later. Soon after, the young couple, foreseeing that the Hillgrove field might be nearing the end of its riches, and hearing wonderful story from the West of the new goldmining centres of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, headed off the Western Australia. They were settled into Boulder-Kalgoorlie area at the Golden Link lease. when their third son John, was born in October, 1900, but their life in the new state was to be soon abruptly torn apart.

Within a few weeks of the founding of the new Commonwealth of Australia, the festivities of Federation gave way to grief for the Davidson family.

Late in January, 1901, Sarah fell ill with enterica, a form of food poisoning, Three weeks later, she died, leaving a widower, and three young sons, the eldest eight years old, without a mother. She was buried in the Boulder cemetery, after a simple notice was published in the Kalgoorlie Miner. The Pioneer Boulder cemetery is now a desolate scene, with only a simple wooden sign to mark the graves of those who died in the short period of 1899-1904.