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whom came from Geelong or thereabouts. Six were also of German origin, six were Irish , and
14 came from Scotland. The English settlers mostly came from Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall.
In the 1880's those families with the most land in the former runs of Torrumbarry and
Wharparilla were the Mountjoys (3,900 acres), the Mooneys (2,600), the Chrystals (2,400)
and the Mitchells.
Let us suppose that William occupied his land in February 1874, a month or so after his 77th
birthday. Whenever it was, what he had to do followed a
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settled routine. He had to fence the land, clear it of trees for cultivation, and build a home and a
reservoir, or 'dam'.
None of this could he have done alone, especially at his age. Someone must have helped him.
But who? Lawrence Harward or some other young man? But the former would surely have
helped his Uncle Lawrence, who was by that time 54. Or did William try to manage on his
own?
AB Facey's book, A Fortunate Life, gives us a picture of what that work entailed, although he is
writing about the wheatlands in Western Australia, east of Wickepin, and about the work he did
in 1911 when he was 17.
Bert Facey was employed by Dick Rigoll then and advised Rigoll how to set about improving
his 3,000-acre lease.
'First we should get a permanent water supply on the property,' said Bert. Up to then Dick
Rigoll had been carting water from a dam about four miles away. So they built their own dam,
using a single-furrow garden plough and a quarter-yard scoop chained to three horses. This
took them four weeks; the dam would fill up when it rained.
William, we know, constructed a reservoir 25 feet by 16.
Then Bert and Rigoll fenced off an area of grassland for the horses, running two strands of
barbed wire between trees and posts: this was called a 'lightning fence'.
Next they built a house. Up to then the Rigolls (Dick had a wife and three children) had been
living in tents. The house that Bert Facey devised for them had two 10' x 12' rooms and a 12' x
24' living-room and kitchen. The walls were of bush timber lined within with hessian, and the
roof was of corrugated iron. The chimney was made of granite rocks and cement. Four glass
windows and proper doors were the final refinements, and the walls were whitewashed inside
and out. This took Bert and Dick some three weeks to build.
William's house, as described by his son-in-law, Lawrence, in 1876, was 24' x 12'. Its two
rooms were made of weatherboard, red gum and softwoods; its chimney was brick.
It was probably very like the house that Bert Facey's uncle had built in 1902: wall-poles in their
hundreds were cut from bush timber and set side by side in trenches three feet deep - clay filled
in the gaps; the timbered roof was thatched with the long grassy spines or leaves of the
blackboy tree; and kangaroo skins curtained the doorways. The furniture consisted of a large
table and two benches made of bush timber. Every daytime activity, there or at Echuca, was
attended by pestering mosquitos and flies.
The last major labour was to clear the land for cultivation.
Bert advised Dick: 'During the summer months, that is December and January, get as much ring-
barking done as you can.'
This meant chopping trees that were six inches to a foot thick down to waist height, knocking
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