Jennifer Horsfield shows how Mary Cunningham’s notebooks and correspondence reveal one woman’s experience of life in the new Federal Capital Territory The Cunningham papers in the National Library are a record of a 26-year correspondence between Mary Cunningham of Tuggeranong Homestead and Lanyon, and her family and friends. They give us an insight into one of the chief pastoral families of early Canberra, and portray life in the first years of Federation and throughout World War I from the viewpoint of an intelligent and perceptive woman. Mary, the eldest of seven children, came from a distinguished Goulburn family. Her father, Edward Twynam, became acting Chief Surveyor of NSW in 1887 and, throughout his long and active life, maintained a great interest in local and world affairs and the progress of his widely travelled children. He was Mary’s chief correspondent. Mary’s mother, Emily Rose, died in 1910, but she had established a name for herself as an accomplished woodcarver and wonderful botanical illustrator with work represented in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Mary was educated at home, at Riversdale in Goulburn. When she was only 20 she married a 38-year-old grazier, James Cunningham, from ‘Tuggranong’. (The original spelling was changed to ‘Tuggeranong’ with the coming of the railway in 1887.) James had inherited this property from his Scottish father Andrew Cunningham, one of the most successful and respected pastoralists in the Queanbeyan district. James’s brother Andrew Jackson Cunningham owned the adjoining property of Lanyon and the two brothers worked in partnership. For the first 13 years of her marriage, Mary’s energies were taken up with her growing family. She had eight children in quick succession. Her position at ‘Tuggeranong’ was always a comfortable one, with a number of live-in domestics and a nurse for the children. Mrs Mabel Pike, nursemaid and housekeeper during the 1890s, refers to Mary and her little girl Peggy: ‘my darling mistress, the dearest mistress in the world’, and her work as ‘darling little Peggie’s loving nurse’. A young parlour maid, Martha Harman, who worked at ‘Tuggeranong’ from 1904, remembered Mary with great fondness, almost as a second mother. When Martha left in 1909 to be married, Mary cried and kissed her goodbye. On her way out to a social occasion, resplendent in evening dress, Mary visited Martha on the night her first baby was born and stayed to comfort her during the delivery. The records we have of Mary suggest a woman of sensitivity and warmth, with a great capacity for friendship, but who often suffered spells of loneliness and intellectual isolation during the years of childrearing. Large notebooks contain page after page of Victorian poetry, carefully copied out in Mary’s graceful handwriting. Her correspondence with her father shows a deep bond between them, not just of affection but of common literary interests, something which might have been absent from the little farming community at ‘Tuggeranong’:
In the years before the war, when her eldest children were young adults and the younger ones were away at boarding school, Mary embarked on an earnest program of self-education, to widen her acquaintance with books and to master the elements of English grammar and poetry. She wrote to her father about her poetry writing:
The Reverend Pierce Galliard Smith, of St Johns Church at Reid, made a monthly visit to the homestead, travelling out on his horse as he had done faithfully throughout his long ministry, to visit his scattered flock. He baptised seven of Mary’s eight children at ‘Tuggeranong’; he also lent her books from the sizeable library he had established for parishioners, and brought her cuttings for her orchard and garden. Gardening was one of Mary’s passions, offering both aesthetic and practical satisfactions. Some of the trees she planted are still standing (as is the homestead). In 1908, the decision to build the new federal capital in the Yass/Canberra region was welcomed by most local people, but landowners soon realised that it would mean the end of their tenure. Sooner or later, their land was to be resumed by the Commonwealth and they would have to start a new life elsewhere. Mary wrote to her father in May 1914, about the large property ‘Gungahleen’: ‘The Craces have received notice of resumption by the Federal Government. I shall be very sorry to lose our neighbours. Mrs Crace was my greatest friend in the district.’ James joined a group called the Federal Capital Vigilance Committee, which was pressing for better compensation from the government for forcible resumption of land. As it was, the Commonwealth did not need to acquire ‘Tuggeranong’ until 1917; the government had decided on the property as the ideal site on which to build a major arsenal (a plan abandoned with the ending of the war). The family, anticipating resumption of the land, had moved to the adjoining property of ‘Lanyon’ in 1914, after Andrew Jackson’s death, though they still visited ‘Tuggeranong’ throughout the war.
With the departure of long-established families, other people arrived on the scene, providing a new range of interests for the local community. The local paper reported in detail on the military training camp, usually held at Liverpool but in 1913 held at the new capital in March, when blizzards and heavy rain provided realistic testing grounds for the 1st and 3rd Light Horse Brigades. The issue of rum for ‘medicinal purposes’ was much appreciated by the shivering soldiers in what was a ‘dry territory’. Another camp was held in March 1914 at ‘Tirranna’, a big sheep station near Goulburn, and the local Goulburn papers were much taken by the visit of Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief, to inspect the troops. Mary’s sister, Joan, gave her own view of the occasion, having talked to some of the local soldiers and recorded their very down-to-earth view of the British military establishment:
The Royal Military College was established in 1911 on the old Campbell property of ‘Duntroon’. Mary and her family became good friends with the staff and were frequent visitors at the games and other events associated with the college. In April 1914 she wrote: ‘On Monday Jim, Andrew and I went to Duntroon to see Sir Ian Hamilton present the prizes to cadets.’ ‘Tuggeranong’ became well known for its warm hospitality to both officers and cadets. The latter would often ride their bikes or borrow a horse and ride out on a visit, during their brief Sunday leave. Some spent the Christmas of 1913 at the property. One of the main attractions of the visit was the presence of Mary’s lively teenage daughters, three of whom married Duntroon officers during or after the war. Mary wrote to her father in 1918, pleading that her brother Ned be spared for the weekend to help Mary’s son Twynam play host:
A number of officers continued to write to Mary while on active service. The memory of that quiet rural homestead and its friendly inhabitants would have been treasured by them as a contrast to life in the trenches. Of approximately 130 men who left Duntroon to serve as officers with the Australian Imperial Force, 37 were killed or died of wounds. Their average age was 21.5 years. In a letter to her sister Joan, serving as a nurse in France, Mary expressed her sense of frustration at not being able to offer more active help to the cause of the war. During the Gallipoli campaign, in which her own son was wounded, she wrote to her father:
With the start of the campaign for the referendum to introduce conscription in 1916, Mary found a voice, and a passion, that led her to public speaking engagements in the local area and to write letters to the Sydney Morning Herald in support of conscription. Part of her local speech of October 1916 went thus:
Mary also became involved with Red Cross fundraising in the district and assumed the management of the War Chest Flower Shop in Sydney, which she visited often during the war because of her husband’s ill health. Perhaps her most meaningful aid to others took the form of letters and poems which she wrote to many of her friends in the local district, so many of them having lost sons in the drawn-out campaigns of trench warfare. We do not have copies of Mary’s letters, but the responses are eloquent. Her friend Jean Rutledge wrote from Bungendore in late 1917:
Like most of her class and generation, Mary was a staunch supporter of the British Empire and of Australia’s contribution to the distant war. In September 1915 she wrote to her father:
After the war, her son Andrew returned to take over the management of the family property of ‘Lanyon’. But the restless, adventurous years of the war had taken their toll and Andrew was never able to settle back to the routines of farming life. Under his careless management, ‘Lanyon’ lost its position as one of the premier properties of the region and was sold at auction in 1926. Mary made a last visit to the property in April 1926, and wrote to her daughter-in-law Helen:
Visitors to ‘Lanyon’ today can look past the grazing cattle, to the left of the entry drive, and they will see a small cemetery surrounded by a white fence and protected by a circle of old pine trees. Mary Cunningham was buried there in 1930, returning at last to her beloved ‘old places’, with views to the river and the quiet hills beyond. JENNIFER HORSFIELD is an independent Canberra researcher. Her book on Mary Cunningham will be published later this year. The Cunningham letters in the National Library can be found in the Manuscript Collection (MS 6748 and 6734). Other correspondence of Mary Cunningham is held privately, and has been made available to researchers by Miss Joan D’Esterre Twynam of Taralga, NSW |
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