From Ardrossan

This is the story of Alexander Shearer (1887-1921) and Annie Barclay Tyre (1889-1979) - two children of the Scottish harbour town of Ardrossan who grew up a street apart, close enough that their backyards met, and who built a life together on the far side of the world, in the wheat-and-wool country of the New South Wales Castlereagh. He was a ship-carpenter's son who went to sea; she was a draper's daughter trained as a children's nurse. They married in Sydney in 1914. He died young, in 1921, before his youngest child was born. She lived on for another fifty-eight years - going home to Scotland and coming back again, keeping a shop, marrying a second time, and outlasting nearly everyone in this book.

It is told from the family's own documents, from the newspapers, and from the records - a marriage certificate, a crew list, an old soldier's letter, a probate file down to the last chisel - and from the memory of their youngest daughter, Lex.

Ardrossan in the 1880s was a working harbour on the Ayrshire coast, a place of slipways and coal-staithes where the produce of industrial Scotland went out to Europe and North America, and where the sea was the natural road for any man who wanted to get on. It was into this town, on 13 December 1887, that Alexander Shearer was born, at 9 Harbour Place, the son of Alexander Shearer, a ship-carpenter journeyman, and his wife Margaret, née Wylie.¹

To understand the Shearers you have to understand the town, because the two were made of the same stuff. Ardrossan had not grown up by accident on the Firth of Clyde; it had been built on purpose - from a foundation stone laid in 1806 - to be a harbour, and by the 1840s it was one, with two great tidal basins, stone quays and shipbuilding slips. Coal and pig-iron went out from it to Europe and across the Atlantic, and from 1825 ships were built along the harbour - one yard carrying a name this family would one day carry across the world: Barr & Shearer, established in 1842. It was a crowded, churchgoing, respectable place of Presbyterian kirks and tenement streets, where a working household counted gas light a small luxury. That was the world the ship-carpenter's son was born into - and the reason the road ahead for such a boy always ran down to the water.⁹⁰

He was one of a large family - at least eight children - and the household moved about the burgh's tenement streets the way working families did: a close at Bute Place, then rooms at 214 Glasgow Street.² The trade Alexander would one day carry across the world, carpentry, was his father's before him. But that inheritance came early and hard. In 1901, when Alexander was thirteen and still a scholar, his father died of phthisis - the tuberculosis of the crowded industrial west.³

His widowed mother did what a capable Ardrossan woman did: she took on work that would keep the family respectable and fed. Margaret Shearer kept the Sub Post Office on Glasgow Street - when the local paper wrote up her son's success years later, it placed him plainly as "son of Mrs Shearer, Post Office, Glasgow Street, Ardrossan."⁴ It is a small, telling detail: the boy who went to sea came from a household that, after the father's death, was held together by his mother behind a Post Office counter.

A short walk away, on Alexander Place, lived the Tyres. James Tyre junior was a draper, a shopkeeping man with premises of his own, and his daughter Annie Barclay Tyre had been born there on 23 December 1889 - almost exactly two years after Alexander.⁵ The Tyre household moved about the better streets of the town - Glasgow Street, then Seton Street - and by family account they were comfortable, the sort of people who kept a nanny.⁶ Annie was trained for a profession, as a children's nurse⁷ - a skill that would, in time, cross the world with her. Of her girlhood the record is otherwise thin; but the shape of it is clear enough - a draper's daughter, brought up a little above the harbour streets, who knew the ship-carpenter's son two doors and a world away.

Alexander, for his part, had a voice. He sang with the Ardrossan Musical Society and trained under a local teacher, J. W. Blythe⁸; in 1908 he performed in a local operetta.⁹ And in 1909 he took a step into the life of the town that would echo far beyond it: he was raised a Master Mason in Lodge Saltcoats & Ardrossan No. 320.¹⁰ It seemed a small thing - a young tradesman joining his brethren. It was not. That single tie would reach forward across thirty years and two oceans to shape the childhoods of daughters not yet born.

His father had been a ship's carpenter; the town built ships; and the way ahead for such a boy was the sea. Alexander followed it, signing on with the Glasgow firms whose vessels were known, with grim sailor's affection, as the "unlucky" Loch Line.¹¹ It would live up to its name.

Alexander signed as an ordinary seaman on the barque Loch Katrine, one of the Loch Line's tall sailing ships still working the long routes in the last age of sail.¹¹ What matters in his story is not the romance of it but one particular voyage - the one that brought him to Australia, and which was no ordinary passage at all.

To go to sea on the Loch Line about 1907 was to step into a trade the world had already begun to leave behind. Steam had taken the mails, the passengers and the paying cargo; the tall square-riggers hung on only where time did not matter and cheapness did - hauling coal, grain and wool on the long, slow routes to the far side of the world. A boy who signed one of them learned his seamanship the old, hard way, on ships that were themselves relics: months at a stretch out of sight of land, the whole southern leg run deep in the Roaring Forties for the sake of speed. It was a young man's world, poorly paid and genuinely dangerous, and it was closing even as Alexander entered it. That is the trade he gave his early twenties to - and it set him down, by accident, in the country that kept him.⁹¹

On 27 April 1910 the Loch Katrine was caught in a gale off Cape Perpendicular, on the New South Wales coast, and dismasted. Crippled, she was taken in tow and brought into Sydney, where she anchored in Athol Bight on 10 May 1910.¹² So Alexander Shearer's first sight of the country that became his home was from the deck of a broken ship being dragged to safety - a documented, dramatic entrance that, as much as anything, decided the rest of his life. He had not come out to stay; but he was here.

From Sydney, Alexander went inland to the Castlereagh, to the Coonamble district, and took up the trade he knew. The 1913 electoral roll has him there as a carpenter, in Namoi Street.¹³ He was, by every sign, a man getting on: skilled, sober, well-liked.

The country Alexander went up into was itself a made thing, and a young one. The Castlereagh districts around Coonamble and Mendooran had been thrown open under the closer-settlement schemes that broke the old squatting runs into selections a working family could take up, and the railway had followed - so a tradesman arriving in the 1910s came into a wheat-and-wool country still building itself: new farms and fences, new houses, new halls and stores in the railway towns. It was exactly the place for a skilled, sober man with a trade in his hands; a carpenter could hardly fail to find work in a district that was, quite literally, going up around him.⁸¹

And Alexander was not alone for long. In May 1911 his brother, Hugh Wylie Shearer, followed him out from Scotland, sailing into Sydney on the Runic - the two of them plainly still in touch across the world, with Hugh coming to exactly where Alex had landed.⁴⁵ From then on the brothers were a pair in the district; so when Alex sent home for Annie three years later, Hugh was no stranger down for a wedding but a Castlereagh man himself, and the natural one to stand beside his brother.

And he was still singing. The boy from the Ardrossan operetta became, in the bush, something of a local celebrity. In October 1912 he carried off the first-class gold medal for bass solo at the Coonamble Eisteddfod - a big open competition of some fifty classes that drew thousands over its two or three days - the test song being "Drinking." The Coonamble Times praised "the possessor of a cultivated light basso voice," and the news travelled all the way home: the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald ran the story in January 1913 under the headline "Vocalist's Success in New South Wales."¹⁴ Wherever Alexander Shearer was, there was singing - and now there were prizes for it.

That a wheat-and-shearing town on the Castlereagh should hold an eisteddfod of some fifty classes, drawing thousands over two or three days, can surprise a modern reader - but it was entirely of its time. Country New South Wales in the 1910s took self-improvement seriously: the eisteddfod, the School of Arts, the church choir and the friendly-society hall were how a raw district built a cultural life of its own, and a first-class gold medal for bass solo was a real local honour. Alexander had walked out of one singing town, Ardrossan, and found another waiting for him half a world away.⁸⁸

Late in 1913 he did a remarkable thing for a working man: he sailed back to Scotland. The departure record from London lists him plainly - "Farmer, age 24."¹⁵ By family account, he went home to ask Annie Barclay Tyre to marry him. Whatever had passed between the two of them in Ardrossan, it had held across three years and half a world. She said yes.

Annie sailed for Australia and reached Sydney on 26 July 1914, bound for Alexander at Coonamble.¹⁶ Two days later, on 28 July 1914, they were married at the Neutral Bay Presbyterian Church in North Sydney, the Reverend Robert H. Waugh officiating, with Alexander's brother Hugh among the witnesses.¹⁷ She had stepped off the ship and into a marriage inside forty-eight hours. Five days after that, on the other side of the world, the Great War began.

They did not stay at Coonamble. Their eldest, Margaret - Meg - was born there in 1915, at a place called "Roslin" in Warrana Street.¹⁸ But by 1917 the little family had moved south to a leased property on the Castlereagh Highway near Mendooran, and Alexander named it "Ardrossan", after the harbour town he had left.¹⁹ The name still stands on the land today. And still there more than 100 years later. There is no neater emblem of the whole migration than a Scottish seaman planting his birthplace, in his own painted letters, in a dry New South Wales paddock - carrying home across the world and nailing it to a post.

Mendooran in these years was a small but rising railway town on the Castlereagh, and it needed precisely what Alexander could do. A town becomes a town when someone builds its stores, halls, houses and public rooms, and a builder-contractor stands at the centre of that work. Shearer & Allan were tendering for the work that builds a town because there was, just then, a town being built.⁶⁶

At Mendooran Alexander became more than a jobbing carpenter. By 1918 he was a builder and contractor in the partnership of Shearer & Allan, tendering for the kind of work that builds a town.²⁰ We know this because of a letter - one of the small miracles of this family's record. On 7 April 1918, from "Ardrossan", Mendooran, Alexander wrote to his brother Bill back in Scotland, and in it you can hear the man whole.

It is all there: the ambition and the realism in one breath, the pride in "Ardrossan", the tradesman's eye for a tender lost by nine pounds, and underneath it all the warmth - the kisses sent from a three-year-old, the brother urged to come out and make good. This was a man building something, and meaning it to last.

And the two brothers kept the old Ardrossan habit of singing alive in the bush. At a crowded send-off in the Mendooran town hall in January 1917 - a farewell to a local lieutenant bound for the front - both Shearers took the floor: Hugh sang "Heroes of the Dardanelles" and "A Deathless Army" to warm applause, and Alex gave "Mary" in his usual musical voice, and was called back for an encore.⁴⁶ At the piano that night, as it happened, was a young A. E. Cruickshank - a name that would appear again twelve years later as a witness at Annie's second wedding.

The family grew. After Meg (1915) came Catherine in 1918.²² Alexander kept up his lodge ties in his new country - they would matter enormously later - and he kept his horse and his place in the district's life. He did not enlist in the Great War; family tradition holds that his brothers in Scotland wrote urging him to stay where he was²³ - to keep building the life he had made, and leave the fighting to others. He took the advice. It is one of the quiet ironies at the centre of this story, and we will come back to it: the man who was told to stay safe, and stayed, would not see thirty-four.

His choice not to go carried more weight than a modern reader might guess. In a small country town between 1916 and 1918 the pressure to enlist was intense and public - honour rolls in the halls, recruiting marches down the main street, and hard words for the men who stayed - and the nation tore itself in half over two conscription referenda on exactly this question. For a Scottish-born tradesman with a young family and a business to keep, staying was defensible and still conspicuous; that his own brothers wrote from Scotland urging him to stay only sharpens the irony the story keeps returning to.⁹²

In the last days of November 1921, Alexander caught pneumonia. There were no antibiotics; with his heart failing under it, the illness ran its course in a few days. He died at "Ardrossan", Mendooran, on 1 December 1921, aged thirty-three.²⁴ The local paper was brief and sincere.

Some hundred Oddfellows and Masonic brethren followed him to the Mendooran cemetery, where his headstone carries the square and compass of his lodge.²⁶ Sixteen days after he died, on 17 December 1921, his third daughter was born and named Alexandra - Lex - for the father she would never meet.²⁷

Alexander died intestate, and the probate file is its own kind of portrait. The Public Trustee's inventory lists a life-assurance policy with the National Mutual - policy number 213889 - paying out £277/1/3; against it, an overdraft of £134/12/1 at the Mendooran bank.²⁸ And it lists, item by item, the tools of his trade, valued at £19/18/0: a mitre plane at £3, a Stanley plane No. 45, a levelling instrument, thirteen chisels and gouges, a sixty-six-foot tape, down to a glue pot at fivepence. When the debts were paid, the estate came to £162/7/2 - a modest sum, and a young family's whole security. It was the insurance policy, more than anything, that would let Annie do what she did next.

Annie Shearer was thirty-two, with three daughters under seven and the youngest a newborn. What she did over the next eight years is the heart of why this family survived. The lodge death-funds and Alexander's insurance gave her a little ground to stand on; everything after that she did herself.

It is worth pausing on what a widow of thirty-two actually faced in 1922. There was no meaningful widow's pension, few respectable trades open to a woman, and a mother of small children was expected to manage on whatever a husband had left and whatever her own hands could earn. Annie had two assets - a trade in her fingers from her draper's upbringing, and the small capital of Alexander's insurance and the lodge death-funds - and she used both. What looks from here like a modest shop and a little dressmaking was, in the terms of its day, a woman engineering her family's survival with almost nothing beneath her.⁹³

Her first instinct was the natural one: go home. In 1922 she took all three girls back to Scotland, arriving on 1 November 1922, to her own people at Ardrossan.²⁹ It did not answer. The cold, the dark, the grief, the sense of no longer fitting the town she had left - and so, after a little under two years, she made up her mind. About July 1924 she brought the children back to Australia.³⁰ She had now crossed the world three times. She did not cross it again.

Back at Mendooran she set about making a living in the most practical way she could, and she did it on two fronts at once. The draper's daughter put her needle to work: in October 1924 she was advertising in the Mudgee Guardian - "Sewing. All kinds of ladies' and children's underclothing done at moderate charges. Mrs A. Shearer, Mendooran."³¹ And then, in 1925, she went into trade on her own account. Among the new buildings going up in the town, the paper noted a shop "which Mrs. A. Shearer intends opening as a fruit shop."³² Needle and shopfront together: a fruit and refreshment shop on the main street of a railway town, and dressmaking by lamplight after hours. It was modest. It was hers.

By the later 1920s Annie was a woman of standing in Mendooran in her own right - a shopkeeper, a mother managing, a known quantity. And in the district was a returned soldier and farmer she had come to know: George Colley. In the years after Alexander's death the two of them grew closer - slowly, in the way of two careful grown people who had each seen hard things - and at last, in 1929, they married.³⁴ Tellingly, when it came, the Mendooran town block was put into Annie's own name first - on 20 February 1929 - before the wedding.³⁵ Whatever else she was becoming, she would not be becoming nobody.

To understand the second half of Annie's life, we have to go back and bring a third person forward. George Colley was born in 1884, at Bathurst, a son of James Colley, and belonged to the Coolah district north-east of Mendooran. By 1915 he held "Wheatlands", a homestead farm of some 1,358 acres north of the town.³⁶ He was, in short, exactly the kind of man Alexander had urged his brother to become: someone on the land, not playing at it.

George served in the Great War, and was badly gassed on the Western Front - an injury that troubled his heart and his lungs for the rest of his life. He also knew Alexander: by family account he visited the Shearers in Scotland while on leave, recuperating. He was welcomed home to Coolah in 1919.³⁷ And like Alexander, he left a letter that lets us hear him. In January 1921 - while Alexander Shearer was still alive, a few miles away - George wrote to a hospital friend, Clifford Mason, with whom he had convalesced in England. It is wry, restless, unmistakably a voice.

That this letter survives at all is a small wonder: Clifford Mason kept it, carried it to Canada, and his son brought it to light again in 2019, nearly a century on. In it George is doing well - sixteen hundred bags of wheat, the best crop he had had - and joking about the gas in the same line. The damage and the determination, side by side. His earlier life, before about 1915, is one of the honest gaps in this story: we meet him already a grown farmer, and exactly where he came from is work still to be done.

In 1929 George Colley and the widowed Annie Shearer married, in the Dubbo district. A son, James - always "Bert" - was born in 1930.³⁸ Annie was forty; she had a new husband, a fourth child, a farm, and the three Shearer girls growing up - mostly away at school now, home for the holidays. For a few years the ledger of her life finally seemed to be running the right way.

The good years did not last, and this time it was not bad luck but the whole world economy. As the Depression bit and wool and wheat prices halved, George's farms could not carry their debt. "Wheatlands" was surrendered to the bank sometime after 1931; a second block was gone by 1936; the land values were cut at the Valuation Court, and the mortgages did the rest.³⁹ This was not a personal failing - it was the engine of the times, and it drove the family off the land and toward the city. By 1938 they were at Fairfield, in Sydney's west.⁴⁰ The farm life was over.

The Colleys were not alone, and that matters. Across the wheat-and-wool country in the early 1930s thousands of closer-settlers and returned-soldier farmers - men put on the land in exactly George's years - were foundering on the same arithmetic: land taken up at good-times values, mortgaged, then caught when prices collapsed and the banks called the debt. The Valuation Court that cut George's land values was busy everywhere at once. What happened to "Wheatlands" was a private grief and a national event, both at once.⁷⁰

They did not stay beaten for long. On 30 August 1939 George bought a forty-acre orchard at Kenthurst, on Sydney's rural fringe, and called himself an orchardist.⁴¹ The family named the place Brucehaven. After the wheat-and-wool plains it was a different kind of farming altogether - closer, fiddlier, more hands-on - and the truth was they had it all to learn.

George Colley died at Kenthurst on 7 June 1950, his war-worn heart finally giving out.⁴² He had outlived the gas by thirty-two years. Here is the quiet irony the whole story has been circling: Alexander Shearer, who was advised to stay safe at home and did, died at thirty-three of an ordinary illness; George Colley, who went to the Western Front and was gassed, lived to be sixty-six. The man who stayed home died first; the man who went to war survived it.

Annie sold the orchard the following year. She had been widowed twice now, and she did what she had always done - she carried on. She lived at Castle Hill through the 1950s, '60s and into the '70s, at 7 Church Street, and finally at Hornsby, an age pensioner.⁴³ These last decades are thinly recorded - the documents grow sparse, and we will not invent what they do not tell us. Annie Barclay Tyre - Shearer, then Colley - died on 25 May 1979, at Hornsby, aged eighty-nine.⁴⁴ She had outlived Alexander by fifty-eight years.

Two children of Ardrossan, a street apart, who grew up where the land ran out and the sea began. He carried the name of the town to the far side of the world and nailed it to a fence post; she carried the family through every loss the century could throw at it - a young husband, a war's worth of grief, a depression, a second widowhood - and kept walking. He is remembered in a few firm dates and one warm letter; she is remembered in fifty-eight years of getting on with it. From Ardrossan, all the way.