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When she left Mt Leyshon she went to Ayr and opened a little lolly-shop. She did not have
much at the time, but she did very well over the years. Her business just grew and grew and
grew.'
Esther's daughter, Alma, who was eleven in 1913, explained the move as follows: 'Charters
Towers was going downhill - the gold had been worked out. The Burdekin was a new area.
People came to Ayr because land was cheaper, and to start a new life. My mother came here
because she knew some family called Rutherford; my father worked for them, cane-cutting,
before he died.'
Bill had worked on the Rutherfords' cane farm, McDesme, for five months in 1909, sharing a
tent with Jack, who may have been Esther's younger brother. Although Bill thought Mrs
Rutherford was 'a funny old sort', her kindness and cooking impressed him favourably - as did
the coastal plains, interrupted by abrupt small dark forested mountains, through which the
Burdekin River ran, and the hamlets of Ayr and Home Hill; the McDesme farm was situated
between them. Or perhaps it was the lusher, less arid landscape near the blue-green sea, and
the breezier climate - as well as the cheapness of the land.
Bill's grandson, Lloyd said: 'My grandfather, Willie, hoped to get enough money together to
establish himself in the Burdekin - and the family; he believed the area would prosper. His
ambition was to get a small block of land, near the railway station. He thought of setting up a
shop.' According to John, Bill's other grandson: 'When Willie died, Esther could see there
wasn't much future in the Charters Towers area for a young family, because the gold was
starting to peter out. She had never been to Ayr, as far as I know. But she must have had
glowing reports from her husband. So she took her children and came to Ayr. She started a
grocery store.'
It wasn't that simple of course, and it wasn't that quick. It was not until March 1913 that Esther,
aged 33, made the move to Ayr, making fact of the Utopian dreams her husband had had, and
making use of her own common sense. It was what Willie had wanted, and it must have seemed
the best thing to do - making a new beginning somewhere else and giving her children the
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aborigines for 17 years in the area of the lower Burdekin and acquired an intimate knowledge of
the land, its flora and fauna, and of aboriginal customs and ideas - little of which would be
passed on to the settlers, squatters and land-grabbers who began invading the interior from
1859, when Queensland became a separate colony, many times bigger than New South Wales.
Morrill returned to his own race in 1863, exposing his naked and sunburnt body to two
shepherds and calling out: 'What cheer, shipmates!' When they pointed a gun at him he yelled:
'Don't shoot me! I'm a British object! A shipwrecked sailor!' Famous thenceforth for the last
two years of his life, he became a storekeeper in Bowen, married a domestic servant who bore
him a son, and died of a fever in 1865; he was 41. He was never comfortable wearing
European clothes and went barefoot, disliking the constricting pressure of boots and shoes.
By the time James Morrill died, the land over which he had freely roamed with the aborigines
had been investigated and occupied by sheepmen, cattlemen and speculators, not a few whom,
as in other areas when land became available, were Scottish. They came north from Port
Denison (Bowen), their sheep and cattle fanning out as runs or blocks were amalgamated into
properties that extended for hundreds of square miles, some almost as large as Scotland itself.
None reached to the coast, as a coastal strip three miles wide had been reserved by the
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