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of the first names of Macmillan's seven children, all girls.
Other plantations were set up, and sugar mills, seven in all, were built. But of these only the
Kalamia and Pioneer mills survived into the twentieth century.
These entreprises and the influx of labour, as well as the domestic and business needs of the
crop-farmers and cattlemen, determined that the area should be provided with some civic,
social and commercial focus, and in 1882 the township of Ayr was established on the site of a
camping reserve near Plantation Creek, chosen as such because it was on a slight rise and
accordingly free from flooding. It was named after the Scottish town of Ayr, the birthplace of
the Queensland premier, Sir Thomas Mcllwraith, who was one of the major partners in the
North Australian Pastoral Company and had large business interests locally, in company shares
and in his own purchases of land. Climatically, the two Ayrs could hardly have been less alike.
A Crown Land sale of lots in the new township was held in August 1882. Among the buyers
were William Muir, William Collins, Robert Philp, Aplin Brown and Company, and a couple of
banks. The 86 lots available grossed £4,441. The first stores were built and the first hotel - the
Queens Hotel, run by Mrs Lynch. All were of timber, as were the rough and ready premises
dotting the dusty roads: a blacksmith, saddler and tin smith; a cabinet-maker and
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undertaker; a painter, butcher and carter. There was also a small courthouse and police-station,
and a local surgeon, Dr Barrow, attended on the few people who lived there then.
Those pioneering families lived mainly in very basic two-room structures made of split palms,
with roofs of galvanised iron to keep out the tropical torrents of rain. They fed simply on dishes
of beef, mutton, poultry, pork, and eggs, with bread and potatoes to fill in the gaps, and a few
other vegetables: onions, pumpkins and peas. Fruit and vegetables were surprisingly scarce. For
exotic fruits were thought to cause diseases, and vegetable gardens were labour and water
intensive and deemed to be the province of the lowly Chinese.
Kitchen necessities - and kitchens, like the toilet outhouse, or dunny, were detached from every
home - included flour, sugar, oatmeal, sago, tapioca, dried apricots, currants, syrup and jam.
Milk, butter and cheese came more often from a goat than from a cow. All these items had to
be protected from ant attack and were usually stored in food safes, whose legs were creosoted
and stood in tins of kerosene. Ants were a minor menace compared to the flies, and there were
frequent and seasonal infestations of mosquitos, moths, beetles and frogs, not to mention the
occasional intrusions of dingos, goannas, spiders and snakes.
There were also the everpresent dangers of illnesses, like dysentery, diphtheria, scarlet fever
and other tropical fevers, typhoid and TB. As cures, castor oil, quinine and aspirin, laudanum
and opium might be kept in medicine cupboards, with bottles of cough and cold mixtures, and
laxatives to ease the bowels.
It was a hard life for all in early Ayr, a daily battle to maintain a basic existence. The working
day was long and hard and leisure hours were few. Holidays were unheard of. But it was the
steamy heat and the dust, the colossal storms, the silences, and the strange bird and animal cries
of the bush that were most wildly different from places where people had lived down south.
And how uncomfortable must their lives have been, roughly dressed as they were: the men in
trousers, shirts, and vests, and wearing hats and boots; the women in full-length, long-sleeved
dresses, buttoned up to their necks. And the only complete wash was in a shallow tin bath once
a week.
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