Susanna De Vries - Blue Ribbons Bitter Bread: Joice Loch - Australias Most Heroic Woman

Chapter 1CHILD OF THE CYCLONE

1. According to Joice NanKivell Loch's A Fringe of Blue: an Autobiography, John Murray, London, 1968, the NanKivell land was near Truro in Cornwall. The family was large, split between England, France, Australia and New Zealand. One of her ancestors had been Mayor of Truro while other NanKivells had been pirates and buccaneers. The spelling of the family name varies. A cousin, Rex Nan Kivell, is famous for donating his valuable collection to the Australian people and it is shared by the National Library of Australia and the National Gallery in Canberra.
2. Joice inherited this silver teapot, which I was shown when I visited Ouranoupolis.
3. Joice relates the story of her maternal grandmother's divorce and remarriage in A Fringe ofBlue, op cit, p 5. George NanKivell referred to Emily Lawson as 'flighty and a bad influence on the children' and refused to let Edith contact her. The scandal of her parents' divorce and its sad consequences may explain why Edith refused to divorce George NanKivell.
4. Loch, Joice NanKivell, A Fringe of Blue: an Autobiography, op cit.
5. An account of the firm of Fanning NanKivell & Sons appears in ADB, Vol 4, pp 152-153 in the entries for William Fanning (1816-1887) and his son, Edward Fanning (1848-1917). Fanning NanKivell was registered in Britain and in Melbourne and their ships and warehouses were heavily mortgaged in the early 1880s to invest in Queensland sugar. In 1882, Thomas NanKivell and Edward Fanning invested jointly in grazing land near Tambo. See Record of Crown Lands offered for Sale at Public Auction, 1882, Department of Lands, New South Wales. Joice's father, George NanKivell, managed the firm's Tambo property before going north to manage Farnham for Fanning NanKivell.
6. The birth certificates of Joice Mary NanKivell and her younger brother, Charles Gordon Lincoln NanKivell, are held in the State Archives of Queensland.
7. ADB, Vol 4, entry under Fanning, Edward, cites Gairloch (4,600 acres) and Macknade (6,856 acres). Gairloch employed 90 Kanakas, 25 Malay field workers, 20 Chinese cooks and mill workers and 10 European overseers. Farnham, with 5,000 acres was larger than Gairloch and doubtless had a similar number of imported workers. According to the ADB, Hamleigh, the company's fourth plantation had been established by a British cane planter with substantial plantations in Java and Fanning NanKivell bought a half-share in what became their fourth Herbert River property.
8. Loch, Joice NanKivell, A Fringe of Blue: an Autobiography, op cit, p 9.
9. Neame family diary, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
10. Nankivell, Joice M., The Solitary Pedestrian, Australian Author's Agency, Melbourne, 1918.
11. See Australian Encyclopedia, Angus & Robertson, 1925 pp 651-655; Graves, Adrian Arthur, Cane and Labour, The Political Economy of the Queensland sugar industry 1862-1906, Edinburgh University Press, 1993; Hokanson, Stig R., Arrival, acceptance and abolition, indentured labour in the Queensland sugar industry 1863-1916, Griffith University, Brisbane, 1887.

Chapter 2PARROT PIE AND PIGWEED SALAD

1. Neame family diary, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, gives the full story of the non-payment of Fanning NanKivell's mortgages to the Neame brothers and their settlement with Fanning NanKivell. Thomas NanKivell escaped bankruptcy by donating assets to his wife. Edward Fanning managed to reorganise his finances and continued to deal in shipping cargoes, according to his entry in ADB, Vol 4.
2. Loch, Joice NanKivell, A Fringe of Blue: An Autobiography, John Murray, London, 1968, pp 44-48.
3. See NanKivell, Joice M., The Solitary Pedestrian, Australian Author's Agency, Melbourne, 1918, for many of her Queensland stories including the death of her Aborignal playmate, Tinker.
4. The land once occupied by Farnham is situated between Ingham and the smaller town of Halifax. Today a sewage treatment plant operates on part of the plantation; another section is known as 'the old Mills Farm'. Nothing remains of Farnham homestead. Information provided by Councillor Vi Groundwater.
5. Decades later, travelling by train in Britain, Joice met a NanKivell cousin who had grown up on a sugar plantation in the West Indies. He was the offspring of an inter-racial marriage. She records their encounter in A Fringe of Blue: an Auto-biography, op cit.
6. According to the City of Prahran Rate Book for 1888 (Prahran Library, Melbourne), Thomas Nankivell had by now moved to a smaller but still substantial house at 57 Toorak Road, listed as having 10 rooms. In 1891 the house was re-numbered 431 Toorak Road, located close to the junction of Kensington and Toorak Roads, near Como House. It was subsequently demolished and the land subdivided. It is now the site of luxury apartments.

Chapter 3RURAL POVERTY AT BOOLARA

1. Loch, Joice NanKivell, A Fringe of Blue: an Autobiography, John Murray, London, 1968, p 9.
2. Ibid, p 13.
3. Ibid, p 20.
4. Ibid, p 26.
5. NanKivell, Joice M., The Solitary Pedestrian, Australian Author's Agency, Melbourne, 1918, pp 51-54.
6. The story of the rabbit dinner given to the guests is related by Joice in The Solitary Pedestrian,op cit.
7. World War 1 ensured that Maie Ryan (later Lady Casey) never had her planned coming-out ball. Instead she did voluntary war work and, chaperoned by her ambitious mother, attended the few debutante balls that did take place in London during the war. Maie did not make her 'glittering' marriage to Richard Casey, diplomat, administrator and eventually Governor-General of Australia until she was in her early thirties, by which time Joice was married and working in Poland.

Chapter 4THE WILD COLONIAL GIRL

1. Loch, Joice NanKivell, A Fringe of Blue: an Autobiography, John Murray, London, 1968, pp 37-38.
2. The school may have been the predecessor of Firbank, the well-known Melbourne girls' school which several younger members of the NanKivell family attended.
3. NanKivell, Joice M., The Solitary Pedestrian, Australian Author's Agency, Melbourne, 1918, pp 80-81.
4. The story of Joice's suitor, Percy B, is related in an amusing way in Loch, Joice NanKivell, A Fringe of Blue: an Autobiography, op cit, pp 49-51

Chapter 5'THE COBWEB LADDER'

1. For descriptions of Geoff NanKivell's time in Queensland, see Loch, Joice NanKivell, AFringe of Blue: an Autobiography, John Murray, London, 1968, and NanKivell, Joice M., The Solitary Pedestrian, Australian Author's Agency, Melbourne, 1918.
2. Details of life at Drouin are from Loch, Joice NanKivell, A Fringe of Blue: an Autobiography,op cit.
3. Ibid, p 52.
4. Nankivell, Joice, M., The Cobweb Ladder, op cit, contains fourteen illustrations by Edith Alsopa Melbourne artist who worked on an important series of murals in Melbourne's Homeopathic Hospital, and exhibited in Sydney and Melbourne with Jessie Trail, another talented artist. For entries on Joice NanKivell Loch, see Muir, Marcie, Australian Children'sBooks, Vol 1, Andre Deutsch, London, 1970 p 293, and Adelaide, Debra, Bibliography ofAustralian Women's Writing, D.W. Thorpe, Melbourne, 1991.
5. Due to a wartime paper shortage, The Cobweb Ladder, was printed for Lothian Book Publishing Co. of Melbourne in England in 1916. A British edition was published in 1916 by Simpkin, London. This large format handsomely produced children's book has become rare, valuable and highly sought after. The author catalogued a copy in 1980 when she was in charge of the Rare Book Department of Lawson's Auctioneers, Sydney and its sale aroused a great deal of interest.