Jeff McGill - Rachel: Brumby hunter, medicine woman, bushrangers ally and troublemaker for good . . . the remarkable pioneering life of Rachel Kennedy

JEFF McGILL is a freelance writer, photographer and former newspaper editor who loves telling Australian stories. He is the great-great grandson of Rachel Kennedy. His heart lifts every time he sees the Warrumbungle Mountains on the horizon.

First published in 2022

Copyright Jeff McGill 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web:www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 998 3

eISBN 978 1 76106 393 0

Maps by Jeff McGill

Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Cover design: Luke Causby/Blue Cork

Cover photograph: Authors collection and Arcangel Images/Heather Reeder

So she roamed the Warrumbungles, unhaltered, proud of eye; Dimly seen in mountain rainstorms or sharp against the sky.

The Warrumbungle Mare, Old Timer (Charles Shaw), The Bulletin

I first met Rachel in 1982, half a century after her death.

A teenager, I was exploring my grandfathers studyone of those wonderful rooms full of maps, books, photos, framed bird paintings and a well-used typewriter. Here, my grandfather said as he opened a small tin box. I want to show you something.

Out came a yellowing newspaper article dated 1930: his grandmothers obituary. I started reading it, out of politeness at first, but was intrigued by the words a noted horsewoman in her younger days and took part in many daring exploits

It fired my imagination. The soundtrack to The Man from Snowy River began running through my head as I conjured up scenes of Rachel galloping through the Warrumbungle mountainsa landscape protected today as one of Australias best-loved national parks.

I wanted to know more and more about this wild colonial girl, but the questions I asked my grandfather only generated new questions. What was she like? How did she learn to ride? Why did she help bushrangers? Who was her Aboriginal friend? Over the next six years, Rachel became a subject of countless conversations between us, a shared bond of interest, until my grandfathers death in 1988.

By that time I was a young newspaper reporter in Sydney and felt a need to somehow preserve all this Rachelana. Maybe a book, or a series of articles. The problem was it was all oral history. Hearsay, one of my colleagues said. Exaggeration at best; lies at worse.

That miffed me. My grandfatherArnold Robert McGill, OAMwas no liar. He was a man of science, an ornithologist renowned for his painstaking, meticulous research. At least thats how he is described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Arnold was a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society, an expert in avian classification, and not the sort of bloke prone to making stuff up. But

Was it possible the stories told to my grandfather by others, even Rachel herself, were exaggerations? Or lies? That simple question gave me a hobby for the next three decades.

With the patient support of my wife Trish I began to collect hard evidence in my spare time: legal records, land records, birth records, death records and marriage records. Also parish maps, police documents and endless history books. My family and I also made many treks to the Warrumbungles to walk the ground, exploring old ruins, meeting relatives and locating bush graves. In the past decade or so, access to thousands of old newspaper articles via Trovethe priceless website of the Australian National Libraryhelped glue the jigsaw puzzle together.

Unfortunately, Rachel did not leave any diaries or journals, but I still believed her story worth telling. She was a woman who stood out on a wild frontier dominated by men, she built rare friendships with Aboriginal people, and there was hardly a twist or turn in the colonial history of the Warrumbungles she did not respond to, influence or witness.

Some people might argue I cant be a truly detached observer because Rachel was my great-great-grandmother. Perhaps. But I had no interest in writing about some boring saint disembowelled of fault; it was the three-dimensional human being who fascinated me. Rachel was an amazing woman, not a perfect woman; the chapter titled Hiding bushrangers should tell you that. Hopefully, my family connection simply provided me with a better perspective of Rachels traits, beliefs and prejudices, thanks in no small part to my grandfather who knew her so well.

In short, I hope this book still sounds like oral history, a campfire yarn but with a firm skeleton of evidence.

A few other points need explanation. Rachel sometimes appears in the records as Rachael, but I only use the former in this book. It was the spelling used for her baptism in 1846, her first marriage in 1865 and her headstone in 1930, so I went with it. In the same vein, Rachels father only appears as Neil, not Neal.

All property names are streamlined. Early squatting runs, often named after a misheard Aboriginal phrase, had dozens of different spellings. Mereyula, for example, can also be found as Meagula, Miruela, Mirrgalla and Merugulah, to name a few. To avoid confusion, I stick with one version throughoutgenerally the best known.

Duke Tritton of The Bulletin, in his warm prose about Rachel, spelt her second married name as Ingles because that is how Inglis was pronounced in the old Scottish way. I have corrected Dukes quotes in to avoid confusion.

All amounts of money are given in the original currency, because inflation renders any conversion meaningless. As a general rule of thumb, 50 was a working mans annual wage in the 1860s. In Rachels time land size was indicated by acres, and because most rural Australians still use that measure I have too. I do, however, use kilometres as theyve well and truly replaced miles in the public mind.

In closing, I hope this book captures the spirit of Rachel as she was, galloping through the Warrumbungles. Little did my grandfather know the long adventure he unleashed on me that day in 1982 when he pulled an old newspaper clipping out of a tin box.

Jeff McGill, 2022