Clunes

In 1871 Jakob took a job as a mine carpenter in one of the many gold mines in and around Clunes, a thriving gold mining town just over 35 kilometres north of Ballarat, and approximately thirty miles north-west of Rocky Lead. Settlement of Clunes and the establishment of its pastoral era started in 1839 when a young Scot, Donald Cameron, brought 500 sheep overland from Sydney and squatted on the river flats. He built a permanent station approximately one mile north-west of the present town centre and named it 'Clunes' after his home on Loch Lochy, Invernesshire, Scotland²⁷. The Pastoral Era from 1838 to 1851 was a peaceful era, but eleven years after Clunes Station was established in 1839, the land it occupied underwent a radical change in use: gold mining²⁸.

It is not surprising that Jakob chose to move his young family to Clunes. The gold mines were operating successfully and there was a thriving business community consisting of 15 hotels²⁹, 12 grocers, 1 baker, 6 butchers, 4 fruit and confectionery shops, 2 restaurants, 4 boarding houses, 2 tailors, 3 drapers, 4 boot-shops, 2 painters and paperhangers, 2 ironmongers, 4 blacksmiths, 2 wheelwrights, 2 stationers, 5 churches, 2 doctors, 3 foundries, 1 gasworks and several brick-making yards³⁰. There were also a number of small privately operated schools and a fine hospital had been established. Clunes had a lot to offer a family man. And there was an added incentive to move to Clunes for Ernst Eberhardt and two of the Weickhardt brothers from Butzbach had set up successful businesses in the town.

From a rough gold-mining settlement Clunes had developed into a well laid out town with good amenities but there must have been times when Jakob compared the town to Butzbach. For instance, when making his way in Winter along unsealed roads and streets he must have thought longingly of Butzbach's cobbled streets; the sheer orderliness of the town, its layout, and its peace ... for while Clunes was a country town set in the midst of pastoral land, it was a noisy town – made so by the stamping batteries which operated day and night at the many mines in and around the town. It was said that when the stamps stopped on Saturday for the weekend, the place was so quiet that no one could sleep³¹.

When Jakob and Mary Ann arrived in Clunes in 1871 their family numbered six; James, Jakob, Charles, Eliza and George. But they were soon to lose George who died from diphtheria during a visit Mary Ann made to her father at Bullarook: he was just one year old. A fourth son, Joseph Charles William, was born in 1872 but in that year they lost John, aged four. Jakob and Mary Ann were to have five more children; Mary Jane in 1874, Robert David in 1876, Daniel Alexander in 1879, Adelaide Mary Rose in 1880 and Emma Caroline Hester in 1884³².

The house which became 'home' to all these children was No. 30, Lathlain Street, an unformed track which formed the southern boundary of Clunes Common³³. Consisting of four main rooms the weatherboard cottage had two smaller rooms under a skillion-roofed section at the rear and, like many workers' cottages of the time, it had no front verandah.

Cottage, garden and small orchard were inside the 'arms' of a giant capital 'E' formed by tall Boxthorn hedges, grown for protection against the cold winds which swept across the Common in Winter. Boxthorn hedges abounded in Clunes for they formed impenetrable fences and fine windbreaks for houses, pasture and stock³⁴.

Jakob evidently intended that the family should be as self-sufficient as possible for he planted many fruit trees, grew his own vegetables and kept a few cows and a small flock of poultry. When his trees matured and began to bear he dried surplus fruit on drying-frames he made himself³⁵.

During his years at Clunes Jakob worked variously as a mine carpenter, labourer, brewer (at a Creswick brewery), factory-hand (Ernst Eberhardt's aerated drink factory at Clunes³⁶), carpenter, violinist, teacher of violin and piano and tuner and repairer of harmoniums, pianos & organs.

The brewery job was at Creswick and must have paid well because he walked to Creswick on Monday mornings and home again Saturday afternoons – the walk one way taking two and a half hours. In a letter to his sister and brother-in-law he defended the long walk to and from work in another town, saying that he did not want to move his family to Creswick because they would have had an hour's walk to school and he was very happy with the school they attended in Clunes³⁷. During his employment at the brewery he trained apprentices in barrel-making³⁸.

Jakob enjoyed poetry and kept a scrapbook into which he copied not only poems which he liked, but also his own compositions³⁹. He copied poems of German origin without translation and some of these are indeed lengthy; The White Roses, fifty verses, The Evening of the Ghosts, thirty verses and The Youth's Farewell to the Forests, twenty verses. Other titles were Return to the Fatherland, The Young Tom Cat, The Charcoal Burner and the Thieves, The Hunters' Choir, The Vow of the Husband and The Shepherd's Sunday Song. On the first page of the journal, however, is an eight verse poem in German titled Mein Glaube (My Faith), and I believe this poem to be his own.

Jakob's own poetry in English is couched in the flowery and often ponderous style of the Victorian period, and in these he reveals a faultless grasp of his adopted language. Two of these compositions come into the category of 'humorous verse' – the kind which were popular concert items right up to the 1940s. Verse such as these would have appeared on programs as... 'A Humorous Recitation' and Jakob may well have written them specifically with concert recitations in mind. The titles of some of the poems in English are: The Old Gate, The Boy and the 'Leader', and The Sweetheart of the Period – a poem with biting satirical overtones⁴⁰.

Also written in English is a Memoriam in the form of a four verse poem on the death at Clunes on August 31, 1884, of Katie Moritz aged twelve. This is not Jakob's work because the initials H.W.C. appear under the final verse. Perhaps Jakob copied it from the Memoriam notices in one of the local newspapers. Jakob's desire to have a copy of the poem suggests, perhaps, that Katie's parents were close friends of the family⁴¹.

Pasted into the scrapbook are a number of highly-coloured illustrations which appear to have come from a Hessen periodical. Two feature pretty, chaste-looking young women and the remainder feature mothers, infants and young children. A newspaper cutting – perhaps from the Melbourne Age – is a thirteen-verse poem titled A Glorious Victory. An explanatory paragraph precedes the poem: The following, from London Punch, relates to the victory of the Australians at the Oval on 29th August, when the Colonists beat the English Eleven by seven runs. There is no clue to the year that great game was played.

Jakob owned two violins, one of them a fine instrument marked 'Stradivarius' which travelled with him from Germany. This instrument had been his father's and was given to Jakob in 1847 when he was eleven years old. Jakob taught his daughter Rose to play the violin and, delighted with her competence, gave her the 'Strad' when she was eleven years old⁴².

The second violin was one which Jakob had painstakingly made himself, using the heat-treatment skills gained from his apprenticeship as a cooper and brewer in Butzbach⁴³.

Jakob's children would have grown up with music being part of their everyday lives for apart from playing the violin for his own enjoyment their father gave lessons to students of the instrument. He played publicly at musical evenings, dances, concerts and social events in the town and sometimes formed a violin duo with William Cullis, Publican of the Nag's Head Hotel and founder in 1864 of the town's first band – the Clunes Recreation Band. On one notable occasion, Jakob and William – both members of the Clunes Church of England congregation – performed the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria at a special Christmas service in the Clunes Catholic Church. As musicians they must have been very highly thought of as it would have been unusual in those days for non-Catholics to participate in a Catholic service.

Coming from a small Hessen town where music was an integral part of family life, Jakob would have been pleased to find that music was also a very important part of family and community life in this raw mining town on the other side of the world. Every church had its own choir and there were a number of other choirs in the town not associated with churches. Each hotel had its own concert hall and one of them, the Bull and Mouth, housed the Lyceum Theatre which served as the venue for many kinds of musical entertainment until larger halls were built⁴⁴.

When Jakob's father, Johannes, died in April 1864 Jakob's uncle, Christof Vogt (husband of his father's sister Elisabeth) wrote to tell Jakob of the death, thereby commencing a correspondence which was to continue until Christof died seventeen years later⁴⁵.

In his first letter to his uncle, Jakob's wrote of his sorrow at the news of his father's death, expressing remorse... because I could not see in the last letter of my father that he was so ill.

In subsequent letters Jakob refers to the administration of his father's will; his wish for his sister Elisé to have a piece of land which had been willed to him and issued instructions on how his share of proceeds from the estate was to be sent to him⁴⁶. There is no doubt that Jakob and Mary Ann had known hard times both at Bullarook and in the early years at Rocky Lead, but after his father's death their financial position must have improved markedly as a result of Jakob receiving his share of the estate. For example, in 1865 he was in a position to lend 600 florins to a friend in Griedel near Butzbach⁴⁷.

In other letters to his uncle he wrote of his work as a carpenter in the mines and of his wife's on-going ill-health which made it necessary for their sixteen-year old daughter Eliza to run the house⁴⁸. He expressed his joy to learn of the safe return from the war of 1870-71 of his cousins Arnold Steinhäuser and Jakob Vogt and sent good wishes to his Grandmother Steinhäuser on her birthday. He also wrote of the stock market's excitement over the discovery of a particularly rich mine in Clunes; the connection of Clunes to a state water supply, the inauguration of the railway to Clunes and the treat given to local schoolchildren when they were allowed to travel by train to Geelong and back for a very small fare. Some things he wrote of were indeed down to earth, for example, the planting of the vegetable garden.

In letters to his nephew Christof wrote of family matters in Butzbach... the safe return of two of Jakob's cousins from the war of 1870-1871 and the delicacy required in the handling of Jakob's stepmother Helene in relation to the terms of the will. He wrote also of the problems suffered by Jakob's sister Elisé because of the insanity and hard drinking of her husband Conrad Fischer who finally took his own life. Writing of Conrad's death in his letter of August 19, 1872 Christof did not mince words;

He assured Jakob that these problems were the reason Elisé did not answer Jakob's letters: she was too ashamed. Poor Elisé. Hopefully, she and her children finally found peace.

Christof must have asked Jakob if – as a consequence of receiving the funds from his father's estate – he was considering returning to Germany, for in a letter dated 22.9.1865 Jakob wrote:

Although Jakob never returned home his family in Germany remained very precious to him. His letter dated 7 February, 1881 – his last letter – contains this touching passage... Though it is more than 25 years since I came to Australia and in that time I have not seen my Butzbach family, you all live in my memory as if it were only several weeks.

Jakob's sons took up a variety of trades and professions. Jake went into the mines in his late teens and was still a miner in 1883 when he married Emma Coleman of Newtown near Geelong. In 1885 Jake must have decided that he didn't want to be miner for the rest of his life and took a job in the Victorian Railways Workshops at Newport. Emma and their infant son Henry joined him and the family settled in Agg Street, Newport. By 1888 Jake evidently had had enough of the railways, for at age twenty-seven he joined the Victorian Army. After training as a Gunner, he served at the Williamstown Battery Garrison Artillery for the next seven years. In 1895 Jake resigned from the Army and returned to his old employer, the Victorian Railways, working as a watchman at the Newport Workshop until his retirement.

James, perhaps inheriting his father's interest in horticulture became an apprentice gardener at the Clunes Hospital and on the retirement of the Head Gardener, was appointed to that position which he occupied for the rest of his working life. In 1898 he married Elizabeth Cullis, daughter of the publican and musician, William Cullis.

Charlie, David and Daniel became miners, working at various mines in and around Clunes. Jakob must have been pleased when Joe chose the profession of brewing, albeit in the area of non-alcoholic drinks, cordials and bottled mineral water. Joe was to acquire a particularly keen business acumen, making his mark not only as a successful businessman, but also as a prominent and respected citizen, Town Councillor and Mayor of Daylesford⁴⁹.

In the middle of the Winter of 1898 Mary Anne was again ill with the chronic bronchitis which had plagued her for most of her adult life. This time, her greatly weakened respiratory system could cope no longer and she died at home on the 30th June. She was just fifty-three.

On the first anniversary of Mary Ann's death Jakob turned to his old scrapbook, expressing his love and pain in a short poem titled I Dreamt of Thee. The ink in the first and third paragraphs is water smudged. Tears? Yes, I am certain of it.

What did Mary Ann look like? Sadly, no one has been able to tell me and there are no known photographs of her. However, because Jakob was fair-skinned and blue-eyed and all his adult children also had fair complexions and blue eyes, I think it is reasonable enough to suppose that Mary Ann may well have had similar colouring. Height seemed to be another Steinhäuser-Joiner attribute, Jakob being above average height as was James, Jakob, Joseph, Daniel, Rose, Janie and Eliza and many Steinhauser grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Perhaps Mary Ann, too, was tall, although, for some reason, I find it hard to think of her as anything else but diminutive.

Two grandchildren who saw a lot of Jakob were James' children May and Bill who lived on the opposite boundary of Clunes Common to where their grandfather's cottage stood. They had good memories of him because he came to their house daily to get water for his precious garden and fruit trees. Jakob's cottage was not connected to town-water so to supplement the supply from his tank, he traversed a well-worn track across the Common to James' house to get water from their garden tap. His method of transporting the precious commodity was the most basic: a smooth wooden yoke he had fashioned himself and two kerosene tins. May remembered an old man with a long white beard stooped over under the weight of the cans and moving along at a 'shuffle' – his feet keeping time with their rhythmic bounce. She also remembers him spreading fruit out to dry on the drying frames he made himself.

Bill's memories are similar to those of May's but he remembers Jakob wearing an old velvet smoking-cap in cold weather on his trips across the Common and that he smoked a long, hooked pipe. He also remembers his grandfather's skill in grafting fruit trees and roses: one grafting experiment with rose stock resulting in a standard rose bearing blooms in three different colours.

My father's earliest memories of Jakob are of his grandfather taking him on walks and patiently trying to explain 'how things worked and why they were so'.

Jakob spoke little to his grandchildren of his country of birth other than to confirm that he left Hessen to avoid conscription and that he had never wanted to go back. May said that her grandfather used to say he was a 'von', but because he smiled when he said it, they regarded this comment as 'Grandad's little joke'⁵⁰.

Forty-six years after his arrival in Victoria, Jakob applied for naturalisation and after swearing an oath of allegiance to... Her Majesty Queen Victoria, as lawful Sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of this Colony of Victoria ... was granted citizenship on January 21, 1901⁵¹. Why did he wait so long to take this step?

In the same year that Jakob became an Australian Citizen David departed for Western Australia where he worked as a camphor-wood cutter in desolate country North of Kalgoorlie. David was soon followed by Rose's husband, George Whitely, who obtained a well-paid job in Boulder as a mine engineer. Rose stayed behind in Clunes to await the birth of her first child and just six-weeks after that event, she and the infant Doris set off on the long, uncomfortable railway journey to join George.

The handsome and well-built Daniel had become engaged to Annie Close, sister of Joe's wife Charlotte, but Annie had a change of heart and jilted him to marry another man. Within months of the break-up of his romance, twenty-seven year old Daniel became ill with a serious heart ailment and was admitted to Melbourne's Prince Henry's Hospital where he died on September 25, 1902. Despite the verification of Daniel's medical condition there was a widely held belief among his family and friends in Clunes that he had died of a 'broken heart'⁵².

In 1909 Eliza's husband George Kemp went to 'The West' looking for work in the mines and later that year, Eliza and her young son Daniel joined him, the family settling not far from Rose's home in Boulder. How delighted Rose must have been to have her elder sister Eliza living so near. 'The West' beckoned another Steinhauser, and Jake's son Henry – known as Harry – left his job as a brass moulder at the Newport Railway Workshops to go to the Western Australian gold-fields Boulder-Kalgoorlie gold-fields. In a mine in Lawlers, he obtained work operating a drilling machine ominously called 'the widow-maker' because it caused severe dust inhalation which resulted in permanent damage to the lungs: Miner's Phthisis. In Lawlers he met and married Murchison-born Lillian Hume and with her raised a large family of five boys and two girls⁵³.

The Steinhausers living in the Kalgoorlie-Boulder area could well have been regarded by their relatives at Clunes as living on the other side of the world. Despite the distance, however, Jakob and his children remained close through regular exchange of postcards and letters. Only Rose seems to have returned to Clunes for visits, making the long, slow trip by train on two occasions, accompanied by her children Doris and Leonard.

Joe visited his father whenever he travelled to Clunes by horse and cart to deliver aerated drinks and mineral water local shops and hotel. Jake and Janie – living in Newport – also made regular visits, sometimes bringing their children. Jake's visits were eagerly anticipated by his young nieces and nephews in Clunes because he always brought them each a small white-paper bag of boiled lollies which he would bury in the capacious pockets of his overcoat then let them rummage for the hidden treats. In between visits the Clunes and Newport families kept in regular touch. They were all good correspondents but if there wasn't a lot to write about they made good use of postcards.

A letter from Newport brought bad news when Jake and Emma's second son Charles 'disappeared'. There was speculation that his abrupt departure was precipitated by a family disagreement, but if this was so, it must have been a very serious disagreement indeed, for years went by without any word from him and notices placed in Victorian and interstate newspapers yielded nothing.

Then, from a town in South Africa came a letter from Charles and in it, a gift for his mother: a gold sovereign. The contents of the letter are long forgotten but if they gave his parents some comfort it was to be very short lived, for that was the first and last letter. Seeking information, Emma wrote to the postmaster of the town where the letter had been posted but the reply simply advised that Charles Steinhauser was not known there and the suggestion was made that he may have only been passing through the town on his way to another destination. As the years passed and there were no further letters from Charles the only conclusion to be drawn was that he had become ill and died, for why would he have written if he had no intention of maintaining contact?

In late November 1907 came a letter from Rose bearing terrible news. Thirty-year old David had died in Kalgoorlie Hospital from burns sustained when his hut in Rose's backyard caught fire. David had been drinking with friends in a Boulder hotel before going home to have tea with Rose and her family. After the meal he went to his hut where he lit the lamp and lay down on his bed. Many hours later neighbours noticed flames leaping from the hut and raised the alarm. David, unconscious and badly burned, was pulled from the hut and taken to hospital where he died three days later on November 25.

Foul play was suspected because a valuable gold watch and chain given to him by his father was never found in the ashes of the hut. There was speculation that a thief had entered the hut with the express purpose of stealing the watch. In the attempt he disturbed his victim, and in the ensuing struggle, the lamp was knocked over⁵⁴.

There is a studio photograph of David, taken, perhaps, in his late twenties. He wears a dark, three-piece worsted suit of which the waistcoat was a smart, double-breasted style. On a pedestal at his side rests a white, broad-brimmed Panama hat which could not help but endow its owner with a slightly rakish look. Hanging from David's waistcoat fob can be seen the chain of the gold watch which was to cost him his life.

In 1912 Rose gave her father's Stradivarius to eleven-year old Doris who was studying the violin at St Joseph's Catholic Convent in Kalgoorlie and showing great promise⁵⁵. How delighted Jakob would have been to know that one of his grandchildren had inherited his love of the violin and was now playing his much loved 'Strad'⁵⁶.

Emma, who did not marry, remained with her father to keep house for him. Eventually, she would nurse him when he became ill with a heart condition of long standing. Jakob died at home on October 14, 1913 aged 77. His death certificate gives the cause of death as... 'cardiac failure due to chronic Myocarditis of many years duration, and Bronchitis'⁵⁷.

When registering his father's death, Jake used the Anglicised form of the name... Steinhaeuser⁵⁸. In answer to the question regarding his father's occupation he wrote... 'Labourer and Old Age Pensioner'. Space would have been at a premium of course, but 'labourer' was a monumental understatement for a man who had been cooper, brewer, carpenter and organ and piano repairer. A man who was also poet, violinist and teacher of the violin... and who made one of the violins he played!

And he was never a labourer...neither was he an Old Age Pensioner, because over the years since his father's death in 1864, Jakob handled his financial affairs prudently enough to be described on the Victorian Electoral Roll of 1913 as being of ... 'independent means' which would suggest that once he ceased to receive a weekly wage, he had enough savings put by to live on without claiming the old age pension. Only judicious investment of the monies which came to him from his father's estate could have given him that independence.

Jakob was buried with Mary Ann in the Church of England section of Clunes cemetery. Their grave has no headstone – the original wooden head-board being destroyed in the 1920s when bushfires swept through the cemetery. The grave is marked only by the crumbling remains of a simple brick border placed there by their daughter Eliza.

There is no doubt that all Jakob's children loved him dearly just for what he was; a loving articulate, gentle and unassuming man.