Surveying Success: The Hume Family in Colonial Queensland

Hilary J. Davies

Jan 2011 · Boolarong Press

About this ebook

Walter and Katie Hume coped with isolation from family and the deaths of five infants while working to establish their financial future, secured promotions for Walter and created a place for themselves among the colonial elite. They attained the ideal middle-class family life with Walter's career success providing sufficient income to educate their children overseas, reside in elite homes and angage in genteel and philanthropic pastimes.

Ratings and reviews

Twenty-five years ago, while on sabbatical in Toowoomba, I became enthralled with the story of Katie Hume in the book Katie Hume on the Darling Downs edited by Nancy Bonnin. It was such a fascinating story, outlining the details of the life of the wife of the famous Queensland surveyor Walter Cunningham Hume – apparently no relation to the explorer of New South Wales, Hamilton Hume. I was attracted to the book because it described an era that even proceeded my own father, who as an 18 year old, orphaned English boy migrated to the Darling Downs in 1923. I found few parallels, however, but a fascinating and a heartrending story of a pioneer woman of the middle class, who suffered the deaths of five of her eight children from her humble beginnings as a newlywed in a wooden house near Drayton, Toowoomba, in the 1860s. I could not, at the time, find any more details of Katie Hume's life, and as so often is the case with biographies, wished that I could learn more. I can hardly portray the ecstasy I felt when I came across Hilary J Davies' book, based on her PhD thesis, not only describing the rest of Katie Hume's life, but providing fascinating details of the life and values of people of her class in the Toowoomba and Brisbane region from the mid-19th century to the beginning of the Edwardian era. Fortunately, this also led me, via Google, to the excellent online collection of the Hume family photographs in the Fryer Library of the University of Queensland. It is rather facile to make the remark that these two books together comprise the Gone with the Wind of Queensland, albeit no exaggeration of their cultural significance. They are even more compelling because they are not fiction. Nancy Bonnin's book, in my opinion, is best read first, although copies are a little harder to find. Both books are available through Amazon, and often from libraries. But do not stop there. Make sure you read Hilary J Davies' book Surveying Success: the Hume Family in Colonial Queensland, otherwise you will feel unfulfilled. It is a priceless and fascinating contribution to the non-fiction literature of Queensland. Professor Napier Roffey-Mitchell, October 2016