The Sturdy Pioneer: Daniel Le Poidevin

At the Southern Farmers' Show at Morphett Vale in October 1915, a man caught a visiting reporter by the sleeve and steered him across the showring. There was someone he wanted him to meet. The someone was eighty-nine years and five months old, with what the reporter described as a happy, intelligent face and faculties that struck him as remarkably acute, and he had lived in the district longer than almost anyone still walking about in it. His name was Daniel Le Poidevin, and by then a version of it could be found on the headstones at Morphett Vale, on the hay trolleys working the O'Halloran Hill road, in the quarry gangs at Reynella and the boiler house at Horndale. It is a name that still crops up across the southern districts, and it began with this one Guernsey carpenter who came ashore with half a crown to his name.

Arrival

He was born on the Channel Island of Guernsey on 19 May 1826 and trained there as a carpenter, serving as a sergeant in the island militia. When he decided to try South Australia he had about twenty-one pounds. Twenty of it went on the passage, and after the ship called at the Cape of Good Hope he stepped onto the wharf at Port Adelaide with two shillings and sixpence left. The voyage out had taken five months in a vessel of around two hundred and fifty tons. He remembered the colony he found at the end of it as a thin scattering of buildings on a plain.

On the way from Port Adelaide to Adelaide they passed only two or three houses. There was no proper road, and conveyances frequently followed different tracks.

Register (Adelaide), 25 October 1915

Water was carted up from the Torrens in wooden or tin casks on drays built for the purpose, and sold about the town. His trade found him work quickly. He was taken on as a carpenter at Government House under Governor Young, and had a hand in building the first ballroom there before he left the city to take up land at Morphett Vale. The militia training came with him. He drilled a volunteer corps at Noarlunga that he believed was about the first formed in the colony, and on 12 October 1852 he married Harriet Palmer Hutchinson, whose family had come out on the Lysander in 1839. Twelve children followed, and the land accumulated until, as he put it, fourteen years after his arrival he was the largest property owner in the district.

Ruin and Recovery

Whatever height he reached did not hold. The mid-1860s brought drought and a slump in wool and copper prices that fell hardest on the farmers, and in April 1868, by then set down plainly as a farmer of Noarlunga, Le Poidevin signed a deed of assignment that handed the whole of his personal estate and effects — everything bar his wearing apparel and the household furniture — to a Morphett Vale storekeeper, Thomas Hocart, to be divided among his creditors. The man who half a century later would remember himself as the district's largest landholder had been brought to insolvency within twenty years of stepping ashore with two and sixpence.

He did not stay down. In 1873 he took a fourteen-year lease on James Galloway's farm at Morphett Vale — Glen Bank, two hundred and forty acres on Christie Creek — at a hundred and twenty pounds a year and with the right to cut his own timber, and when the mortgagee put the place up for sale in 1880 his tenancy still had seven years to run. By the time that lease fell in, in March 1887, he was working a larger holding still — close to six hundred acres of the Hundred of Noarlunga, advertised for tender that February as land "now in the occupation of Daniel Le Poidevin." The man ruined in 1868 had made himself one of the larger farmers of the district all over again.

Much of what those acres grew was hay. Early in 1890 he contracted to supply a hundred tons of wheaten hay to the Adelaide and Hindmarsh Team Company, by the ton and to sample, and when part of the crop was judged to have gone rusty the deliveries stopped and the two sides finished up before the magistrates, who found against him. It was the sort of reverse that came with farming at scale, and it was the hay trade that his sons and grandsons would carry on after him.

Stony Hill

In the earlier years the couple lived at Stony Hill Farm, on the rising ground that is now Onkaparinga Heights, in a small two-roomed stone cottage. Le Poidevin worked it on lease — first from James Clark of the neighbouring Greenloop Farm, and then from John Antonio, who bought the place in 1863 and let him stay on as tenant while his own family lived at Warnock Farm over towards Hackham. The cottage outlasted them all. Antonio's grandson Herbert lived out his days there, and since his death it has stood empty, the last of it now in the hands of the Urban Renewal Authority and awaiting the spread of the suburb that has grown up around it.

The Eyewitness

There was an eyewitness in him, too. He was present in 1850 when the foundation stone was laid for the Anglican church at Noarlunga, the church that became St Philip and St James on the hill above the township. Sixty-five years later he was the only named witness to that ceremony anyone could produce. About five years after the stone went down he watched the Church of Scotland at Morphett Vale burn, and he afterwards kept its graveyard for twenty-five years as curator. Between those two churches sits most of his working life.

The first harvests he knew were cut by hand. The Kaurna people, on whose Country Morphett Vale sits, worked those harvests as skilled reapers, and he remembered them as expert with the sickle at a time when there was little else to cut with.

Everything except threshing was done by hand, and in some cases that also. It was some time after my arrival before the first reaping machine was seen.

Register (Adelaide), 25 October 1915

Farmers shaped their own forks from wattle, splitting a limb and pinning it with a nail.

Bygone Episodes

When word of the Bendigo gold reached the district, Le Poidevin and five companions fitted out a dray and a spring cart at a cost of a hundred and twenty-six pounds and set off overland for Forest Creek. The way was shown to them by Aboriginal guides who travelled only as far as the edge of their own Country and would not cross into the Country of their neighbours; at each boundary the party took on fresh guides who knew the next stretch of ground. The roughly five hundred miles took five weeks. Le Poidevin worked at his trade when he got there, building a store at Forest Creek before going on to Bendigo, where for a time he had eleven pounds weight of gold, worth about four pounds an ounce, buried beneath the floor of his tent. The whole of it was stolen. A later trip recovered only about three pounds of metal.

He had a stock of other district memories, told plainly and without much embroidery. He recalled the wreck of the Nashwauk, a vessel carrying young Irish women out as immigrants, lost on the coast between Willunga and Noarlunga, the survivors sheltered overnight in farm buildings and then carried up to Adelaide on bullock drays that local farmers turned out for the purpose. He remembered being caught with his horse by a bushfire in the Hindmarsh Valley that left him nearly dead, his eyelashes burnt away, and staying on a week to help put it out. Vines, he reckoned, had come into the district about fifty years before — small plantings on the farms making wine for the household, long before anyone thought of selling it.

A Name Across the District

His own life by 1915 had outlasted a good deal of what he described, and not all of it gently. Two years before the reporter found him at the show, his son Richard Gordon Le Poidevin had been killed on No. 2 Hill beside Christ Church at O'Halloran Hill, walking alongside his loaded hay trolley when he slipped stepping onto the running board and went under the wheels; it was said his own son Hurtle found him. Richard had carted hay across the district for most of his life, latterly with his three sons, and for seven years, from 1893 to 1900, he leased a farm down at its southern edge — the old Bennier place beside Christie Creek — until it was sold to a Port Adelaide policeman named Robert Morrow, whose name the Morrow Road bridge over the creek carries to this day. Richard's children and their cousins carried the name on into every kind of work the district offered. Howard Le Poidevin carted hay and drove the first motor truck of it down Tapley's Hill in 1924. Others cut stone in the Reynella quarries, dug graves, drove teams, and worked at Horndale. The Guernsey carpenter had set down a root that spread through the whole southern country.

Last Years

The old man himself put his survival down to his legs. He thought the young would never reach his age because they did not walk enough, got too much of the wrong kind of exercise, and spent their money on lollies, races, and the theatre. At eighty he had still been driving a five-horse team. At eighty-nine he sawed his own wood, kept a vegetable garden, walked his five miles, and went out of an evening to play cards. The reporter who had been steered across the showring to meet him left convinced he had been in the presence of the district's living memory, and in a sense he had.

He had three years left, and he did not have to go far to spend them. Harriet was gone and the active farming behind him, but he ended his days at Glen Bank — the farm he had leased from Galloway back in 1873 and never given up — where his daughter and her husband, John McCloud, now kept the place. He died there on 30 October 1918, aged ninety-two, on the same ground he had worked for forty-five years, survived by three sons and four daughters and by grandchildren and great-grandchildren together numbering close to sixty. The Guernsey carpenter who had come ashore with half a crown had multiplied into a tribe, and the name has been cropping up across the southern districts ever since.

Sources

• Register (Adelaide), 25 October 1915 — "Sixty Years Ago. Bygone Episodes Recalled," an interview with Daniel Le Poidevin covering his arrival, the Noarlunga foundation stone, the goldfields journey, and early district life. Trove
• Register (Adelaide), 15 October 1915 — "A Sturdy Pioneer. Mr. Daniel Le Poidevin," the showground interview, with his age, appearance, Government House work, militia service, and views on the young. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 10 April 1868 — insolvency notice setting out the deed of assignment by which Daniel Le Poidevin, farmer of Noarlunga, made over his personal estate to Thomas Hocart of Morphett Vale for the benefit of his creditors. Trove
• Adelaide Observer, 2 May 1868 — "Insolvencies and Assignments," the fortnightly summary listing the assignment of Daniel Le Poidevin, farmer of Noarlunga. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 5 May 1880 — auction notice for the mortgagee's sale of Galloway's farm in the Hundred of Noarlunga, recording the fourteen-year lease of 240 acres to Daniel Le Poidevin from March 1873 at £120 a year. Trove
• Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), 20 March 1882 — a stray-stock notice signed by Daniel Le Poidevin of Glenbank Farm, Morphett Vale, placing him on the Glen Bank holding where he would die thirty-six years later. Trove
• Adelaide Observer, 12 February 1887 — tender notice (Fisher & Culross, solicitors) for a seven-year lease from March 1887 of some 583 acres in the Hundred of Noarlunga "now in the occupation of Daniel Le Poidevin." Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 9 May 1890 — local court report of Adelaide and Hindmarsh Team Company v. Daniel Le Poidevin, a dispute over his contract to supply a hundred tons of wheaten hay that was found to have gone rusty. Trove
• Observer (Adelaide), 5 July 1913 — "Crushed to Death," the report of Richard Le Poidevin's fatal accident at O'Halloran Hill. Trove
• Register (Adelaide), 1 November 1918 — "Concerning People," the notice of Daniel Le Poidevin's death at ninety-two at Glen Bank, Morphett Vale, recounting his arrival, his work on early public buildings, his farming, the Bendigo journey, and his surviving family. Trove
• Pioneers of Reynella, Margarette Powell, Audrey Green and Bob Stupple (2015) — family entries for the Le Poidevin, Bennier, Booth and Mitchell families, with detail on the later generations at Morphett Vale, Reynella and Horndale, and on Richard Le Poidevin's 1893–1900 lease of the Bennier farm later sold to Robert Morrow.
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries — local history record of Stony Hill Farm (Sections 53 and 54, Hundred of Noarlunga): Daniel Le Poidevin's lease of the farm and two-roomed cottage from James Clark of Greenloop Farm and afterwards from John Antonio, who bought it in 1863; the Antonio family at Warnock Farm, Hackham; and the cottage's later vacancy under the Urban Renewal Authority at Onkaparinga Heights.