The Braes, Reynella

On a Saturday morning late in September 1884 Abraham Wallace asked his coachman for the garden knife he used to cut weeds, walked into a spare room of his house at Reynella, and closed the door. The coachman, William Fulbrook, heard groaning a little while later and found him on the floor in his own blood. Wallace lived long enough to speak. To his wife he said that he had done it himself, and asked whether she could forgive him; to the household he said something that the inquest jury would not forget.

I am tired of the world, and the world is tired of me.

Frances Fulbrook, cook at The Braes, evidence to the inquest, 28 September 1884

The man who said it had crossed a continent. Abraham Wallace was born in Ireland about 1826 and reached the colony around 1850, settling first at Mount Gambier and trying his luck briefly on the Victorian goldfields before turning to sheep. He was, by the reckoning of the stock journals, the first man to take sheep across the Barrier Ranges, and from holdings scattered between those ranges and the River Darling he built up the run that became Sturt's Meadows, north-east of Poolamacca in the far west of New South Wales. By the early 1880s it carried more than thirty thousand sheep. Not content with that, he set his sights on the far north. Starting out in January 1880, Wallace and his men bought a herd of some twenty-seven hundred cattle in Queensland and drove them, with a hundred horses, north and west for the better part of eighteen months — holding through a wet season on the Nicholson and abandoning the weakest beasts in the final dry stretch — before reaching the Roper River country in June 1881. Contemporary accounts of the journey recorded that the Aboriginal people whose land the party crossed were friendly and in many places gave it valuable help. The run Wallace founded there, meant at first to be called Wallace Park, instead took the name of the Elsey — after the creek that crossed it, which Augustus Gregory had named on his North Australian expedition of 1856 for Joseph Elsey, the young surgeon who travelled with him from the Victoria River to the Roper and on to Queensland. It became the station Jeannie Gunn would make famous a generation later in We of the Never Never, the place said to have its front gate fifteen miles from its front door.

The Elsey all but ruined him. The northern venture drained the southern run, and Wallace, lately retired from the saddle, bought a comfortable house at Reynella to see out his years and set about improving it. Six weeks before his death he was thrown from his buggy on the road back from Adelaide when it struck a hay van, and the injuries to his head needed twenty-four stitches. He was never the same afterwards. Witnesses described him as dull and melancholy, given to saying he wished the accident had finished him. Walter Reynell, sitting as coroner at an inquest held in the house itself, heard the surgeon Charles Morier describe the wound to the throat, and the jury returned the only verdict the evidence allowed: that Wallace had taken his own life while of unsound mind.

Matilda

The widow the newspapers mentioned in a single line had been the equal of everything her husband attempted. Matilda Hill was born in November 1838 at High Ham in Somerset, the youngest child of a labouring family, and had worked as a glove-maker and dairy-maid before sailing for South Australia on the North, reaching Adelaide early in 1859. She met Abraham at Mount Gambier and married him there in December 1861. What followed she set down herself, years later, in a memoir called Twelve Years' Life in Australia, from 1859 to 1871 — a manuscript long forgotten and only rediscovered among the holdings of the State Library.

It describes a hard apprenticeship. In 1863 the couple set out by wagon for Queensland through country that was barely mapped, by way of Swan Hill and Balranald, seven weeks on the track before they reached a station on the Darling. On the runs that followed, and at Sturt's Meadows once it was taken up, Matilda was frequently left to manage alone while Abraham was away droving or dealing — once, by her account, for as long as four weeks at a stretch. She ran the shearing, kept the stores, and held the place together through drought and flood, working alongside the Aboriginal people of that western country on whose land the runs had been laid out. Children came and several were lost; only a daughter, Mary Ann Sarah, born at Menindee in 1871 and known as Annie, lived to grow up. By the time her husband retired to Reynella, Matilda had spent twenty years in some of the loneliest country in the colony.

The house the Wallaces bought

The house they chose for that retirement was already among the finest in the district. It had been built in 1866 and 1867 for Dr Louis Joseph Maurau, who bought the land in February 1865 and engaged George Strickland Kingston — surveyor, parliamentarian, and one of colonial South Australia's foremost architects — to design it. Kingston's office in Grote Street advertised for builders that March. What went up was a substantial stone house set into the side of an embankment above Reynella, with a slate roof, a bay window looking out over the township, and a basement reached from the hall in which the doctor kept his dispensary.

Maurau was the kind of country doctor a district remembered. A Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, he had practised at the Burra mines before coming south to Happy Valley and Reynella, and he attended the poorest of his patients as readily as the richest, often making up the shortfall in his own church's accounts from his own pocket. He was a lay reader and warden of Christ Church at O'Halloran Hill, chairman for a time of the District Council of Clarendon, and the officiating surgeon at the inquest into the boiler explosion at the Southern Grist Mill. When he died in 1878, only fifty-two, the funeral drew more than two hundred mourners and the district raised a public subscription for his headstone.

Perhaps no greater gloom has ever been cast over this district than was caused by the unexpected news of the death of Dr. Maurau, M.R.C.S. As a medical practitioner few residing in a large country district would take the pains that he did to do his duty night and day. No matter whether it was the poorest or the richest, the Doctor was always ready and willing.

South Australian Register, 20 August 1878

After co's death the house passed first to his widow, Sarah, and then through the Tietkens family before Abraham and Matilda Wallace bought it in 1884. They had it only a matter of months together before Abraham was dead.

After

Matilda stayed on. Appointed to administer her husband's tangled estate, she held both the southern station and the northern one with managers in charge, mortgaging Sturt's Meadows to keep things afloat, and kept The Braes as a home for herself and Annie. Relatives of hers, the Hills and Bartletts, had settled not far off at Coromandel Valley, which may be part of why she had agreed to the place to begin with. She remained until 1892, when she sold The Braes and moved to Port Adelaide, and later to Largs Bay to live with her daughter. She died there early in 1898, not yet sixty, and left everything she had to Annie. Today a lookout in the Barrier Ranges and a silhouette near the old Sturt's Meadows run carry her name, the frontier remembering her where Reynella largely forgot her.

The Kenihans

The family that bought The Braes from Matilda Wallace in 1892 had its own reason to need a new home. The Kenihans were Happy Valley people. Hugh Kenihan, an Irish farmer from King's County, had arrived on the Navarino in December 1837 — the ship that also brought Sir John Morphett — and after a start at Hindmarsh had taken up land in the heart of Happy Valley in 1851, where he farmed for the rest of his life. In the early 1890s that land was compulsorily acquired for the Happy Valley Reservoir, and the family that had broken it had to leave before it was flooded. Hugh's son Michael bought The Braes and moved the household to Reynella, and old Hugh came with them, dying at the house only a few days after the move, in August 1893, at the age of ninety-one.

Hugh Kenihan who died at his son's residence, The Braes, Reynella on August 6 at the ripe age of 91, was one of the rapidly diminishing band of pioneer colonists. He then settled at Happy Valley, where he lived for 54 years engaged in farming. The land being required for the reservoir, the deceased who was living with his son, Mr Michael Kenihan, moved to Reynella a few days before his death.

Death notice, Adelaide newspaper, August 1893

Michael Kenihan was already a man of standing when he brought the household to Reynella. A justice of the peace and a member of the Clarendon District Council for more than twenty years, active in the affairs of St Mary's Catholic Church at Morphett Vale, he was remembered at his death in 1913, at seventy, as one of the most popular and respected residents in the south, and the funeral that carried him to the Morphett Vale cemetery was said to be the largest the district had seen. His widow, Elizabeth — born at Avoca in County Wicklow and brought out to the colony as a girl in the late 1850s — kept The Braes for another quarter of a century, secretary and treasurer of the St Mary's altar guild almost to the end. When she died in the house in December 1938 the archbishop called her the last link between the past and present generations, for she had been confirmed by Adelaide's first Catholic bishop.

In between, The Braes had sent its sons to the Great War. Ray Kenihan, the youngest, served as a regimental medical officer with the 44th Battalion, was wounded at Messines and gassed at Passchendaele, and came home in 1919 with a Military Cross to live again with his mother in the old house; an elder brother had gone with the artillery to France. For close to half a century, through a death, a war, and the slow advance of the suburbs, the doctor's house on the embankment was simply the Kenihans' home — though the road that still carries their name runs past the Happy Valley ground they lost, not the Reynella house they kept. When Elizabeth died the long tenure ended; in 1939 The Braes was sold to Albertus and Jane Hayward, and changed hands several times after that.

The Braes still stands, off Braes Close at Reynella East, a State Heritage Place now at the centre of a retirement village that took its name. There is a quiet irony in that. Abraham Wallace had bought the house to retire to, to see out his years in comfort after a lifetime in the saddle, and never reached the old age he had paid for; the place he chose for a peaceful retirement has become exactly that for hundreds of others. Kingston's slate roof and finely finished doorways are still there, and the bay window still looks out over a view the suburb long ago filled in — a doctor's house that became a pastoralist's last address, then a farming family's home through two generations and a war, and at last the retirement Wallace himself never had.

Sources

• Matilda Wallace, Twelve Years' Life in Australia, from 1859 to 1871 — manuscript memoir, State Library of South Australia; the principal record of the Wallaces' frontier years.
• Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 4 October 1884 — "The Late Mr. Abraham Wallace", obituary of the pastoralist. Trove
• South Australian Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide), 4 October 1884 — "Suicide at Reynella", report of the death and the inquest held by Walter Reynell. Trove
• The South Eastern Times (Millicent), 29 July 1927 — "Pioneers of the South-East: Abraham Wallace", reprinted from the Adelaide Stock and Station Journal, on Sturt's Meadows and the Elsey. Trove
• Glen Innes Examiner and General Advertiser (New South Wales), 28 June 1881 — "Overland from Queensland to Fort Darwin", a contemporary account of Wallace's eighteen-month cattle drive to the Roper. Trove
• The Southern Cross (Adelaide), 12 September 1913 — obituary of Michael J. Kenihan, J.P., of The Braes, Reynella. Trove
• The Mail (Adelaide), 4 October 1919 — "Personal", on Surgeon-Captain Ray L. Kenihan, M.C., of The Braes, returned from the war. Trove
• The Southern Cross (Adelaide), 6 January 1939 — obituary of Mrs Elizabeth Kenihan of The Braes, Reynella. Trove
• Paul B. Stark, Meadows Heritage (District Council of Meadows, 1983) — heritage survey; entry on The Braes, its construction for Dr Maurau and design by G. S. Kingston.
• City of Happy Valley Heritage Review (Hassell Planning Consultants, 1988) — architectural and historical assessment of The Braes and its ownership.
• Margarette Powell, Audrey Green and Bob Stupple, Pioneers of Reynella (2015) — family entries for the Kenihans and for Dr Maurau, including Hugh Kenihan's obituary and the Maurau biography.
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries, local history collection — photographs and notes on The Braes, Reynella East.