‘CHILDREN LOST IN BUSH’ - 1864
The National Library of Australia. In August 1864, in outback north-western Victoria, the plight of three children lost in the bush for nine days aroused colonists’ primitive fears about nature.
The Duff family lived in a shepherd's hut on Spring Hill station, west of Mount Arapiles. On Friday 12th August 1864, around 9-10am, their mother Hannah sent the children - Isaac (aged 9), Jane (7) and Frank(3½) - to cut and collect broom bush, about a mile from their home.
On this occasion the children ventured further to another patch of broom and wildflowers which lay beyond a brush fence. After gathering the broom the children mistakenly turned north, the opposite direction to home, until they reached a fence (probably the boundary fence between Spring Hill and Heath Hill stations) where they turned north-easterly.
The country was sandy with the bush composed of mallee scrub and vast swathes of heath, in some places dense and almost impenetrable. When they did not return, their father searched on horseback, till near midnight, when the moon went down.
Dozens of local men on horseback combed the cold, harsh Wimmera scrub west of Horsham for days but lost their footsteps in heavy rain.
Three Aboriginal trackers picked up the trail, enabling the children’s father, shepherd John Duff, to spot Isaac Cooper, 9, Jane Cooper, 7, and Frank Duff, 3, emaciated but alive.
It was approaching sunset when Duff rode ahead of the other searchers to higher ground and saw a clump of saplings, closer he saw a covering moving in the wind and found the children asleep, Frank in the middle wrapped in Jane’s dress.
The arrival of the others woke the children, Isaac attempted to sit up and speak but could only groan feebly “Father” and fall back. Frank asked why they had not come sooner. Jane could not open her eyes, only murmured “Cold, cold”. They had walked over 4 miles on the final day.
Emaciated, weak and barely able to speak the children were given crumbs of bread and taken to a waterhole where they were much revived before proceeding to the nearest hut 8 miles away, where they were reunited with their mother about 8pm. Putting the children to bed, Jane was heard saying her prayers as she had each night.
The trackers challenged settlers’ hostile views of Aborigines and they were widely praised.
Dick-a-dick, also known as Djungadjinganook, Jumgumjenanuke, and King Richard, was one of the trackers who found the children on 20th August 1864. Dick-a-Dick was a Wotjobaluk man of the Wergaia language group. After rescuing the Duffs, he would go on to tour England as part of an Aboriginal cricket team that played 47 games between May and October 1868.
The children became well known, inspiring paintings, poems, books and generations of folk stories. The tale was part of the school texts across Victoria from the early 1900s to the late 1960s.
Jane, in particular, was anointed a heroine, for helping carry little Frank and covering her brothers with her dress to keep them warm at night.
Victorian schoolchildren raised over £150 to reward her, and an 1866 British publication, The Australian Babes In The Wood, retold the story as a morality tale for children. When the-then Jane Turnbull hit hard financial times in 1904, Victorians again raised over £360.
After Jane died in 1932 a memorial stone was erected, funded by schoolchildren’s coins, near where the children were found, 10 kilometres from their hut (they had walked 100 kilometres in circles).
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